Polymarket is bad at computing odds, this is a criticism of Polymarket's odd computation algo not prediction market.
Example say you arbitrage with 2k
CA wealth tax appears on ballot at 50% -> 1k on "Yes" (1k win, 1k loss)
CA wealth tax passes 52 -> 1k on "No" (1.04k win, 1k loss)
In principle you have 3 scenarios:
A: Appears on ballot, doesn't pass -> you win 2.04k [say this is at a 5% chance]
B: Appears on ballot, passes -> breaks even [say this is at a 50% chance]
C: Doesn't appear on ballot (auto not pass) -> you win 0.04k [say this is at a 45% chance]
So, if your belief is that there's at least a 6% chance the proposition fails, and that it makes no logical sense "appears and passes" should be 4% more likely than "appears" (a fair assumption to make, given first order logic) ... you'd win ~$120
Not a great return, but, it's 6% annualized, greater than bonds, and you get ~3% annualized on first order logic alone
Ok, how does this actually play out if you bet right now:
A: The *actual* win is 1.7k
B: This is not an actual break even, you would lose ~0.25k
C: Instead of winning 0.04k you lose ~0.27k
So on average you are... now losing $160 instead of winning $120
Indeed, there are *no* ways of arbitrating this diff. That's because order books are thin ... and were a lot thinner when you made this comment.
I expect that in about 1-2 months they will normalize (indeed, I am noting the odds evening out as I speak, as some people are correcting the market) - but the corrections happen only when people with the opposite belief see a deal in the middle, not because people are buying both to arbitrage.
In practice Polymarket doesn't really allow for arbitrage on most market under 10m or so in volume ... the only reason to buy a position is if you believe in it, and belief is a thickle thing. Why do more people believe that it will appear than that it will pass ? who knows, but 2% diff (even if illogical) should not bother us, because the system won't allow us to arbitrage it.
Realistically Polymarket should display these as 30-70% more so than 52% and 50% | Using the place where order books "even out" | But that would require people to look at a confidence range and that is too much
Sometimes it feels like internet drama is both infinitely deep and infinitely shallow.
Everywhere you go there's a brand new iteration of "Person Who You've Never Heard Of But Apparently Is Very Important To Some People Said Something Stupid" vs "No You Really Have To Understand The Context Though"
But everywhere you go it turns out to be the same four or five dumb subjects over and over again.
I take your point, but I disagree this is an instance of that. "I'm deeply sorry for suggesting the existence of a secret Jewish conspiracy. The secret Jewish conspiracy tricked me into doing it" is funny without needing any context.
In other news, Shankar once replied to somebody's question by saying "think of it as the limiting case," and that was the funniest comeback ever. Except that you have to know the context to appreciate it. Sort of like the Ms Rachel thing.
That DOES sound like something I'd say, so if you've made up the example, kudos! (If you haven't, and that actually happened, could you please refresh my memory?)
I wonder if the 1 year old kids actually prefer this kind of content, but to me it feels like a new form of torture. I can feel the IQ points leaving my brain as I watch.
Unhappily I have neither Apple TV nor Google TV so I will not be able to watch the stars of Substack broadcast!
"Today we’re launching the Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV. Substack is the home for the best longform—work creators put real care into and subscribers choose to spend time with. Now these thought-provoking videos and livestreams have a natural home on the TV, where subscribers can settle in for the extended viewing that great video deserves.
That might mean watching Dolly Parton reflect on her showbiz journey, George Saunders read from his book, or Tina Brown interview leading figures in news and culture. Chris Cillizza, the author of So What and a frequent on-air contributor, put it simply: “Video doesn’t have to live in any one place. It needs to be wherever someone chooses to consume it. The Substack TV app does just that for me and my work.”
Agreed! Mine is always for a free press live that i don't care about
ETA: Found the setting i think that fixes it. I went to the gear in the activity window and then in Notifications expanded Live and unchecked all those. Hope that helps!
...in Islam where the next prophet is supposed to be the anti-Christ."
Checks out so far.
Okay, I'm too old for this, I've seen too many "hey guize here's my cool new take we are all God, see?" variants before, but someone who has never encountered any of this in the wild might be interested. I am no more impressed by "let me slap on a coat of hip new quasi-scientific buzzwords of the day" this time round than by the previous of-their-time hip new quasi-scientific buzzwords in former efforts.
Good luck to you all.
EDIT: And there's even a proto-Gnostic quote! I've never read any of the Gospel of Thomas but I recognised the "saying of Jesus" as not something I've heard in the canonical Gospels, looked it up, and my oh my there we go.
I'm laughing here. Of course it is, of course it is. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
Asserting that it's rather rich the Canadians talking about "keeping international agreements" when they've hijacked NAFTA to work as rebranders of Chinese products. "Look, it's gotta be better, it's Canadian!" (given China's issues with pine nuts I can sympathize with the person, even if they are dumber than a sack of bricks).
I read it, which is how I always consume political speechifying, and was agog. Literally historical-level good both on the merits and as communication.
The final three paragraphs form a peroration that Churchill or Obama or Reagan or MLK -- thinking offhand of some of the greatest English-language public speechmakers of the past century -- wouldn't have been ashamed of.
Also some people whose wisdom in such things I tend to respect say that Carney's manner in delivering it was every bit as good. Perhaps partly because he personally wrote it at least in large part, hence was not reciting but rather speaking his own thoughts.
All that from a 60-year-old banker whose very first partisan-politics role at any level began less than a year ago....January 2025 me did _not_ have any of that on my bingo card, couldn't have picked Mark Carney out of a lineup.
The speech was excellent, and appropriate. The question is whether the Canadian people will back it up with more than words. And I'm frankly quite skeptical on that.
Same goes for the rest of the target audience. It's so much easier to imagine that the fine words will be enough.
It is not a matter of will, but simple capabilities. Ambition is worthless unless you have the resources to do anything with it. A rebellious will does not change the fact that their only choice is to serve or die.
Even against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy who is certain to win a military confrontation, a weaker country has no choice but to fight a war with the objective of making the engagement as costly as possible for the neighboring empire, or (much) preferably to signal they will do so without actually having to do it. The higher the cost the greater the degree of freedom the diplomats will have at the negotiating table when hashing out the terms of a surrender agreement. This is because even if the greater power wins, it is some inconvenience to them to spend the blood and treasure it'd take to pacify them, so there is a range of options that is better for both parties than active war. Once again, the greater the cost, the greater that range.
In addition to "serve" and "die", Canada has the choice of establishing a new alliance with people powerful enough to stand up to the United States. I see at least two obvious options there. And I see no advantage to the United States in pushing Canada down that path.
Canada, as the proud owner of twenty-five large heavy-water fission reactors, also has the option of establishing a strategic nuclear deterrent capable of going full MAD. If they die, we die with them. Given the long and mostly indefensible border between the two nations, and the fragility of modern economies, there are also plausible non-nuclear deterrent options available to them.
And even if those options were unavailable, Canada would only be faced with the choice between serving or dying, if a superpower demands "serve or die". Since you're pretty clearly thinking of the United States in that role, that gives Canada the third option of hoping that the American people would do the right thing and, if necessary, destroy the United States of America before America can kill all the Canadians. You might be surprised by how many of us would step up for that.
Canada may end up choosing to serve. But if they do, it will be out of cowardice rather than necessity. And maybe the Canadians will surprise us both and follow Carney's lead on this.
This edgelord-y crap has been all over the internet recently, and has gotten old and tiresome very quickly. All the more so because it's so plainly and egregiously wrong.
Canada has, of course, a smaller population, a smaller economy and a smaller military than its neighbor to the south. But it is neither weak nor helpless, and has been charting and following its own course for over a century. There's no signs that it will stop doing so any time soon. People saying things like this appear to have not even given the situation 30 seconds of serious thought, but instead pattern matched to "we strong, they weak, therefore they gotta do whatever we say." Which is absurd and patently false.
The actual fact is that the U.S. of 2026 doesn't have much leverage to compel Canada to do anything. A year ago it seemed plausible that the U.S. might extract significant and painful concessions from Canada through careful use of economic coercion. Instead, the newly-formed administration spend several months pointlessly dicking around using large threats to obtain very small gains, and then proceeded to completely blow up it's leverage by trying to apply aggressive and broad-based tariffs to *nearly the entire world*. That predictably and immediately backfired, and by now I don't expect Ottawa would move much at all even if the U.S. made even more aggressive tariff threats: the power of those threats is largely gone.
The U.S. of years past might instead have tried to compel Canada through diplomatic means: by gathering allies and threatening to isolate Canada on the global stage. Instead, the U.S. has managed to badly and repeatedly alienate the global community and isolate *itself*, simultaneously squandering its ability to build coalitions and increasing the importance of keeping healthy ties to more stable countries like Canada.
But I suspect you're thinking of neither of these things: people who say this kind of crap usually seem to be possessed by the childish fantasy that military power is the only sort of power that matters. They imagine that because the U.S. has more tanks and planes and missiles than anyone else, it can just tell countries like Canada what to do and be obeyed. To which I say "go ahead and try it." I doubt Ottawa would respond to military threats from Washington with *open* mockery. But I highly doubt they'd comply in any meaningful sense, either. Probably they'd make a great show of being polite and accommodating and then draw things out and drag their feet and ultimately do nearly nothing that the U.S. asked for. See, basically everyone who's not a completely mindkilled red-triber knows how utterly disastrous the outcomes are likely to be if the U.S. *actually* attacked Canada[1]. Obviously it would involve terrible and needless loss of life on both sides, and I doubt it would be *fun* to be living in Canada if it happened. But the attempt would wreck the U.S. like few other actions possibly could. (If you can't see why this is true, then you simply don't have the basic understanding of people and knowledge of the world to understand politics *at all*: you'd be better of sticking to sports of video games.)
[1] Including (I assume), large portions of the U.S. military brass, who have a reputation for being no-nonsense realists regardless of their personal politics.
Today Carney announced he won't be pursuing a "trade deal" with China, due to Trump's "threats" of 100% tariffs (given our current stance on China, I'd rather call those "promises").
Soft Power: wielding the great American economy as a cudgel to keep Canada from doing something stupid, that Canada itself would regret (note: I'll withdraw this assertion if Canada was simply "Negotiating" and wants a better deal with America. Trump's not adverse to using carrots, as the Abraham Accords (pipeline!) shows).
Did they actually reverse course from what they announced previously? From the reporting it just looks like they're saying they have "no plans" to go further. That seems like it could easily fit under the umbrella of "they'd make a great show of being polite and accommodating and then draw things out and drag their feet and ultimately do nearly nothing that the U.S. asked for"
Start from a point inside Canada. Move due South (i.e. along a latitude line) until you are in some other country that is no longer Canada. What country are you in? The answer for every the vast, vast majority of points in Canada[1] is "The United States."
In the straightforward way that most English speakers use and understand words, that puts the U.S. "to the south" of Canada. Regardless of whatever weird quirks of human geography you happen to bring up.
[1] The exception being parts of the Maritimes where the answer is "The Dominican Republic" or "Venezuela", that one tiny bit of Newfoundland where you technically end up in France, and a section of the B.C. coast where it looks like you'd stay in international waters until you crossed Antarctica, and not actually intrude on the territory of another nation until somewhere in Asia.
How do White Supremacists that put a lot of stress on the Black-White IQ gap deal with the (Ashkenazi)Jewish-White IQ gap? Isn't it challenging to foreground a metric in which you are smack in the middle between your alleged inferiors?
Didn't stop them from almost getting wiped out every other century. Maybe there's more to race than just IQ? Either way, it's not as if blacks have any accomplishments under their belt... except inventing jazz, I guess. Even that didn't last.
My impression is that "white supremacy" is not at its heart a claim that "whites are smarter than anyone else and therefore should rule", it's just a desire that whites should rule. Reasons are only opportunistic.
I can as easily construct a "white supremacist" that is logically consistent:
1. White IQ > Black IQ (and other large groups that have lower alleged IQ)
2. Don't want tribal people with higher IQ and strong in-group preference to lord over you
3. Get them all out of the country, so you can live among your own
But at this point it isn't so much a "white supremacist" no more, than ethnic nationalist (like Chinese in China are, like Jews in Israel are, etc).
So realistically speaking, every time you hear an alleged "white supremacist", it's most likely just an ethnic nationalist - that happens to be white, so you open the whole can of worms of mental gymnastics, ad-homs, etc, etc...
The Chinese are actually racist. See that "won best advertisement in China for the Year" washing machine advertisement where they literally whitewash a black person into being chinese.
Ethnic Nationalists are ... all of Spain, pretty much. It's why Spain always wants to dissolve as a country.
White supremacists presumably have a holistic understanding of white supremacy that weighs intelligence highly but not as the only factor. As motivated reasoning goes, this is not even difficult.
I think that any reasonable white supremacist would consider Jews to be white and not inferior to other whites. Historical race science often divided the white race into the subraces Aryans, Semites and Hamites. E.g. look at this old map from an encyclopedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race#/media/File:Meyers_map.jpg
You can come with a narrative where your group is just right, and the other groups are either holding you back with their low IQs, or plotting against you with their superior IQs. I've seen people do that.
It would appear that you do not have access to very good IQ tests. The best IQ tests are long-term, and are definitely not advertised (these are IQ tests designed for the higher range of humans, naturally. People failing the marshmallow test do not apply, and would not do well if enrolled).
No, of course not, but a person who consistently fails to change their smoke detector because they fail to register the pattern isn't going to do well on a long-term intelligence test.
Online data of people playing videogames (aka there's a lot of audio recorded while people are playing Doom, etc. -- the first person multiplayer shooter games, in particular.) suggests that Yes, there is a correlation between race and "not changing the smoke detector."
Pattern recognition isn't the same across people, and certain races have higher genetic variability than others. Given that, and even a "everyone's the same on average" (which, hardly, but even assuming that...), you'd expect to see some people "not tying the beeps together."
Scott, you need to figure out how to make moderation happen effectively while you are busy. Now it's a joke; once in a month you ban someone, the next day they are back with a new account.
Yeah, it was fun for quite a while but… yeah. The conspicuous avoidance of observable reality, the sane washing of all the bullshit being put out right now is too much.
Anything can be discussed except… the transparent destruction of the Republic, the tossing away 80 years of an imperfect but valuable rules based order by the Toad in Chief… Nauseating.
One of the problems with "traditional" IQ tests is that they need to be easy to grade (and relatively quick). It is rather hard to grade creativity, is it not? How about long term pattern analysis? Or predicting consequences more than one step ahead? The last one is tricky to grade, as you're grading the logic (and, naturally, the independently-devised models) and not the correctness of the consequences.
In this world, there do exist jobs that demand general intelligence (with starting skills being relatively immaterial). There is a high "financial" incentive to find the smartest people on Earth, and the companies are willing to devise tests that don't need to cover, say, below 120 IQ (which outlines a different problem with traditional IQ tests, they purport to cover all of humanity with a single scale.).
I know someone who administers and grades such tests (he's a "top 1000 in the world" talent, so you've definitely encountered his work). I wouldn't pass, so no, I haven't taken any.
I could easily imagine games like "The Magic Candle" or Minecraft being part of a long-term IQ Test -- "how much initiative and creativity do you show? how goal-directed are you when given a world to explore, and only a very vague time limit?" (remember the part about "hard to grade?")
In general, modelling, pattern recognition, analysis and creativity, with a consequential deemphasis on "verbal intelligence" and memorization.
Usually they'd point to something about how they're naturally covetous and evil. It's kind of like how some say that Asians have higher IQs but we are "more creative".
If they really took that stuff seriously, they'd talk about how some of the biggest mistakes the US ever made were the Chinese Exclusion Act which kept all those Chinese immigrants from making a life here and having kids, and the Immigration Act of 1924 which ruined America's chance to accept millions of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing antisemitism. Imagine the improved genetic makeup of the nation! The national IQ score!
I think a lot of them accept it, and then use it and other supposed "selection pressures" acting at the population level to argue for their deviousness, cunning, etc.
With an ex colleague I founded https://unbubble.news, a tool that uses LLMs to analyze links or screenshots and give more context, surface biases and propose different perspectives.
We're in the validation phase, to see if this idea and implementation has a future, or decide to kill it and try to fight social polarization from a different entry point.
I'm very much interested in feedbacks and hot takes about it! If you are interested, please reach out :)
It noted what i also noticed, that a bunch of D controlled states did not participate, although it apparently doesnt assign it the same significance that i do.
I dont like that it just regurgitates various claims without further investigation. Example "Critics warn that assembling a federal database with names, birth dates and partial SSNs heightens breach risks and could chill registration and turnout." or "Academic work and advocacy-group analyses find only isolated, often unproven cases of noncitizen voting, far below levels that could sway national results." could have used some links so i can evaluate for myself how much i should believe 'Academic work and advocacy-group analyses'
Anyone have experience donating a kidney while single? All of the experiences I've read so far involve the donor being cared for by a spouse but I'm at a loss who to ask to be my caretaker.
What about a task rabbit? The hospital won't discharge you if you still need IVs or can't walk to the bathroom without help, so it doesn't seem like you need somebody with medical training. A task rabbit could come a few hours a day and make you a meal and a sandwich for later, run errands, clean the cat litter box, etc. If you think you will need more help than that, or if the hospital requires you to have someone with you for the first 48 hours, there are services that provide home health aides, probably for 8 or 12 hr shifts, also people who do that work outside of a agency -- many are retired nurses and the like. I believe there are funds to cover expenses of kidney donorsand it seems like it's reasonable for you to ask them for coverage for paid help for a brief period.
Another alternative is to simply lie and say someone will be with you. I did that after I had IVF procedures, which are just a day surgery but leave you feeling like you've been run over by a truck. I had just moved to the town I was in and did not know anybody there well enough to ask them to stay with me, and thought the risk of me being alone was pretty minimal. I did have on old friend who lived in another state on alert, and she and I checked in a couple times over the course of the day when I came home, and that worked out OK.
What are some plausible mechanisms behind rumination?
As I understand it, rumination is getting stuck cycling through more or less the same set of painful thoughts, thoughts that evolve anger, sadness, fear, etc.
If these thoughts are painful, why won't the mind snap out of them, trying to escape the pain? Or is it the case that whatever pain these thoughts evoke is the lesser pain (ie. rumination as distraction)?
I understand that one way to stop rumination is to label it and force the focus away. Another way is to try and remove what seem like triggers (people, places, etc). I suspect journaling or Gendlin focusing might help by "consuming" the rumination, ie. producing action on it, telling the brain it's ok to let go.
I'm very curious about others experience with rumination and handling it--less from a seeking advice perspective, and more from trying to understand how different minds ruminate.
Rumination is a big part of being obsessive and obsessive people often find solutions to problems that other people don't. Unfortunately, some problems don't benefit from rumination but from the inside it's hard to know which is which. So unhelpful rumination is a failure mode of an evolutionary strategy that on net confers some advantages.
I find I do not want to stop thinking about sad or angry or frightening topics when I find myself ruminating about one of them. They don't feel like pain states that I'd like to escape, the way a headache does. They feel like motivational states. I don't crave to escape them, I crave the event that will relieve my distress. If I am angry I want to interfere with the events I object to, or punish or expose those who are to blame. If sad, I want to have the thing whose absence is making me sad. It feels to me like I keep ruminating because I am busy seeking a way to get the thing that will make me feel bettter. And that's true even when my common sense tells me there is no way to get that thing.
Described that way, that tracks better for me now. It's not that rumination is painful, it's that it's more like keeping focused on a problem, almost compulsively, without finding a way to crack it.
For me, I rarely ruminate on technical problems, but often on people problems.
I guess from inside, rumination is like: "Hey, I am trying to *solve* this problem. How am I supposed to solve it without thinking about it first?" It feels like working towards a solution. Rewarded by feeling that you are doing the right thing.
The argument from outside is like: "Uhm, you have already spent a few months or years thinking the same sequence of thoughts over and over and over again, without coming to any conclusion. How is another month of doing the same loop going to improve anything?"
The response from inside is denial ("this time it will be different, because I will do it properly"), because the person feels like they have a choice between doing the thing that feels right (even if evidence kinda points against it), or face the bad feelings without the protective shield of hope.
The proper solution would be to try something else. But that requires stopping the loop, admitting that there was no progress so far, and brainstorming other possible approaches. Some of the other options, often the obvious ones, may even be connected with bad feelings, for example you would have to do something that you prefer to avoid, such as start exercising, say something openly and risk a conflict, give up something convenient, etc.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, I guess repeating the same thoughts may feel like asking your parent for a help repeatedly -- which is a strategy that sometimes works for children; being annoying may help you get your wish granted. The problem is that this time there is no parent; you are just talking to yourself.
Rumination is the cognitive focus of melancholia or phlegmatism. As some people, choleric in temper, are ectomorphs, the Melancholic or phlegmatic personality tends towards endomophism.
In short: "do nothing unless pressed" is a way to preserve energy for later use.
Imo it's beneficial to ruminate sometimes. You find solutions by thinking about things. If the local tribe's Chadgar slept with your wife, you may ruminate on it and find the evolutionarily advantageous strategy of bashing his head in and sleeping with HIS wife.
"I'm killing the devil with the sword God gave me" does tend to have you carted off to the hospital.
"No, what I meant is warmed-over Buddhism" is better, but you may be English as a Second Language and though your fluency is good, it's still a little off.
A lot of Tolkien's characters have names that are fairly literal descriptions in a language other than modern English. Sometimes a real-world language and sometimes in one of Tolkien's fictional languages. For example, Gandalf is Old Norse for "Wand Elf" (and is not of Tolkien's invention: he borrowed the name along with the names of Thorin &co from a Norse saga), and Círdan the Shipwright's name is Sindarin (one of the in-universe Elvish languages) for "Shipwright".
The full Fellowship's names render to modern English as:
Wise (Old English)
Halfwit (Old English)
Green Leaf (Sindarin)
Fiery (Old Norse)
Revered King (Sindarin)
Steadfast Jewel (Sindarin)
Wand Elf (Old Norse)
Great Lord (Welsh)
Foreigner (Latin)
Challenge: without looking it up, identify which LotR character was named "Spider-Woman" and which was named "Goldilocks". The former appears in the Peter Jackson movies, while the latter was book-only.
Pbeerpg ba Fcvqre-Jbzna. "Ybo" vf na nepunvp Ratyvfu grez sbe fcvqre, n inevnag bs "pbo" nf va "pbojro". V'q sbetbggra nobhg Tbyqvybpxf Tnztrr; Rynabe vf gur bar bar bs Fnz'f xvqf V erpnyyrq. Ohg va nqqvgvba gb ure, gurer'f nabgure punenpgre (bar jub unf npghny fperra gvzr va gur znva fgbel va gur obbxf) jubfr anzr zrnaf Tbyqvybpxf va n qvssrerag ynathntr.
V qvqa'g xabj "ybo", qrfcvgr orvat n sna bs byq-snfuvbarq navzny anzrf yvxr "gbqq" naq "pbarl". Gur fynat grez V xabj sbe n fcvqre vf "obevf", juvpu V'z cerggl fher vf qrevirq sebz Gur Jub.
Tbaan gnxr n fubg va gur qnex ba gur erphefvir Tbyqvybpxf naq fnl Tnynqevry. Vg fhvgf ure, naq nyfb fbhaqf nobhg evtug va grezf bs babzngbcbrvn.
You're leaving out a lot of detail about that there Wand Elf:
‘The Grey Pilgrim?’ said Frodo. ‘Had he a name?’
‘Mithrandir we called him in elf-fashion,’ said Faramir, ‘and he was content. Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.’
The character named "Spider-Woman" is Shelob ("She" meaning of course a female, "lob" an English country word for spider).
"Goldilocks" would be Glorfindel (and I didn't even have to look that one up!) 😁 Lemme pull out that quote I mined years back about "hair-names" for the Elves:
"XI.
THE SHIBBOLETH OF FEANOR.
With an excursus on the name of the descendants of Finwe.
The names of Finwe's descendants.
Few of the oldest names of the Eldar are recorded, except those of the four leaders of the hosts on the Great Journey: Ingwe of the Vanyar; Finwe of the Noldor; and the brothers Elwe and Olwe of the Teleri. It is not certain that these names had any 'meaning', that is any intentional reference to or connexion with other stems already existing in primitive Eldarin; in any case they must have been formed far back in the history of Elvish speech. They consist each of a stem (ing-, fin-, el-, ol-) followed by a 'suffix' -we.
…The first elements were often later explained as related to …Common Eldarin PHIN 'hair', as in Quenya fine 'a hair', finde 'hair, especially of the head', finda 'having hair, -haired'; …The others are doubtful. All the Eldar had beautiful hair (and were especially attracted by hair of exceptional loveliness), but the Noldor were not specially remarkable in this respect, and there is no reference to Finwe as having had hair of exceptional length, abundance, or beauty beyond the measure of his people. (He had black hair, but brilliant grey-blue eyes).
With regard to Findekano/Fingon it may be noted that the first element was certainly Quenya finde 'hair' - a tress or plait of hair (Common Eldarin *phini- a single hair, *phinde a tress; Sindarin fin; find, finn-).
…(cf. findesse' a head of hair, a person's hair as a whole), but this is not conclusive proof that the name Finwe was or was thought to be derived from this stem. It would have been sufficient for Fingolfin to give to his eldest son a name beginning with fin- as an 'echo' of the ancestral name, and if this was also specially applicable it would have been approved as a good invention. In the case of Fingon it was suitable; he wore his long dark hair in great plaits braided with gold."
This was part of legitimate discontent with "The Rings of Power" (and not just review-bombing, the go-to excuse for "why is our show getting all negative comments online?"), what is this short back and sides/90s boyband male Elven hair, give us our boys with long plaits of gold! Only Gil-galad had proper hair! 😁
EDIT: "to the East I go not", says he, so what do our genius showrunners Payne and McKay have I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf (Okay You Were All Correct, It's Gandalf) do? Go to Rhûn! In the East! To find his staff! Conveniently meeting up with Tom Bombadil! And also Is This Dark Wizard Guy Saruman Tell Me This Is Not Saruman He's Gonna Be Saruman Isn't He Next Season?!
(That show has reduced me to the Pratchett excess of exclamation marks state. "'Multiple exclamation marks,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘are a sure sign of a diseased mind.' ")
Gandalf is Odin with a glass eye. Tricky guy who shows up when he's not expected, always has a plan he won't talk about, excessively cryptic but kicks butt when needed.
>You're leaving out a lot of detail about that there Wand Elf
You're absolutely right. He's one of the worse offenders in the legendarium in terms of having a bazillion names, albeit not quite as bad as Túrin Turambar or Sauron. Each has a different reason, though. Gandalf acquired different names given to him by various peoples he has dealings with, Túrin used pseudonyms to obfuscate his identity and also acquired several kennings from his varied (mis)adventures, and Sauron did a bit of all three.
For Elves, Tolkien gave them multiple names partially as an in-world explanation for their standard names often being extremely on-point. IIRC, the standard custom is for Elves to be given two private names in childhood, one from each parent, and then one or more names in adulthood assigned by peers or self-chosen. We mostly (often exclusively) hear about Elves by peer names or self-chosen names, which are often descriptive, and that's where we get the the guy with especially beautiful blond hair getting named "Goldilocks" and the great ship-builder getting named "Shipwright the Shipwright".
>This was part of legitimate discontent with "The Rings of Power" (and not just review-bombing, the go-to excuse for "why is our show getting all negative comments online?"), what is this short back and sides/90s boyband male Elven hair, give us our boys with long plaits of gold! Only Gil-galad had proper hair!
Even Gil-Galad looked weird in RoP. The styling in the front combined with his receding hairline and the lack of sideburns or forelocks makes his hair seem mullet-adjacent to my eyes.
I think the most damning observation on how RoP styled the Elves was that Robert Aramayo looked more like Elrond when he appeared in Game of Thrones (he played young Ned Stark in a flashback) than he did in RoP when he was literally playing Elrond.
I have heard a claim that they styled the Elves differently for rights reasons, but that sounds like bullshit because they licensed the film rights to LotR from New Line and constantly make gratuitous forced references to the Peter Jackson movies. If they don't have the rights to the look and feel of the Elves, then their lawyers did a shitty job negotiating the contract.
Similarly, a lot of the gaping plot holes get excused by claims that they only have the rights to the books and the appendices. But the Tolkien Estate is involved in the project, and by all accounts Simon Tolkien specifically wanted them to do a Second Age show, so it makes absolutely no sense that the Estate wouldn't have licensed them the rights to the relevant material at least from Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
>EDIT: "to the East I go not", says he, so what do our genius showrunners Payne and McKay have I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf (Okay You Were All Correct, It's Gandalf) do?
I still insist that Meteor Man should have been Tilion, the Maia of the Moon. Even with the alleged rights issues, the song Frodo sings at the Prancing Pony in Fellowship (written by Bilbo based on much older Hobbit folklore) establishes that Hobbits have the idea that there's a Man in the Moon who might have come down to Middle Earth at some time in the past.
I think they were dancing around "We are obviously copying the *hell* out of the movies, but we also can't be *too* obvious in what we're lifting wholesale", so they had to change up some things (white plastic scales Númenorean armour, anybody?) plus also my opinion of Payne and McKay is so stellar (sarcasm off) that I do think they thought "aw yeah, short hair Elves, we're so cool and original!"
Apparently Elrond was going through his Edgy Teenage Rebel phase with his hair like that*. Still doesn't explain Celebrimbor, but the guy playing that character got dealt an awful hand (when they *finally* let him do some acting instead of "stand there in the corner like a bumbling idiot" I went "okay, *now* I see why this actor was cast in the part").
I can't wait for Season Three. Because the spite must flow 😁 (and yes, I did mean "spite" not "spice" there).
Payne: If Tolkien ever wrote a comprehensive style guide to hairstyles in Middle Earth over its thousands of years of history, I would love to see it.
McKay: Part of this show is to go deeper and broader into each of these races and cultures. To say that any culture as rich and with as long of a history as the elves would all have the same hair for 9,000 years … that doesn’t seem to correspond and harmonize with the breadth of the imagination that Tolkien left us."
"Because it's cheaper. Good make-up and wigs are very expensive and you need a staff to maintain them and it take a lot of time to keep the hair right in shoots. I can't think of any creative reason why."
Spiteful, Watsonian (okay, my) reason:
Because Payne and McKay are talentless hacks. Yeah, sure: we're harmonising with the breadth of Tolkien's imagination. So we ripped off all the Big Recognisable Characters from the movies in order to drag in viewers, rather than working on original characters.
On second thoughts, their original characters are so bad, maybe it would have been worse. After all, they gave us OC Imaginary Daughter for Elendil, who is so drippy she should be playing Uinen; Imaginary Son for Pharazon, who *would* be a moustache-twirling villain if he could only muster enough testosterone to grow a moustache; Healer Lady in Forbidden Romance who loved her part so much, she skedaddled after the first season and had to be hurriedly killed off for the second; Low Down Cheatin' Skanky Ho who threw over the guy who genuinely did everything for her in order to canoodle with Isildur in hopes he'd take her back to Númenor and she could ditch the mud and gloom of whatever god-forsaken region they ended up in (Pelargir? I think it was meant to be 'this is where Pelargir is going to be') and others too numerous to remember or care about.
Oh, how could I forget Creepy Backstabbing Traitorous Innkeeper Southlands Guy? As easily as the show did, my dears. Not to mention Healer Lady's Rebel Without A Clue Son, and Daylight Walker Orcs because all you need is a hood made from what looks like cast-off snakeskin, apparently.
Ooh, and Fluffy! The Killer Warg! She's a good girl, yes she is, yes she is! The most ferocious giant chihuahua in all of The Southlands aka Mordor!
Sigh. Wouldn't you rather watch the show that was made purely as a distraction? Aka the original scripts said "Do not make this show." (and also "Do not set it in Wales").
I gave up on RoP an episode or two into the second season. The first season was rough going, but I was willing to make allowances for medium shift and early installment weirdness and give them a chance. to get better. And it did have some good bits. I agree with Deiseach about Adar. Elrond and Durin were well-acted enough to salvage all but the worst lines. The Numenor politics plotline had potential, even if several of the details were poorly thought-out.
I got really, really annoyed with it late in the first season, when the payoffs for the mystery box elements turns out to be silly and they committed to making major changes to the lore that were gratuitous and quite a bit worse than the source material. I tried to give Season 2 a chance, but it seemed to be doubling down on all the bad bits. The "Middle Manager Sauron" flashback was absurd, and the despite the actor's best efforts to sell things, "Sauron as master manipulator" seemed to be getting implemented as "Sauron gets away with everything because he's surrounded by idiots". Sauron's charisma and manipulation are so essential to the Second Age storylines in the lore that if it's being done badly, I'm going to be too annoyed with it to appreciate any good bits that manage to make it into the show by accident.
I also concur with Brett Devereaux's line of criticism of RoP setting up the context of the action scenes so incoherently that it ruins the stakes. As he put it:
>for the audience to care about the outcome of the battle, that outcome needs to feel like a product of the decisions characters made leading to it. The moment the audience feels like the battle’s decision depends entirely on the whim of the storyteller, disconnected from anyone’s actions, those actions stop mattering and the audience loses investment in the battle. Instead the storyteller needs the audience to feel like each decision, each event shifts the potential outcome of the battle, the way that for instance much of the action of The Two Towers and the first chapters of Return of the King determine the shape of the eventual battle outside Minas Tirith: the reader sees the decisions being made and then watches one by one as the consequences roll in. As a result, tactics that make sense to the audience are important for sustaining that investment. Does that mean the tactics need to be historical? No, of course not; most audiences do not have degrees in military history. But they need to be plausible and as with so much of the worldbuilding, accuracy is a shortcut to plausibility.
Having incoherent world-building in a Tolkien adaptation of all things is utterly unforgivable, since the world-building is right there waiting for you to use it. "The rules are made up and the points don't matter" might work for Whose Line is it Anyway, but not for a LotR prequel.
I am in the same boat as Deiseach: Tolkien is my fandom and has been since a similar age. I was really, really excite for RoP when it was announced. The Peter Jackson movies had proven that good screen adaptations were possible. I love the Second Age material in Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, but it's frustratingly unfinished. I would have loved a decent adaptation.
I started off with "I would like to see a show based in Middle-earth, it sounds like they're not trying to remake Lord of the Rings, yes I'll give it a go".
First episode was a bit iffy, but okay, they need to change a lot of things, compress the timeline, I get it. New original characters are terrible but it's only the first episode, maybe it'll improve. Except Adar, thanks mainly to Joseph Mawle being able to act the hell out of that part, but when you've got me cheering for the Second Banana Bad Guy because the Heroine is so unbearably awful, you're maybe not in "moral grey areas, not simple black and white, situations are complicated, there's good and bad reasons for what they're doing on both sides" but "we flipped the black and white so the Good Guys are the Bad Guys and the Bad Guys are the Good Guys, ain't we cute?" territory instead.
Hint: it did not improve. And they were trying to remake the Lord of the Rings. And what was even more aggravating, there was no excuse for "we didn't know such-and-such a detail", because they put in little blink-and-you'll-miss-them Easter eggs for the lore nerds (like the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Green_Bough_of_Return)
So I switched to mainly watching the reviews (critical) and then catching up with the episodes to see if they were continuing to slide downhill.
Okay, second season! This time round I had *no* expectations at all, in fact I was watching to see how much stupider it could get, and it did not disappoint me (Orc Guy rationale for betrayal? "Daddy doesn't love me!")
However, some bits *were* decent, I have to give them that. When they *finally* gave Celebrimbor's actor something to do, he was good in the part. And I will take Halbrand-Sauron shooting him full of arrows as being as close to book canon as this show will give me, I'm not too proud to accept scraps.
Floomp-monster Sauron was hilarious, too.
Best bits were the critical reviewers, though. Erik Kain, God bless the man, started out as TV critic saying "come on guys, give it a chance" but the first season wore him down and by the second he was happily alongside us being a Haladriel shipper and hoping for cute Elf-Maia evil babies 😁
Charlie Hopkinson had the real characters reviewing the show:
So, season three (of five, which I don't believe at all will happen) is slowly, slooooooowly, shambling its way towards us (supposedly sometime early 2027, don't hold your breath waiting). And I anticipate it with great anticipation, because in order to fix everything they screwed up, they will need to pull off a miracle in writing and direction (seriously, guys, how could you manage to hire a director who screwed up your climactic battle of season two? how?) and these guys are **not** miracle workers.
Why do I care? Because LOTR is my fandom since I was eleven and got my hands on a copy of The Hobbit. Were this just "generic TV fantasy show", I'd have watched a few of the first season episodes, shrugged, and dropped the whole thing without caring a straw about it. But they got me to fork out for a Prime subscription to watch their mess and by Tevildo Prince of Cats, I am going to get value for my money out of this some way!
Tolkien originally attached the name to the character who would become Thorin Oakenshield, with the wizard having the name Bladorthin. About halfway through writing The Hobbit, he decided to shuffle the names because "Wand Elf" fit better on a wizard than a dwaven king. I think that was before he decided on the nature of wizards.
Later, he justified the "elf" part with the idea that men who didn't know that wizards were Maiar but did know a fair amount about their habits and activities often assumed that they were Elves who, like Cìrdan, were old enough to grow beards. It stood to reason, since they were far too old to be Men, Hobbits, or Dwarves and were too tall for the latter two categories besides. This gets discussed in the Istari essay in Unfinished Tales.
Reading the HoME book about how LOTR was originally conceived, it's amazing the differences that happened. Everyone was going to be a Hobbit, because the publishers wanted a sequel to The Hobbit, and tactfully (but definitely) rejected his hopeful submission of what was, at the time, The Silmarillion as far as it had been completed.
And then about a third of the way in, he went "Nope, this is not working, scrap everything and start again". Sir Stanley Unwin was a very patient publisher, but also very shrewd, and the subsequent unlooked for success has made everyone very well-off indeed:
"From 1972 letter
15 July. I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead. A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and book-stores of Allen & Unwin. To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Despatch) was dealing with my works. I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from board-room downwards. ‘Accountancy’ told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights. Also a large single order for copies of The L.R. had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000."
Agreed. In particular, Aragorn started out as a mysterious Hobbit called "Trotter" because (depending on the draft) he wore wooden shoes or had wooden prosthetic feet. Tolkien tried on a bunch of backstories for Trotter and didn't like any of them before making him a Man instead and giving him the Chief of the Dunedain backstory. The two backstories for Trotter that I remember were that he was a "wild" Hobbit from a tribe that had never settled down in the Shire or Bree, or that he was one of the young Hobbits besides Bilbo whom Gandalf had sent off on adventures (and was a cousin or uncle of Frodo on the Took/Brandybuck side of his family).
Inidentally, it's struck my that Elrond got a pretty substantial retcon in LotR that doesn't get talked about much. In The Hobbit, he was introduced thus:
> The master of the house was an elf-friend [...] In those days of our tale there were still some people who had both elves and heroes of the North for ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was their chief.
Apart from the "master of the house" bit, that sounds more like Aragorn's backstory than Elrond's as established in LotR. Frodo's astonishment at the Council of Elrond to discover that Elrond was old enough to have been personally participated in the War of the Last Alliance feels like one of Tolkien's retcons (acknowledging and correcting the impression given in Hobbit that Elrond was a mortal descendant of mixed ancestry rather than being an actual Elf Lord), like the better-known and more comprehensive retcon of the stakes of Gollum's riddle game.
Yes, Sir Stanley Unwin was extremely patient. One of the things that struck me reading the Tolkien Letters compilation was the recurring theme of Tolkien starting so many letters by apologizing for taking weeks or months to write back. Several letters that start thus are responding to Sir Stanley or someone else at Allen & Unwin.
V guvax gur ynggre vf obzonqvy'f jvsr jubfr anzr rfpncrf zr ng gur zbzrag (V guvax vg fgnegf jvgu T?). Gur boivbhf nafjre sbe gur sbezre vf furybo, ohg gung ernyyl vf whfg n thrff.
So what’s going on with the economy? Job creation numbers are barely positive, ~35,OOO+(barely a rounding error) in the latest federal report. News reports and social media are full of job search horror stories, what with years of experience required for “entry level” jobs, six or seven or even more interview rounds, rampant ghosting, you name it.
And yet, federal figures for first-time claims for state unemployment benefits are extremely low, at levels not seen for decades. Not many people are getting hired, but then again not many people are losing their jobs. I don’t believe the US has ever before had this sort of situation.
I personally think this is the "phony war" phase of the next recession. Lots of local small businesses are throwing in the towel lately, saying that they've never been able to get out of the post-pandemic funk and are tired of trying. Lots of big or unprecedented layoffs lately.
> Not many people are getting hired, but then again not many people are losing their jobs. I don’t believe the US has ever before had this sort of situation.
There's a huge pool of "not looking" men that has been growing steadily, who don't show up in the commonly reported unemployment statistics.
Anecdotally, this matches what I see in the economy. Everyone I know who's unemployed has been since the pandemic and has basically given up hope for finding a job at this point.
IIRC, the prime age labor force participation rate was actually at record highs back in 2023. The Biden era rebound was real and not explained by people giving up looking. (Which of course doesn't mean that *noone* gave up looking, just not many people statistically.)
No, it damn well doesn't stand! People taking gig jobs are still looking for work. They are still working and registered on the Rolls. We see them in the Federal Statistics. they aren't MISSING.
20 million people MISSING out of our jobforce is a Problem. The type of problem that people start looking for "vaccine related injuries" to explain (see the multiple studies on mRNA vaccines causing accelerated cancer, including the population study in South Korea).
In my experience, most young unemployed men are living with relatives (parents, mostly) and are not even looking for a job because they don't want one. Most of them probably could find a low-skilled job, but for the most part they simply don't want those jobs. They may feel that those jobs are for losers and are soul-crushing so there's no point in getting one.
I think there's a general feeling of disillusionment and hopelessness among young men.
Have you met a lot of these guys? How many of them do you think would show up for an $18/hour job (no bennies) of hard, semi-skilled labor (half a year's experience needed)?
I have only met a handful of people like this, by nature of them being pretty reclusive. Many of them I knew in high school and they just never did anything after graduating. I don't keep contact with any of them so I'm mostly guessing at how they may feel.
I worked some warehouse and general labor jobs after high school and during college, and I usually didn't have a lot of coworkers who were around my age, especially not men. These are the kinds of jobs I would assume young men would be willing to work at, but that's not what I observed. I think maybe they have high expectations and aren't willing to work their way up or get a higher education.
I am not claiming that this is what’s happening, but you can imagine the sort of person who would rather move in with mom and dad than take a job that doesn’t fulfill socioeconomic expectations.
20 million? Last I checked (a couple years ago), the feds were looking for vaccine-related injuries to explain this discrepancy (unlike women, who can be pregnant or busy with kids... men are basically driven by sex (extremely high sex drive), and to get sex, support a family, you need a job).
OpenAI seems bad. That certainly doesn't apply to everyone at the company. I'm sure there are people there who are doing their best and trying to make the best product they can. But their legal team and leadership have had enough incidents at this point that I feel like I'm surprised that people who are concerned with AI safety (including Scott) seem fine with using (and paying for!) their products. I am not trying to draw a hard line in the sand here. The purpose of my comment is mostly just confusion. I won't use ChatGPT and use Claude instead, and I don't know why this isn't more common. I understand that there are things ChatGPT can do better than Claude at this point, and that any one person's impact is going to be minimal, but with the importance of the subject, I would really like OpenAI's bubble to pop and market share to head towards Anthropic. Why aren't more people acting the same way?
If you are curious what problems I have with OpenAI, here is a list of major incidents.
2022: The OpenAI board decides that Sam Altman was untrustworthy after compiling a (as yet unreleased publicly) 50 page document of times he was manipulative and fires him. He got reinstated and still leads the company today
2025: OpenAI tried to subpoena all private correspondence about SB 53 (CA AI bill) from people involved in the bill. The PR firm they are using has previously said explicitly that "The goal was intimidation, to let everyone know that if they fuck with us they'll regret it" (https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/1976649129179959304)
2025: OpenAI cofounder donates $50M to start Leading The Future SuperPAC, which makes it the largest non-partisan lobbyer organization, and they are attacking anyone trying to pass AI safety bills (namely Alex Bores)
This is false equivalence. From looking into the FEC findings, Dario Amodei has donated a total of about $136k, and none of that has been since 2020. Daniela Amodei has donated $6k and I can't find donations from any of the other Anthropic founders.
In contrast, Greg Brockman and his wife are the 5th and 6th largest donations on the MAGA Inc FEC page, totaling $25M. This is not including the reported $50M that he has put toward the Leading The Future PAC.
That means OpenAI founders have donated more than 500x what Anthropic founders have.
As for the NDAs, the existence of an NDA is less of an issue than OpenAI withholding vested equity, money that would have been understood as already being banked by the employee. They are essentially taking money (sometimes millions of dollars) out of the employees bank account if they don't sign the NDA. That is not normal practice and it's not what Anthropic did.
Re prediction markets: supporters argue that there are big benefits to predicting the future, because it allows us to more accurately measure risk, apportion resources, and otherwise operate efficiently. Detractors don't generally disagree that there are benefits to predicting the future, but rather argue that prediction markets are a uniquely bad way to do this because of the inherent corrupting influences of the profit incentive and what that means at a macro scale.
As an example of the latter, we generally want things to trend towards 'stability', so a lot of effort is made to make things more stable. The more likely stability is, the more money there is to be made in predicting that things will suddenly become unstable, which in turn incentivizes people to do destabilizing things. Another way you can think of this is that prediction markets create pressure to move everything towards a toss up, proportional to how certain something seems to be
It is still early days for prediction markets, but I would love to hear concrete predictions from supporters about when they would turn around and say 'actually this whole thing was a bad idea' (the way we are already starting to see with legalized sports betting, for eg)
Prediction markets seem to be morphing into "sports betting, except for everything", or maybe that's what they always were but now they're going mainstream. It's kind of predictable that tech companies become sketchier when they start getting big money.
I do think the tech companies are exacerbating issues with prediction markets, but I'm more interested in the fundamental tension of prediction markets providing financial pressure towards destabilizing outcomes (tautologically, if you define destabilizing as unpredictable)
That's a good point, there is never going to be another American invasion or police action that doesn't make some Pentagon guy rich enough to buy a boat.
> That's a good point, there is never going to be another American invasion or police action that doesn't make some Pentagon guy rich enough to buy a boat.
Still, all this is scriptable, so surfaceable information.
Any security team worth their salt is going to have automated monitors looking out for said actions since Maduro, and presumably some of those will be able to act quickly or efficaciously enough that they avoid the capture, and make Pentagon guy lose enough that's he's boat-poor instead of boat-rich.
Also, any savvy trader is going to be programatically looking for last minute buys like this that look like insider trading enough to buy the upswing, so Pentagon guy's arbitrage is going to get eaten more and more, too.
I am starting to wonder if prediction market advocacy is going to turn out to be a big egg on the face of Rationalists. The "insider training is good actually" argument is looking progressively worse over time, as insiders get enormously rich for trivial information gains (eg discovering about some policy change ~20min before you otherwise would have known), and all of the major real-money platforms are rapidly converging on becoming a sports betting clone. Prediction markets may well just turn into a giant money pump to transfer money from young men with addictive personalities to corrupt government and business insiders.
I think it was obvious these were dumb arguments even three years ago, and it's a continual discredit to people like Scott who still push them (though at least Scott has started to acknowledge some of the downsides).
This isn't hindsight either - I've been consistent in arguing against prediction markets all along.
To be fair, I was massively wrong about AI, so I guess I'm 1-1 there compared to the Rationalists. Or 2-1 if you count crypto.
> I am starting to wonder if prediction market advocacy is going to turn out to be a big egg on the face of Rationalists
There's a failure mode that I notice that I'm struggling to put into words, but its something approximating 'typical mind fallacy'.
The average very smart person sees prediction markets and goes 'o neat!' because they think everyone will use it like the average very smart person, while the average person sees prediction markets and goes 'wait no this wont work' because they think everyone will use it like the average person. There's a stereotype about intelligence being anticorrelated with wisdom and I wonder if this kind of typical mind thing is pointing to some kind of mechanism / kernel of truth -- very intelligent people by virtue of being very intelligent will *not* have a 'typical mind', so their 'typical mind fallacies' are more egregiously wrong. I think something similar happened to crypto (cf FTX?)
Mark me down as the average person, because "becoming sports betting, you say?" isn't surprising me. I said back when these were being discussed that I thought they would not be the pure perfect rational tool for using the wisdom of crowds to set policy as hoped, but instead once people thought that they could make money off this, that is what the aims would be diverted towards.
Very Smart People thinking "we can invent a way to make better decisions, and handing out money prizes is only the equivalent of getting that gold star from teacher, not a motivation in itself to put profit and expediency above truth and honesty" is the failure mode here. If you confine prediction markets only to the Very Smart People, they'll be too small to mean anything. If you let everyone in, then yeah - sports betting markets.
Is that actually a bad thing? I've always seen gambling as a natural way of moving resources from people who would have squandered it anyways, to people who can actually make productive investments. Isn't that what we mean by "dumb money"?
Even by the usual standards of gambling, legalization of online sports betting has been a massive disaster, with measurable increases in all sorts of social ills.
As discussed below, much of that is an issue with the ease of declaring bankruptcy. This would not be an issue if we had systems to ensure that debts were returned, even if they requires the loss of some agency for the debtor. Banks every incentive to take the necessary actions in order to ensure that they are made whole. They simply need to be allowed to do so in the first place.
> I've always seen gambling as a natural way of moving resources from people who would have squandered it anyways
But this is just not true. Many people who may struggle with gambling can live very productive lives if they manage to abstain, much in the same way alcoholics can live very productive lives if they manage to avoid alcohol. It would be callous to argue that 'alcoholism is a natural way of moving resources from people who would be addicted anyway to bartenders' or whatever
More generally, I think that these things are not binaries. It is *much harder* to abstain from gambling if gambling is everywhere. Every single person is on some gradient of 'very likely to be addicted to gambling' to 'not likely to be addicted to gambling' and the place where an individual falls on 'addicted' or 'not addicted' is as a result a mix of their own tendencies AND how society is structured around them
Alcoholism is an issue because it's a drug, and the adverse effects inebriation and poisoning cause on society. That doesn't apply to gambling. Sure, they might need to sell a house or a kidney to make ends meet, but again, those are resources going to people who can make better use of them. Though, we may need better systems to force people to pay back their debt to take full advantage of this...
I just explained it. It doesn't cause them to be a nuisance to society, and doesn't cause health problems that would prevent them from being useful to others. They do not need wealth to work off their debt.
I don't know if this is what theahura had in mind, but when I hear "previous supporters of legalized sports betting starting to turn around and say that it was actually a bad idea," this essay is the sort of thing I think of.
For historical interest, the pools in Britain were a form of mass sports betting before the likes of the National Lottery. They used to be huge, are still going, but have fallen away from their peak. The attraction was that anyone could play, even housewives, so filling out your coupon and handing it over to the collector was nearly a weekly ritual:
"In the United Kingdom, the football pools, often referred to as "the pools", is a betting pool based on predicting the outcome of association football matches taking place in the coming week. The pools are typically cheap to enter, and may encourage gamblers to enter several bets."
I think I don't understand the argument well enough to summarize it, and there's a 30 page paper too, but it makes a lot of sense from what I can tell.
This post sounds an awful lot like "we can't scientifically distinguish conscious from unconscious AI" or "a falsifiable theory of consciousness is impossible" rather than the claimed "LLMs are not conscious." A theory has to be falsifiable for humans to consider it scientific, but human limitations about testing things does not say anything about the underlying reality.
I got about halfway through before I realized the central claim, that this is a theory-agnostic proof of non-consciousness, is wrong/exaggerated. Granted I'm very much just a layman here, so take this with a grain of salt with a value equivalent to the mass of the human soul, but my objection goes something like this (trying to steelman his claims the best I can, tell me where I'm wrong):
Hoel: "This proof is theory-agnostic. It doesn’t rely on any particular account of consciousness."
Critic: "Ok, granted that we're talking about a narrow space of purely physicalist theories, you treat lookup tables as paradigmatically non-conscious and classify any theory that disagrees as trivial. But you never establish that lookup tables must be non-conscious, you just assume it and build that assumption into your definition of triviality.."
Hoel: "Any theory that cannot make principled distinctions between paradigmatically conscious systems and paradigmatically non-conscious ones collapses into triviality or unfalsifiability and therefore fails as a scientific theory."
Critic: "Then your conclusion isn’t that ChatGPT isn’t conscious under any theory, but that no theory violating your prior boundary conditions is allowed. Those constraints THEMSELVES constitute a substantive theory of consciousness, so calling the proof theory-agnostic is misleading."
It's just the same IIT nonsense restated in the negative pretending to not just be that. Humans are conscious (are we? did we prove this?), calculators are not (aren't they? did we prove this?), therefore we need to draw some dividing line between calculators and humans (do we really though?). If you draw the line *just right* you can put chatgpt in the calculator side of the line. This makes the proof entirely circular and trivial.
> Humans are conscious (are we? did we prove this?), calculators are not (aren't they? did we prove this?),
I despise this argument. If you don’t think humans can be proven conscious, and you don’t think calculators can be proven not conscious then we can’t really say anything about humans, dogs, cats, calculators, rubber ducks, atoms, French fries, a bag of chips or LLMs. So in reality there’s no need to discuss any of this.
The argument seems to be that because we don’t know what consciousness is we can’t say what it isn’t. We don’t know what dark matter is but can say what it isn’t.
We don't only know ordinary matter isn't dark matter - we can prove it's not dark matter. But how do we approach proving a calculator isn't conscious? It's not a pointless question at all - the inability to define consciousness itself tells us something about consciousness. It adds to plausibility of the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that can happen in many different ways - after all, it would be much easier to disprove if it could happen only one way. If there are many ways, then there are many paths for computers to achieve consciousness. So in a sense, the harder it is to disprove a simple calculator is conscious, the easier it is for massive data centers to achieve true consciousness. And when we manage to prove a simple calculator is definitely not conscious, the odds of datacenter succeeding will take a nosedive.
Yeah, that's the one thing you can be most certain of, that you're having experience.
> Calculators are not
I think it's more that a theory that grants consciousness to calculators would grant consciousness to everything and therefore have no predictive power. Similar to one granting consciousness to LLMs.
Democritean atomism doesn't seem to have much predictive power to me. Our own theory of atoms is far more complex than "everything is made of atoms" and predicts things like atom bombs. It also doesn't hold that everything is made of atoms.
>Yeah, that's the one thing you can be most certain of, that you're having experience.
I strongly agree with this personally(but I'm christian and I believe in the soul and free will implicitly), so *shrugs*
However a decently large category of consciousness models dispute this point in various capacities (illusionism, solipsism, some versions of simulation theory).
>I think it's more that a theory that grants consciousness to calculators would grant consciousness to everything and therefore have no predictive power. Similar to one granting consciousness to LLMs.
There is a large body of coherant, non-magical, non-trivial consciousness models that resolve this contradiction: Global Workspace Theory, the Self-Model, Higher Order Theory, Attention Schema Theory, and Sensorimotor Contingency Theory, to name a few. Most of them would be described as "trivial" by Hoel despite being major classes of consciousness theories. All of them have totally separate claims about what would be required to make an AI model "conscious".
So you see why I think Hoel's claim that ChatGPT is *literally proven-by-science for all non trivial theories of consciousness* is at least misleading, and the real claim is closer to "ChatGPT is provably not conscious, assuming you implicitly believe in a very tiny subset of IIT-adjacent consciousness models"
Hmm, I'm gonna paste this in a comment in his post, maybe he replies. However, I did read Hoel's book, The World Behind the World, there he says that IIT is essentially vacuous, so he can't be really defending that theory here.
I think only illusionism disputes the existence of consciousness (which makes it the craziest thing philosophy ever produced). In solipsism, only oneself is conscious, and I don't see what simulation theory (I feel this shouldn't have the word theory, it is not scientific) has to do with consciusness: even if you're experiencing a simulation, you're still experiencing!
He doesn't know what consciousness is, yet he purports to prove that LLMs don't have it using arguments that it's too similar to other things he claims cannot have consciousness (the thing he doesn't know what it is, remember).
I'm still reading the paper, but let me point out that he claims to know *some* things about consciousness and not everything, so I don't think there's a paradox as you're describing it. In fact, he claims to derive certain necessary conditions for consciousness, while agreeing they're not sufficient. He might be wrong, but if so I expect the problem to lie in his assumptions, not some sort of illogic in his argument.
It's amazing how AI has become marketable in every way regardless of one's feelings on it. DuckDuckGo is especially funny as they have DuckAI and are actively working on different AI products even as they also pander to the anti-AI crowd.
Hate AI? You get redirected to one homepage with a proud "no AI!" banner
Love AI? You get redirected to another homepage with a big DuckAI interface
I've seen posts on Reddit about this DuckDuckGo marketing bit with 20,000+ upvotes. It is a clear PR coup for them to lean into anti-AI sentiment even as they are not actually penalized by continuing to work on DuckAI and offering that service as well.
I imagine we'll see a lot more companies straddling this divide with even more conscious separation of AI and non-AI services. I guess one big question is whether there are enough rabidly anti-AI folks where they will exert pressure to remove all AI services and not just the ones they are exposed to (or deliberately redirected around).
I was just in an online conversation among doctors about a contract provision saying that we wouldn't use any software with AI functionality, and there was general agreement that it's becoming impossible to avoid AI, it's being built into *everything*.
As AI usage has become more popular, the criticisms became more ridiculous. We went from existential concerns and threats to our ability to make a living to talking about how data centers use electricity.
For AI safety purposes, it's good that there's a public backlash against AI, for whatever reasons, no? The backlash is also taking the form of rejecting AI outputs.
Imo no. It means we will miss out on benefits of AI all while countries that do not respect public opinion can proceed themselves with destroying the world.
What a uselessly vague question. It's like asking "are you yes or no on cars" - it depends a lot on what situation you're using it in!
I would say probably 80% of AI uses I've seen seem pointless to me, but I wouldn't say I'm "against AI," I just think it's overhyped. That other 20% looks pretty interesting!
No need to make it that complicated. Apply whatever metrics are important to you and vote accordingly, if you're going to vote at all. Do your 20% in favor outweigh the 80% useless/harmful, then vote Yes, otherwise No. The poll is not an aptitude test whatsoever, you're not going to be graded, so why be aggrieved about the lack of direction? You could, of course, always ask some kind of always confident assistant whether you're yes or no on AIs...
The "AI safety" movement has come a long way toward creating the apocalypse they wanted to prevent. Now you want to do mirror life next?
Cautionary advocacy doesn't work. Cautionary tales don't work. The human race's best defense against the horrors on the tech tree is its lack of imagination. If you think of something you don't want to see happen, please just shut up about it.
The mirror life people tried that for a while (I remember that in order to discuss any biosecurity stuff with EAs I had to promise never to blog about certain things without their permission, and mirror life was one of them, and the fact that you spent the whole 2010s never hearing about it was a success of this policy). Then the NSF gave some people a grant to produce mirror life, and the smart people decided that never mentioning that this might be bad, even as other people tried to create it, probably wasn't the right tactic anymore. See the very first section in their Technical Report, "Rationale For Public Release".
Also, I think the AI safety talking point is overblown - you think without Eliezer Yudkowsky, they wouldn't have invented the transformer?
Google more or less sat on the transformer for a while. I guess I think ChatGPT or RLHF could have come a couple of years later and we'd have had a couple more years of "human joy and wonder and regret" before the end. That is a lot of QALYs.
I guess I think the first group trying to create mirror life will probably fail, or get lucky and not release it, or get cancelled for being too woke or not woke enough. It's not like the first attempt to build AI ended in paperclips. It takes sustained effort to destroy the world (and that's why we are still here).
Greg Egan has mirror life as a plot point in one of his novels, where rich people are getting "converted" to mirror life so they don't have to worry about biological weapons which wouldn't effect them anyway.
I’m not part of any movement and I think my feelings about AI are much smaller than those of people in the AI safety movement, but if the things you list as not working don’t work maybe it’s because those are just noises people make instead of actions people take.
If you don’t want a given technology in your life, take action: change your life to omit that technology. If you want other people to do the same, lead by example and show them why your way of living without that technology is better.
What do you propose he do if he doesn't want a particular technology in anyone else's life, even if they want it in theirs? The traditional approach is to leverage state violence against its developers, distributors and users. In what ways is your suggestion better?
I said in my comment above that if you want others to do what you do, lead by example. I have written previously on my blog about why it is that so few people (none as far as I can tell), even within the AI safety community, have issued a statement to the effect of “I have stopped using AI and so should you” even though that would be far more effective than cautionary tales.
To summarize my thoughts, 1) they mistakenly see non-connection between everyday AI use and future AI development, 2) possibly some of them don’t really believe their own arguments, and 3) they have internalized a paradigm in which technology adoption is deterministic, forgetting that there is always an element of choice.
I can see how talking up something like mirror life makes it likelier that scientists and wacko evildoers will get interested in the topic and work on developing some mirror life, and that making it likelier it will spread or be spread and do damage. But how does talking about AI killing us all make that likelier?
OpenAI, Anthropic, and from what I have heard DeepMind were founded and funded by people influenced by Yudkowsky. They needed some AI to align, so they built some. They needed investors to fund that, so they looked for applications. The whole arms race was created by "safety" people! It doesn't seem likely that we could have avoided it forever, but it *has* to have been accelerated.
I guess the exact same sequence could play out with mirror life. How are we going to prevent it from killing us all if we don't make some to study?
Deepmind was not founded by Yudkowsky acolytes, it was founded by Demis Hassabis, whose background was in video games. He worked on Black & White, which had very advanced NPC AI for its time, back in 2001. Although if you're just saying Hassabis subsequently read Yudkowsky or heard of Yudkowsky-influenced ideas, then that's of course possible (indeed probable), but I doubt he'd consider him a major influence.
AI development was like a fire in a bone dry forest with lots of deadwood. It could have been set off by any of a number of things, but was guaranteed to be set off by somebody People have been fascinated for a long time by the idea, and built calculating machines and the like not long after the science and tech of their era made it possible, and their were serious attempts at building something we would call AI before Yudkowski et al. were even born. Being harmed by smart robots and the like is also quite an old idea. Once science and tech reached a point that made it possible to build AI of the type we have now, human ingenuity and greed guaranteed that someone would build it and that there would be enormous interest in it, enormous deployment of resources etc. And our fear of it was also inevitable.
Like everybody else on the board, occasionally I have dreams about 2015-era SSC essays.
Last night, I had a dream about "Untitled" and re-engaged with it in a world where the grooming gangs in England are common knowledge and pulling the whole (played out) "Where are the feminists?" game.
Then I realized that this was (yet another) Marxism Brain thing (for lack of a better term).
In most circumstances, if someone says "I am in great pain because I do not have X", Marxism Brain's immediate knee-jerk response is "We have an obligation to get you X."
From each according to his something something, whatever.
But when a somewhat nerdy guy says something like "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship", Marxism brain immediately seizes up and the fight gets *WEIRD*.
"NOBODY OWES YOU A RELATIONSHIP!"
"YOU ARE SO (FREAKING) ENTITLED!"
"THIS IS RAPE CULTURE!"
That sort of thing. People with Capitalism Brain (for lack of a better term) read "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" and smile sadly and nod and say "yeah, life is like that... hey, you should do some things to change your life. Groom yourself better. Shower more. Work out more. Get an interesting hobby like cooking. Hang out in group settings where people hang out and make friends."
Why? Because they read something like "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" and do *NOT* immediately respond with "therefore we, as a society, have a responsibility to get you laid".
People whose brains immediately kick in with "therefore we, as a society, have a responsibility to get you laid" have to immediately start screaming "YOU ARE SO FREAKING ENTITLED!" at the guy who is, quite honestly!, saying "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship".
The screaming isn't merely at the guy who is appealing to a very important foundational emotional response, it's also the screamer screaming at themselves trying to tamp down the immediate knee-jerk response to have the government institute something like Universal Basic Girlfriend.
People with Capitalism Brain would never IN A MILLION YEARS imagine something like UBG.
People with Marxism Brain hear "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" and the first thing they think of is UBG and because this is an obviously odious conclusion, respond with arguments about how the person making the claim that they are in pain is *WRONG*. They are bad. They are undeserving. They have no right to a girlfriend at all.
"Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
Presumably under Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, it will be simple and easy to find a gf, or you can ask your friendly neighborhood super intelligence who knows what's up with everyone for help.
I miss the days when one of the more silly political factions we had were feminist ideologues making hysterical accusations about "rape culture." Nowadays, they're the sane ones.
Let's not pretend these are isolated incidents. The right was galvanized in large part because they felt the need to permanently deal with these feminists.
Yeah. Generally, extremes feed each other; the typical reason people join one is that something made them fear the other.
As an extremist politician, the opposite extremists are in some sense not your enemies; they are rivals. When they get stronger, you also get stronger (because "they are getting stronger" is a great slogan for your recruitment). The actual enemy is someone who says: "uhm, guys, stop talking nonsense, we have more important things to do, let's focus on those", because when people start listening to that guy, both you and your rival start losing votes.
(Oh, and I have come to suspect that I had conflated Untitled with Radicalizing the Romanceless in my dreaming state. I feel like I should regret the error but, hey. I was asleep and my brain was doing stuff.)
This feels like a Capitalism Brain take on a Marxism Brain.
To make the jump from "the state should transfer wealth from those who have it to those who don't to alleviate poverty" to "the state should transfer sex from those who can get it to those who can't to alleviate sexlessness," feel natural/inevitable, one first must adopt a key Capitalist Brain axiom - "interferences with my property are functionally the same as interferences with my body, because I use my body to labor to obtain property."
But the "Marxists" simply don't believe that. It's a popular take in Randian/Libertarian circles, but not Marxist (or even mildly left-leaning) ones.
Thus, a leftist simply wouldn't view "if the state should forcibly transfer wealth to solve poverty, then it should also (obviously) forcibly transfer sex to solve sexlessness," as a valid statement. They don't have this "my property is an extension of my body and thus my rights to integrity of both are mirrors of the other" thought pattern going, so they'd just say that the nature/importance of the two rights proposed to be infringed are fundamentally different. Doing the one need not imply doing the other. And most people would probably agree, at least intuitively - it's pretty safe bet that most would view welfare work requirements very differently if they were welfare sex work requirements, or if we tried to have people pay taxes in blowjobs.
Yes, in capitalism, owning property increases your status. And high-status guys typically get laid more. But abolishing (the importance of) property wouldn't abolish status differences -- it would just change the relative importance of various human traits.
Things like "work ethics" and "careful planning" would probably lose some of their value. Not all, because you still need to do some household work, and plan your holidays or whatever. -- Unless we assume that the communist government would also provide 100% childcare etc. If you go far enough this way, then the only important thing about your partners becomes how enjoyable they are in bed. Which is still a wildly varying thing, because some people are prettier than others, some are more funny, or more adventurous. The communist utopia (without sex redistribution) would still have incels.
(Also, even if people still valued traits related to work ethics and responsibility in their partners, these would become more difficult to signal. In capitalism, you can sometimes see their accumulated effects. Things like "this guy can talk a lot about changing the world, but he can't even keep a simple job for more than a month".)
> Things like "work ethics" and "careful planning" would probably lose some of their value.
It will be like going back to the dynamics of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness.
Physical skill, demonstrated excellence, looks, high social skills? All get top marks. Athletes and salespeople will dominate that future's status pyramid.
I actually argue we're going to get here even before Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism - when everyone has a superintelligent AI assistant + life coach + super persuader in their ear, everyone has a super-ego that works, and things like "planning" and "work ethic" matter relatively less, because a much bigger slice of humanity is empirically demonstrating them (even if they were largely following an AI's plans and being super-persuaded to do so). So all those physical EEA things will move upwards in relative status even earlier.
That is a good point, but I think it can be easily rephrased to ignore the body-property collusion:
Just as a state may pay for higher education, health care services, food or accommodation of the less fortunate, it may also finance sexual services for those who lack such. This does exist to some extent, afaik in Germany and Netherlands disabled people can get prescriptions for receiving such, and that was the case in Australia between 2020 and 2024.
That being said, I agree that the description for the "Marxism Brain" by op is indeed how "Capitalism Brain" interprets it. I am myself also thinking in the terms of the second one, but let me try steelmanning the "Marxist" position:
There are oppressed and oppressors, we must help the former and fight/weaken the latter to better society. One of the best ways for this is to transfer resources from oppressor group(s) to oppressed group(s). Males as a group are in a superior position compared to women. Creating services for which the primary cost bearers are women while the primary beneficiaries are men increases the oppression and makes society worse.
Wouldn’t legalized hookers achieve the same end? There would be costs involved, but as the old saying goes, the difference between sex for free and sex for money is that sex for money is a lot cheaper.
Not entirely. It would most likely help, but some people would be priced out of it, just like in case of any other services (food, healthcare, education is legal after all, but there is still government support).
It is not a coincidence that in the mentioned German and Dutch examples (some) disabled people are the targeted group: Although any adult can already purchase sexual services (prostitution is legal in these countries), but if ones circumstances inhibit him/her from earning well, they likely won't be able to finance it for themselves. (Or even if they technically could, (social) insurance may support it by the same logic it supports non-critical medical/welfare requirements).
I feel like I'm being asked to "steelman for all leftists broadly" a little bit here, but I think most leftists, at least in the American sense of the word, would enthusiastically embrace the idea that you own your body. See, e.g. basically all their abortion arguments.
Honestly, body ownership doesn't strike me as much of a left-right divide. I think Americans broadly would agree to that principle.
It's the idea that "because I own my body, the fruits of my labor-power are an extension of my body, which I used to get them. There's no distinction between my hand and the apple that I used my hand to pick, and therefore infringements upon the one should be treated alike to infringements upon the other" where the most libertarian parts of the right cross a bridge that most people on the left (heck, most people in general) probably won't go over with them.
For a certain kind of Randian, one can make the argument that a tax paid in dollars and a corvee labor tax are "the same thing," but for most people that argument will fall flat because they intuitively recognize that there is something different about infringing upon the money that was earned with the body's labor vs infringing upon the body itself.
I'm sorry to have contributed to your feeling that way: not my intention. I was just interested in your claim that most marxists lac the thought pattern: "my property is an extension of my body and thus my rights to integrity of both are mirrors of the other." Interested because it surprised me!
You're arguing against me as if I argued that "Marxists argue for UBG!"
But I did not argue that.
I pretty explicitly came out and said that their response to a guy saying "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" is stuff like "NOBODY OWES YOU A RELATIONSHIP!"
Which is one of those things that I think is demonstrated in, for example, the essay I mentioned.
>>People whose brains immediately kick in with "therefore we, as a society, have a responsibility to get you laid" have to immediately start screaming "YOU ARE SO FREAKING ENTITLED!" at the guy who is, quite honestly!, saying "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship".
>>The screaming isn't merely at the guy who is appealing to a very important foundational emotional response, it's also the screamer screaming at themselves trying to tamp down the immediate knee-jerk response to have the government institute something like Universal Basic Girlfriend.
What I'm saying is that a leftist doesn't have a neat kneejerk response to *every* problem that says that the governement should solve X with universal basic X. That's a common Capitalist Brain take on "what Marxist Brain wants," but it's not an accurate take. All they have to do is distinguish between property rights and bodily autonomy rights and there's no need for them to do the self-screaming you're under the impression they are doing.
More that the leftists doing the screaming are overclocking on the nutjobs their algorithms are feeding them of people saying that the way to solve male loneliness is stuff like taking women out of the workforce and restoring the sexual politics of the 1950s, master key vs shitty lock, etc, which is causing them to lash out as though your hypothetical lonely guy had said all that, when actually all he said was "I am in great pain," without really any indicator that he is "one of *them*."
People are pretty lousy at empathy when you lead with a flag that you might be part of an outgroup that is hostile to them. Not that he owes the world that kind of tiptoeing, but the vitriol from people who misread the signals is the shitty inevitable result of engaging with something vulnerable in a public forum.
And naturally, this being the internet, his algorithms are also elevating the worst of their responses to help him maximize his engagement as well. Great system we've got going for ourselves.
That's pretty good, never thought of it that way. Fatal blocker in Marxism Brain, recognzining that people are supposed to exercise their agency, it's not all systemic.
Hmmm ... SPEAK cite only one reference for their headline claim "25+ arrests per day for online posts in the UK" and that's to the Daily Mail, a right wing tabloid that's earned such a reputation for inaccuracy that Wikipedia has a blanket ban on using it as a source.
Their "core principles" include "Direct incitement to violence" and "Repeated, targeted harassment of individuals" but not of groups or communities of people based on their skin colour, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation; an omission which would permit exactly the sort of indirect incitement to violence which leads to harassment of and stochastic violence against immigrants, refugees, muslims, Jewish people, LGBTQIA+ people etc which existing hate speech laws attempt to mitigate, but which their proposed free speech law would negate.
And most extraordinarily amongst the 'Cases" they list they include none of the almost 3,000 people arrested for peacefully holding up signs saying "I opposing genocide, I support Palestine Action".
> And most extraordinarily amongst the 'Cases" they list they include none of the almost 3,000 people arrested for peacefully holding up signs
That's fair but:
1) even if they don't mention them, their proposed reforms would absolutely make that not a crime any more, and that's already something
2) ultimately this is what somewhat healthy liberal politics should be about, people converging on principles they support even if they empathise with different victims of them. Not all cases they report are right-wing coded (the girl who posted rap lyrics, the woman who held a sign at King Charles' coronation), and even if they were, the actual contents of the reform suggested are very well-defined and anyone can decide if they sound worth supporting or not.
The incitement to violence is a point, but it's entirely legitimate to argue that the stochastic terrorism argument puts too much responsibility on the speaker. After all, the same could be said of any political discourse - if you say e.g. "the policy supported by <party> will destroy our country!" you are creating a potential compelling argument for someone to go and do a terrorism against that party's leaders. Saying that the oil industry is destroying the Earth could invite shooting the CEO of Exxon, saying that AI might kill us all could encourage someone to kidnap Sam Altman. Criticism of US pharma industry was obviously a big part of what radicalised Luigi Mangione. But it's hard to argue these things should be curtailed wholesale for fear that they might cause extreme reactions. Then the only argument left is "ok but these criticism are right and the ones based on ethnicity or religion are wrong" which is too subjective to be encoded into law.
When Grokipedia was announced, I went to check the article for Parliament for Finland, and it had the wrong numbers of seats. I just went to check it again and it continues to have the wrong numbers of seats:
"As of October 2025, the Eduskunta features eleven parliamentary groups, reflecting ongoing minor shifts such as MP independences or realignments since the April 2023 election. The election yielded seats distributed proportionally across nine parties: National Coalition Party (48 seats), Finns Party (46 seats), Social Democratic Party (43 seats), Centre Party (31 seats), Left Alliance (27 seats), Green League (24 seats), Swedish People's Party (10 seats), Christian Democrats (5 seats), with the remainder comprising independents or minor adjustments.[1] [71] This fragmentation precludes single-party majorities, fostering dynamics centered on coalition bargaining for government formation and policy passage.[72]"
This doesn't even pass the basic sanity check of the stated group sizes together being (something below) the total number of seats, ie. 200. One can see the actual numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Finland
I've tested it a bit as a Wikipedia editor and I was impressed by some things and not so impressed by others
+
1. Accuracy is generally okay, I don't have statistics but in the areas I know well I don't find many errors. Wikipedia is also not error-free but that's a topic for another day.
2. Some articles are much better than Wikipedia, especially those that a) require frequent updates and b) few people care about. See "Economy of Laos" for example
3. The UX
-
1. Everything to do with sources. Sometimes I get the feeling that Grokipedia treats citations as decoration rather than as fundamental building blocks of an encyclopedia. There are lots of instances of inline citations that don't support the content they purport to support. Many sources are self-published, using only online sources it excludes most academic sources. But see + #1.
2. Opaque rules. While Wikipedia has publicly available policies (for example on who is deemed important enough to merit an article) Grokipedia is a black box.
Maybe I am late to the game, but I just started using Claude Code over the last week. For the first time, I'm really excited about the possibilities of AI. In some sense, allowing Claude read/write access to a local folder is a minor innovation, and so is allowing Claude to write and execute command line prompts.
But the whole is much more than the sum of its parts: instead of relying on Claude to give a good enough answer based on its glance over a file, I can ask it to find the appropriate tool, write the appropriate command and then it'll ask my permission before executing it. I've had it write python code, run simulations, graph the results and write a dummy paper with introduction and references that I would probably accept if asked to referee for a lower ranked journal. I've more-or-less delegated my tax receipts to it. I intend to get it to update my webpage... these are not lofty goals, but I can see it has potential and it's exciting.
Have others used it for interesting projects? Are there even better tools out there?
Hi yes, soft plug: I am a very avid user of coding agents, regularly use 5+ at a time to build, and have used them to build my entire company's codebase of which virtually 0 of it is written by hand. Coding throughput is through the roof. You are very early to the game.
My company builds tools to help engineers and teams go from 'help i dont know what an agent is' to, well, doing what I am doing above. Claude Code is great but would recommend our cli and our configs to make it even better. In case you're interested, feel free to reach out!
So far I've built a tool for checking the accuracy of citations on Wikipedia and a cooperative-competitive game set up in a medieval Russian republic. Looks like I should use it more haha
I hear that with Claude Code in agent mode, you can spawn several agents and essentially have a team of software developers working under you. But I don't know about that, I feel it's reliability when coding is like 80 - 90%, you have to be aware of what it does, it isn't like giving the task to a human dev.
I've never supervised 5 software developers... but getting the humans I've supervised to 80% reliability would be a win.
Seriously though - I find the token limits run out pretty quickly on any moderately complex task so I haven't needed multiple agents. My next goal is to work out how to use Claude skills to efficiently carry out small repeatable tasks.
Is the rapid development of new music genres a thing of the past?
When I think back over the second half of the 20th century, it is naturally broken into well-defined musical eras. In the 60s, classic rock came about, with huge influence from British bands (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, etc.) The 70s was somewhat of an extension of that, leading to a branching out of rock genres (hard, prog, etc.) as well as disco. I’m not actually familiar with the origins of disco, I assume that it arose due to culture combined with technological advancements in synthesized music? Hard rock led to hair metal in the 80s. The 90s is known for grunge, originating from Seattle, as well as gangster rap, a product from black ghettos.
(This is definitely not a complete history and I left out a ton of genres.)
What has developed since 2000? EDM? That probably counts, and I guess it came about from a specific subculture (the rave community).
But I can’t really think of any truly new genres that have emerged recently. New music mostly seems to be a mix of stuff that’s vaguely considered “pop” with heavy hip-hop influences. Most genre-oriented innovation seems to be an explicit mashup of two or more existing genres (rap and country for example). The closest thing I notice is a slow evolution of stylistic details over time.
I also get the sense that whereas in the past, entire bands generally became famous (often with the singer or guitarist being most well-known, but other members still getting plenty of fame and recognition), nowadays it’s more often just solo artists/singers that are widely recognized. Certainly there are still famous bands today, and there were famous solo artists before (e.g. Prince), but by and large that feels like the trend now.
So, here’s my pet theory: I suspect that the emergence of a new genre requires a period of relative isolation in order for the sound/style to truly develop, and the modern way of sharing music and getting instant recognition/feedback from a wide audience via the internet is not compatible with that.
To give an example, gangster rap became hugely popular because a small, relatively isolated community (gangsters in the ghetto) spent years developing the craft. When it was good enough and got out, it was already at a high quality level and people loved it.
But could gangster rap arise today? If no such thing existed already, and somebody posted a track with the vague traces of gangster rap beginnings, what would happen? I suspect that if it was bad, the artist would get no feedback and few listens, and would likely try pivoting to something that incorporated more popular trends. And if/once it started to become good, the novel elements would quickly get copied and incorporated into other artists’ musical works, in a much more diluted form than what gangster rap is today. There wouldn’t necessarily be a long period of innovation and maturation before presentation to the rest of the world.
Similarly, I suspect that the internet provides new paths for young and very talented musicians to become famous and turn into solo acts, as opposed to before the internet, the best option was probably to find other talented musicians around you and form a band.
And for the record, I’m not necessarily complaining or trying to come across as “get off my lawn”. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, as much of the music I listen to nowadays isn’t even in the category of popular music (e.g. old NES video game soundtracks).
I’m sure none of these ideas are new, and this is all just my speculation, so I could be totally wrong. I’d love to hear some counter-examples (I’m sure there are plenty!) or other takes on this.
Very Interesting. I am reading Mark Fisher’s ‘Ghosts of My Life’ and he makes a very similar point in his book. It’s quite a tricky read for me, but I gather his main point is that it’s rare you now hear something and realise it’s the sound of the future to come. I wouldn’t necessarily agree, I think synthpop although maybe not novel as a genre has developed particularly in the last 2/3 years to bring that futuristic feel.
I think the same thing happened to subcultures. TikTok is constantly throwing up fake lab-grown subcultures like cottagecore that are really just aesthetics, but if a small group of kids in, say, Provo Utah came up with a really cool subculture with its own slang and fashion sense, they'd end up on short form video in a week and be 100% commodified by Shein and other fast fashion in two weeks. The only subcultures that can survive are those so insular or anti-tech that they have a moat to protect them from liquid modernity.
You might want to read some of the substack https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/archive - there's a lot of articles with data analysis of pop music history. To start try - 101 Things I Learned Listening to Every Number One Hit.
The number of new genres being created is empirically true. Even worse once powerful genres (like rock) are on life support.
I suspect the reason for the former is the lack of technological change, and not the acceleration of it. Genres in music are often downstream of technology.
I would diagnose the present situation differently. I think previously, there were fewer different strands going on in music, and so those strands could more readily be classified into "genres." You had whatever was mainstream, and maybe a couple different counter-cultures/sub-cultures. Now you just have so many sub-cultures running in parallel that it's functionally impossible to classify them all.
Analogous to classical music history, where there was the Baroque era, Classical era, Romantic era, and any music from these eras (100+ years long!) is very readily identifiably of that era, and has tons of similarity. And then we get on towards the end of the Romantic era and compositional styles get caught up in the tide of nationalism, and German Romanticism dominated while composers in other countries tried to create their own "national styles"—very much a culture/counter-culture dynamic.
Then we get on into the 20th century, and "modernism" arises, but modernism means so many different things. Strauss' later works (Salome, Elektra) are pushing German Romanticism to the absolute limit, while other composers in Germany, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, are pushing the boundaries of what people would even call music at all. France has Debussy and Ravel creating what gets called "impressionism." But you also have tons of masterful composers in this period who are totally singular, where you can identify just that composer by their sound world (Stravinsky, Bartok, Poulenc). Or composers who aren't so distinctive as to have their own style, but their style doesn't quite have a name either. You might hear a lesser-known composer like Ibert or Francaix and think, "oh, this sounds French," but there's not a name for that style. And even in the 1950s you still have tons of nostalgic Romanticism.
And that fragmentation and lack of definition of genres has just continued over time. For a time ivory tower modernism came to be pretty dominant, which did a lot to kill classical music for general audiences. But even all through that, more accessible works were still being written, and classically-trained composers were churning out beloved music in Hollywood. You can't point at the biggest names in classical music today and say what "genre" their music is. John Adams, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly... The word "post-minimalist" is forced to carry a lot of water, because basically everything good that has happened in classical music since the '80s has been influenced by minimalism.
The point being, identifying genres requires a certain amount of uniformity. You can have a thriving music scene full of new innovations and an interesting variety of styles without being able to label everything, because that labeling actually requires that a lot of people are doing the same thing as each other, and that they continue doing that thing for long enough for it to become distinctive. If everyone's doing different things, and keeps experimenting with different things, then labeling sub-genres becomes harder and harder. You can still listen to new music and say, "oh, this comes from jazz," "this comes from pop," etc., much like you can hear a new classical piece and say it's kind neo-romantic or post-minimalist or whatever.
The struggle to identify new genres is actually a product of too many disparate new styles, not a lack of new styles.
I was thinking something similar. You worded it better than I could have.
I think it's important to consider the role the internet plays in making musical innovation more 'fluid'. Instead of in previous years when musical innovation came from singular sources (like one band or geographic region), today, the internet allows artists to more quickly adapt techniques and styles from one another. I think this probably blurs the genre lines a bit and makes them harder to distinguish.
Musical innovation is still certainly happening, it's just happening more continuously.
What's interesting is that musical innovation came to a halt around about the time that music production got democratised. Now instead of an expensive music studio you can produce music on your computer in your bedroom; music unshackled from the constraints of actual musical instruments, any sound you can imagine you can produce.
You might have predicted that this would have led to a huge explosion in musical creativity, but it seems to have been the opposite. Maybe the lesson is that creativity is driven by constraints, and once you're no longer constrained (e.g. by the instruments available to you) you're paralysed with choice.
One area where music has advanced a lot recently is in mashups, an area where you're very much constraint-driven in what you can produce (there's only so many ways you can combine Uptown Funk with Feed My Frankenstein).
Dubstep was developed by a singular man, in order to stimulate women's tatas. Particular soundwave, particular beat, voila!
So, no, one doesn't need isolation, one merely needs a sellable product. And dance music that is arousing is better dance music.
You can see "bad cattitude"'s take on "why we don't have good music anymore", it's also instructive.
Also: the popularity of gangster rap was entirely artificial, and a reaction to MC Hammer having screwed over his constract-holders (and then being a spendthrift, which made them even more mad than getting gypped).
What new musical.genres have emerged since 2000ad?
ChatGPT said:
Since 2000 AD, music has splintered rapidly due to the internet, affordable production tools, and global cultural exchange. Many “new” genres are hybrids or internet-native scenes rather than traditional label-defined styles. Here’s a clear, structured overview of the most notable genres and movements that emerged or crystallized after 2000.
Electronic & Dance (Post-2000)
Dubstep (early 2000s, UK)
Heavy sub-bass, syncopation, sparse rhythms
Later evolved into aggressive “brostep”
EDM (as a commercial genre) (late 2000s–2010s)
Festival-oriented electronic music
Artists: Swedish House Mafia, Avicii
Future Bass
Lush synths, modulated chords, emotional drops
Artists: Flume, San Holo
Vaporwave
Internet-native, ironic, nostalgic
Slowed-down samples, corporate & 80s imagery
Hardstyle / Rawstyle (modern form)
Earlier roots, but modern sound emerged post-2000
Aggressive kicks, festival culture
Hip-Hop & Rap Evolutions
Trap (modern Southern trap)
Hi-hats, booming 808s, dark melodies
Artists: Gucci Mane, Future, Migos
Drill (2010s)
Dark, minimalist, violent realism
Chicago → UK → NYC scenes
Cloud Rap
Dreamy, lo-fi beats, emotional detachment
Artists: Lil B, A$AP Rocky
SoundCloud Rap / Emo Rap
DIY internet-driven movement
Artists: XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD
Rage / Hypertrap (late 2010s)
Distorted synths, high energy
Artists: Playboi Carti, Yeat
Rock, Metal & Alternative
Metalcore (modern form)
Metal + hardcore punk, refined in 2000s
Breakdowns, clean/harsh vocals
Deathcore
Extreme metal + hardcore breakdowns
Post-Rock (popularized post-2000)
Long instrumental builds, cinematic sound
Artists: Explosions in the Sky
Djent
Polyrhythmic, palm-muted guitar tone
Coined in the mid-2000s
Indie Folk / Indie Pop (modern wave)
Lo-fi aesthetics, intimate songwriting
Artists: Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers
Pop & Internet-Native Genres
Hyperpop
Maximalist, distorted, chaotic pop
Artists: 100 gecs, SOPHIE
Bedroom Pop
DIY home-produced pop
Intimate vocals, minimal production
Alt-Pop
Experimental pop outside mainstream formulas
Artists: Billie Eilish, Lorde
Global & Fusion Genres
Afrobeats (modern global form)
West African pop fusion (not to be confused with Afrobeat)
Artists: Burna Boy, Wizkid
Reggaeton (modern revival)
Became globally dominant in the 2010s
Artists: Bad Bunny, J Balvin
K-Pop (modern idol system)
Earlier roots, but global genre explosion post-2000
"To give an example, gangster rap became hugely popular because a small, relatively isolated community (gangsters in the ghetto) spent years developing the craft. When it was good enough and got out, it was already at a high quality level and people loved it."
This isn't the case.
If you're talking about the subgenre of hip-hop we now call "gangster rap," it was a pretty natural evolution of the already-popular hip hop scene. The people involved got popular pretty quickly within the already-existing hip hop scene (although the early breakouts were definitely incredibly talented.)
If you're referring to all of hip hop as gangster rap, well, first stop doing that. Second, yes it did have a pretty long incubation period, but that had more to do with the fact that early hip hop was people live-mixing disco, r&b, and early techno (Kraftwerk, etc.) It took a while for the genre to become different enough to differentiate itself.
I mean specifically gangster rap, not broader hip-hop. It grew from an existing genre (like how metal grew from earlier forms of rock) over a reasonably short period of time (late 80s to early 90s, I think)? Its lyrical themes focused around a specific set of topics (hustling, etc.), more focused and more exclusive than hip-hop more broadly. There are also some well-known feuds (East vs. West Coast for instance) which I imagine would rapidly fuel innovation, though perhaps if they were already "well-known", that's evidence against my hypothesis. And from what I recall, it fairly quickly became a huge nation-wide phenomenon outside of its original audience/demographic, e.g. every white 12 year old boy wanting to listen behind his parents' backs.
I'm no expert so I'm sure I have some details wrong, so please do correct me more as needed, but I'm not trying to conflate the two.
I'm sorry - I've seen people conflate the two before and had assumed you'd done so as well. Please accept my apology, my comment was a bit too snide.
But to your point - I do think I disagree with your overall hypothesis, my perspective is that we're currently at a high water park for musical creativity, even if most of it doesn't gain traction. The modern-day equivalent of gangster rap, drill, originated in the relatively isolated hothouse of soundcloud and had the same kind of incubation period you're describing.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of drill before, thanks for the counter-example. There are plenty of good alternative explanations people are offering, so I'm definitely not confident in my original hypothesis, or at least, if that is a factor, it's likely not the main factor.
If the same incubation environments do in fact exist today, why do you think "crazes" don't seem to come about anymore as they did in the past (i.e. it doesn't gain traction, as you mentioned)? I still think it must be related to the speed at which new creative works can be output (even if incubation environment itself isn't the factor being limited), meaning there is much more out there to compete with, meaning potentially less untapped space to grow into something truly unique.
My intuition is that most people consume music in a pretty passive manner. They listen to what's on the radio and/or on the charts and that's about it.
Pre-internet, the minority of people who do consume music actively, and seek out new stuff, were basically limited to the same radio stations and record shops as the rest of the population.
So, a craze would happen when the novelty obsessed people found a new thing and it jumped to the majority.
Today though, there's just not much crosstalk between music nerds and normies, so the information flow is much less robust. Music nerds are still out there finding new stuff, but because we've fragmented so much, there's no effective mechanism to get the new music out to the masses. Hence, pop culture is stuck right about where this breakdown happened (mid-to-late 2000s, by my reckoning.)
"Unique" doesn't mean "good". People enjoy novelty, sure, but that requires something that is both truly novel and actually good to listen to. Both creators and consumers have seen enough to understand what works and what doesn't. They aren't going to deviate from that without good reason.
Of course. But presumably there are still people out there who are talented enough to create both unique _and_ good new music. So the question is, why doesn't this seem to set off "crazes" as much as it did in the past? Possible answers could be:
- Those people are out there but aren't incentivized to be unique, just to be good
- There's so much unique but mediocre/bad stuff out there that even the truly unique and good stuff has to fight through a lot more to become widely recognized than it did in the past
- Maybe crazes do still happen and my timescale is too small
- Maybe crazes do still happen but appear differently and more fragmented than in the past
- Most of the low-hanging unique sound has been captured already so it's harder to come across. That's not to say that there won't be more low-hanging unique sounds in the future (e.g. synthesizers opened up lots of novel sounds that composers in the 1700s could never have predicted).
> Video games still seem to be creating new genres.
Like what? The only thing I can think of in the last decade that could really be considered a new genre is auto battlers (pioneered by DOTA Auto Chess in 2019). Everything else is derivative of existing genres.
don't really want to quibble about what counts as a new genre and what is derivative, but I think genres like roguelikes, loot shooters, idle/incremental games, survival/crafting open world games are newer genres (and quite dominant in the current market) that are at least as comparable to, say, heavy metal being a distinct genre from rock, and a couple of them are at least as comparable to rock being a distinct genre from 50's R&B that it came from.
Bullet heaven was codified by vampire survivors in 2022, extraction PvPvE games were codified by Escape From Tarkov in 2016, "Metroidbrainias", if we are to guess at their formation would be outer Wilds on 2019.
For subgenres, Doom eternal style fpses, where resources are tied to aggressive play has only existed for five years.
I'm not sure I'd agree with any definition of "derivative" which somehow separates auto chess from say random strategy games but not bullet heaven. I'd be skeptical of definitions which rule out doom eternal style games as a subgenre (well, the fact that there are like 5 games total in the genre may be incredibly damning)
On a somewhat tangential note... how are folks here discovering new music? I find myself kind of stuck in the genres that I found and liked as a teenager/20-something, plus a few others (not very many) that I've encountered by chance since then. I know this is pretty typical, but I'd like to think I can do better.
Finding current pop music is easy enough, but with one or two exceptions each year, I mostly don't like any of it.
On the other hand, I liked a couple of the tunes linked in this thread. But I have no idea how I might have found them, other than random comments on a blog (that really has nothing to do with music).
I guess I could find a college radio station to listen to, but whenever I've tried that, I get bored really quickly.
There must be a podcast that specializes in unearthing new genres. Or something?
Someone should start up a "weird new song of the day" service. That's probably about the right frequency for me anyway. If I discovered something really good, say once or twice a month, I'd be pretty happy. Does this already exist?
Sometimes Spotify gives me something interesting in Discover Weekly or whatever. The last time I went to a music festival, I discovered one new band and genre. But there's a lot less discovery these days compared to when I was young and would just download random albums off slsk or whatever.
I find Discord is good for this. Join the servers for one or more of the big music bots (jockie, hydra, rythm…) and lurk in the party channels when people are playing music; join the fan discords for artists you like, do the same there. People in these places are generally super happy to swap recommendations as well.
Another possible source is the”x reacts to y” genre of music videos. You’re probably seeing them in your feed right now if you’ve been clicking the links here: “Jazz musician reacts to Blastbeat Felafel”, “Composer reacts to G.O.A.T.” etc etc. These are not in themselves worth watching, at least for me, but the channels of the people making them are a treasure trove of music that their subscribers really, really loved, were desperate for the human connection of having someone they could show it off to, and yet is so weird that they had to persuade one of these guys to watch it to get their fix instead of just talking to their real-world friends about it.
Now that’s a much tougher question! The artists generally self-describe by listing their influences “blended into a unique new sound”. I’ve tried to pick tracks that are central to clusters of things - the similarities can be heard, and also you can see which works (and artists!) are in evolving conversation with each other (e.g. Henson has now collaborated on pieces with Marcin and also with Nito!). As for neat labels, however - ask me again in a few years once the industry has come up with some :)
Sorry, I forgot to include a disclaimer, which is: I realize that there's still plenty of variety out there being created if you search off the beaten path. I'm talking more about huge crazes that sweep the nation. The 80s is _known_ for hair metal, for instance.
In the 80s we had a few radio stations and a few TV stations, and when those played something new over and over again for a season, the nation as a whole couldn’t help but know of it.
This unifying force is now gone, and with it the cross-community cross-generation nation-sweeping effects. Popular things are popular in particular groups, and (just as with literature, politics etc) those groups mostly aren’t really aware of what is happening elsewhere.
This does sound like progressive with more variety of tone. A bit of metal singing (is that singing? yelling into the microphone?) and a fair amount of middle eastern influence.
Link 3: てねてね / 悒うつぼ
This is brilliant. Game music but more musical/less mechanical.
From the lyrics: "Unattractive evil is unattractive". So true.
4, Bullug Gegbug Ibgabiug Gixcure Dagabciea Fuic
Rockmaninof
Gets smarter comments than most. Eighteen minutes of goodness.
5. Infected mushroom
Good illo. March of the electronic weirdos. The bit at about 3:50 and gets quiet and clicks is really good.
I think you have a genre there, and I'm calling it complex caffeine for the ears. Or maybe caffeine for complex ears.
I am glad you enjoyed! I like “caffeine for the ears”, but I’ve actually been thinking of each of those as representative of their own class - for each one, I have more things that belong in the same bucket (cf. my links to the Ichika / Marcin / Maromaro pieces for the Polyphia bucket in the post below).
There’s also remixers/resamplers to consider: when does something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kmbrih45lg become its own class instead of being categorised by its sources?
As far as the question of where you can take the 8-bit game aesthetic goes, I think of Ujico / Snail’s House as genre defining; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nlSDxvt6JU
This is a question I'm interested in too. One hypothesis I've heard mentioned is that it's the algorithmic feeds like spotify. These algorithms only show people what they are already likely to like, and will almost never show someone something from a new genre, because a new genre is essentially unclassifiable.
Rick Beato has some videos discussing a related topic, namely that kids largely don't consume music the same way that they used to - they're generally not going out and buying albums, listening to the whole thing 20 times, learning about the musicians' background, etc. Even knowing the names of the albums, lead singer, band members, what instruments they play. I'm sure there are some that still do, but almost certainly the minority. No doubt this has an effect on the market, what becomes popular, etc.
30 years ago or more, people were driven to innovate by boredom. If the radio plays the same 15 songs on repeat and going to buy a cassette or CD is an experience once a month, then you're driven to start playing yourself, to seek out like minded individuals and to make some music. For every band that made it, there were a thousand that didn't. When I was in school (late 90s and early 2000s) it seemed like maybe 1/3 of kids played music in some form - I'm sure that this proportion has decreased, though I don't have stats.
I think a contributing factor is that we live in a world saturated in media. We don't have to seek out anything new - we're bombarded with new media all the time. It's slop, mostly. But no-one buys a magazine about music, reads about new bands and then seeks out their album to see if they'll like it anymore. No-one discusses music with their friends to see what the latest thing is. Making and listening to music is not a social experience anymore.
> No-one discusses music with their friends to see what the latest thing is.
Sure they do. It happens on social media, though, instead of where you can see it. Discord servers with streaming bots where teens hang out and queue up their latest discoveries to listen to together are a huge thing.
The alternative is that we've simply exhausted the possibilities of music that sounds good. There's plenty of modern, experimental music being developed today, but no sane person would want to listen to it, so in obscurity it stays.
The possibilities of music per se are pretty unlimited. The possibilities of popular music are less so, because of the requirement for simplicity. Arbitrary restrictions, like using only 4/4 time and major chords make popular music even more limited.
They're not arbitrary. Due to what I can only assume to be innate biological tendencies, people find certain types of rhythms and melodies more intuitive and pleasing than others. Most people want stability. They do not find it comfortable for measures to be uneven and changing all the time, nor do they enjoy dissonance.
Ah yes, that music comprising random squeaks and gibbers, with the occasional crash of garbage can lids! No music is worthy of the name unless if can stir some kind of emotion in the listener, and it's hard to imagine that style doing so with anyone!
I have a theory that people tend to favour music opposite to their personality. So laid back or outright cold people like emotion-laden music such as Wagner, whereas highly-strung people find formulaic Bach fugues and late Baroque more soothing because of its somewhat dry lack of emotion.
Heroes of Might and Magic III got a lot of mileage out of "we found the bird chirps on the soundboard." And people love the soundtrack for that. I've seen other games using owl-hoots and other animal cries, and they're wonderfully atmospheric.
Also, "Happy Worker" -- a talented musician like Tori Amos can pull off a fantastic piece with truly weird instruments.
The phrase "working to prevent its creation" is the stuff of Greek tragedy.
The Dilbert pushback I've seen failed to recognize the half-dozen or so self-owns throughout the piece as well. Those self-owns make it clear that Scott sees Scott as type of himself. Perhaps this was too subtle for most people to notice, but many of his critiques were clearly self-directed as well!
OK, here's what I know, fortified by a visit to GPT. The peak age of onset is a bit later in women: Male peak onset is late teens to early 20's, female is mid-20's to early 30's. the data on race are unclear. Appears that blacks are more often diagnosed with schizophrenia than whites in the US, but there are reasons to question that data. Did not see data about Asians. As for traumatic events, the common diagnoses for people who have a diagnosable response are anxiety disorders (panic disorder, generalized anxiety, depersonalization and PTSD). There's a thing called Brief Reactive Psychosis where someone develops psychotic symptoms that do not last long right after experiencing a traumatic event, but it is not considered a form of schizophrenia. Symptoms resolve quickly and do not recur. And it is not common. I have never seen someone with it.
As for somebody developing schizophrenia after a traumatic event: There is evidence that a first break occurs in association with stressful life events, but stressful events in this kind of study are things like leaving home for college, having a first sexual relationship, working on a goddam dissertation, etc. -- not mostly things like auto accidents, close friends getting shot, etc. And the psychotic state doesn't usually spring into being quickly. The picture is typically much more that the person over a period of weeks or months gets increasingly reclusive, uncivilized, and odd. They stop going to class, stop showering, make weird jokes and comments to their friends, etc. Then one day they tell someone a weird tale about new strain of Argentinian rabies that is spread by sex during daylight hours, and it's clear that they really believe what they're saying, and somebody takes them to the university health service.
I was asking about a particular media personality, not anyone I know personally, so all I was going off of was the evolution of what she's saying on camera.
There are a couple other paths to being crazy besides schizophrenia. One is being bipolar, esp bipolar manic. The lawyer in Michael Clayton who takes off his clothes during a deposition is quite a good representation of the quality of that kind of crazy. The other is being so committed to drugs that you're high all the time. Musk may have that going on. People becoming schizophrenic generally become low-energy and reclusive, so if a media personality is still showing up at work and spouting some wacko ideas on camera it's fairly likely they are manic or perpetually drugged rather than schizophrenic.
Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day: it comes at the wrong time of year. Too close to Christmas and New Year’s and not far from Presidents Day.
A much better time for it would be maybe the second week in August. This would help fill the long holiday gap between Independence Day and Labor Day. Instead of his birthday it would commemorate his famous I Have a Dream speech (August 28, 1963).
Agree, and having it be on/near his birthday is pretty arbitrary, shouldn't be hard to pick a time for the holiday and then backfill a justification. Surely there are plenty of anniversaries more relevant to civil rights, and more broadly the struggle for racial equality, than MLK's birthday.
E.g. along the lines of what you say, you could replace Labor Day with MLK Day, and then move Labor Day to spring where there's a big gap between Presidents Day and Memorial Day. Could have May Day as a holiday. Or Patriots Day.
Mid-April would be an ideal time for Labor Day as it would fill the three-month gap from Presidents Day to Memorial Day. Good Friday is too explicitly religious, though it’s a holiday in some states, while May Day has some lingering socialist connotations and comes too late in the gap.
Another holiday issue is that we have no Hispanic holidays even though they are now the country’s largest minority group (Cinco de Mayo is just for fun).
MLK is overdue for cancellation anyway, apart from the whole mistreatment of women thing his entire schtick would be considered Colorblind Racism these days.
Time to commemorate a true hero instead, I nominate October 14 as George Floyd Day.
There aren't policy proposals that can fix the housing issue. Nothing fixes the fundamental problem of scarcity. Housing is a good unlike others in that you can't really create more of it. Yes, you can build more housing, but that's just chopping up existing land. The YIMBYers will point to places like Tokyo as an example but almost everything in Tokyo is apartments squished together. Do you think American families dream of owning a 500 square foot condo? Obviously not, which means that all you can really do is something like Dallas-Fort Worth where you expand outwards aggressively. But now your nice little suburban home is an hour away from your job, making your quality of life worse and there are practical limits to how far you can go out. Now anyone who wants more affordable housing has to chop up the land around you, meaning that there are fewer homes of the type Americans want. The government can favor existing suburban homeowners who want to keep their existing homes or it can favor prospective homeowners who are priced out. But you can't do anything to make them both happy.
But although it's not a policy, there is one outcome where everyone can get what they want: lower population. Existing homeowners get to keep their homes while new homeowners can afford to buy a house but that has its own issues.
We have a lot more land than places like Japan does. One solution is absolutely to build more houses. In terms of spacing, not every American wants to live in a suburb. Single family homes are a really inefficient way of housing people usually, but is still an option. Building more affordable housing to those who are completely priced out is also an option that YIMBYers advocate for.
In Seattle, developers are happily chopping up big single family lots in newly rezoned areas to build quad-plex homes and they sell very quickly, people really want housing they can afford in nice areas, even if the houses are smaller.
For that matter, people were enthusiastically buying really small Japanese style "apodments", kind of like upscale SROs, until the always-helpful city council made them illegal to build.
Do you live in a major city? Nyc residents have already traded the front lawn option for something else. But they are stuck in crummy pre war buildings with no laundry machine and no garbage disposal in the sink, barely functional AC. Those buildings could get a lot taller and a lot nicer with better policy and that would in turn create more room elsewhere for single family homes. I agree though that a tall building isnt a good substitute for a single family home, but its a great substitute for a 4 story walkup.
The inability to replace bad housing stock didnt start with mamdani. The policy fix may seem easy. But the politics of achieving it is hard and the whole purpose of the yimby movement. Hence: there are in fact housing proposals that can vastly improve housing in certain areas. They just havent been enacted. And it can be very frustrating.
Mamdani has surprisingly done a whole lot for housing in the past month, so you're kind of revealing your ignorance here.
Him and Hochul essentially ended environmental reviews and he started a task force to look at available city land for development. He's streamlined zoning variances already too. Also quite a lot of money for public housing, but I'm not really convinced how much of a difference providing cheap housing to disabled and poor people will make on overall housing costs.
The fact people are willing to pay $5,000+ a month to live in NYC shows that a significant number of people would like nice, dense housing. Concentration in cities frees up the suburbs as well for people who prefer that lifestyle.
One of his advisers helped enact an extreme rent control law. But he is also pushing for policies that lead to more violent felons in the streets so maybe that will convince enough New Yorkers to leave and make homes more affordable.
In theory, eventually, there's scarcity limits that can't simply be solved by building more... but I don't think we're *anywhere* near them.
I live one of the cities that's in the top-20 cities in the US by population and we really aren't anywhere near 'carrying capacity', either urban or suburban. At one point, I lived about a 10-15 minute drive from tech company I worked for and still drove past farms on my way into work.
And sure, not everyone wants to live in a 500 square foot condo (though... you know you can make bigger condos than that, too, right? Tokyo has a wide variety of sizes, while we've forbidden the small ones), but lots of people would, given the opportunity and we aren't building enough to meet that demand.
And the "hour from your job" problem assumes that your job is in the main downtown which is often not true, even assuming it's not remote - larger metro areas often have multiple "pockets" of more urban areas which often have offices, rather than one central urban hub that everyone commutes to. (e.g. the Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill "Research Triangle") And secondly "one hour from your job" depends on how good public transport is, which absolutely can be affected by policy choices.
>But although it's not a policy, there is one outcome where everyone can get what they want: lower population.
That's a good start, but there's another, complimentary way. It's about population density in the end, so you can improve the density not just by lowering population, but also by increasing area!
So is that finally the Grand Unifying Theory of Trump II policies? Lower the population count (deport brown people) and also increase available space (annex Greenland) to build more 'burbs because real Americans would rather change the world than change themselves. Enrich himself in the process because he's an urban developer. Be envious of Russia and China because of their huge tracts of land. It makes so much sense now.
This conveniently allows us to predict which countries Trump is going to go after next:
Everyone below the USA (183rd) in population density can chuckle and be in danger. Venezuela (187) and of course Greenland (245th, dead last) about to go down, a few more to choose from. Notably, there are some more South American countries that would qualify, so they better watch out now. Also Canada (233), which is an ongoing interest of Trump's, but I repeat myself.
They don't need to stop at brown people, of course. Given that whites don't even make up half the population now, an aggressive ethnic cleansing effort could more than double the amount of living space available to Americans, even before expansion. Automation and off-shore labor camps can make up for the lost productivity.
That is basically the main use case of charter cities that I can think of. It solves the issue of the citizenry getting upset over the presence of immigrants, and makes it practical to do manufacturing in a territory that the US controls without the worker protections that are meant for citizens getting in the way. Medical research also makes a lot of sense for the same reasons.
Huh, those really are just charter cities under a different name. Well, if we have a system that's proven to work already, that's good news for the future of charter cities as well.
The reason some people dislike the idea of living like cramped sardines is that they do not want to alter their present, habituated lifestyles, and these are based around suburban living. Or rather, their dislike is conditional on having habituated lifestyles which differ from the prospective ones.
This is to say, they have built their lives around things like gardening and lawncare, which can only be done in suburban areas. Change is frightening and people will do anything to avoid it.
However, if we look at this from the perspective of people who have habituated to dense, urban life, they would probably find the idea of giving up their urban lifestyles equally as detestable. Those people see the same fear as the first group, just reversed. The suburbs are their fear-specter.
Essentially, people become accustomed to preestablished lifestyles and their subjective preferences are merely contingent on chance.
You've never heard someone complain about the pipes having orgasms, I take it? One of the basic complaints of "living like sardines" is "I can hear my neighbors shouting and fucking."
This is a SOLVABLE problem. We can absolutely build sound-free walls.
Gardening can absolutely be done in a city, as can lawncare. Do you really need a full acre to be happy? Maybe all you need is a 10 foot by 10 foot garden (with fences to keep the deer out)?
Now now, don't get all defensive about your own insight. Own it! Run with it! Least of all, don't mistake my enthusiasm for sarcasm. Like everyone else, I've been scrambling for purchase in my attempts to plumb the depths of Trump's intentions, but you, if you'll forgive the triple metaphor, may hold the key after all.
Oh the feeling's all mutual. In a rational debate, little irritates me as much as choosing assertions that fit the desired conclusion, which I suspect is happening here: You declare all potential preconditions immutable, like zoning laws, the American Housing Dream, the size of a condo, the number of homes. All these things seem perfectly reasonable to change, yet "population size" is the only thing you'll admit. That seems VERY suspect to me.
Or you could just let builders build what they want and everyone gets to choose what they buy. If they don't build what people want then they go out of business. This is unbelievably simple.
I moved from nyk to tky and got a bigger, nicer, cheaper place as a result. You may need an update as to what is available in tky. Its true that japanese seem to be fine with smaller homes. But other homes can and do exist there. Someone with a front yard and a basketball hoop lives 100 meters from my apt. Japan also has much higher population density to begin with. Tky policy in nyc would result in different homes than exist in tky.
Walk me through this, because an anchoring principle of your first post was that Americans don't *want* Tokyo. So why then, are you rejecting Fallingknife's proposal that American builders just build, and American buyers just buy, on the grounds that if that happens "that's how you get Tokyo."
Assuming you're right and nobody in the US dreams of owning a 500 sq ft condo, why wouldn't they punish a builder who created such a product by simply not buying it? Do we secretly long for the East?
Sounds like we secretly long for the East, then. Given the option to make a tradeoff, existing homeowners will sell their homes to developers for gobs of money, developers will build denser housing to allow new buyers to affordably trade off house/yard size against proximity to desirable hubs full of work opportunities, restaurants, services, social opportunities, etc, and new buyers will take the tradeoff and buy in.
That seems like an argument for YIMBY policy, though. Not so much "the government can favor existing suburban homeowners who want to keep their existing homes or it can favor prospective homeowners who are priced out," as, "the government can let the market settle into a natural equilibrium, or it can intervene to protect a specific subset of players, who like the disequilibrium they have and want to keep it going."
Chinese very famously do not do this. you can find very small houses being kept by homeowners as the expressways and mega-apartments spring up around them.
If you give an American prospective homeowner the choice between a typical home and a condo, they’re choosing the home. But the current land owner prefers to build condos because it’s more profitable, so without restriction that’s what you would get.
There is plenty of houses available outside of the densest areas of Tokyo, and more than anyone knows what to do with once you leave it entirely. But everyone wants to live there because it turns out everyone living in the same place is extremely convenient for everyone involved. If it stopped being dense, suddenly it's no longer convenient, regardless of how much you reduce the population. Of course, if you want to raise your child in a nice home in nice school district, you can do that, because everyone isn't legally incentivized to sit on their house like their life depends on it.
How far do you have to go before you can find something that looks like a typical American home?
Obviously there are a lot of conveniences with Tokyo but it takes some things away. There are a variety of ways of living that are mutually exclusive with one another and policy can’t resolve contradictions.
Interested to see the free speech for the UK organisation. The main body already on the ground is the Free Speech Union set up by the extraordinary Toby Young. The FSU lobbies and provides legal and financial support and have won quite a few legal cases. He has been cancelled a million times but somehow still bounces back. Very sceptical on climate change and lockdowns (though not vaccines) and set up the Daily Sceptic website/newsletter. Hugely interested in education he set up the UK's first free school when the Tories made that possible. And I could go on for thousands of words and not capture his extraordinary career of successes and disasters. Oh, and did I mention, he just got appointed to the House of Lords? So he is now Lord Young. (His father was also in the House of Lords - Michael Young, the man who coined the term 'meritocracy'). Anyway all this to ask Scott to produce an article 'Toby Young - more than you wanted to know'. I think it would be great!
Has anyone used a cold essential oil diffuser and how was it?
I got a cheap little essential oil diffuser, I like it, and I hate refilling it every day. It seems like the cold essential oil diffusers just run for 4-6 weeks without needing more oil, which sounds awesome.
How do you actually get European freeloaders on collective defense (Italy, Spain, Beligum, etc) to actually contribute and what does that contribution look like?
I was going to joke about European posturing on NATO breaking apart. "Sure", I thought, "Europeans can posture about NATO breaking apart but European security is guaranteed on the US nuclear umbrella. Without the US, the Ruskies have nukes and Europe in general doesn't. As long as Europe is absolutely dependent on the US for nuclear security, all of this is just a joke."
And, well, bravo, bravisimo to France and the UK. It looks like in July they actually sat down and are beginning to coordinate their nuclear strategy and arsenals. (1) And they actually have submarines with nuclear weapons, so they've got guaranteed nuclear second-strike capability. Yeah, it's mostly them forming a joint committee at this point but, well, that's just kinda how the Europeans do things. This is still awesome; finally some Europeans taking collective security seriously and coordinating their own key defensive plans.
And right now this looks awesome, again, bravo to the UK and France, but in 5-10 years...this still looks like Europe coasting on the Red, White, & Blue, just with 2 new flags instead of the old one. It's awesome that a European military force is arising but for the near future it looks like it will be carried, in both nuclear and conventional terms, by the British and the French. If the (no offense) the larger and richer US got fed up with European freeloading, how long until the British and French do to. Especially given the fact that the UK is outside the EU and France is...French.
But what do, like, Italian and Spanish contributions to collective defense actually look like. Is Europe really going to be comfortable with German remilitarization, including with the AfD in the wings? What can a country like Belgium actually do?
Another option is an alliance with Russia and China - which would be my preferred choice. After all Russia has invaded a sorta European country and the US threatens Denmark, a proper western country.
I’ve felt for a while that US is post western, rather anti western both on the right and left. The left is just obviously anti white/european, the right anti Europe.
I know we hate llm output on this forum but considering running your takes passed one if you are this out of your depth.
UK and France have nukes since the 60's, always have a nuclear armed sub with a credible second strike capability at sea. UK shares components with US but France's capability is completely independent.
If the US disappeared tomorrow there would still be no way the Russians could make a conventional or nuclear first strike without loosing Moscow, St Petersburg and the next ~10 most valuable targets. How much more credible do you want the European nuclear deterrent to be
The primary concern here is about unified control, structure, and guarantees. The French, for example, have had a very unique, very French, understanding of their relationship with NATO and how their nuclear forces will/should be deployed. That's what makes this arrangement with the UK such a big deal from my perspective.
Just as a quick refresher, the US nuclear umbrella is very well defined, very expansive, and has been in place since ~1945, as was the Soviet Unions. (1). This is especially important because both the US and USSR clearly understood the escalation ladder, ie what the risks were in a situation like the Cuban missile crisis and how to avoid an actual nuclear exchange. France, by contrast does not and has not participated in NATO nuclear planning and strategy. If you're someone like Poland, that makes a huge difference.
That's a big concern for border countries like Poland. If the US nuclear umbrella, which was very clear and well defined, goes away, under what circumstances will the British engage in a nuclear exchange and are those the same as the circumstances that would cause the French to fire their nukes. Are those circumstances clear to both the Russians (becuase we really want to avoid a nuclear conflict) and the Poles (who need to trust that the British and French will really risk a nuclear exchange instead of selling them out). In the abstract, the British and French have always had this capacity but actually establishing and coordinating MAD with a rival nuclear power is a non-trivial thing and I'm glad to see the British and French doing the hard work.
Considering the last time the Poles said "Russia bombed us! Invoke Article 5!" I think it would be better for the world if everyone decided to double-check before believing Poland. It is good that America geo-locks their weaponry before distributing it to mad dogs and the Poles.
Poland doesn't have enough military strength to defeat Russia. The only reason they were barking so loudly is "we can get all our friends to pile on." Either they were incredibly, irresponsibly twitchy, or they're just blatant warmongers (I find the later unlikely).
1) Are you withdrawing your lie that Poland invoked article 5?
There was only one time in NATO's history its collective defense provisions have been invoked, after 9/11 attacks.
2) Blaming this explosions on Russia was 100% kosher - also if these specific ones were for example AA missiles launched by Ukraine (as Russia invading Ukraine can be blamed on Russia, this includes reasonable collateral damage - and AA surely counts)
3) Also, interesting trick was used in at least some official statements about Russia-made weapons (and this covers vast majority of arsenal of Ukraine and Russia, made in Russia when it was USSR)
Apologies! Apparently I missed one in my recollection. I was speaking of the one where Poland figured out about the geolocking, because they tried to send missiles into Russia (this was under Biden, so years ago).
Good attempt at a pivot. Given that you just learned UK/France had nukes today i'm surprised this is your core objection though. I'm not sure the US is any more or less ambiguous than UK on use of nukes. Article 5 is not if anyone takes one square foot of poland the nukes fly. Both UK and US say they will use nukes if they need to in service of the NATO alliance.
Maybe Us is slightly less ambiguous or slightly credible but I think the deterrence factor is similar
And maybe I am a meanie head but i'm a British meanie head who is a little tired of hearing how much we're freeloading and how helpless Europe are to stop Russia without the US
You have less of a standing army than Chamberlain did, and he went cringing in front of Hitler in order to buy time to arm up again. And you're reducing your police force as well, I hear.
Also, your tanks suck, and lose to shrubberies. Nato Combined Forces Doctrine does not have any solution other than "call in airstrike" (and pages of "what to do until airstrike comes"). Russia has overturned the "air superiority" model, and NATO has no "approved" solution.
I don't think you need to stop Russia. Russia just wants to sell gas and other natural resources at a fair price. You want to trade with Russia, and stop sending Germany out of business. (Why the Biden Administration found this completely unacceptable is perplexing. Russia is your natural ally.)
Russia is an imperialistic actor launching aggressive wars of conquest, and actively works to undermine democracy and freedom both at home and abroad by covert action and by exploiting free societies. Russia should be destroyed, or if not that diminished in its capacity to do so; the invasion of Ukraine shows that Russia is a villain.
>Russia just wants to sell gas and other natural resources
this is a lie; Russia wants a 'sphere of influence', wants to diminish other countries and is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of lives for this, including having kill-lists for civilians it seem might disagree with it. It routinely Gulags any opposition who then die in mysterious circumstances; there is no free speech; there is no justice; it is a society only marginally away from a dictatorship.
before you accuse me of falling for propaganda, please don't. I have personal experience of these things and others, and have materially supported Ukraine in resisting their invasion. I stand by these statements.
Your statements about tanks losing to shrubberies and the like are vacuous. Europe has been trying to play nice with Russia for decades, trying to see them as a rational actor who only wants to sell gas - but then you get nerve gas in capitals and countries being invaded.
Would you apply the same metric to other countries? Ones with, say, better propaganda?
Yes, of course, Russia wants a "sphere of influence", every country wants that, except for countries too small to create a buffer zone (see Iran's buffer zone in Iraq, which it has for damn good reason). Ukraine has kill lists for civilians like Elon Musk, and even Donald Trump -- It's not that I object to the idea of a kill list (in principle this might even work for good... although it's a stretch), it is that the Ukrainian one seems remarkably ineffective and stupid.
I suppose I must confess to materially supporting suicide attacks waged by the Ukraine. Should I apologize?
Tanks losing to shrubberies is a description of materiel that fails without any enemy intervention. That is hardly a vacuous statement -- if European tanks cannot perform in the Ukraine, they are hardly ready for battlefield use in Poland. Were Russia to have tanks that had the turret fall off before getting to the front line, it would be equally stupid and funny (and I'm not saying they didn't.)
Europe is definitely going to rearm, but non-proliferation may be going out of the window at the same time, and future American presidents might well need to deal with new nuclear powers.
One of the advantages of the European pacifist spell was that some of the richest nations on Earth didn't pursue WMDs even as a side project, because they felt safe under the American nuclear umbrella. That set of incentives is now out of the window, doubly so for traditional adversaries of Russia such as Poland and Sweden.
Smaller states have always ridden along on the defense policies of their nearby allies. Belgium in particular has existed or not existed based on the views of the surrounding states.
The contributions of the smaller states will be to send modest amounts of money and provide deterrence by showing a large set of allied European resources that hypothetically could be mobilized if needed. A country like Spain has no incentive to maintain a larger standing peacetime military that could be deployed abroad on a NATO/EU mission at scale, nor does anyone else have practical authority to compel it to do so. The Med states if called upon in a WW3 scenario would contribute mostly (a) access to the Middle East, (b) food, and (c) labor. For reasons of geography and specialization, Germany and the UK would struggle to keep armies in the field and an industrial workforce producing absent substantial food and oil imports. France could feed an army, but would need help with everything else.
There is certain specialization in play within alliances. For example, Finland is really good at building icebreakers. The US likely lost its capability to do so, as it launched it last domestically built icebreaker fifty years ago.
That leaves the question of just who Europe needs to be protected against. Russia would have been the answer four years ago, but subsequent events have shown its military to be a sick joke unable to fight its way out of the proverbial paper bag. Iran doesn’t seem to present an immediate threat to Europe. The same is true for the more unstable Arab countries; in the US we’re afraid of Arabs because they wiped the floor with us 24 years ago, but most Europeans seem less fearful. Afghanistan is scary but is far from Europe and has shown no inclination to use force beyond its borders. *Maybe* a long-term threat would arise if Turkey goes fundamentalist, but I’d say the likelihood of that is very low if not necessarily zero.
Russian conscripts are "embarrassingly bad" if you mean "pimped out by the military for money." This doesn't have much to do with combat effectiveness, where Russian materiel has been consistently outperforming Western materiel, dollar per dollar.
It's to the point where Israel no longer wants American-made foreign aid.
The Russian military *was* a sick joke four years ago. They've had four years of hard-earned lessons in what needed fixing in their military. And the Russian military has generally been pretty good at learning from its mistakes. There's a limit to how much rebuilding they can do while still actively stuck in a Ukrainain quagmire, but anyone who thinks the Russian military of 2030 will be a "sick joke" is smoking high-grade copium.
European militaries, outside of maybe Poland and Finland, haven't really learned the key lesson: war is a messy, ugly business with an enormous cost in treasure and blood, *that your army actually has to be good at, before the war starts*.
Russian military four years ago still was able to remove "air superiority" from the Ukrainians. NATO has nothing else, other than "call in an airstrike" in their manuals.
(This is aside from the usual European nepotism, which always gets pruned in real war).
Trump is busy proving that "limited interventions" can have outsize effects, if you do them precisely and with accurate foresight.
Russian military isn't a joke. They are unable to conquer Ukraine in a land war, but they are very capable of wantonly destroying cities, power plants and grid infrastructure on a large scale from the air. Look at how Kiev looks every morning after the nightly wave of Shaheds and other flying bombs arrives. That is not a joke for anyone living there.
This could happen to Tallinn, Helsinki or Warsaw in the next round of hostilities. At the very least, Europe needs excellent anti-air capabilities, much like Israel does.
Russia simply doesn't want to conquer the rest of the Ukraine. They have what they need, and some comfort margin. That's good enough for a sleepy bear.
Given the sheer amount of bloodshed (Ukrainian military is encouraged to not report dead soldiers, so they get paid salaries for dead men), Russia could curbstomp the rest of the Ukraine (or, perhaps, I should say, the rest of "flat ukraine" -- mountains are hard, be they Afghani or not).
That doesn't look like "continue conquering." Maybe I am misinformed by too much Civil War and World War II wargaming? You think this looks like a lot of land to have taken in a year?
> How many more Russian soldiers are they willing to burn for the next ounce of land?
current situation, recent history, deeper history give answer: a lot of them
> You think this looks like a lot of land to have taken in a year?
1) I answered whether they want to conquer, not whether it is going well for them
2) Russia keeps pressure in hope of Ukraine collapsing
> You think this looks like a lot of land to have taken in a year?
fortunately, no - but it is not a reason for dump optimism and huffing copium too much
Russia is still moving, Ukraine is in weak position and if things go badly Russia can end occupying Baltics by the end of 2026 (not saying it is very likely, but it is not something that is unable to happen)
And if this does not happen, it will not happen due to lack of Putin's desires for it.
Russia is vulnerable to Ukrain's airstrikes, what do you think will happen when squadrons of F35s start flying missions over Moscow which Russia is completely unable to deal with
> Russia would have been the answer four years ago, but subsequent events have shown its military to be a sick joke unable to fight its way out of the proverbial paper bag.
What is the chance that the European army turns out to be equally or even more pathetic when shit hits the fan?
When Trump says: "NATO? what NATO? you still didn't give me the Nobel prize and Greenland. my good friend Mr Putin has a wonderful peace proposal that he gets the Eastern Europe, and you keep the Western part, and it's a very reasonable plan that you should accept, the best plan".
Russia still has millions of bodies it can throw at Europe, and China will happily supply it with parts for drones. Also Iran, if the regime stays. Currently, Europe is not even able to shoot down an occasional drone that Russia flies over their territory... the diplomatic strategy is to pretend that it never happened; we'll see how well that strategy works when there are thousands of drones flying towards strategic targets.
And on the side of Europe, Hungary and Slovakia and who knows who else will sabotage any attempt to actually coordinate on anything.
Trump's laying down better cards than -that-. Specifically, he's retreating the American umbrella to "Fortress America" (western hemisphere, down to venezuela and up to greenland). Perhaps when that's built out, the military will become more adventuresome again.
So, yes, if some strange time happened when Russia decided (against most of it's normal tendencies and proclivities), to romp over Europe, it could probably have the whole thing.
America doesn't shoot down chinese weather balloons, either. This is a "we could do that, but... why?" Spycraft has changed a lot now that drones are available -- everyone is in each other's business, and shooting down a drone says "you went somewhere we can't have eyes on" (which means "high priority spying target.")
Oh, sure, and maybe that might work for Israel (on a good day. on a bad day Iran just sends "enough" to get some through). Russia is a VERY big place, as is the United States.
> What is the chance that the European army turns out to be equally or even more pathetic when shit hits the fan?
Why did the Russian underperform? Corruption, exegerting strength, new kit didn't live up to spec.
Europe has; a bigger economy, less corruption, better weapons (5th gen fighters, the best air to air missiles, the best air defense tech, much better tanks than the stuff Russia is pulling out of soviet era storage.)
Europe has around 1.5 million active personnel in basically peace time. Russia has about 1.5 after dragging every last convict they could out of jail and requesting assistance from North Korea.
Europe has another 1-2 million of pre trained, pre equipped reserve troops that could be mobilized in war time.
China will supply anyone with drone parts. European countries could shoot down drones if they chose to. They are choosing not to avoid escalation. The drone are drifting just over borders and landing in fields. There is no world in which a drone headed to Warsaw makes it there without being shot down.
> Europe has; a bigger economy, less corruption, better weapons
Yes to all... although the weapons might turn out to be obsolete for a modern drone war. Maybe spamming cheap drones with exactly the right abilities really fast is more important.
But also, Europe has a lot of internal political disunity, which will only get worse once the personnel starts actually dying. The usual bureaucracy will also slow things down -- imagine how much paperwork would be necessary for a tank to get from France to Russia's borders...
Those issues are real, but can we extrapolate them to a wartime scenario? I feel like (I have no special knowledge on this wrt to war specifically) that once shit hits the fan, things that usually take months suddenly become very doable in a day.
EU was never attacked on its territory, so we have no data here. Foreign military interventions were actions of individual countries (i.e. not EU as a whole); the few common activities were peacekeeping and training, not combat.
I wonder if EU even has common military trainings separately from NATO; if we are planning and training for the scenario if USA stabbed us in the back at the least convenient moment.
I don't necessarily mean "Trump joins with Putin and they attack us from both sides", because then I guess we are screwed anyway, but more like "Trump remotely turns off all American weapons and devices that European forces use, and everyone who uses Gmail or Microsoft Windows or Android finds that their secrets have somehow all leaked to Russia".
Russia underperformed because America always overestimates Russian capabilities. In the 1960s, we were absolutely convinced Russia was planning a full scale attack, when Russia couldn't have mounted one if they wanted to, and was trotting around a few old tanks just to "look good."
OTOH, State thought sanctions would crush Russia in 2 months. So russia overperformed as well, economically speaking.
Europe has a bigger economy. No, Europe has an "on paper" bigger economy with "added value."
Europe can't send their military anywhere because they don't trust their civilian populace (they also would have trouble if they put the troublemakers under uniform), and with good reason. Mr. Americani says "I Told You So."
> Europe can't send their military anywhere because they don't trust their civilian populace (they also would have trouble if they put the troublemakers under uniform), and with good reason. Mr. Americani says "I Told You So."
I have no idea what that means. What civilian population is not trusted by Europeans. If Europe needs to go to war it will go to war. Russia has managed to get a few hundred km into a country one tenth its size and gdp.
Obviously Europe is in a bit of a stupor right now but, in the abscence of a nuclear war, it would win.
The preferred solution is an alliance though, with Russia and China.
The Europeans have let in a substantial amount of non-Europeans, as refugees and economic migrants. Already, the number of non-Europeans has led to a mass cancellation of Christmas light displays across Germany, citing "security is too expensive."
Well, what happens if you give the non-Europeans guns? Or if you send the European boy-men to war, thus leaving only non-Europeans at home with the womenfolk? Nothing good (see the long-term coverup of rapes).
This was foreseen by Mr. Americani over half a decade ago. So, he told the Europeans, "You have a demographic problem, and you cannot raise a fighting force." He was told the "approved answer:" "Oh, that's racist!"
Now he just says, "I told you so."
Whose preferred solution is an alliance with Russia and China? Nobody wants that (except the Chinese), not even Russia.
I think you underestimate the effect of actual combat experience.
In the last exercise that Czech elite paratroopers performed with their Ukrainian counterparts, the Ukrainians wiped them out every single time with drones before they even came into close contact. Czech equipment was good, but the Ukrainians were better at using theirs, because they were actual survivors of a protracted conflict where you either perform at your best or you die. That is evolutionary pressure like no other.
As of now, Russia and Ukraine are the only two places on Earth that have profound, battlefield-tested knowledge on how to fight a drone war. Everyone else is just watching, much like the Great Powers of 1905 watched the trench slog of Port Arthur without actually adapting their militaries. Armies are conservative (including the Chinese and the American one), and their political handlers prefer huge purchases of expensive machines over anything else. It took a lot of grassroots organizing in UA to actually build up their drone force.
In a conflict between Europe and Russia, Europe would likely prevail in the end, IF it stayed united. (I am not that sure whether the French are ready to die for Danzig again, much less young French Arabs who sympathize with Putin anyway). But Russia would stand a realistic chance of conquering something tangible, the Baltics at the very least.
Experience is a factor but not decisive. Before Trump, with the US strongly supporting NATO, no one seriously worried about Russia's troops overmatching the alliance despite NATO's lack of recent peer combat experience. Russia is more experienced now, but has significantly fewer tanks, shells, APCs, aircraft, and air defence assets than it started with. They may have more experienced 30-year-old men, but they have fewer 30-year-old men in general.
Even accounting for experience, I don't think Russia could take the Baltics. The Baltic states know the threat and train specifically around it. There are already European tripwire forces in place; British troops in Estonia, Germans in Lithuania, Canadians in Latvia. And the geography has shifted dramatically: Finland and Sweden joining NATO means the Baltics are now surrounded by allied airpower from multiple directions. Russia can't establish air superiority over Ukraine with its handful of aging Soviet jets and donated F-16s — the idea they'd achieve it against NATO fighters operating from Finland, Sweden, Poland, and Germany isn't credible.
The real question is political cohesion, but that was always the question. The tripwire forces are European, not American. If we trust that British deaths in Estonia would trigger a response, US membership wasn't the variable that mattered.
"No one seriously worried about Russia's troops" -- this is demonstrably false. If you don't think Russia has a plan to take over Europe, I assure you, they do. They probably also have a plan to take over China, and India... and even America (although I figure that plan is probably -really- wild, and may involve bears). This is standard planning, you lay out what cards you can use to take over any nation you could possibly manage. America does it too. Canada has a plan to take over America, and it's even pretty good.
I don't think that's really a concern. Germany is a European democracy: the AfD will almost certainly be banned before it wins, and if there's an unexpected surge and it manages a win, they'll annul the election and redo it.
Why? I see no contradiction, and think they're both true.
EDIT: Maybe you're coming into this with Usamerican ideas of what "democracy" means. In the civilized world, a democracy is when the constitutional scholars and other experts in the judiciary decide who the most democratic candidate is, and then allow his party to form the government.
The US has a fairly active judiciary as far as I can see, so you may be missed a few history lessons. On the other hand in free countries, of which there are few enough, parliament is sovereign.
Whatever you want to talk about. Do you expect to still be talking to real people at that point? Real users are a liability. Every comments section will be populated by threads personalized for each user in order to maximize engagement. You won't be able to tell the difference.
Well, there will be a long stretch where we debate "oh but is it *really* AGI"? Then after it becomes undeniable we'll start discussion when ASI will be created.
If the answer is that molecules can't detect their stereoisomers, then how will the mirror organisms detect the normal ones? If being anti-chiral comes with an automatic advantage then shouldn't that advantage work both ways? Wouldn't we be as much of a danger to them?
I looked at the linked LessWrong post so you (or some others reading along) wouldn't have to:
The short version is that there's a concern that mirror-bacteria specifically would be able to feed off substances that are achiral (i.e. have no handedness, and thus exist both for our biology and their biology), but be effectively invisible to our immune system.
There's some good conversation in the comments that suggests that our immune system would actually be able to handle it fine, but there's an additional problem that the kind of adaptive immune system that humans possess is not universal across all species, so many foundational species could be affected by pathogens of this sort.
The advantage of having a different chirality is a kind of first-mover advantage; bacteria that are like this would not have similarly-chiral predators, unlike bacteria of our chirality.
Caveat: I may be summarising this sloppily, I don't buy into this threat for a number of reasons (see more of the comments on the linked LessWrong article for some causes of scepticism, some of which I share), but I'm trying to do it some justice in a small number of words, because I too was curious and I'd like other people to have at least this basic context for the topic in this comment section without having to leave ACX for it. :)
Yeah, it sounds like this is generic risk-aversion on the basis of "this would be fundamentally different and therefore unpredictably risky". And hey, maybe that's the right attitude. I just think the disaster scenarios are unrealistically simplistic (as they always seem to be). Adaptation is tricky for any organism so I just don't buy the notion that a mirror version of E Coli would be a perfect superorganism. I'm sure there are subtleties in the way that the stereoisomers interact with world such that a well-adapted left-handed genetic sequence isn't the same as the equivalent right-handed sequence. That's just not how complex system work, ever. If it were possible to press a button and magically make a perfectly chiral copy of an existing bacteria, I would bet heavily that it would immediately die for reasons that would take decades to understand, and that tweaking its genetic code to fix those problems would be an evolutionary problem of a similar complexity to the creation of the same bacteria from scratch. But, like I said, maybe it's wiser to just assume that it would be ice-9.
Sure, life may be complex, but it's made of simple parts. The only two forces relevant to life (electromagnetism* and gravity) are very well established to have the necessary mirror symmetry.
Of course, there's the possibility that some chiral substance in the environment is toxic to mirror organisms, but evolving resistance to toxins is clearly something bacteria are capable of.
*In the case of electromagnetism it's also necessary, in the usual convention, to reverse the magnetic field upon reflection. With that caveat it works fine though.
But the complexity lies in the emergent interactions. I bet those aren't all symmetric. Some molecules are chiral in complex ways: they have both right and left handed parts. Sometimes several of each. I bet a universal reflection wouldn't preserve all of the relevant dynamics. I mean, I hear you about E&M and gravity being achiral ... I just bet there's something that wouldn't work. The weak force is chiral, after all. Maybe there's a yet-to-be-understood subtle consequence of that which would alter a biochemical equilibrium point enough to wreak havoc.
> Given how quickly the evolution of AI has upended technology across the globe and is affecting various markets, it's nigh impossible to accurately predict where anything might be headed. There's no shortage of predictions, ranging from utopia to ultimate doom for established industries. An NYT columnist, however, has one specific bet: OpenAI will be destitute in 18 months in the wake of its AI endeavors.
According to an external report last year, OpenAI was projected to burn through $8 billion in 2025, rising to $40 billion in 2028. Given that the company reportedly predicts profitability by 2030, it's not hard to do the math.
Altman's venture projects spending $1.4 trillion on datacenters. As Sebastian Mallaby, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes, even if OpenAI rethinks those limerence-influenced promises and "pays for others with its overvalued shares", there's still a financial chasm to cross. Mallaby isn't the only one thinking along these lines, as Bain & Company reported last year that, even with the best outlook, there's at least a $800 billion black hole in the industry.
I would bet heavily against this if there were a prediction market. Sam Altman has shown a virtually peerless ability to raise capital; the only scenario I can see OpenAI running out of cash would be in the aftermath of a massive downturn in AI-adjacent stocks *and* a massive disappointment in their next-gen models (or some other catastrophic product rollout of some kind).
Thing is that they lose cash even on paid users. It's not clear how they can become profitable. Not really how early-stage Google, Amazon, Uber etc. worked.
There are good arguments against OpenAI - this isn't one of them. Amazon lost money until 2003 and even afterwards had years of sparse profits. Uber went public with huge losses and turned profitable in 2023. Google is the only one that rapidly turned profitable, and while you can dismiss approximately ~99.9% of companies with the line of reasoning "not as good as Google," it's not a useful way to view the world.
The current version of the product is not the real product. The current version of the product is just what they sell to help offset the development costs of the real product. The gamble is that the real product, when it arrives, will be worth enough to make all these other numbers seem trivial (and also that it doesn't kill us all).
> The gamble is that the real product, when it arrives, will be worth enough to make all these other numbers seem trivial (and also that it doesn't kill us all).
And to be clear, I've run some numbers on this and if you're able to counterfeit just ~50% of white collar jobs just in America for 1/3 the current price, the AI company(ies) that do this will be netting at least $13T a year, or a third of the entire present economy. And that's NET.
It's entirely possible that the real product would have been worth enough to make all these other numbers seem trivial...except Google, Anthropic, xAI, and Deepseek all have better and cheaper models, so nobody uses OpenAI's model.
OpenAI will run out of cash... if they don't raise more money. But they will raise more money, and easily, because every investor on Earth is desperate to get exposure to them.
Speak UK: despite claiming "25 arrests per day" they can only list 18 convictions in total, many of which are, by their own criteria, racist abuse directed at specific individuals (and some others are genuinely concerning cases of racism by serving police officers). Literally their only landing-page cited source is the *Daily bloody Mail*. I feel quite concerned that this is the bar for ACX grant recipients.
Worth noting that under the terms of their proposed instrument the doxxing of Scott Alexander would be protected free speech (specifically, harassment and intimidation are only prohibited if they're face-to-face or conducted repeatedly; one-off online publication seems to be protected regardless of the size/reach of the publisher or the vulnerability of the target).
I'm confident the ACX grant programme does far more good than it does harm, overall - but, well, it's difficult to be sufficiently EA-minded to think of it that way when stuff like this is so much closer to home than any potential successes.
(note 1: I concede that of their 18 cases many genuinely are miscarriages of justice where the defendant should have been protected by free speech laws but wasn't - I'd say this is true for perhaps half of them - but by their own statistics that's 25 arrests *per day* and maybe 9 miscarriages of justice *in total*: I very much suspect this is a better figure than most countries, the USA in particular, achieve...)
(note 2: Why are anti-bigotry and anti-harassment laws so broad in scope?
Because perpetrators become incredibly adept at judging the threshold for police intervention and staying only-just below it whilst still causing life-changing harm to victims. Every proposed way of solving this is terrible, but "legislating against even on-paper-light harassment and allowing the police/judiciary sufficient common-sense discretion as to whether to prosecute/convict" seems to be slightly less-terrible than other terrible solutions (as evidencd by Speech UK's own 9-odd cases of injustice overall from their own claimed 25 arrests per day).
For example, let's say there's a student group chat and every time the black kid posts in it, somebody else posts a photograph of a banana. This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so - but if you make it illegal then eventually somebody somewhere is going to be come to the attention of the police for innocently posting a harmless photograph of a banana that got misinterpreted by somebody else. Since it's essentially impossible to define in law whether a particular banana photograph is racist or not, current UK law gives the police powers to interview people who post banana photographs that come to their attention, and as a backstop it gives the judiciary powers to determine, in the course of a fair trial, which ones genuinely were intended to be racist.
This system is, I admit, terrible and it fails in awful life-ruining ways - but it is *less* terrible than the system proposed by Speech UK, and it ruins far fewer lives than their system of legally protecting almost all racism and online abuse would)
Itd probably be easier for you to just accept that SA has different values. As a libertarian leaning American, he and many of his readers think legally protecting almost all racist speech is good not bad. You can expound the reasons you think otherwise, but he'll keep giving to groups that champion free speech.
As for the scenario you are concerned about. Their website says they consider limitations including "Repeated, targeted harassment of individuals". So this behavior would potentially fall out of protection
Thanks for the reply! It's true: I agree that would be easier.
I think legally protecting most bigoted/harassing speech has helped make the USA into what it is today. If that's what Scott wants, fine, but I'd rather he stopped trying to make Britain into what the USA is today.
Prohibiting "repeated, targeted harassment of individuals" allows for one-off-but-large-scale harassment of individuals (such as the doxxing that Scott says was so harmful) and for the repeated long-term harassment of groups (including small and vulnerable groups). And for other edge-cases addressed by large bodies of statute and case law dating back centuries - Speak UK would have this large and well-established body of law torn down without anything similar to replace it (leaving those the laws were designed to protect left unprotected).
This isn't even just a case of Chesterton's fence: in this case we /actually have evidence/ for A) what public discourse in a free-speech-absolutist state is like, and B) how much freedom, democracy, and open public debate we have in Britain* under our laws prohibiting bigotry, harassment, etc.
* (Specifically, the UK scores 9.9 on The Economist's global democracy index; the USA scores 7.85)
Perhaps a less well trod area of discussion than the merits of free speech would be the morality of cross border political influence, which is what you are pointing out here. One could claim, its moral to try to induce free and fair elections overseas as that way the ppl can get what they want. Its even moral to influence the electorate itself as that is just the spread of ideas, but its immoral to attempt to lobby the elected representatives directly, its up to the ppl of that nation to tell them what they want. Funding Speak UK might be a little bit of both of the 2nd two.
I'm not sure I could call the former a well-trod area of discussion; one of the reasons I felt so strongly inclined to comment is that I see very vocal "free speech absolutist" libertarian types (whose views, as you pointed out, Scott seems to share) but nobody at all really espousing the merits of the UK's long-held policy of regulating those areas of speech where we have strong evidence of their harms, but little evidence of any benefits from leaving them unregulated - despite the country having successfully followed the policy for a very long time. That seemed rather too one-sided, to me!
For your second point, I would agree with the idea that trying to induce free and fair elections in another country indirectly (eg. by means of economic incentives, speeches in the UN, etc. etc.) is morally permissible - possibly praiseworthy, even - but I question the *efficacy* of trying to make a 9.9-index democracy more democratic by inducing it to emulate a 7.85-index democracy.
For your final point, I'd agree that directly funding a political lobby campaign (or otherwise purchasing political influence) in another nation, the consequences of which one won't be subject to oneself, is wrong insofar as it seems like it sets up perverse incentives, dangerous precedents, etc. It may of course still come out ahead in the utilitarian calculus - but I don't think it does in this particular case (which of course goes back to your well-trodden free speech vs. honesty/civility topic, upon which I'll spare you any further remarks..)
Thanks once again for the polite and well-reasoned replies. It's a pleasure to talk to you, disagree as we may!
"This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so"
It's only life-ruiningly bad because children are slaves who aren't allowed to leave their communities. If I find a community where everyone is extremely rude to me for no good reason, either online or in-person, I could just decide not to interact with their social network. But students and teachers can make schools (and student group chats) really horrible because runaways are forcibly returned by authorities including the police if they try to leave.
1) Prevents Backstabbing -- imagine if that banana-posting kid simply sabotaged the black kid's work, so that the black kid couldn't ever get a passing grade, and got held back?
2) Prevents Isolation -- even the racist can find friends, and friends make the entire group easier to infiltrate, and also easier to defuse (Not All White Supremacists murder people).
3) Improves Honesty -- you no longer have a "lie to everyone" ethos, where people are incentivized to lie and nobody knows what anyone else believes.
4) Improves people's mental health. If you aren't Type A Hostile, and convinced everyone is sneaking around and doing things behind your back, your blood pressure is lower, statistically speaking.
5) Social interactions with the banana-posting kid may lead to them "no longer being so racist". But you have to target that kid first, yes? Otherwise, he might just avoid your "wellintentioned outreach." Imagine 200 interactions with the banana posting kid, gently asking him for sources, showing him "well performing" black students, etc. Maybe those 200 interactions stop a school shooting. Maybe many people don't die.
I think 5) is a very important function of free speech. You get to say your thing, and see how many people you respect say "yeah, that's right." If you get laughed at, maybe you improve your argumentation.
"This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so - but if you make it illegal then eventually somebody somewhere is going to be come to the attention of the police for innocently posting a harmless photograph of a banana that got misinterpreted by somebody else. "
And that's why it should absolutely not be illegal. The proper recourse is for the black kid to leave the group chat and get better friends (if the chat is private), or for the school to ban the harasser from the chat (if the chat is school run). The law's role is not to shield everyone from every unpleasant interaction ever. That is a sure path to authoritarianism, and I'd much rather be harassed by a kid in a group chat than by an authoritarian state with a monopoly of violence over me.
Maybe I don't understand how school group chats work and possibly I could have picked a better example! I have to admit I'm, well.. not exactly close to school age myself..
I'm imagining (perhaps mistakenly!) a group chat that is not run by the school but that the entire class (or form or year or house or whatever..) is a part of, almost-all online social interaction is initiated there, all event invites, sports, club and society info, all social news and chat, even essential school information is disseminated that way (eg. the teacher tells the head of the class "there's a test next week" and the head of the class disseminates it through the group chat). Telling this kid he should just leave the chat is basically the same as saying he can't have a social life for the rest of his school career. (And after he's left school school - even if I'm wrong about how school group chats work, workplace group chats seem to work exactly like this.)
I agree that if the kid *can* sort it out himself, or with help from friends, or the school, or parents, or whatever, that's *vastly* preferable to having the police involved. But I want the kid to have the protection of the law for when those preferred systems fail, as in some cases they tragically do, and I don't think having a law against racial abuse or harassment makes the country into some kind of authoritarian state.
What do you mean by "head of the class"? Would the "head of the class" be a student? Picking one student as the "head" and making all communication from the teacher to the students go through them, so that if said head doesn't do his job properly then the rest of the students miss key information, seems to me to just be a bad way to run things, even irrespective of any other issues we've been discussing.
And if the "head of the class" was a teacher or staff member, why would they be posting information in a student-run group chat, rather than using their own channels?
It's how it was done when I was in school? The teacher would pick one student, disseminate all information to them, and they would be expected to disseminate it to the rest of the class however they wanted - if they told the rest of the class but somehow failed to tell you, and you missed the test (or whatever) it was typically considered to be your fault for "not finding out".
There was no such thing as a group chat when I was at school*, but twenty-odd years later, when I went to sea, the system was exactly the same amongst cadets, except by then the dissemination was done via group chat.
(*Except for, y'know, a group of people, chatting..)
> It's how it was done when I was in school? The teacher would pick one student, disseminate all information to them, and they would be expected to disseminate it to the rest of the class however they wanted
I've never seen that happen. When I was in school, if a teacher wanted information disseminated to a class, they would announce that information in class.
Today, they may post an official statement to a website run by the school.
> For example, let's say there's a student group chat and every time the black kid posts in it, somebody else posts a photograph of a banana. This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible*
I think the problem with all this discourse is that it vastly privileges certain types of bullying over all others.
Why does the hypothetical black kid being bullied for being black deserve a massive state-level response, but not the short kid bullied for being short, or the rich kid bullied for being rich, or the kid with weird teeth bullied for having weird teeth, or just the kid who is bullied because his classmates think his reaction to being bullied is funny?
I find this argument pretty disingenuous, I have to say. You don't claim "people are starving in Africa, so my food should be taken away too otherwise we're vastly privileging my right to dinner over theirs". Yes, I agree that privileging racist bullying over other types of bullying (and bullying over other types of abuse) is a problem. I don't think the solution is to remove protection from racist abuse victims whilst doing nothing about any of the rest of it.
The point of law is to step in when other systems fail. The other bullies' parents should be raising them to not be bullies; where they fail the other kids themselves should ostracise bullies and protect the victim; where the kids fail the teachers/schools should prevent bullying; and so on. The law is kind of a final back-stop to stop bad things happening when everything else fails, so: if all those other systems have tried and failed and this kid is still being harassed and racially abused, *of course* he deserves protection under the law (and if you want to describe protection under the law as "a massive government effort" then fine: he deserves a massive government effort. Government, like Jungle, is massive and making that effort is what it is there for.)
If there's an easy uncomplicated way to extend similar protections to other sorts of abuse victims then great, I'd be most glad to. But it took us decades (centuries?) to make inroads into racism and sexism and they're the obvious stand-out ones so I'm not exactly confident on that score, and basic human compassion says that we if we can protect some kids we should do so, even if we can't protect everybody.
You seem to have a different stance on the role of law than most. I, and most people here, don't believe that the point of law is to step in when other systems fail, but rather to govern a very narrow and minimal scope.
This is a great point that doesn't get mentioned enough. Racism is widely considered uniquely super bad, but other immutable physical characteristics are mostly fair game. The closest characteristic to get such protection is religion, but that's not even immutable. It's not logical, it's vibes-based morality.
Race has political significance. Modern societies have all sorts of disparate peoples coming together and mingling, and in order to maintain public order certain ethical behaviors or etiquettes need to be adopted in order to avoid conflicts between these groups. Back when religion was a major risk for group conflict, there were all sorts of laws and customs about regulating interactions between different religious groups. For instance, keeping them apart.
But that doesn't mean the races need to be treated equally. Given the wide gap in population and capabilities between the races, there minority races simply do not have any leverage to make demands. Even in the US, blacks didn't force whites to do anything. Their rights were given entirely willingly by the whites. It can be taken away just as easily.
" Even in the US, blacks didn't force whites to do anything. Their rights were given entirely willingly by the whites."
A massive civil war and nationwide protest movements are what "entirely willingly" looks like to you? I'd hate to see what "unwillingly" looks like.
In all seriousness, I think you must have gotten your history from very biased sources. Every victory in the fight for black peoples' civil rights was won by a coalition in which large numbers of U.S. blacks were extremely active and impactful participants. U.S. whites didn't just wake up one day and en-masse decide they wanted to be less of shitheads to their non-white neighbors and quietly vote in different laws. They were persuaded, gradually, by a thing called "activism." Much of it was carried out by black people. And much of it *does* involve applying leverage and making demands: strategically, in the places it will be most effective.
"It can be taken away just as easily."
The U.S. is currently in the middle of the most massive and prolonged wave of civil unrest in generations, largely due to certain relatively limited and targeted attempts to take away some of those rights. Again, if that's your notion of "easy," I'd hate to see what "hard" looks like.
> The U.S. is currently in the middle of the most massive and prolonged wave of civil unrest in generations
The difference is that this time, those in power have no sympathy for the activists. The whole point of the crackdown in the first place was to remove the influence these people have on society. We are about to see what the state is capable of when it actually wants something.
Modern commerce and urban lifestyles are easy to disrupt through terrorism and riots. Blacks did just that back during the civil rights era. They and other low-performing groups continue to do that periodically when their perceived desires go unmet, see the George Floyd riots or any of the post-2000's Paris riots.
The elites of society have a number of options. They could restyle society under the fashion of medieval institutions and lock all their wealth and assets up behind castles and other fortifications, sallying out only with entourages of guards. They could attempt to genocide all of the low-performing groups in society, although that would come at some cost.
Or they could do what they do now... Which is bribe and placate disgruntled groups to the point where things will mostly run smoothly.
This last option appears to be the least costly, and so this is likely why our society is styled the way it is.
Interestingly, the "uniquely bad" aspect was codified in American law as being targeted at a "discrete and insular" group of people. Racism was worse than sexism because a racist can go his whole life without ever needing to interact with someone of another race, while the analogous statement is obviously not true of a sexist.
The American legal system seems to have completely forgotten what their own standard meant; in recent Supreme Court arguments, the justices have been insisting that transsexuals constitute a "discrete and insular" class.
This is at least partly because the types of discrimination which are legally prohibited tend to be the same ones which used to be legally enforced, or at least enforced through the machinery of the law.
So until the mid twentieth century in many places it was legal to attach to the deed of a house a provision that it could not be sold to a black person or a Jew. (It was also generally possible for a seller to get such a restriction removed, but while it was in place it would be legally enforcable.) Later on, by the late 1960s it became illegal to refuse to sell or rent your home to someone on grounds of the race or religion of the prospective purchaser or renter. In an ideal world I think we should just prohibit the use of the law to enforce discrimination rather than make it illegal for private persons to discriminate, but I understand why people think this is a problem the law should solve.
I've not looked too deeply into the org, but on the surface I'd say most of those cases listed shouldn't have happened. I'm going to guess we may differ on the some of the racist ones - I don't think people should be racist, but I don't think saying racist things in a *private group chat* should be illegal. It's very 1984, in my view.
And I'd say the "daily mail" reference can't help but be a reverse argument from authority - ok, we don't like the paper because it's a low-brow tabloid, fine, but the only thing that really matters is whether the individual story in question is true.
I see lots of people (majority left wing) in the UK outright dismiss any reference to the DM - it's fully a meme at this point - but the general complaint seems to be "they draw attention to things I don't like having attention drawn to" e.g. immigrant crime, as opposed to any individual story in question being false. Of course they have an agenda in choosing what stories to run, but so does the Guardian and the BBC.
Other than that I agree with you that free speech in general is a non-trivial problem to solve, legally, and going too far in either direction causes its own issues. The one thing I'm certain of is that criticism, satire and mockery of religion must be protected and that the distinctions between race, culture and religion made crystal clear in law, lest it all be successfully swept up under the banner of 'racism' or 'islamophobia' i.e. blasphemy laws via the backdoor (or actual re-introduction of blasphemy laws, for which we have sitting MPs supporting at the moment, and only 8 MPs having supported a pro-free-speech, anti-blasphemy law motion tabled last year)
> but the only thing that really matters is whether the individual story in question is true.
It is not.
Or, rather, the headline of both the Daily Mail article, and the banner referencing on Speak's homepage, are complete lies. The Daily Mail article itself tells you its actual methodology in paragraph 14, and it does not at all align with the headlines or central claims above.
I agree that many of those cases shouldn't have happened (I'd say around half of them), but I think that Speak UK's proposed Act would leave lots of vulnerable people unprotected and to justify their proposal we would need A) a much higher base-rate than just nine bad cases would seem to suggest, and B) much stronger supporting evidence than a single Daily Mail article.
I'm not sure your criticism of Daily Mail dismissal (er, or your dismissal of Daily Mail criticism..?) is justified:
1) Most fundamentally, I think people who want to write new statute (and for that matter people who receive ACX grants..) genuinely ought to provide better-quality citations than a single newspaper article (from any newspaper), even if the newspaper article is technically true.
2) If they do cite a newspaper article, and that newspaper article is true, I think they ought to be politically aware enough to recognise that the newspaper in question is one that nobody takes seriously: citing the Daily Mail makes me think that either A) they genui cannot find any other source for their claim at all, which makes me suspicious of the claim, or B) that they don't actually realise the Daily Mail's reputation in the UK, which makes me suspicious that they might be somebody from another country trying to interfere with British politics (and have laws enacted that they themselves don't have to live with)
3) The information was supposedly obtained via a publicly-available freedom of information act request. Why do Speech UK cite a Daily Mail article about it (that doesn't itself provide the data) and not the FOI request itself? This seems deliberately obfuscating at best, and at worst as though they wanted to link to the Daily Mail's (frankly incendiary) report on it more than they wanted to present any actual data.
4) (Now addressing the truth of the article in question .. sorry to keep you waiting..!) The figures referred to (but not actually given…) by the Daily Mail seem (as far as I can tell) to count people arrested for racist tweets etc. together with people arrested for some cases of (eg.) offline sexual harassment, online sexual abuse, “revenge porn”, online grooming of minors, etc. etc. - presumably all things both the Daily Mail and Speak UK agree should be illegal - they’re counted by Act, not by nature of offence. I can understand the Daily Mail counting all of these together (but not explicitly saying they are, quelle surprise..) in order to make misleading implications about the number of racist tweet arrests, but I'm not okay with prospective legislators or ACX grant recipients doing the same thing.
[Irrelevant side-note, feel free to skip… I'm old enough to remember the Daily Mail Journal of Oncology (a list of all the things that the Daily Mail claim causes and/or cures cancer (now sadly offline). It ran to hundreds of mutually-contradictory items, was a running joke in medical circles, and shows how deeply misleading and untrustworthy you can be whilst still being entirely legal - which is kind-of my issue with the Daily Mail - and crucially was entirely apolitical..]
I agree that blasphemy laws (or other laws that ended-up being functionally similar) would be terrible for the country. I'm just not okay with a “solution” that leaves lots of vulnerable people unprotected against genuine racism, abuse, and harassment. If the distinction can be clearly made in law such that only the latter are prosecuted - great. If it can't be made perfectly and we need to accept some kind of imperfect compromise law, well, I think we kind of already have that and I struggle to understand the mindset of people who think the way to improve the quality, niceness, and usefulness of online discourse is to remove legal protections against online racism, bigotry, etc. I wouldn't exactly say our online spaces are in any danger of developing a shortage of these things any time soon….
What is your argument in favor of racism being illegal? That a picture of a banana would have life-changing consequences for a black person? I'm not sure I understand the difference there between racism and other kinds of insults, or are all insults covered by your proposed law against harassment and abuse? Do you think all insults should be illegal? What about harsh criticism? Could repeated harsh criticism have life-changing consequences?
I'm not proposing some new "law against insults", I'm defending our existing laws against harassment, abuse, racism, etc. The laws aren't perfect, but they do address every single one of the questions you ask*. You can read them here:
*Except for "What's the argument for making racism illegal?", upon which I'll give my tuppence worth (since you ask!)...
I think there's a sort of matrix: if you say something that you'd like to say that doesn't hurt anybody else, that's positive on net. If you say something that you'd like to say but other people are (nontrivially) hurt by, that's net negative. If you're prevented from saying things that you'd like to say (but don't hurt other people) that's net negative. If you're prevented from saying things that you'd like to say but that (nontrivially) hurt other people, that's net positive.
Our goal in passing laws is to get as much of the positive and as little of the negative as possible. (To minmax, if you want to think of it that way..) But this is difficult because it's basically impossible to set out, in law, into which square of the matrix all the infinite different things a person might say should go, based on some impossibly-perfect weighing-up of whether they're positive or negative on net.
So, we try to use some heuristics. "This one type of speech almost-always does more harm than good so it should be restricted by law". "This one type of speech almost-always does more good than harm so it should be protected by law". "This type of speech could go either way so go away and figure it out amongst yourselves".
I admit these heuristics aren't perfect, but if we use them properly I think they get us closer to maximising the positive and minimising the negative than does the "free speech absolutism" strategy.
Because 99% (or whatever) of speech genuinely is net positive, and because "always free speech everywhere" is a much, *much* neater-looking rule than "free speech except for exceptions X, Y, and Z in circumstances A, B, and C", I think we're fooled into thinking that the free-speech absolutism position must automatically be correct. But if we carefully apply some (admittedly flawed and ugly) heuristics such as "free speech except for certain kinds of racism in certain places" I think we can get that 99% up to 99.9% (or whatever).
Put another way:
Racism is bad for society. It hurts people, hurts social cohesion, and leads to concrete measurable harms. Free speech is good for society. We unfortunately can't simultaneously have [free speech] + [nonracism] because people apparently choose to be racist. So, we have to choose between [free speech] + [racism], or [free speech except for racism] + [nonracism].
In private spaces, civilised countries choose [free speech] + [racism], on the principle that nobody else has to be in that space if they don't want to and if you want to be racist in your own space the freedom do do so makes your life better but doesn't hurt anybody else.
In public spaces (which includes much of the internet) and for public servants (such as policemen) civilised countries choose [free speech except for racist abuse] + [nonracism], on the principle that other people have to be there whether they like it or not* and the racism harms some of those people without really bringing any real benefit to anybody.
Just my tuppence worth, of course! I haven't thought about this for very long and I'm sure there are some flaws in the above, but hopefully it works as the basis for an argument in favour of restricting racist public speech?
I don't think the government has a right to tell me I can't express an idea, any more than I have the right to tell someone they can't express an idea. Obviously you disagree and that's a value difference, so no point arguing about that.
But I believe that valuing free speech is better from a utilitarian perspective as well. A world where the government has that power is a strictly worse one, even if it allows a few (more) people to say racist things.
For one, freedom of speech is a protection against tyranny. There is a slippery slope here, where, for example, restrictions on racist speech become restrictions on speech criticizing government policy, like affirmative action or immigration. A government and society that does not value freedom of speech will not value other individual freedoms (like a right to self defense), and have steeper gradient toward collectivism, utilitarianism, and literal mountains of skulls.
Secondly, a society where people are first off concerned about being politically correct in their speech is one where truth is not a priority. If you don't prioritize saying true things, then pretty soon you can't build bridges or rollout a vaccine during a pandemic efficiently, or you shut down your nuclear power plants, and people die, your economy suffers, and life is worse for everyone.
Third, for most people (not authoritarians like yourself) it is deeply unpleasant having a threat over you about what you can say or write. It insults your dignity as a person. And though I might not leave the house for two days and not care, if I was on house arrest and not allowed to leave, I would care very much. Humans value freedom, which is why it takes enormous amounts of state violence, or threats of violence, to keep it from them.
Fourth, arresting racists for saying bad things turns them into "martyrs" and radicalizes them. It doesn't stop racism and probably makes it worse.
Fifth, trusting the government to decide what counts as racist is naive. 1960s Alabama would have considered any criticism of white treatment of blacks to be racism against whites. 2010s progressives were extremely racist yet successfully painted themselves as anti-racist, and were not judged as racist by the state.
I'm willing to allow bad speech so it can be corrected. So someone can interact with someone with a dumb idea. Otherwise? The dumb ideas simply metastasize inside people's heads. And lonely people "make statements" by crashing planes into buildings.
Yeah it seems a bit bonkers to me, this idea that the government should be getting involved, or even has the ability to prevent people from insulting each other. It's a deeply authoritarian mindset.
As always it's interesting seeing the same people who are here arguing that UK laws on hate speech are an affront to liberty and civil society are the same people who were arguing that it's fine for police to execute an unatmed woman in her car in broad daylight because he was apparently terrified for his life.
What rubbish. As we all know, the hate-speech laws are shamelessly used to intimidate and bully. Down to and including attacking people for publishing unquestionably true facts of obvious political importance, thus working to keep voters in the dark.
People who can conduct frontal attacks on democracy itself are the strong.
Yes, exactly. Which is why, in the US, the right has proven themselves to be superior by seizing power, and thus their agency is no longer retricted. People upset about this in the UK should try to do the same.
The people who feel that their agency should not be restricted. That is the root of the issue, yes? That people should not have their speech restricted in the interests of those who lack the leverage to make demands.
And now in the US, they're not oppressed anymore. They always had it in them, they just needed to realize they could actually just do things. The spell of liberal morality is being broken, and now the natural hierarchy is in the process of being restored. Other countries will follow suit, I'm sure.
Knock it off, you're doing the purely-tribal, reddit-level style of "debate" where every issue is the same and everyone who disagrees with you is a stereotyped strawman of your fantasy of "the other side". The kind of thing people come here to get away from, and that Scott has mocked repeatedly (e.g. "None of this “I’m going to vote Trump because I think Clinton is corrupt” followed by “Yeah, but Reagan was even worse and that just proves you Republicans are hypocrites” followed by “We’re hypocrites? You Democrats claim to support women’s rights but you love Muslims who make women wear headscarves!”" from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/).
Have you actually counted the number of people supporting each combination of stances?
She wasn't executed, she was killed as an incidental outcome of resisting arrest. Her death was much more an outgrowth of protest culture than it was of law enforcement culture.
Oh really? Got any data on how much overlap there is? And you aren’t really *interested* in the very high overlap (the one you believe exists). Actually you are gleefully contemptuous of the imagined hordes in your imaginary overlap whose thinking is so much less sharp and nuanced than you believe yours is.
In the college - that means irl, in a place he has to attend to get education. Compared to the internet where you don't have to communicate with anyone who is mean to you and even visit sites where it is normal. How is it comparable?
...that most of us are utilitarians, and are supposed to dislike suffering?
I really don't understand that whole 'these people are suffering massively in ways that will traumatize them for life, what's the big deal?' angle, here.
Like, if your utility function doesn't already include a term for that being bad, I don't think it's the type of thing you can be argued into. Just, you know, be aware that people will avoid you if they see you acting on that preference.
There's also the self-interested aspect of this, namely that the people who are very invested in the free speech rights to attack one minority are likely also interested in going after other minorities when they feel strong enough. Better to nip this kind of thing in the bud early on.
> ...that most of us are utilitarians, and are supposed to dislike suffering?
Uh... I think you're mistaken about that. Even Scott has admitted that he's not a hard utilitarian, and nowadays he seems more interested in virtue ethics.
> Just, you know, be aware that people will avoid you if they see you acting on that preference.
I wouldn't assume that everyone shares your brand of slave morality. It seems at least half the population of the US is interested in giving people the respect that they deserve.
For this to be so, I think you'd have to define "real harm" to preclude pretty much any form of mental health.
Scott himself has described serious tolls on his mental health owing to merely having his full name published online.
Moreover, it's trivial to find statistics on the number of people who've harmed or even killed themselves owing to online abuse. An NHS meta-analysis I just found in response to another reply puts the rate of attempted suicide following cyberbullying at 257% of the UK baseline.
Scott was harmed by doxxing, in the UK you just call someone some racist slur and it's enough to be jailed.
As for people harming or killing themselves as a result of "online abuse" they willingly subjected themselves to - how is it fair to punish someone else for the harm they inflicted on themselves?
> Scott himself has described serious tolls on his mental health owing to merely having his full name published online.
But that was entirely his fault for publishing under his full name on the internet, despite what an obviously terrible idea that is. He is of course free to take revenge on the press by pushing to get the whole industry shut down, but that doesn't change the fact that it was his error that left him exposed in the first place.
> Scott himself has described serious tolls on his mental health owing to merely having his full name published online.
OK, then. Since the same logic applies, I guess you will say that the worthless journalist who wrote that hit piece should be arrested and thrown in prison, right?
Well I do think doxxing should be illegal, if that's what you're asking, whether it’s done by online abusers or by journalists. As for “..and thrown in prison” I'm not sure I'm really qualified to pronounce sentencing!
Or you can teach people to not let their mental health be subject to the whims of anonymous haters on the internet. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". That was, if never quite perfectly true, at least aspirationally true. And it worked quite well for many generations, enough so to be one of the classic Copybook Headings.
Now, we too often teach our children to be maximally harmed by words, because that harm gives them status and power and forces the rest of the world to do whatever it takes to make them not feel bad.
Well, OK, not so much "the rest of the world", just the bubble within which that perverse ideology holds true. And that's not going to be enough to prevent great harm to the people you trying to protect.
My daughter told me her teacher said having hateful words directed at you can feel just like rocks. I was shocked how closely it contradicted exactly that metaphor. I stopped short of challenging the teacher to a rocks vs hateful words duel. But the rot is deep.
> Now, we too often teach our children to be maximally harmed by words, because that harm gives them status and power and forces the rest of the world to do whatever it takes to make them not feel bad.
That honestly might be a consequence of kids not getting hit enough. The source of the harm is the surprise of being given the treatment that they are entitled to, and no more. There would be no surprise if they come to expect it from a young age.
It is trivially easy to prevent online abuse from killing you. Simply don't kill yourself.
Also, attempted suicide is an easily gamed metric. The classic example of women having more attempted suicides while men have more actual suicides is instructive.
Which causes more harm to mental health: a picture of a banana, or laws and customs that characterize any insult as traumatic, potentially life-changing and illegal events?
Of course words can harm, teenagers have killed themselves from non-physical bullying. I know you say "on the internet" as a distinction from, say, real life, but for kids these days, is it? I see how teens are completely captured by social networks predatory algorithms and phones in general and imagine it's not so simple to just not use them.
Hate-speech laws do not criminalize speech for driving someone to suicide. It doesn't even have to do any harm. Meanwhile, speech that does drive someone to suicide does not fall under the law -- such as falsely claiming to be harassed by someone else's speech and driving that person to suicide.
To cite such cases is to show the problem with the law.
I have treated half a dozen men who were given the old, harsher version of Catholic education, where they were told by authorities that masturbation. was a mortal sin. Each had developed an anxiety disorder that lasted for years, sometimes for decades, that clearly derived from being told this terrifying story at around the age when young guys discover masturbation Example: One had spent several *years* in his teens bouncing a ball up against an outdoor wall for several hours after school to keep himself from going into his house before his parents got home from work. Once they were there he felt safer from his impulses. When I met him 10 years later he was still refraining from masturbating and had elaborate decontamination rituals for use on his bedding after nights when he had had a wet dream.
No. I don’t even think the nuns should be forbidden by law to say that stuff, even a law with a much lighter punishment. I don’t know what the appropriate social remedy is.
The appropriate social remedy is, in my view, to empower parents to control the social environments of their children. Meaning the state has as little impact on it as possible. No speech laws. School vouchers. Basic libertarian stuff, in other words.
The other remedy is to acknowledge that mental health is to a large degree genetic and to embrace the positive selective effects that stigmatizing it has for the population. We really need to stop coddling every little thing that can be construed as mental illness. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a social contagion aspect to mental illness. While we should be (somewhat) understanding, that understanding should come with firm guardrails around malingerers. In my view our tolerance has long since passed the threshold of incentivization. In the 50's we probably really did need a little more "hey we understand", but these days we need a hell of a lot more "suck it up".
Yeah, OK, but the guy I'm talking about wasn't anything remotely like a malingerer. After a godawful adolescence he went to college, and got a decent job, which he still had when I first encountered him. Far from getting lots of leeway and sympathy for the disorder he had suffered in adolescence, he totally went it alone. He did not tell a soul about his anxiety, & his rituals. He was profoundly ashamed both of his craving to masturbate and of the weird thoughts and rituals he had that were associated with fear of masturbation.. He described himself as a weird, lame bitter little twisted piece of shit, and he was one of the most anguished people I've ever talked with, and that's saying a lot.
As for the positive selection effect of having one's weirdness and fragility be stigmatized, i.e. seen as repellent rather than evidence that one needs help -- well, Wanda, my mind put me through a lot of bad shit while I was growing up, and I probably wouldn't be here if I hadn't gotten some sympathy and effective help, mostly from my parents, during those periods. I'm guessing Scott would say the same. You sure you want to throw the smart fragiles to the wolves? You wouldn't have my gibes to annoy and entertain you, and in fact you wouldn't even have the forum where it happens.
I can think of three cases that *were* kept below the threshold in exactly the calculated way I describe - but I wouldn't care to share them publicly. (And even if I could, I'm well aware that n=3 doesn't exactly carry much weight around here..)
I suspect we probably disagree very strongly - but thanks for keeping me honest on this point, nevertheless!
Is your claim that all cyberbullying should be made illegal? If so, why the focus on racism in particular? Here in the US, there are tons of conservatives who would *love* to throw liberals in jail over the horrible things they say about conservatives on the Internet. If a picture of a banana counts as cyberbullying, calling people fascists, retards, and pedophiles who should be punched in the face *definitely* counts.
I think I agree with you on nearly all counts! I'm not too sure about “fascists” - that seems like it might be legitimate political criticism? - but if somebody is falsely accused of being a paedophile (in a nontrivial, potentially life-ruiningly way), or is harassed and abused for their perceived intelligence by being called a retard (again, in a nontrivial way that's dependent on the particular case - I'm not claiming that just using the word alone under any circumstances should get you automatically sent to Devil’s Island!) and if every single other system for protecting people in that situation from harm has unrecoverably failed then yes, I'd say that those people should have the full protection of the law.
Keep in mind that the direction of causality may run counter to your expectations there. Bullies may naturally gravitate to those who are already psychologically ill. I suspect that that's actually likely and that bullying may be interpreted as an adaptive social immune response to mental illness. The recent rise in mental illness may in fact be a symptom of a social autoimmune disorder caused by the artificial suppression of the natural immune response.
Even if bullying is responsible in a causal way, I still think that the remedy is worse than the problem. Suppressing free speech with the force of the state is far more destructive than making some small percentage of people feel bad about themselves.
You keep looking for harms though. Having draconian concrete laws to prevent vague ill-defined harms is a classic symptom of authoritarian overreach.
The rise in mental illness diagnoses is far too much for "lack of appropriate suicides" to explain, unless you're saying bullying at the right time can cure or otherwise pre-empt their development?
Yes, the latter. It functions as a "this is what acceptable social behavior looks like" signal. Yes sometimes it can be brutal but hey, life is brutal. Look at how brutal manhood rituals are in primitive societies. Obviously those exist for a reason. I think our psyches might be evolved to be in equilibrium with them. Absent firm behavioral guardrails I think people have a tendency to become neurotic. That's what happens with dogs: without a strong pack leader or owner they can get nutty. Purse dogs are frequently aggressive and neurotic because they're not properly disciplined. I think humans function in an analogous way. Some people just don’t develop properly if they don’t get their ass kicked in the right way.
Bullies do not stop bullying when the victim engages in "acceptable social behavior." Indeed, they often double down on the bullying.
Given that people enjoy bullying, the obvious default assumption of anyone's bullying anyone else is that it's been done for the pleasure of it -- especially when your function obviously doesn't fit the facts.
*Because perpetrators become incredibly adept at judging the threshold for police intervention and staying only-just below it *
That's what we call "the rule of law." The point is that people can know what is and is not legal for them to do.
Also, it is perfectly legal for them to engage in "causing life-changing harm to victims" as long as they stay out of the forbidden groups. That shows that the harm is not really the justification, because if it were, it would be a lot more expansive. Anti-nerd bullying for instance.
I don't think that's a good way of describing the rule of law. I think a better way would be: that the rule of law is the concept that the rulering classes aren't above the law: in effect that the law rules, and the ruling classes are subjects to it just as everybody else is.
I know there are schools of jurisprudence which put this concept into a framework where having clear and well-defined laws is essential - but A) I don't think such a framework is universally accepted, and B) I notice we don't apply this to many other aspects of the law and most people (yourself included, I suspect) agree that's perfectly fine!
For example: the speed limit is perfectly clear, but the police have the discretion to choose whether or not to arrest somebody driving faster than it (and it would be awful if they arrested every single motorist that was driving 1 mph too fast without any discretion). The age of consent is perfectly clear, but the police have the discretion to choose whether to arrest two 15-year-olds who have sex with each other. Drug laws are perfectly clear but the police don't start breaking down doors every time they smell weed in the street. In all these cases, we accept the laws being clear but the police using discretion about when applying them is or isn't in the public good.
Furthermore, your examples undermine your case because you offer clear laws that draw clear lines in defense of having a law where it's impossible to determine what is legal. Since they are opposite, you are arguing my case for me.
Doubting myself in light of your claim (my last law lecture being over a decade ago..) I looked up the Wikipedia article on the Rule of Law and it does rather seem to support my definition better than it does yours. (But I'm happy to just say that we each have different conceptions of the rule of law and discuss the actual underlying idea rather than the mere definition!)
In that spirit: I agree that the laws I referred to (speeding etc.) are clear, yes - but I don't think the Equality Act 2010 (which I have read in detail) or the Online Safety Act 2023 (which I admit I've only briefly glanced at) are any less clear at all. The online abuse and harassment in question was unequivocally illegal under UK law, and all the cases cited by Speak UK were successfully tested in court*.
Speak UK say we should change the law to make them all legal (and many other things besides) and I say that doing this would leave lots of vulnerable people unprotected and instead we should keep the law close to what it is but have police guidelines (perhaps issued by the NCP?) such that the police use common sense and discretion in deciding which prosecutions are and aren't in the public interest (and ideally arrest less than 25 people per day for this, even if they do interview that many people).
(* Surely part of your formulation of the rule of law is that you accept judicial rulings?)
1. The WP article...seems to clearly support Mary's definition. "The rule of law entails that the law is clear, consistent and open", "secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power", "It entails that all people and institutions within a political body are subject to the same law." If the law can be in some sense written on the spot by a judge, in what meaningful sebse is the judge subject to the law? If whether your act is illegal depends on the opinions of the judge you happen to get, in what sense is everyone subject to the same law?
2. You seem to have significantly shifted your claim. First you described, as Mart quoted, "Because perpetrators become incredibly adept at judging the threshold for police intervention and staying only-just below it " as a bad situation. Now you say that the laws you're defending are as clear as the speed limit. So which is it? Either the laws are unambiguously defined, like the speed limit, such that people carefully staying just below the threshold are completely protected and their being protected is the law functioning exactly as it's supposed to...or the law should be vague enough that such people can still be charged if certain authority figures decide that in their opinion it was still subjectively bad. In other words, very much *unlike* the speed limit, unless you think it's fine for police to say "yeah, the limit is 60 and you were going 57, but *really* I feel like that was too fast as well, and the law is whatever I say it is, so you're going to jail."
1) Gosh, I really don't want to argue about definions, but it's just so difficult to avoid! It seems unproductive for me to point out issues with your quoting or clauses from the article and I think it's probably best if we can say that “The law should apply even to the ruling classes” and “The law should be clear and unambiguous” are two different concepts in law, and I believe one is commonly referred to as ‘the rule of law’ and you believe the other is (and we should both encourage anybody else happening upon this exchange to read the article for themselves and decide which of us they agree with)? I'm sorry to disengage but I really don't want to debate the definition!
2) Good to clarify this - thanks for bringing it up. I definitely could have put it better! I intended to claim that the UK’s laws are broad - as in they give the authorities a wide scope of powers - not that they're ambiguous.
For example, let's say the speed limit on some motorway is 70mph. Under most circumstances you could do 90 along that road perfectly safely, but in other circumstances (perhaps it's raining heavily, there's lots of slow-moving traffic, and your 35 year old Vauxhall Nova is making a worrying noise) it would barely be safe even to do 70. It's difficult to define in law exactly which circumstances it'd be safe to do 70 and in which it's safe to do 80, so the speed limit is set at 70 for everybody all the time, and the police can arrest anybody driving at 80 even if they're doing so safely: in other words, the police have broad powers, not ambiguous ones.
And we do this because, under some circumstances, doing 72mph genuinely is dangerous and we want the police to be able to arrest people doing that, whilst leaving the people safely doing 80 alone.
The system is terrible - loads of people get speeding tickets even when they’re driving perfectly safely and loads of other people get away with driving at 80 even when it isn't safe to do so - but by-and-large the police do seem to use discretion and most people in the outside lane of the motorway do seem able to drive at 80+ most of the time without any problems, and removing the speed limit altogether would only make things worse from a safety perspective.
I admit that the laws limiting online abuse etc. are necessarily messier than speed limit (how could it be otherwise - the latter is literally just an integer!) but I'm claiming that the law is similarly broad in the sense that the legal bar is low enough that more-or-less all genuine abuse is illegal, even if some trivial abuse is also illegal (just as the speed limit is low enough that nearly all dangerously-fast driving is illegal, even if some safe-but-faat driving is also illegal), a perpetrator of abuse can't say “well everything I published on line was technically legal”, and we rely on police discretion to arrest the people doing genuine harm and the CPS to prosecute them if it's genuinely in the public interest to do so.
I agree this is an obviously flawed system and does obviously fail, but A) it seems to me vastly better than just blanket making all of it legal without exception, B) Given that we started writing laws like this in the 80s, if the campaign of opposition to the law can only find 9 obvious failures then probably it isn't *too* flawed? And C) Claiming the system is flawed in this way is different to claiming the law is ambiguous rather than broad, in any case.
I'm not saying that all judicial rulings are wise and just! On at least nine of the eighteen presented cases I happen to agree with you that the outcome was unjust.
I'm saying that when a judge says "X is guilty of Y" then, *whether or not you believe that Y should be a crime in the first place*, accepting the judge's right and qualification to give that verdict seems like a necessary part of supporting the rule of law (*Especially* in the UK where we operate under the Common Law principle of stare decisis...)
If you wanted to say "I don't support the rule of law and therefore I don't accept judicial rulings" I could understand. If you said "I don't believe that the judge's ruling was correct but I accept it nevertheless because if people ignored judges the rule of law would break down" I could understand. But you seem to be saying"I fully support the rule of law but I don't accept judicial rulings"!
If the problem is not that the laws ban speech which they shouldn't, but rather that the police are arresting innocent people, then your cause should be police reform, not changing laws.
SPEAK did not post 18 convictions. They posted 18 cases that are abuses of justice in their view, from the past 15 years or so. It looks like about 6 of them resulted in convictions.
If we assume the 25 arrests per day figure is correct, that's over 100,000 in 15 years. If only 18 of them were notable miscarriages of justice, and most of those were dropped or overturned, it points to illegal harassment being relatively rare.
No, I don't think it's trivial, I think that, if true, it's too heavy-handed and the wrong way to police. I think if there are 25 arrests a day it's A) harmful for public trust and it'd be better to request interviews rather than interview under arrest most of the time, and B) probably very expensive and not the best use of the police's limited resources.
However - the only source we have for this 25 per day figure is Speak UK's citation of the *Daily Mail*. The Daily Mail doesn't itself seem to cite a source. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and without any such evidence I strongly suspect, give my knowledge about how policing is done in the UK, that actually there are 25 *police interviews* per day, not 25 arrests.
But even if somehow the statistic is true (and we agree it's bad if true) I do think addressing it by prohibiting by statue the police from arresting people for online racism and abuse will cause far more social harm than it solves.
What nonsense. If only because people have been driven to suicide by people falsely accusing them of "online racism."
Furthermore, the case of Germany shows that if you allow it, you allow punishing people for stating accurate statistics about a social problem. Consequently, you are irrevocably harming democracy by keeping people in the dark about the truth.
I think we have very different intuitions here on the tradeoffs of clamping down on speech "just in case" it's harmful.
And in particular, while I find the choices the NYT made in publishing their article on Scott ethically reprehensible, I would be *strongly* opposed to any law attempting to make it illegal for them to do so.
Infringing on actual, legitimate speech is far too dangerous and harmful to do as lightly as you're proposing.
I agree that we have different intuitions in the tradeoffs of legally protecting ethically reprehensible speech, true - but (perhaps more productively?) we might also have different intuitions of what constitutes "clamping down":
The Equality Act entered the statute books in 2010 and the groundwork was laid for the Online Safety Act in 2019. If since then we have a total of just 18 cases that Speak UK consider to be miscarriages of justice (and having read their list of cases I think the real figure is more like nine, but that's by-the-by..) would you consider this "clamping down"?
(nb. I'm not asking whether it's bad-but-justified or bad-and-u justified, I think it's clear we disagree on that, just why you consider that a "clamp down"?)
As Mary says, someone getting arrested, charged, etc is still immensely harmful even if they're eventually acquitted. And even more, you have people feeling pressured to keep silent because they don't want to risk being subjected to all that.
They're not being arrested, charged, tried, and acquitted; they're being arrested, interviewed, and dearrested without charge.
I agree such arrests are harmful - but I think they're less harmful than letting people say racist (or other abusive) things online with no consequences.
I have to admit that I struggle to see how a person can be so concerned with the wellbeing of an online racist but so unconcerned with the wellbeing of an online racism victim that they would rather the victim suffer abuse unprotected than that the abuser has to sit in a room and answer some questions before being allowed to go home.
I don't mean the following in an aggressive way, but I really think you need to be aware that your perspective on this is so fundamentally alien to the deepest values of many people here, that it's liable to provoke a not-dissimilar reaction to someone genuinely asking why democracy is better than dictatorship, or why slavery is always such a bad thing. People often have no idea how to respond, because the reasons seem so obvious and "in the water supply" and "the common premises of all people in a free society" that it's hard to explain these reasons to someone who so thoroughly rejects the premises of their basic values.
Now to be clear, the alien perspective is *not* "there are extreme situations where freedom of speech is outweighed by other factors" but rather "the right to speak freely and the right to be protected from unwelcome speech need to be weighed up, as basically equal considerations". This, I would suggest, comes across to many people, particularly on ACX, the way "in discussions of rape, one needs to weigh up the harm of being raped with the harm of being denied sex one really wants" would come across to the average woman, or how a discussion of criminal laws against homosexuality framed as "weighing up the fear of homosexuals of living under such laws against the disgust of conservatives of living in a society without them" would to most people. In all these cases, one can dispassionately argue that the harms are not equal...but the understandable reaction is often closer to outrage at the mere suggestion, at the complete failure to acknowledge that one of these things is so absolutely fundamentally not like the other.
I think if you're going to argue this equivalence, you should do so with a much greater explicit recognition that this is a pretty extreme position within the standard framework of a liberal society built on individual rights.
As to the actual problems with it...again, it's difficult to know where to start. For one thing, it's taking an extremely dogmatic utilitarian position where outcomes are all that matter and notions of rights, freedoms, limits on the state etc, have no value except in tetms of outcomes. But even within that utilitarian position it has so many problems, so many extreme asymmetries between the fear of hearing demeaning speech and the fear of being arrested for your speech. Such as:
-you can train yourself to be less affected by, or even immune to, insults and mean words. You can't train yourself to be immune to handcuffs and prison bars.
-you can fight back against offensive words, with your own words or otherwise; you can't fight back against the police and the state.
-if you're a minority within a given space, and thus vulnerable, you can recruit friends or other members of your demographic into that space to even the scales a bit. You can't do this against the state.
-you can, if you can't handle being subject to the power of aggressive bullies, avoid all spaces where you might be so subject, in a way that's difficult but not impossible. If you can't handle being subject to the power of aggressive or overpowered police, there may be absolutely nothing you can do, if no other country is willing to give you asylum.
-the power of the state to arrest people for their speech is unimaginably greater, unimaginably scarier, and unimaginably more open to enormous abuses than the power of bullies to insult and demean and cause mental distress.
These are the tiny tip of an iceberg of differences. And I want to reiterate that by engaging in the academic object-level discussion of the differences between too much regulation of speech and too little, I am in no way implying that this is a meaningfully different kind of discussion (as opposed to degree) than the differences between the advantages of democracy and dictatorship.
In my experience, most Americans don't actually have a deep respect for freedom of speech, only Freedom of Speech Of My Allies While Punishing Anyone I Disagree With To The Maximum Extent Possible.
(Not taken in a aggressive way - thanks very much indeed for the qualifier, it's thoughtful and I appreciate it.)
I admit I do seem to be in a minority on ACX - but if we take “current legislation in the West” as a yardstick ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country ), I don't think my position is anywhere near as extreme as you portray it.
Essentially every nation has restrictions on individual speech. Even the USA, which is famously more permissive than the rest of the West in what it lets its subjects say in public, has approximately twenty different kinds of speech that are prohibited by law. The UK (which this conversation was originally supposed to be about) has had restrictions on individual speech aimed at improving the overall civilisation of discourse dating back a century, and these were extended to online communications in the 1980s: I'm not advocating some weird new extreme position, but defending the long-term status quo.
One outcome of Britain's century-plus of restricting those limited forms of speech that seem to always do harm without ever doing good (such as racist abuse) is that the quality of public discourse feels (to me) higher here than it does in the USA. How it feels to me is subjective, I know - but there is data suggesting Britain is one of the world's least racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. societies - by some measures several times over more so than the USA: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/love-thy-neighbour.pdf
Finally, the weighing-up you criticise seems to me to be a necessary part of making basically any prohibition in law? For example, presumably(?) you support copyright protection as a restriction on free speech: in deciding whether to institute copyright protection lawmakers must have weighed-up the harms to society of absolute free speech (viz. people not creating so many works of entertainment, art, etc.) against the harms to society of copyright protection (viz. one additional restriction on speech)* and decide which is the lesser harm. This seems like how we go about prohibiting most prohibited things, and equating it to “weighing-up whether a rapist's right to sex is greater than their victim's right to not be raped” seems like a really weird and deliberately incendiary way of describing a perfectly normal part of the lawmaking process.
* (Lest you object that there are no harms to society from the restriction on free speech caused by copyright protection, there are a great many famous cases of copyright law being used like that. I have limited appetite for looking them all up online just now, so please excuse my sharing just the first web-search result; I admit it's just a listicle but there do seem to nevertheless be a few such examples on the list: https://listverse.com/2018/07/15/top-10-craziest-copyright-claims-ever-made
I'm probably going to bow out of this discussion now (though of course I’ll gladly read anything further that you write!) - thanks once again for the polite and friendly way you've disagreed with me (despite clearly hating my views!) It's very open-minded of you and I'm grateful for it.
> -you can fight back against offensive words, with your own words or otherwise; you can't fight back against the police and the state.
> -if you're a minority within a given space, and thus vulnerable, you can recruit friends or other members of your demographic into that space to even the scales a bit. You can't do this against the state.
Wait, what? People fight back against the state all the time. It's called a revolution. It just usually requires a majority. The fact that minorities have no means to improve their situation against a majority isn't exclusive to dealing with the state. You cannot "even the scales" when your demographic simply lacks the numbers or capabilities that are necessary for meaningful agency.
Now, the question is "do minorities deserve anything?" My answer is no, because nobody deserves anything, but I'm sure your answer is different.
Some news from the (culture)war: I was speaking to a guy I know in China recently in the course of some business
(in this case, they have some sort of magic injection formation: eight trigrams : seal of the five elements: our fiber reinforced plastic can be all sorts of weird shapes and it still turns out strong, so tariffs will not work in the short or medium or probably long term because the americans that are willing to do it cost 5 times as much and their product is shitty and the fucking finance assholes are going to plow 50bajillion dollars into another stupid fucking tech product instead of physical capital intensive projects that will expose them to the risk of having to pay people to do labor, the dumb cunts.)
(no, I'm not bitter that it's both cheaper and better to have parts stamped out in china and shipped across the world than to buy local, and that the problem has actually gotten WORSE over the last year.)
And the subject of Trump came up, he had some interesting mixed feelings about it:
On the one hand, he thinks that Trump is good for china long term in a zero-sum sense. He has so thoroughly discombobulated the US partners in the region that he thinks even a couple NeoLibDems in a row won't be able to undo the damage; and that within 20 years the pacific ocean all the way to Guam will be a chinese lake, as it were, unless (note in next bit).
On the other hand: China is in the Business of doing business, and things are so chaotic that he doesn't know which way to punch like he did 10 years ago; that even if China overtakes the US politically and economically --
(which he thinks is now entirely China's game to throw; the US has damaged itself so thoroughly with it's stupid financialized industrial policy and senile-mad-cow diplomatic policy that it would be impossible for them to catch up unless the Party blows a gasket and shits itself, which is always a 60/40 chance in any country and especially so where the process of selection is as closed and sclerotic as it is in China. Just because they rolled boxcars with Xi doesn't mean the next guy will be as good, type of feeling.) --
that the loss of the rules based order will be so destructive that even if China can establish local or regional hegemony that they will be worse off than they are now, and the fact that the laowai are doing even worse isn't that much of a comfort.
Interesting how quickly the world changes under your feet; all castles are made of sand, every vast leg ends up trunkless, etc and so forth.
> expose them to the risk of having to pay people to do labor, the dumb cunts.
I understand you're being facetious, but it seems to me that there are enough labor protections that it now indeed comes with vast amounts of risk and they're responding correctly to the incentives with which they've been presented.
Those aren't even the pressures I'm talking about!
I'm talking about the pure market forces of it all, of the fact that employing people who develop skills and institutional knowledge that results in your product being beyond competitive, that allows a firm (to pick a random name out of a hat: Boeing!) to completely dominate a field and crush all who come before them and to hear the lamentations of their shareholders, is bad actually. You fool. You fucking imbecile. You moron.
What we need to do is deskill as much as possible, outsource everything else, mistreat everyone who we can't eliminate so badly they check out completely or quit, and destroy our decades of market hegemony in a few quick years because WE are BUSINESSMEN doing BIG CAPITALISM and we are jealous of the guys who's labor force is fungible. Mcdonnell Douglas Delenda Est.
Basically: American capital holders would rather risk failing outright than risk having to deal with labor who's lack of willing, enthusiastic participation could affect the stock price.
It's been to my individual profit as someone who hasn't plucked out their own eyes to better appreciate the glorious light that emanates from Hayek; I've had the ability to see, for example, the glaringly obvious, but it is alarming as an ant that has to tapdance with the blind elephants.
Okay, but none of that matters if you have to pay your workers extravagant wages and let them work in humane conditions. As far as manufacturing goes, you need sweatshops and labor camps to stay competitive on anything but extremely high-end products. The fault for eliminating that lies with the state and its people, not the companies themselves.
This is straight up not true. I've worked in manufacturing, I've been to china, I've seen firms take a haircut for thinking like you. The people who are not fungible, as in the analogized passage above, get treated to safe working conditions, high wages, benefits, big checks, the whole shebang, anywhere in the world that has any labor market whatsoever.
This is because THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT FUNGIBLE. You CANNOT go out on the street and get a replacement level die maker, because there is no such thing. These are the positions that produce irreplaceable value for a firm, and these are the positions that capital hates the most because they can demand a portion of their surplus value and get it without organizing. If you mistreat the guy who sets up the dies and teeth on the stamping press, he walks out the door, gets a new job the same day, and your line shuts down until you can replace him unless you have some redundancy, which you don't because the MBA who makes the decision didn't get to use the braincell when they were laying off people on the floor instead of people in the C suite.
I rate this take: MBA brained, soft handed, never actually been part of a productive enterprise.
You can't say that someone is responding correctly to incentives without quantifying them.
You can say that worker protections create incentives which directly point away from using human labor, and that's true. So does ending slavery, and the fact the some human labor is ugly and it's unpleasant to have to look at them. None of these incentives prove a certain decision 'correct' until you quantity them, and compare to the marginal utility of the decision.
>The Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund is the main organization working to prevent its creation
I do kinda worry that this is basically a 'Lets do a lot of research into how one might build the Torment Nexus and bring the Torment Nexus to very wide public attention to make sure that no one builds it' sort of situation.
Was anyone actually trying to make mirror life before this? Is this group going to do a huge amount to advance the knowledge base and popularity behind this idea, and does that actually make it less likely than leaving it an obscure thought experiment that a tiny tiny fraction of the population has ever heard of?
I know the argument that it's zero-sum mentality and therefore irrational to believe there are issues with income inequality or the existence of billionaires or even trillionaires, but empirically, it does seem like it bothers a lot of people*, offending their sense of fairness. Everyone derides the idea of the new man of socialism, but it seems like the capitalists need a new man of capitalism that wouldn't have the natural tendency to think in zero-sum terms or care about income inequality...
*Not me, my material conditions are peachy, I don't care if billionaires or trillionaires exist, and I doubt their existence causes there to be poor and destitute people anywhere.
The argument I'd make (though not 100% confident about it) about billionaires (aside from the "buy the government/media" thing) is that if the money you make in a capitalist society is supposed to reflect your contribution to the economy, almost nobody is *actually* contributing enough to the economy to justify *that* big an income gap over everyone else.
Like if a plumber makes 2x as much as the average plumber, OK, he's better than most plumbers. Fixes tougher issues, works longer hours, whatever. But if he makes 10,000x the average, you wouldn't think he's the Greek god of plumbing, you'd think something more was going on, maybe fishy.
CEOs are supposed to be different than plumbers in this regard, but I don't think we should uncritically accept that idea.
E.g. Mark Zuckerberg; is he actually an order of magnitude better at designing social networks than other people?
Part of it is luck/right place right time; some is network effects and it's worth considering whether antitrust should play a role; some is that Facebook undercut traditional media by lying about advertising efficiency and video viewership numbers and maybe some copyright violation about hosting their content.
"E.g. Mark Zuckerberg; is he actually an order of magnitude better at designing social networks than other people?"
Not a Zuck fan, but all available evidence points to yes here. Most billionaire founders are at least good at the thing they founded that generated billions of dollars even after paying huge returns to everyone else who invested. They might be jerks or bad for the world or a huge cringey nerd or in the process of spending billions of dollars on bad ideas, but they're at least good at the first thing they did. If you're looking for idiots with unjustified wealth, there are better places to look.
A mural by Dain Fitzgerald, called "A Friendship Forged in Winter Fire": https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G-W7j9ZbQAAEJP5.jpg
Since prediction markets are everywhere, we should be able to get accurate predictions about the probability of significant future events, right?
Polymarket:
CA wealth tax appears on ballot: 50% (https://polymarket.com/event/billionaire-one-time-wealth-tax-on-california-ballot)
CA wealth tax passes: 52% (https://polymarket.com/event/billionaire-one-time-wealth-tax-passes-in-california-election-2026/billionaire-one-time-wealth-tax-passes-in-california-election-2026)
Somehow, the wealth tax is more likely to pass than it is to even appear on the ballot!
Polymarket is bad at computing odds, this is a criticism of Polymarket's odd computation algo not prediction market.
Example say you arbitrage with 2k
CA wealth tax appears on ballot at 50% -> 1k on "Yes" (1k win, 1k loss)
CA wealth tax passes 52 -> 1k on "No" (1.04k win, 1k loss)
In principle you have 3 scenarios:
A: Appears on ballot, doesn't pass -> you win 2.04k [say this is at a 5% chance]
B: Appears on ballot, passes -> breaks even [say this is at a 50% chance]
C: Doesn't appear on ballot (auto not pass) -> you win 0.04k [say this is at a 45% chance]
So, if your belief is that there's at least a 6% chance the proposition fails, and that it makes no logical sense "appears and passes" should be 4% more likely than "appears" (a fair assumption to make, given first order logic) ... you'd win ~$120
Not a great return, but, it's 6% annualized, greater than bonds, and you get ~3% annualized on first order logic alone
Ok, how does this actually play out if you bet right now:
A: The *actual* win is 1.7k
B: This is not an actual break even, you would lose ~0.25k
C: Instead of winning 0.04k you lose ~0.27k
So on average you are... now losing $160 instead of winning $120
Indeed, there are *no* ways of arbitrating this diff. That's because order books are thin ... and were a lot thinner when you made this comment.
I expect that in about 1-2 months they will normalize (indeed, I am noting the odds evening out as I speak, as some people are correcting the market) - but the corrections happen only when people with the opposite belief see a deal in the middle, not because people are buying both to arbitrage.
In practice Polymarket doesn't really allow for arbitrage on most market under 10m or so in volume ... the only reason to buy a position is if you believe in it, and belief is a thickle thing. Why do more people believe that it will appear than that it will pass ? who knows, but 2% diff (even if illogical) should not bother us, because the system won't allow us to arbitrage it.
Realistically Polymarket should display these as 30-70% more so than 52% and 50% | Using the place where order books "even out" | But that would require people to look at a confidence range and that is too much
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_bar
Funny story about Ms. Rachel in the news: under one of her posts, she liked a comment that said “Free America from the Jews.”
Later, she made an apology video for this, saying it was an accident, and that she meant to delete it.
Under THIS video, there was a comment from @thepalestinenewsnetwerk that read “Spoiler Alert: They left that comment themselves.”
She pinned this comment and replied "oooooooooooohhhhhh"
Sometimes it feels like internet drama is both infinitely deep and infinitely shallow.
Everywhere you go there's a brand new iteration of "Person Who You've Never Heard Of But Apparently Is Very Important To Some People Said Something Stupid" vs "No You Really Have To Understand The Context Though"
But everywhere you go it turns out to be the same four or five dumb subjects over and over again.
I take your point, but I disagree this is an instance of that. "I'm deeply sorry for suggesting the existence of a secret Jewish conspiracy. The secret Jewish conspiracy tricked me into doing it" is funny without needing any context.
Those "secret" Jewish conspiracies really need to improve their OPSEC.
In other news, Shankar once replied to somebody's question by saying "think of it as the limiting case," and that was the funniest comeback ever. Except that you have to know the context to appreciate it. Sort of like the Ms Rachel thing.
That DOES sound like something I'd say, so if you've made up the example, kudos! (If you haven't, and that actually happened, could you please refresh my memory?)
Made it up. I’ve got your number, dude.
Yeah, such accidents happen to all of us all the time. More seriously, who is Ms. Rachel?
Ms. Rachel is an entertainer for very young children, like, one and under. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTqtGJwsJVE
My knowledge of her mostly ends at the Lindsay Ellis video about her, which is not an unbiased source. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwpanShgOp4
I wonder if the 1 year old kids actually prefer this kind of content, but to me it feels like a new form of torture. I can feel the IQ points leaving my brain as I watch.
> who is Ms. Rachel?
Mr. Beast for babies.
Who is "they" here?
In this context, that's standard terminology for International Jewry.
Unhappily I have neither Apple TV nor Google TV so I will not be able to watch the stars of Substack broadcast!
"Today we’re launching the Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV. Substack is the home for the best longform—work creators put real care into and subscribers choose to spend time with. Now these thought-provoking videos and livestreams have a natural home on the TV, where subscribers can settle in for the extended viewing that great video deserves.
That might mean watching Dolly Parton reflect on her showbiz journey, George Saunders read from his book, or Tina Brown interview leading figures in news and culture. Chris Cillizza, the author of So What and a frequent on-air contributor, put it simply: “Video doesn’t have to live in any one place. It needs to be wherever someone chooses to consume it. The Substack TV app does just that for me and my work.”
It's sure irritating to come here and see I have an item in the Activity box, then click and discover it's a notice that Hanania's live on Substack.
Agreed! Mine is always for a free press live that i don't care about
ETA: Found the setting i think that fixes it. I went to the gear in the activity window and then in Notifications expanded Live and unchecked all those. Hope that helps!
Hi guys, I'm the Third Coming of Christ. Yes, I know that makes me sound like a schizo, but hear me out.
gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/the-third-coming-of-christ
AMA!
Come again?
"The Second Coming was Nietzsche.
...in Islam where the next prophet is supposed to be the anti-Christ."
Checks out so far.
Okay, I'm too old for this, I've seen too many "hey guize here's my cool new take we are all God, see?" variants before, but someone who has never encountered any of this in the wild might be interested. I am no more impressed by "let me slap on a coat of hip new quasi-scientific buzzwords of the day" this time round than by the previous of-their-time hip new quasi-scientific buzzwords in former efforts.
Good luck to you all.
EDIT: And there's even a proto-Gnostic quote! I've never read any of the Gospel of Thomas but I recognised the "saying of Jesus" as not something I've heard in the canonical Gospels, looked it up, and my oh my there we go.
I'm laughing here. Of course it is, of course it is. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
“You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember.”
Don Vito Corleone is speaking perhaps?
He talks a big game, but the Danish flag still flies over the ice of Greenland.
Scuttlebutt says this is Trump's way of preventing the next Sevastopol. Capiche?
TACO!
Mark Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum:
https://youtu.be/dTvFnC-oFGw?si=Pe76pZ9sFi7CaRa-&t=39
I don't have a specific point I want to make, just wanted to share what I think is one of the best political speeches of this decade so far.
Fascinating the lies that someone can spread, isn't it?
Have you ever tried Canadian puerh tea?
Without anything specific, what is the value of this comment?
Asserting that it's rather rich the Canadians talking about "keeping international agreements" when they've hijacked NAFTA to work as rebranders of Chinese products. "Look, it's gotta be better, it's Canadian!" (given China's issues with pine nuts I can sympathize with the person, even if they are dumber than a sack of bricks).
I read it, which is how I always consume political speechifying, and was agog. Literally historical-level good both on the merits and as communication.
The final three paragraphs form a peroration that Churchill or Obama or Reagan or MLK -- thinking offhand of some of the greatest English-language public speechmakers of the past century -- wouldn't have been ashamed of.
Also some people whose wisdom in such things I tend to respect say that Carney's manner in delivering it was every bit as good. Perhaps partly because he personally wrote it at least in large part, hence was not reciting but rather speaking his own thoughts.
All that from a 60-year-old banker whose very first partisan-politics role at any level began less than a year ago....January 2025 me did _not_ have any of that on my bingo card, couldn't have picked Mark Carney out of a lineup.
The speech was excellent, and appropriate. The question is whether the Canadian people will back it up with more than words. And I'm frankly quite skeptical on that.
Same goes for the rest of the target audience. It's so much easier to imagine that the fine words will be enough.
It is not a matter of will, but simple capabilities. Ambition is worthless unless you have the resources to do anything with it. A rebellious will does not change the fact that their only choice is to serve or die.
Even against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy who is certain to win a military confrontation, a weaker country has no choice but to fight a war with the objective of making the engagement as costly as possible for the neighboring empire, or (much) preferably to signal they will do so without actually having to do it. The higher the cost the greater the degree of freedom the diplomats will have at the negotiating table when hashing out the terms of a surrender agreement. This is because even if the greater power wins, it is some inconvenience to them to spend the blood and treasure it'd take to pacify them, so there is a range of options that is better for both parties than active war. Once again, the greater the cost, the greater that range.
You again. OK, let's do this.
In addition to "serve" and "die", Canada has the choice of establishing a new alliance with people powerful enough to stand up to the United States. I see at least two obvious options there. And I see no advantage to the United States in pushing Canada down that path.
Canada, as the proud owner of twenty-five large heavy-water fission reactors, also has the option of establishing a strategic nuclear deterrent capable of going full MAD. If they die, we die with them. Given the long and mostly indefensible border between the two nations, and the fragility of modern economies, there are also plausible non-nuclear deterrent options available to them.
And even if those options were unavailable, Canada would only be faced with the choice between serving or dying, if a superpower demands "serve or die". Since you're pretty clearly thinking of the United States in that role, that gives Canada the third option of hoping that the American people would do the right thing and, if necessary, destroy the United States of America before America can kill all the Canadians. You might be surprised by how many of us would step up for that.
Canada may end up choosing to serve. But if they do, it will be out of cowardice rather than necessity. And maybe the Canadians will surprise us both and follow Carney's lead on this.
This edgelord-y crap has been all over the internet recently, and has gotten old and tiresome very quickly. All the more so because it's so plainly and egregiously wrong.
Canada has, of course, a smaller population, a smaller economy and a smaller military than its neighbor to the south. But it is neither weak nor helpless, and has been charting and following its own course for over a century. There's no signs that it will stop doing so any time soon. People saying things like this appear to have not even given the situation 30 seconds of serious thought, but instead pattern matched to "we strong, they weak, therefore they gotta do whatever we say." Which is absurd and patently false.
The actual fact is that the U.S. of 2026 doesn't have much leverage to compel Canada to do anything. A year ago it seemed plausible that the U.S. might extract significant and painful concessions from Canada through careful use of economic coercion. Instead, the newly-formed administration spend several months pointlessly dicking around using large threats to obtain very small gains, and then proceeded to completely blow up it's leverage by trying to apply aggressive and broad-based tariffs to *nearly the entire world*. That predictably and immediately backfired, and by now I don't expect Ottawa would move much at all even if the U.S. made even more aggressive tariff threats: the power of those threats is largely gone.
The U.S. of years past might instead have tried to compel Canada through diplomatic means: by gathering allies and threatening to isolate Canada on the global stage. Instead, the U.S. has managed to badly and repeatedly alienate the global community and isolate *itself*, simultaneously squandering its ability to build coalitions and increasing the importance of keeping healthy ties to more stable countries like Canada.
But I suspect you're thinking of neither of these things: people who say this kind of crap usually seem to be possessed by the childish fantasy that military power is the only sort of power that matters. They imagine that because the U.S. has more tanks and planes and missiles than anyone else, it can just tell countries like Canada what to do and be obeyed. To which I say "go ahead and try it." I doubt Ottawa would respond to military threats from Washington with *open* mockery. But I highly doubt they'd comply in any meaningful sense, either. Probably they'd make a great show of being polite and accommodating and then draw things out and drag their feet and ultimately do nearly nothing that the U.S. asked for. See, basically everyone who's not a completely mindkilled red-triber knows how utterly disastrous the outcomes are likely to be if the U.S. *actually* attacked Canada[1]. Obviously it would involve terrible and needless loss of life on both sides, and I doubt it would be *fun* to be living in Canada if it happened. But the attempt would wreck the U.S. like few other actions possibly could. (If you can't see why this is true, then you simply don't have the basic understanding of people and knowledge of the world to understand politics *at all*: you'd be better of sticking to sports of video games.)
[1] Including (I assume), large portions of the U.S. military brass, who have a reputation for being no-nonsense realists regardless of their personal politics.
Today Carney announced he won't be pursuing a "trade deal" with China, due to Trump's "threats" of 100% tariffs (given our current stance on China, I'd rather call those "promises").
Soft Power: wielding the great American economy as a cudgel to keep Canada from doing something stupid, that Canada itself would regret (note: I'll withdraw this assertion if Canada was simply "Negotiating" and wants a better deal with America. Trump's not adverse to using carrots, as the Abraham Accords (pipeline!) shows).
Did they actually reverse course from what they announced previously? From the reporting it just looks like they're saying they have "no plans" to go further. That seems like it could easily fit under the umbrella of "they'd make a great show of being polite and accommodating and then draw things out and drag their feet and ultimately do nearly nothing that the U.S. asked for"
Its neighbor to the south? Most of Canada's population is south of the northernmost part of the Continental US (not counting Alaska).
This is an extremely weird and silly nitpick.
Start from a point inside Canada. Move due South (i.e. along a latitude line) until you are in some other country that is no longer Canada. What country are you in? The answer for every the vast, vast majority of points in Canada[1] is "The United States."
In the straightforward way that most English speakers use and understand words, that puts the U.S. "to the south" of Canada. Regardless of whatever weird quirks of human geography you happen to bring up.
[1] The exception being parts of the Maritimes where the answer is "The Dominican Republic" or "Venezuela", that one tiny bit of Newfoundland where you technically end up in France, and a section of the B.C. coast where it looks like you'd stay in international waters until you crossed Antarctica, and not actually intrude on the territory of another nation until somewhere in Asia.
Agree. And reportedly he wrote it himself.
It’s a great clear-eyed speech.
What do you guys think about intergenerational transmission through influence? I wrote an article relating to it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/mumbiss/p/baby-mama-recursion?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
How do White Supremacists that put a lot of stress on the Black-White IQ gap deal with the (Ashkenazi)Jewish-White IQ gap? Isn't it challenging to foreground a metric in which you are smack in the middle between your alleged inferiors?
Whenever you bring up Asian IQs, they usually pivot to saying "we need to keep non-white people out of the country because of culture".
Didn't stop them from almost getting wiped out every other century. Maybe there's more to race than just IQ? Either way, it's not as if blacks have any accomplishments under their belt... except inventing jazz, I guess. Even that didn't last.
My impression is that "white supremacy" is not at its heart a claim that "whites are smarter than anyone else and therefore should rule", it's just a desire that whites should rule. Reasons are only opportunistic.
Let me be clearer. I am asking about the particular set of people that:
A. Say that whites are superior to other races.
B. Say that jews aren't white.
C. Often cite IQ studies to demonstrate blacks are inferior to whites.
We can also replace "white" with "Aryan" to get a larger set.
Malconstructed argument.
I can as easily construct a "white supremacist" that is logically consistent:
1. White IQ > Black IQ (and other large groups that have lower alleged IQ)
2. Don't want tribal people with higher IQ and strong in-group preference to lord over you
3. Get them all out of the country, so you can live among your own
But at this point it isn't so much a "white supremacist" no more, than ethnic nationalist (like Chinese in China are, like Jews in Israel are, etc).
So realistically speaking, every time you hear an alleged "white supremacist", it's most likely just an ethnic nationalist - that happens to be white, so you open the whole can of worms of mental gymnastics, ad-homs, etc, etc...
The Chinese are actually racist. See that "won best advertisement in China for the Year" washing machine advertisement where they literally whitewash a black person into being chinese.
Ethnic Nationalists are ... all of Spain, pretty much. It's why Spain always wants to dissolve as a country.
White supremacists presumably have a holistic understanding of white supremacy that weighs intelligence highly but not as the only factor. As motivated reasoning goes, this is not even difficult.
I think that any reasonable white supremacist would consider Jews to be white and not inferior to other whites. Historical race science often divided the white race into the subraces Aryans, Semites and Hamites. E.g. look at this old map from an encyclopedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race#/media/File:Meyers_map.jpg
You can come with a narrative where your group is just right, and the other groups are either holding you back with their low IQs, or plotting against you with their superior IQs. I've seen people do that.
It would appear that you do not have access to very good IQ tests. The best IQ tests are long-term, and are definitely not advertised (these are IQ tests designed for the higher range of humans, naturally. People failing the marshmallow test do not apply, and would not do well if enrolled).
Marshmallow tests aren't IQ tests.
No, of course not, but a person who consistently fails to change their smoke detector because they fail to register the pattern isn't going to do well on a long-term intelligence test.
So now you're onto a third topic...
It's a different angle to the same topic, actually. Metaintelligence.
The pattern is that when the battery runs down the thing drives you crazy by beeping. You believe there are many people who fail to grasp that?
Online data of people playing videogames (aka there's a lot of audio recorded while people are playing Doom, etc. -- the first person multiplayer shooter games, in particular.) suggests that Yes, there is a correlation between race and "not changing the smoke detector."
Pattern recognition isn't the same across people, and certain races have higher genetic variability than others. Given that, and even a "everyone's the same on average" (which, hardly, but even assuming that...), you'd expect to see some people "not tying the beeps together."
The marshmallow test is not a reliable measure of willpower or adult functioning more generally.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11581930/
Can you explain what you mean?
Scott, FFS, you're asking Wimbli the Aristocat to explain what he means. What could possibly go wrong.
The name keeps changing but the inane jive remains the same.
I can barely read these threads anymore. The flood of shit makes it not worth the time to block the Shankars and Wimblis.
Yep, the garden no longer feels well-kept.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
Scott, you need to figure out how to make moderation happen effectively while you are busy. Now it's a joke; once in a month you ban someone, the next day they are back with a new account.
Yeah, it was fun for quite a while but… yeah. The conspicuous avoidance of observable reality, the sane washing of all the bullshit being put out right now is too much.
Anything can be discussed except… the transparent destruction of the Republic, the tossing away 80 years of an imperfect but valuable rules based order by the Toad in Chief… Nauseating.
One of the problems with "traditional" IQ tests is that they need to be easy to grade (and relatively quick). It is rather hard to grade creativity, is it not? How about long term pattern analysis? Or predicting consequences more than one step ahead? The last one is tricky to grade, as you're grading the logic (and, naturally, the independently-devised models) and not the correctness of the consequences.
In this world, there do exist jobs that demand general intelligence (with starting skills being relatively immaterial). There is a high "financial" incentive to find the smartest people on Earth, and the companies are willing to devise tests that don't need to cover, say, below 120 IQ (which outlines a different problem with traditional IQ tests, they purport to cover all of humanity with a single scale.).
So wutz on these tests? How are they developed? Is there info online about them? Have you taken one? Do you remember any of the items?
I know someone who administers and grades such tests (he's a "top 1000 in the world" talent, so you've definitely encountered his work). I wouldn't pass, so no, I haven't taken any.
I could easily imagine games like "The Magic Candle" or Minecraft being part of a long-term IQ Test -- "how much initiative and creativity do you show? how goal-directed are you when given a world to explore, and only a very vague time limit?" (remember the part about "hard to grade?")
In general, modelling, pattern recognition, analysis and creativity, with a consequential deemphasis on "verbal intelligence" and memorization.
Usually they'd point to something about how they're naturally covetous and evil. It's kind of like how some say that Asians have higher IQs but we are "more creative".
If they really took that stuff seriously, they'd talk about how some of the biggest mistakes the US ever made were the Chinese Exclusion Act which kept all those Chinese immigrants from making a life here and having kids, and the Immigration Act of 1924 which ruined America's chance to accept millions of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing antisemitism. Imagine the improved genetic makeup of the nation! The national IQ score!
I think a lot of them accept it, and then use it and other supposed "selection pressures" acting at the population level to argue for their deviousness, cunning, etc.
So this would mean that they consider blacks inferior and jews superior but evil? Or intellectually superior but morally inferior?
The old George Carlin joke: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
"White supremacist" is rarely a self-applied label.
The ones who take IQ data seriously don't call themselves that, and the ones who call themselves that don't take IQ data seriously.
With an ex colleague I founded https://unbubble.news, a tool that uses LLMs to analyze links or screenshots and give more context, surface biases and propose different perspectives.
We're in the validation phase, to see if this idea and implementation has a future, or decide to kill it and try to fight social polarization from a different entry point.
I'm very much interested in feedbacks and hot takes about it! If you are interested, please reach out :)
It did an ok job with this:
https://www.unbubble.news/wrap/pZzHPRfreQ6hTVN8BKPP?utm_source=share
It noted what i also noticed, that a bunch of D controlled states did not participate, although it apparently doesnt assign it the same significance that i do.
I dont like that it just regurgitates various claims without further investigation. Example "Critics warn that assembling a federal database with names, birth dates and partial SSNs heightens breach risks and could chill registration and turnout." or "Academic work and advocacy-group analyses find only isolated, often unproven cases of noncitizen voting, far below levels that could sway national results." could have used some links so i can evaluate for myself how much i should believe 'Academic work and advocacy-group analyses'
Ah, right, in the context! Yes, I could add the sources also there. Thanks for the feedback!
Anyone have experience donating a kidney while single? All of the experiences I've read so far involve the donor being cared for by a spouse but I'm at a loss who to ask to be my caretaker.
What about a task rabbit? The hospital won't discharge you if you still need IVs or can't walk to the bathroom without help, so it doesn't seem like you need somebody with medical training. A task rabbit could come a few hours a day and make you a meal and a sandwich for later, run errands, clean the cat litter box, etc. If you think you will need more help than that, or if the hospital requires you to have someone with you for the first 48 hours, there are services that provide home health aides, probably for 8 or 12 hr shifts, also people who do that work outside of a agency -- many are retired nurses and the like. I believe there are funds to cover expenses of kidney donorsand it seems like it's reasonable for you to ask them for coverage for paid help for a brief period.
Another alternative is to simply lie and say someone will be with you. I did that after I had IVF procedures, which are just a day surgery but leave you feeling like you've been run over by a truck. I had just moved to the town I was in and did not know anybody there well enough to ask them to stay with me, and thought the risk of me being alone was pretty minimal. I did have on old friend who lived in another state on alert, and she and I checked in a couple times over the course of the day when I came home, and that worked out OK.
Maybe you can ask a transplant center if in this situation they would pay for professional help with recovery.
What are some plausible mechanisms behind rumination?
As I understand it, rumination is getting stuck cycling through more or less the same set of painful thoughts, thoughts that evolve anger, sadness, fear, etc.
If these thoughts are painful, why won't the mind snap out of them, trying to escape the pain? Or is it the case that whatever pain these thoughts evoke is the lesser pain (ie. rumination as distraction)?
I understand that one way to stop rumination is to label it and force the focus away. Another way is to try and remove what seem like triggers (people, places, etc). I suspect journaling or Gendlin focusing might help by "consuming" the rumination, ie. producing action on it, telling the brain it's ok to let go.
I'm very curious about others experience with rumination and handling it--less from a seeking advice perspective, and more from trying to understand how different minds ruminate.
Rumination is a big part of being obsessive and obsessive people often find solutions to problems that other people don't. Unfortunately, some problems don't benefit from rumination but from the inside it's hard to know which is which. So unhelpful rumination is a failure mode of an evolutionary strategy that on net confers some advantages.
I find I do not want to stop thinking about sad or angry or frightening topics when I find myself ruminating about one of them. They don't feel like pain states that I'd like to escape, the way a headache does. They feel like motivational states. I don't crave to escape them, I crave the event that will relieve my distress. If I am angry I want to interfere with the events I object to, or punish or expose those who are to blame. If sad, I want to have the thing whose absence is making me sad. It feels to me like I keep ruminating because I am busy seeking a way to get the thing that will make me feel bettter. And that's true even when my common sense tells me there is no way to get that thing.
Described that way, that tracks better for me now. It's not that rumination is painful, it's that it's more like keeping focused on a problem, almost compulsively, without finding a way to crack it.
For me, I rarely ruminate on technical problems, but often on people problems.
I guess from inside, rumination is like: "Hey, I am trying to *solve* this problem. How am I supposed to solve it without thinking about it first?" It feels like working towards a solution. Rewarded by feeling that you are doing the right thing.
The argument from outside is like: "Uhm, you have already spent a few months or years thinking the same sequence of thoughts over and over and over again, without coming to any conclusion. How is another month of doing the same loop going to improve anything?"
The response from inside is denial ("this time it will be different, because I will do it properly"), because the person feels like they have a choice between doing the thing that feels right (even if evidence kinda points against it), or face the bad feelings without the protective shield of hope.
The proper solution would be to try something else. But that requires stopping the loop, admitting that there was no progress so far, and brainstorming other possible approaches. Some of the other options, often the obvious ones, may even be connected with bad feelings, for example you would have to do something that you prefer to avoid, such as start exercising, say something openly and risk a conflict, give up something convenient, etc.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, I guess repeating the same thoughts may feel like asking your parent for a help repeatedly -- which is a strategy that sometimes works for children; being annoying may help you get your wish granted. The problem is that this time there is no parent; you are just talking to yourself.
Rumination is the cognitive focus of melancholia or phlegmatism. As some people, choleric in temper, are ectomorphs, the Melancholic or phlegmatic personality tends towards endomophism.
In short: "do nothing unless pressed" is a way to preserve energy for later use.
Imo it's beneficial to ruminate sometimes. You find solutions by thinking about things. If the local tribe's Chadgar slept with your wife, you may ruminate on it and find the evolutionarily advantageous strategy of bashing his head in and sleeping with HIS wife.
You find solutions by thinking about things.{{citation needed}}
cogito, ergo sum
Rene Descartes ~ 1637
Nice theory, won't work unless you're nuts.
"I'm killing the devil with the sword God gave me" does tend to have you carted off to the hospital.
"No, what I meant is warmed-over Buddhism" is better, but you may be English as a Second Language and though your fluency is good, it's still a little off.
I'm not a rationalist, and if you don't want to seem to have plagiarised Buddhism, maybe lay off on appropriating terms and themes straight from it.
'Desire is suffering, cessation of desire is the solution' is not your original discovery.
A lot of Tolkien's characters have names that are fairly literal descriptions in a language other than modern English. Sometimes a real-world language and sometimes in one of Tolkien's fictional languages. For example, Gandalf is Old Norse for "Wand Elf" (and is not of Tolkien's invention: he borrowed the name along with the names of Thorin &co from a Norse saga), and Círdan the Shipwright's name is Sindarin (one of the in-universe Elvish languages) for "Shipwright".
The full Fellowship's names render to modern English as:
Wise (Old English)
Halfwit (Old English)
Green Leaf (Sindarin)
Fiery (Old Norse)
Revered King (Sindarin)
Steadfast Jewel (Sindarin)
Wand Elf (Old Norse)
Great Lord (Welsh)
Foreigner (Latin)
Challenge: without looking it up, identify which LotR character was named "Spider-Woman" and which was named "Goldilocks". The former appears in the Peter Jackson movies, while the latter was book-only.
Not responding to the challenge, but can't not share this:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/632
Love it, thank you!
Related:
Tolkien: My favorite part of fantasy writing is the elaborate word-building.
Interviewer: Don't you mean "elaborate world building"?
Tolkien: I enjoy that, too.
ROT13:
Fcvqre-Jbzna jnf cerfhznoyl Furvybo, hayrff vg'f n gevpx dhrfgvba. Tbyqvybpxf jnf qrsvavgryl bar bs Fnz'f qnhtugref.
Pbeerpg ba Fcvqre-Jbzna. "Ybo" vf na nepunvp Ratyvfu grez sbe fcvqre, n inevnag bs "pbo" nf va "pbojro". V'q sbetbggra nobhg Tbyqvybpxf Tnztrr; Rynabe vf gur bar bar bs Fnz'f xvqf V erpnyyrq. Ohg va nqqvgvba gb ure, gurer'f nabgure punenpgre (bar jub unf npghny fperra gvzr va gur znva fgbel va gur obbxf) jubfr anzr zrnaf Tbyqvybpxf va n qvssrerag ynathntr.
V qvqa'g xabj "ybo", qrfcvgr orvat n sna bs byq-snfuvbarq navzny anzrf yvxr "gbqq" naq "pbarl". Gur fynat grez V xabj sbe n fcvqre vf "obevf", juvpu V'z cerggl fher vf qrevirq sebz Gur Jub.
Tbaan gnxr n fubg va gur qnex ba gur erphefvir Tbyqvybpxf naq fnl Tnynqevry. Vg fhvgf ure, naq nyfb fbhaqf nobhg evtug va grezf bs babzngbcbrvn.
Qnzzvg, whfg fnj lbhe bgure pbzzrag nobhg Tbyqvybpxf abg orvat va gur zbivrf. Vg'f Tybesvaqry, vfa'g vg?
Lrf, Tbyqvybpxf vs Tybesvaqry.
Apparently the Norse word is believed to have meant 'elf familiar' rather than 'wand elf': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gandalfr#Old_Norse
You're leaving out a lot of detail about that there Wand Elf:
‘The Grey Pilgrim?’ said Frodo. ‘Had he a name?’
‘Mithrandir we called him in elf-fashion,’ said Faramir, ‘and he was content. Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.’
The character named "Spider-Woman" is Shelob ("She" meaning of course a female, "lob" an English country word for spider).
"Goldilocks" would be Glorfindel (and I didn't even have to look that one up!) 😁 Lemme pull out that quote I mined years back about "hair-names" for the Elves:
"XI.
THE SHIBBOLETH OF FEANOR.
With an excursus on the name of the descendants of Finwe.
The names of Finwe's descendants.
Few of the oldest names of the Eldar are recorded, except those of the four leaders of the hosts on the Great Journey: Ingwe of the Vanyar; Finwe of the Noldor; and the brothers Elwe and Olwe of the Teleri. It is not certain that these names had any 'meaning', that is any intentional reference to or connexion with other stems already existing in primitive Eldarin; in any case they must have been formed far back in the history of Elvish speech. They consist each of a stem (ing-, fin-, el-, ol-) followed by a 'suffix' -we.
…The first elements were often later explained as related to …Common Eldarin PHIN 'hair', as in Quenya fine 'a hair', finde 'hair, especially of the head', finda 'having hair, -haired'; …The others are doubtful. All the Eldar had beautiful hair (and were especially attracted by hair of exceptional loveliness), but the Noldor were not specially remarkable in this respect, and there is no reference to Finwe as having had hair of exceptional length, abundance, or beauty beyond the measure of his people. (He had black hair, but brilliant grey-blue eyes).
With regard to Findekano/Fingon it may be noted that the first element was certainly Quenya finde 'hair' - a tress or plait of hair (Common Eldarin *phini- a single hair, *phinde a tress; Sindarin fin; find, finn-).
…(cf. findesse' a head of hair, a person's hair as a whole), but this is not conclusive proof that the name Finwe was or was thought to be derived from this stem. It would have been sufficient for Fingolfin to give to his eldest son a name beginning with fin- as an 'echo' of the ancestral name, and if this was also specially applicable it would have been approved as a good invention. In the case of Fingon it was suitable; he wore his long dark hair in great plaits braided with gold."
This was part of legitimate discontent with "The Rings of Power" (and not just review-bombing, the go-to excuse for "why is our show getting all negative comments online?"), what is this short back and sides/90s boyband male Elven hair, give us our boys with long plaits of gold! Only Gil-galad had proper hair! 😁
EDIT: "to the East I go not", says he, so what do our genius showrunners Payne and McKay have I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf (Okay You Were All Correct, It's Gandalf) do? Go to Rhûn! In the East! To find his staff! Conveniently meeting up with Tom Bombadil! And also Is This Dark Wizard Guy Saruman Tell Me This Is Not Saruman He's Gonna Be Saruman Isn't He Next Season?!
(That show has reduced me to the Pratchett excess of exclamation marks state. "'Multiple exclamation marks,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘are a sure sign of a diseased mind.' ")
tl;dr
Gandalf is Odin with a glass eye. Tricky guy who shows up when he's not expected, always has a plan he won't talk about, excessively cryptic but kicks butt when needed.
You mean Gandalf the grey. Gandalf the white is an entirely different person, different powers different personality.
>You're leaving out a lot of detail about that there Wand Elf
You're absolutely right. He's one of the worse offenders in the legendarium in terms of having a bazillion names, albeit not quite as bad as Túrin Turambar or Sauron. Each has a different reason, though. Gandalf acquired different names given to him by various peoples he has dealings with, Túrin used pseudonyms to obfuscate his identity and also acquired several kennings from his varied (mis)adventures, and Sauron did a bit of all three.
For Elves, Tolkien gave them multiple names partially as an in-world explanation for their standard names often being extremely on-point. IIRC, the standard custom is for Elves to be given two private names in childhood, one from each parent, and then one or more names in adulthood assigned by peers or self-chosen. We mostly (often exclusively) hear about Elves by peer names or self-chosen names, which are often descriptive, and that's where we get the the guy with especially beautiful blond hair getting named "Goldilocks" and the great ship-builder getting named "Shipwright the Shipwright".
>This was part of legitimate discontent with "The Rings of Power" (and not just review-bombing, the go-to excuse for "why is our show getting all negative comments online?"), what is this short back and sides/90s boyband male Elven hair, give us our boys with long plaits of gold! Only Gil-galad had proper hair!
Even Gil-Galad looked weird in RoP. The styling in the front combined with his receding hairline and the lack of sideburns or forelocks makes his hair seem mullet-adjacent to my eyes.
I think the most damning observation on how RoP styled the Elves was that Robert Aramayo looked more like Elrond when he appeared in Game of Thrones (he played young Ned Stark in a flashback) than he did in RoP when he was literally playing Elrond.
https://tvovermind.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Who-Plays-Young-Ned-Stark-in-Game-of-Thrones.jpg
I have heard a claim that they styled the Elves differently for rights reasons, but that sounds like bullshit because they licensed the film rights to LotR from New Line and constantly make gratuitous forced references to the Peter Jackson movies. If they don't have the rights to the look and feel of the Elves, then their lawyers did a shitty job negotiating the contract.
Similarly, a lot of the gaping plot holes get excused by claims that they only have the rights to the books and the appendices. But the Tolkien Estate is involved in the project, and by all accounts Simon Tolkien specifically wanted them to do a Second Age show, so it makes absolutely no sense that the Estate wouldn't have licensed them the rights to the relevant material at least from Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
>EDIT: "to the East I go not", says he, so what do our genius showrunners Payne and McKay have I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf (Okay You Were All Correct, It's Gandalf) do?
I still insist that Meteor Man should have been Tilion, the Maia of the Moon. Even with the alleged rights issues, the song Frodo sings at the Prancing Pony in Fellowship (written by Bilbo based on much older Hobbit folklore) establishes that Hobbits have the idea that there's a Man in the Moon who might have come down to Middle Earth at some time in the past.
I think they were dancing around "We are obviously copying the *hell* out of the movies, but we also can't be *too* obvious in what we're lifting wholesale", so they had to change up some things (white plastic scales Númenorean armour, anybody?) plus also my opinion of Payne and McKay is so stellar (sarcasm off) that I do think they thought "aw yeah, short hair Elves, we're so cool and original!"
Apparently Elrond was going through his Edgy Teenage Rebel phase with his hair like that*. Still doesn't explain Celebrimbor, but the guy playing that character got dealt an awful hand (when they *finally* let him do some acting instead of "stand there in the corner like a bumbling idiot" I went "okay, *now* I see why this actor was cast in the part").
I can't wait for Season Three. Because the spite must flow 😁 (and yes, I did mean "spite" not "spice" there).
*They said it, not me:
https://archive.ph/crewx
“Elves don’t have shaved heads or short hair”
Payne: If Tolkien ever wrote a comprehensive style guide to hairstyles in Middle Earth over its thousands of years of history, I would love to see it.
McKay: Part of this show is to go deeper and broader into each of these races and cultures. To say that any culture as rich and with as long of a history as the elves would all have the same hair for 9,000 years … that doesn’t seem to correspond and harmonize with the breadth of the imagination that Tolkien left us."
Practical, Doylist reason:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LOTR_on_Prime/comments/sp9v47/why_did_they_make_the_elves_have_short_hair/
"Because it's cheaper. Good make-up and wigs are very expensive and you need a staff to maintain them and it take a lot of time to keep the hair right in shoots. I can't think of any creative reason why."
Spiteful, Watsonian (okay, my) reason:
Because Payne and McKay are talentless hacks. Yeah, sure: we're harmonising with the breadth of Tolkien's imagination. So we ripped off all the Big Recognisable Characters from the movies in order to drag in viewers, rather than working on original characters.
On second thoughts, their original characters are so bad, maybe it would have been worse. After all, they gave us OC Imaginary Daughter for Elendil, who is so drippy she should be playing Uinen; Imaginary Son for Pharazon, who *would* be a moustache-twirling villain if he could only muster enough testosterone to grow a moustache; Healer Lady in Forbidden Romance who loved her part so much, she skedaddled after the first season and had to be hurriedly killed off for the second; Low Down Cheatin' Skanky Ho who threw over the guy who genuinely did everything for her in order to canoodle with Isildur in hopes he'd take her back to Númenor and she could ditch the mud and gloom of whatever god-forsaken region they ended up in (Pelargir? I think it was meant to be 'this is where Pelargir is going to be') and others too numerous to remember or care about.
Oh, how could I forget Creepy Backstabbing Traitorous Innkeeper Southlands Guy? As easily as the show did, my dears. Not to mention Healer Lady's Rebel Without A Clue Son, and Daylight Walker Orcs because all you need is a hood made from what looks like cast-off snakeskin, apparently.
Ooh, and Fluffy! The Killer Warg! She's a good girl, yes she is, yes she is! The most ferocious giant chihuahua in all of The Southlands aka Mordor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erDc9HWq1D8
Sigh. Wouldn't you rather watch the show that was made purely as a distraction? Aka the original scripts said "Do not make this show." (and also "Do not set it in Wales").
I gave up on RoP an episode or two into the second season. The first season was rough going, but I was willing to make allowances for medium shift and early installment weirdness and give them a chance. to get better. And it did have some good bits. I agree with Deiseach about Adar. Elrond and Durin were well-acted enough to salvage all but the worst lines. The Numenor politics plotline had potential, even if several of the details were poorly thought-out.
I got really, really annoyed with it late in the first season, when the payoffs for the mystery box elements turns out to be silly and they committed to making major changes to the lore that were gratuitous and quite a bit worse than the source material. I tried to give Season 2 a chance, but it seemed to be doubling down on all the bad bits. The "Middle Manager Sauron" flashback was absurd, and the despite the actor's best efforts to sell things, "Sauron as master manipulator" seemed to be getting implemented as "Sauron gets away with everything because he's surrounded by idiots". Sauron's charisma and manipulation are so essential to the Second Age storylines in the lore that if it's being done badly, I'm going to be too annoyed with it to appreciate any good bits that manage to make it into the show by accident.
I also concur with Brett Devereaux's line of criticism of RoP setting up the context of the action scenes so incoherently that it ruins the stakes. As he put it:
>for the audience to care about the outcome of the battle, that outcome needs to feel like a product of the decisions characters made leading to it. The moment the audience feels like the battle’s decision depends entirely on the whim of the storyteller, disconnected from anyone’s actions, those actions stop mattering and the audience loses investment in the battle. Instead the storyteller needs the audience to feel like each decision, each event shifts the potential outcome of the battle, the way that for instance much of the action of The Two Towers and the first chapters of Return of the King determine the shape of the eventual battle outside Minas Tirith: the reader sees the decisions being made and then watches one by one as the consequences roll in. As a result, tactics that make sense to the audience are important for sustaining that investment. Does that mean the tactics need to be historical? No, of course not; most audiences do not have degrees in military history. But they need to be plausible and as with so much of the worldbuilding, accuracy is a shortcut to plausibility.
Having incoherent world-building in a Tolkien adaptation of all things is utterly unforgivable, since the world-building is right there waiting for you to use it. "The rules are made up and the points don't matter" might work for Whose Line is it Anyway, but not for a LotR prequel.
I am in the same boat as Deiseach: Tolkien is my fandom and has been since a similar age. I was really, really excite for RoP when it was announced. The Peter Jackson movies had proven that good screen adaptations were possible. I love the Second Age material in Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, but it's frustratingly unfinished. I would have loved a decent adaptation.
I started off with "I would like to see a show based in Middle-earth, it sounds like they're not trying to remake Lord of the Rings, yes I'll give it a go".
First episode was a bit iffy, but okay, they need to change a lot of things, compress the timeline, I get it. New original characters are terrible but it's only the first episode, maybe it'll improve. Except Adar, thanks mainly to Joseph Mawle being able to act the hell out of that part, but when you've got me cheering for the Second Banana Bad Guy because the Heroine is so unbearably awful, you're maybe not in "moral grey areas, not simple black and white, situations are complicated, there's good and bad reasons for what they're doing on both sides" but "we flipped the black and white so the Good Guys are the Bad Guys and the Bad Guys are the Good Guys, ain't we cute?" territory instead.
Hint: it did not improve. And they were trying to remake the Lord of the Rings. And what was even more aggravating, there was no excuse for "we didn't know such-and-such a detail", because they put in little blink-and-you'll-miss-them Easter eggs for the lore nerds (like the Bough of Return on the Númenorean ships https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Green_Bough_of_Return)
So I switched to mainly watching the reviews (critical) and then catching up with the episodes to see if they were continuing to slide downhill.
Okay, second season! This time round I had *no* expectations at all, in fact I was watching to see how much stupider it could get, and it did not disappoint me (Orc Guy rationale for betrayal? "Daddy doesn't love me!")
However, some bits *were* decent, I have to give them that. When they *finally* gave Celebrimbor's actor something to do, he was good in the part. And I will take Halbrand-Sauron shooting him full of arrows as being as close to book canon as this show will give me, I'm not too proud to accept scraps.
Floomp-monster Sauron was hilarious, too.
Best bits were the critical reviewers, though. Erik Kain, God bless the man, started out as TV critic saying "come on guys, give it a chance" but the first season wore him down and by the second he was happily alongside us being a Haladriel shipper and hoping for cute Elf-Maia evil babies 😁
Charlie Hopkinson had the real characters reviewing the show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNyNyqgkgh8&list=PLyJrI7fwl_bP8yueSwegq_msQL_Rt5nTS
So, season three (of five, which I don't believe at all will happen) is slowly, slooooooowly, shambling its way towards us (supposedly sometime early 2027, don't hold your breath waiting). And I anticipate it with great anticipation, because in order to fix everything they screwed up, they will need to pull off a miracle in writing and direction (seriously, guys, how could you manage to hire a director who screwed up your climactic battle of season two? how?) and these guys are **not** miracle workers.
Why do I care? Because LOTR is my fandom since I was eleven and got my hands on a copy of The Hobbit. Were this just "generic TV fantasy show", I'd have watched a few of the first season episodes, shrugged, and dropped the whole thing without caring a straw about it. But they got me to fork out for a Prime subscription to watch their mess and by Tevildo Prince of Cats, I am going to get value for my money out of this some way!
I miss Ren the Unclean (and tolkien experts that weren't afraid to add new mythology).
Relevant video: https://youtu.be/vGi9sUpl4lE?si=BNDJN482NYlnxVD7
Gandalf's not an elf, though, he's a Maiar, and is resurrected with a different powerset and personality.
Tolkien originally attached the name to the character who would become Thorin Oakenshield, with the wizard having the name Bladorthin. About halfway through writing The Hobbit, he decided to shuffle the names because "Wand Elf" fit better on a wizard than a dwaven king. I think that was before he decided on the nature of wizards.
Later, he justified the "elf" part with the idea that men who didn't know that wizards were Maiar but did know a fair amount about their habits and activities often assumed that they were Elves who, like Cìrdan, were old enough to grow beards. It stood to reason, since they were far too old to be Men, Hobbits, or Dwarves and were too tall for the latter two categories besides. This gets discussed in the Istari essay in Unfinished Tales.
Reading the HoME book about how LOTR was originally conceived, it's amazing the differences that happened. Everyone was going to be a Hobbit, because the publishers wanted a sequel to The Hobbit, and tactfully (but definitely) rejected his hopeful submission of what was, at the time, The Silmarillion as far as it had been completed.
And then about a third of the way in, he went "Nope, this is not working, scrap everything and start again". Sir Stanley Unwin was a very patient publisher, but also very shrewd, and the subsequent unlooked for success has made everyone very well-off indeed:
"From 1972 letter
15 July. I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead. A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and book-stores of Allen & Unwin. To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Despatch) was dealing with my works. I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from board-room downwards. ‘Accountancy’ told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights. Also a large single order for copies of The L.R. had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000."
Agreed. In particular, Aragorn started out as a mysterious Hobbit called "Trotter" because (depending on the draft) he wore wooden shoes or had wooden prosthetic feet. Tolkien tried on a bunch of backstories for Trotter and didn't like any of them before making him a Man instead and giving him the Chief of the Dunedain backstory. The two backstories for Trotter that I remember were that he was a "wild" Hobbit from a tribe that had never settled down in the Shire or Bree, or that he was one of the young Hobbits besides Bilbo whom Gandalf had sent off on adventures (and was a cousin or uncle of Frodo on the Took/Brandybuck side of his family).
Inidentally, it's struck my that Elrond got a pretty substantial retcon in LotR that doesn't get talked about much. In The Hobbit, he was introduced thus:
> The master of the house was an elf-friend [...] In those days of our tale there were still some people who had both elves and heroes of the North for ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was their chief.
Apart from the "master of the house" bit, that sounds more like Aragorn's backstory than Elrond's as established in LotR. Frodo's astonishment at the Council of Elrond to discover that Elrond was old enough to have been personally participated in the War of the Last Alliance feels like one of Tolkien's retcons (acknowledging and correcting the impression given in Hobbit that Elrond was a mortal descendant of mixed ancestry rather than being an actual Elf Lord), like the better-known and more comprehensive retcon of the stakes of Gollum's riddle game.
Yes, Sir Stanley Unwin was extremely patient. One of the things that struck me reading the Tolkien Letters compilation was the recurring theme of Tolkien starting so many letters by apologizing for taking weeks or months to write back. Several letters that start thus are responding to Sir Stanley or someone else at Allen & Unwin.
>while the latter was book-only.
Oh, so it's Tom Bombadil.
Not Bombadil, but Goldilocks is one of the book characters whom people complain about being dropped from the movies.
You do not perhaps mean Goldberry, wife of Tom Bombadil, by chance?
No, there's a Goldilocks.
(rot13)
V guvax gur ynggre vf obzonqvy'f jvsr jubfr anzr rfpncrf zr ng gur zbzrag (V guvax vg fgnegf jvgu T?). Gur boivbhf nafjre sbe gur sbezre vf furybo, ohg gung ernyyl vf whfg n thrff.
Lbh ner pbeerpg nobhg Furybo. Ure anzr vf fur (Zbqrea Ratyvfu) cyhf ybo (nepunvp Ratyvfu grez sbe fcvqre, inevnag bs "pbo", nf va "pbojro"). Tbyqoreel vf n tbbq thrff sbe gur bgure, ohg ab.
Bu, V'z n sbby. Tybesvaqry, gur zbfg snzbhf obbx-bayl punenpgre!
Lrf, Tybesvaqry vg vf!
Her name was Tbyqoreel.
So what’s going on with the economy? Job creation numbers are barely positive, ~35,OOO+(barely a rounding error) in the latest federal report. News reports and social media are full of job search horror stories, what with years of experience required for “entry level” jobs, six or seven or even more interview rounds, rampant ghosting, you name it.
And yet, federal figures for first-time claims for state unemployment benefits are extremely low, at levels not seen for decades. Not many people are getting hired, but then again not many people are losing their jobs. I don’t believe the US has ever before had this sort of situation.
I personally think this is the "phony war" phase of the next recession. Lots of local small businesses are throwing in the towel lately, saying that they've never been able to get out of the post-pandemic funk and are tired of trying. Lots of big or unprecedented layoffs lately.
> Not many people are getting hired, but then again not many people are losing their jobs. I don’t believe the US has ever before had this sort of situation.
There's a huge pool of "not looking" men that has been growing steadily, who don't show up in the commonly reported unemployment statistics.
https://imgur.com/a/sDz7dP1
Anecdotally, this matches what I see in the economy. Everyone I know who's unemployed has been since the pandemic and has basically given up hope for finding a job at this point.
IIRC, the prime age labor force participation rate was actually at record highs back in 2023. The Biden era rebound was real and not explained by people giving up looking. (Which of course doesn't mean that *noone* gave up looking, just not many people statistically.)
How are they living, then? On Welfare and Food Stamps? Are they unable to find -any- job, even a fryguy at McDonalds, or a maid , or a dogwalker?
"are there no prisons? Are there no poor houses?
To answer your question - it depends. Some are relying on family, others have taken a series of gig or freelance positions or service industry jobs.
Sure - a better term here might be "underemployed," but I think the point stands.
No, it damn well doesn't stand! People taking gig jobs are still looking for work. They are still working and registered on the Rolls. We see them in the Federal Statistics. they aren't MISSING.
20 million people MISSING out of our jobforce is a Problem. The type of problem that people start looking for "vaccine related injuries" to explain (see the multiple studies on mRNA vaccines causing accelerated cancer, including the population study in South Korea).
In my experience, most young unemployed men are living with relatives (parents, mostly) and are not even looking for a job because they don't want one. Most of them probably could find a low-skilled job, but for the most part they simply don't want those jobs. They may feel that those jobs are for losers and are soul-crushing so there's no point in getting one.
I think there's a general feeling of disillusionment and hopelessness among young men.
Have you met a lot of these guys? How many of them do you think would show up for an $18/hour job (no bennies) of hard, semi-skilled labor (half a year's experience needed)?
I have only met a handful of people like this, by nature of them being pretty reclusive. Many of them I knew in high school and they just never did anything after graduating. I don't keep contact with any of them so I'm mostly guessing at how they may feel.
I worked some warehouse and general labor jobs after high school and during college, and I usually didn't have a lot of coworkers who were around my age, especially not men. These are the kinds of jobs I would assume young men would be willing to work at, but that's not what I observed. I think maybe they have high expectations and aren't willing to work their way up or get a higher education.
I am not claiming that this is what’s happening, but you can imagine the sort of person who would rather move in with mom and dad than take a job that doesn’t fulfill socioeconomic expectations.
20 million? Last I checked (a couple years ago), the feds were looking for vaccine-related injuries to explain this discrepancy (unlike women, who can be pregnant or busy with kids... men are basically driven by sex (extremely high sex drive), and to get sex, support a family, you need a job).
We're pretty sure they're not dead, at least!
Optimistic take?
https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/working-papers/2025/04/pulled-out-or-pushed-out-declining-male-labor-force-participation/
OpenAI seems bad. That certainly doesn't apply to everyone at the company. I'm sure there are people there who are doing their best and trying to make the best product they can. But their legal team and leadership have had enough incidents at this point that I feel like I'm surprised that people who are concerned with AI safety (including Scott) seem fine with using (and paying for!) their products. I am not trying to draw a hard line in the sand here. The purpose of my comment is mostly just confusion. I won't use ChatGPT and use Claude instead, and I don't know why this isn't more common. I understand that there are things ChatGPT can do better than Claude at this point, and that any one person's impact is going to be minimal, but with the importance of the subject, I would really like OpenAI's bubble to pop and market share to head towards Anthropic. Why aren't more people acting the same way?
If you are curious what problems I have with OpenAI, here is a list of major incidents.
2022: The OpenAI board decides that Sam Altman was untrustworthy after compiling a (as yet unreleased publicly) 50 page document of times he was manipulative and fires him. He got reinstated and still leads the company today
2024: OpenAI is caught withholding vested equity from employees leaving the company unless they signed an NDA that prevented saying anything negative comments about OpenAI for the rest of their life (https://web.archive.org/web/20240601032823/https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai-departures-sam-altman-employees-chatgpt-release),
2025: OpenAI tried to subpoena all private correspondence about SB 53 (CA AI bill) from people involved in the bill. The PR firm they are using has previously said explicitly that "The goal was intimidation, to let everyone know that if they fuck with us they'll regret it" (https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/1976649129179959304)
2025: OpenAI cofounder donates $50M to start Leading The Future SuperPAC, which makes it the largest non-partisan lobbyer organization, and they are attacking anyone trying to pass AI safety bills (namely Alex Bores)
This feels a lot like saying "Why do people keep drinking Coca-Cola? It's bad for your teeth, and causes weight gain. Drink Pepsi instead."
Anthropic used similar NDAs, and its founders also made large political donations.
This is false equivalence. From looking into the FEC findings, Dario Amodei has donated a total of about $136k, and none of that has been since 2020. Daniela Amodei has donated $6k and I can't find donations from any of the other Anthropic founders.
In contrast, Greg Brockman and his wife are the 5th and 6th largest donations on the MAGA Inc FEC page, totaling $25M. This is not including the reported $50M that he has put toward the Leading The Future PAC.
(https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?committee_id=C00892471&two_year_transaction_period=2026&data_type=processed)
Sam Altman has donated $1M to Trump's Inaugural Fund. (https://www.opensecrets.org/trump/2025-inauguration-donors)
That means OpenAI founders have donated more than 500x what Anthropic founders have.
As for the NDAs, the existence of an NDA is less of an issue than OpenAI withholding vested equity, money that would have been understood as already being banked by the employee. They are essentially taking money (sometimes millions of dollars) out of the employees bank account if they don't sign the NDA. That is not normal practice and it's not what Anthropic did.
I like ChatGPT a lot but I've recently become Claude-pilled, I'll have to think more about it.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/noboycott.jpg
Re prediction markets: supporters argue that there are big benefits to predicting the future, because it allows us to more accurately measure risk, apportion resources, and otherwise operate efficiently. Detractors don't generally disagree that there are benefits to predicting the future, but rather argue that prediction markets are a uniquely bad way to do this because of the inherent corrupting influences of the profit incentive and what that means at a macro scale.
As an example of the latter, we generally want things to trend towards 'stability', so a lot of effort is made to make things more stable. The more likely stability is, the more money there is to be made in predicting that things will suddenly become unstable, which in turn incentivizes people to do destabilizing things. Another way you can think of this is that prediction markets create pressure to move everything towards a toss up, proportional to how certain something seems to be
It is still early days for prediction markets, but I would love to hear concrete predictions from supporters about when they would turn around and say 'actually this whole thing was a bad idea' (the way we are already starting to see with legalized sports betting, for eg)
Prediction markets seem to be morphing into "sports betting, except for everything", or maybe that's what they always were but now they're going mainstream. It's kind of predictable that tech companies become sketchier when they start getting big money.
I do think the tech companies are exacerbating issues with prediction markets, but I'm more interested in the fundamental tension of prediction markets providing financial pressure towards destabilizing outcomes (tautologically, if you define destabilizing as unpredictable)
That's a good point, there is never going to be another American invasion or police action that doesn't make some Pentagon guy rich enough to buy a boat.
> That's a good point, there is never going to be another American invasion or police action that doesn't make some Pentagon guy rich enough to buy a boat.
Still, all this is scriptable, so surfaceable information.
Any security team worth their salt is going to have automated monitors looking out for said actions since Maduro, and presumably some of those will be able to act quickly or efficaciously enough that they avoid the capture, and make Pentagon guy lose enough that's he's boat-poor instead of boat-rich.
Also, any savvy trader is going to be programatically looking for last minute buys like this that look like insider trading enough to buy the upswing, so Pentagon guy's arbitrage is going to get eaten more and more, too.
I am starting to wonder if prediction market advocacy is going to turn out to be a big egg on the face of Rationalists. The "insider training is good actually" argument is looking progressively worse over time, as insiders get enormously rich for trivial information gains (eg discovering about some policy change ~20min before you otherwise would have known), and all of the major real-money platforms are rapidly converging on becoming a sports betting clone. Prediction markets may well just turn into a giant money pump to transfer money from young men with addictive personalities to corrupt government and business insiders.
I think it was obvious these were dumb arguments even three years ago, and it's a continual discredit to people like Scott who still push them (though at least Scott has started to acknowledge some of the downsides).
This isn't hindsight either - I've been consistent in arguing against prediction markets all along.
To be fair, I was massively wrong about AI, so I guess I'm 1-1 there compared to the Rationalists. Or 2-1 if you count crypto.
> I am starting to wonder if prediction market advocacy is going to turn out to be a big egg on the face of Rationalists
There's a failure mode that I notice that I'm struggling to put into words, but its something approximating 'typical mind fallacy'.
The average very smart person sees prediction markets and goes 'o neat!' because they think everyone will use it like the average very smart person, while the average person sees prediction markets and goes 'wait no this wont work' because they think everyone will use it like the average person. There's a stereotype about intelligence being anticorrelated with wisdom and I wonder if this kind of typical mind thing is pointing to some kind of mechanism / kernel of truth -- very intelligent people by virtue of being very intelligent will *not* have a 'typical mind', so their 'typical mind fallacies' are more egregiously wrong. I think something similar happened to crypto (cf FTX?)
Mark me down as the average person, because "becoming sports betting, you say?" isn't surprising me. I said back when these were being discussed that I thought they would not be the pure perfect rational tool for using the wisdom of crowds to set policy as hoped, but instead once people thought that they could make money off this, that is what the aims would be diverted towards.
Very Smart People thinking "we can invent a way to make better decisions, and handing out money prizes is only the equivalent of getting that gold star from teacher, not a motivation in itself to put profit and expediency above truth and honesty" is the failure mode here. If you confine prediction markets only to the Very Smart People, they'll be too small to mean anything. If you let everyone in, then yeah - sports betting markets.
Is that actually a bad thing? I've always seen gambling as a natural way of moving resources from people who would have squandered it anyways, to people who can actually make productive investments. Isn't that what we mean by "dumb money"?
Even by the usual standards of gambling, legalization of online sports betting has been a massive disaster, with measurable increases in all sorts of social ills.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment
As discussed below, much of that is an issue with the ease of declaring bankruptcy. This would not be an issue if we had systems to ensure that debts were returned, even if they requires the loss of some agency for the debtor. Banks every incentive to take the necessary actions in order to ensure that they are made whole. They simply need to be allowed to do so in the first place.
> I've always seen gambling as a natural way of moving resources from people who would have squandered it anyways
But this is just not true. Many people who may struggle with gambling can live very productive lives if they manage to abstain, much in the same way alcoholics can live very productive lives if they manage to avoid alcohol. It would be callous to argue that 'alcoholism is a natural way of moving resources from people who would be addicted anyway to bartenders' or whatever
More generally, I think that these things are not binaries. It is *much harder* to abstain from gambling if gambling is everywhere. Every single person is on some gradient of 'very likely to be addicted to gambling' to 'not likely to be addicted to gambling' and the place where an individual falls on 'addicted' or 'not addicted' is as a result a mix of their own tendencies AND how society is structured around them
Alcoholism is an issue because it's a drug, and the adverse effects inebriation and poisoning cause on society. That doesn't apply to gambling. Sure, they might need to sell a house or a kidney to make ends meet, but again, those are resources going to people who can make better use of them. Though, we may need better systems to force people to pay back their debt to take full advantage of this...
> that doesn't apply to gambling
Why?
I just explained it. It doesn't cause them to be a nuisance to society, and doesn't cause health problems that would prevent them from being useful to others. They do not need wealth to work off their debt.
and what exactly is the problem with sports betting in this context, I assume you aren’t referring to gambling addition?
You can choose whichever example you want of 'thing becoming legalized resulting in adverse consequences'
That sounds too IYKYKy. Could you please be more specific?
I don't know if this is what theahura had in mind, but when I hear "previous supporters of legalized sports betting starting to turn around and say that it was actually a bad idea," this essay is the sort of thing I think of.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment
For historical interest, the pools in Britain were a form of mass sports betting before the likes of the National Lottery. They used to be huge, are still going, but have fallen away from their peak. The attraction was that anyone could play, even housewives, so filling out your coupon and handing it over to the collector was nearly a weekly ritual:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pools
"In the United Kingdom, the football pools, often referred to as "the pools", is a betting pool based on predicting the outcome of association football matches taking place in the coming week. The pools are typically cheap to enter, and may encourage gamblers to enter several bets."
How to work out the scoring:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2jW8sYONBs
Reading out the scores:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V03ZZmkmUDU
+1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
Neuroscientist Erik Hoel thinks he has proven that it is impossible that an LLM is conscious:
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/proving-literally-that-chatgpt-isnt
I think I don't understand the argument well enough to summarize it, and there's a 30 page paper too, but it makes a lot of sense from what I can tell.
These arguments usually fail for me by not defining "conscious" in a way that makes sense to me.
I assume there really isn't a well defined definition in common usage?
Eric claims that his method applies to all non-trivial definitions.
I concur; there isn’t.
This post sounds an awful lot like "we can't scientifically distinguish conscious from unconscious AI" or "a falsifiable theory of consciousness is impossible" rather than the claimed "LLMs are not conscious." A theory has to be falsifiable for humans to consider it scientific, but human limitations about testing things does not say anything about the underlying reality.
I got about halfway through before I realized the central claim, that this is a theory-agnostic proof of non-consciousness, is wrong/exaggerated. Granted I'm very much just a layman here, so take this with a grain of salt with a value equivalent to the mass of the human soul, but my objection goes something like this (trying to steelman his claims the best I can, tell me where I'm wrong):
Hoel: "This proof is theory-agnostic. It doesn’t rely on any particular account of consciousness."
Critic: "Ok, granted that we're talking about a narrow space of purely physicalist theories, you treat lookup tables as paradigmatically non-conscious and classify any theory that disagrees as trivial. But you never establish that lookup tables must be non-conscious, you just assume it and build that assumption into your definition of triviality.."
Hoel: "Any theory that cannot make principled distinctions between paradigmatically conscious systems and paradigmatically non-conscious ones collapses into triviality or unfalsifiability and therefore fails as a scientific theory."
Critic: "Then your conclusion isn’t that ChatGPT isn’t conscious under any theory, but that no theory violating your prior boundary conditions is allowed. Those constraints THEMSELVES constitute a substantive theory of consciousness, so calling the proof theory-agnostic is misleading."
It's just the same IIT nonsense restated in the negative pretending to not just be that. Humans are conscious (are we? did we prove this?), calculators are not (aren't they? did we prove this?), therefore we need to draw some dividing line between calculators and humans (do we really though?). If you draw the line *just right* you can put chatgpt in the calculator side of the line. This makes the proof entirely circular and trivial.
> Humans are conscious (are we? did we prove this?), calculators are not (aren't they? did we prove this?),
I despise this argument. If you don’t think humans can be proven conscious, and you don’t think calculators can be proven not conscious then we can’t really say anything about humans, dogs, cats, calculators, rubber ducks, atoms, French fries, a bag of chips or LLMs. So in reality there’s no need to discuss any of this.
The argument seems to be that because we don’t know what consciousness is we can’t say what it isn’t. We don’t know what dark matter is but can say what it isn’t.
We don't only know ordinary matter isn't dark matter - we can prove it's not dark matter. But how do we approach proving a calculator isn't conscious? It's not a pointless question at all - the inability to define consciousness itself tells us something about consciousness. It adds to plausibility of the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that can happen in many different ways - after all, it would be much easier to disprove if it could happen only one way. If there are many ways, then there are many paths for computers to achieve consciousness. So in a sense, the harder it is to disprove a simple calculator is conscious, the easier it is for massive data centers to achieve true consciousness. And when we manage to prove a simple calculator is definitely not conscious, the odds of datacenter succeeding will take a nosedive.
> Humans are conscious
Yeah, that's the one thing you can be most certain of, that you're having experience.
> Calculators are not
I think it's more that a theory that grants consciousness to calculators would grant consciousness to everything and therefore have no predictive power. Similar to one granting consciousness to LLMs.
Does A theory that everything is made of atoms have no predictive power?
Democritean atomism doesn't seem to have much predictive power to me. Our own theory of atoms is far more complex than "everything is made of atoms" and predicts things like atom bombs. It also doesn't hold that everything is made of atoms.
>Yeah, that's the one thing you can be most certain of, that you're having experience.
I strongly agree with this personally(but I'm christian and I believe in the soul and free will implicitly), so *shrugs*
However a decently large category of consciousness models dispute this point in various capacities (illusionism, solipsism, some versions of simulation theory).
>I think it's more that a theory that grants consciousness to calculators would grant consciousness to everything and therefore have no predictive power. Similar to one granting consciousness to LLMs.
There is a large body of coherant, non-magical, non-trivial consciousness models that resolve this contradiction: Global Workspace Theory, the Self-Model, Higher Order Theory, Attention Schema Theory, and Sensorimotor Contingency Theory, to name a few. Most of them would be described as "trivial" by Hoel despite being major classes of consciousness theories. All of them have totally separate claims about what would be required to make an AI model "conscious".
So you see why I think Hoel's claim that ChatGPT is *literally proven-by-science for all non trivial theories of consciousness* is at least misleading, and the real claim is closer to "ChatGPT is provably not conscious, assuming you implicitly believe in a very tiny subset of IIT-adjacent consciousness models"
Hmm, I'm gonna paste this in a comment in his post, maybe he replies. However, I did read Hoel's book, The World Behind the World, there he says that IIT is essentially vacuous, so he can't be really defending that theory here.
I think only illusionism disputes the existence of consciousness (which makes it the craziest thing philosophy ever produced). In solipsism, only oneself is conscious, and I don't see what simulation theory (I feel this shouldn't have the word theory, it is not scientific) has to do with consciusness: even if you're experiencing a simulation, you're still experiencing!
He doesn't know what consciousness is, yet he purports to prove that LLMs don't have it using arguments that it's too similar to other things he claims cannot have consciousness (the thing he doesn't know what it is, remember).
Who does? It’s a useless word right now.
I'm still reading the paper, but let me point out that he claims to know *some* things about consciousness and not everything, so I don't think there's a paradox as you're describing it. In fact, he claims to derive certain necessary conditions for consciousness, while agreeing they're not sufficient. He might be wrong, but if so I expect the problem to lie in his assumptions, not some sort of illogic in his argument.
Search engine duckduckgo is holding a poll on whether you're YES or NO on AI.
https://voteyesornoai.com/
Get your vote in! Currently, NO is crushing YES. I wonder what the implications of that are for AI safety and AI in general.
It's amazing how AI has become marketable in every way regardless of one's feelings on it. DuckDuckGo is especially funny as they have DuckAI and are actively working on different AI products even as they also pander to the anti-AI crowd.
Hate AI? You get redirected to one homepage with a proud "no AI!" banner
Love AI? You get redirected to another homepage with a big DuckAI interface
I've seen posts on Reddit about this DuckDuckGo marketing bit with 20,000+ upvotes. It is a clear PR coup for them to lean into anti-AI sentiment even as they are not actually penalized by continuing to work on DuckAI and offering that service as well.
I imagine we'll see a lot more companies straddling this divide with even more conscious separation of AI and non-AI services. I guess one big question is whether there are enough rabidly anti-AI folks where they will exert pressure to remove all AI services and not just the ones they are exposed to (or deliberately redirected around).
I was just in an online conversation among doctors about a contract provision saying that we wouldn't use any software with AI functionality, and there was general agreement that it's becoming impossible to avoid AI, it's being built into *everything*.
As AI usage has become more popular, the criticisms became more ridiculous. We went from existential concerns and threats to our ability to make a living to talking about how data centers use electricity.
For AI safety purposes, it's good that there's a public backlash against AI, for whatever reasons, no? The backlash is also taking the form of rejecting AI outputs.
Imo no. It means we will miss out on benefits of AI all while countries that do not respect public opinion can proceed themselves with destroying the world.
Well it makes people lump in the serious arguments with the not serious ones, making AI concerns seem less serious overall.
Hmm, I have a hunch that the people that would dismiss serious arguments because of the arguments the public is using are an insignificant number.
I don’t think the supporters of AI know how much it is detested. They should get out of their bubble.
What a uselessly vague question. It's like asking "are you yes or no on cars" - it depends a lot on what situation you're using it in!
I would say probably 80% of AI uses I've seen seem pointless to me, but I wouldn't say I'm "against AI," I just think it's overhyped. That other 20% looks pretty interesting!
I think it's deliberately vague for comic effect.
The point of the question is to serve as an ad for DuckDuckGo. Your answer doesn't matter.
> You’d rather skip AI. With DuckDuckGo, you can, because it’s optional.
> You’re into AI. With DuckDuckGo, you can use it privately.
Ah, I didn't actually click on the vote button because I was annoyed with the question.
No need to make it that complicated. Apply whatever metrics are important to you and vote accordingly, if you're going to vote at all. Do your 20% in favor outweigh the 80% useless/harmful, then vote Yes, otherwise No. The poll is not an aptitude test whatsoever, you're not going to be graded, so why be aggrieved about the lack of direction? You could, of course, always ask some kind of always confident assistant whether you're yes or no on AIs...
I think a lot of people would just say they are "No" on cars too.
I expect it's mostly the same people.
Hehe, most likely, yeah.
The "AI safety" movement has come a long way toward creating the apocalypse they wanted to prevent. Now you want to do mirror life next?
Cautionary advocacy doesn't work. Cautionary tales don't work. The human race's best defense against the horrors on the tech tree is its lack of imagination. If you think of something you don't want to see happen, please just shut up about it.
The mirror life people tried that for a while (I remember that in order to discuss any biosecurity stuff with EAs I had to promise never to blog about certain things without their permission, and mirror life was one of them, and the fact that you spent the whole 2010s never hearing about it was a success of this policy). Then the NSF gave some people a grant to produce mirror life, and the smart people decided that never mentioning that this might be bad, even as other people tried to create it, probably wasn't the right tactic anymore. See the very first section in their Technical Report, "Rationale For Public Release".
Also, I think the AI safety talking point is overblown - you think without Eliezer Yudkowsky, they wouldn't have invented the transformer?
Google more or less sat on the transformer for a while. I guess I think ChatGPT or RLHF could have come a couple of years later and we'd have had a couple more years of "human joy and wonder and regret" before the end. That is a lot of QALYs.
I guess I think the first group trying to create mirror life will probably fail, or get lucky and not release it, or get cancelled for being too woke or not woke enough. It's not like the first attempt to build AI ended in paperclips. It takes sustained effort to destroy the world (and that's why we are still here).
Greg Egan has mirror life as a plot point in one of his novels, where rich people are getting "converted" to mirror life so they don't have to worry about biological weapons which wouldn't effect them anyway.
I’m not part of any movement and I think my feelings about AI are much smaller than those of people in the AI safety movement, but if the things you list as not working don’t work maybe it’s because those are just noises people make instead of actions people take.
If you don’t want a given technology in your life, take action: change your life to omit that technology. If you want other people to do the same, lead by example and show them why your way of living without that technology is better.
What do you propose he do if he doesn't want a particular technology in anyone else's life, even if they want it in theirs? The traditional approach is to leverage state violence against its developers, distributors and users. In what ways is your suggestion better?
Are you familiar with the serenity prayer?
I said in my comment above that if you want others to do what you do, lead by example. I have written previously on my blog about why it is that so few people (none as far as I can tell), even within the AI safety community, have issued a statement to the effect of “I have stopped using AI and so should you” even though that would be far more effective than cautionary tales.
To summarize my thoughts, 1) they mistakenly see non-connection between everyday AI use and future AI development, 2) possibly some of them don’t really believe their own arguments, and 3) they have internalized a paradigm in which technology adoption is deterministic, forgetting that there is always an element of choice.
I can see how talking up something like mirror life makes it likelier that scientists and wacko evildoers will get interested in the topic and work on developing some mirror life, and that making it likelier it will spread or be spread and do damage. But how does talking about AI killing us all make that likelier?
OpenAI, Anthropic, and from what I have heard DeepMind were founded and funded by people influenced by Yudkowsky. They needed some AI to align, so they built some. They needed investors to fund that, so they looked for applications. The whole arms race was created by "safety" people! It doesn't seem likely that we could have avoided it forever, but it *has* to have been accelerated.
I guess the exact same sequence could play out with mirror life. How are we going to prevent it from killing us all if we don't make some to study?
Deepmind was not founded by Yudkowsky acolytes, it was founded by Demis Hassabis, whose background was in video games. He worked on Black & White, which had very advanced NPC AI for its time, back in 2001. Although if you're just saying Hassabis subsequently read Yudkowsky or heard of Yudkowsky-influenced ideas, then that's of course possible (indeed probable), but I doubt he'd consider him a major influence.
AI development was like a fire in a bone dry forest with lots of deadwood. It could have been set off by any of a number of things, but was guaranteed to be set off by somebody People have been fascinated for a long time by the idea, and built calculating machines and the like not long after the science and tech of their era made it possible, and their were serious attempts at building something we would call AI before Yudkowski et al. were even born. Being harmed by smart robots and the like is also quite an old idea. Once science and tech reached a point that made it possible to build AI of the type we have now, human ingenuity and greed guaranteed that someone would build it and that there would be enormous interest in it, enormous deployment of resources etc. And our fear of it was also inevitable.
https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/against-misalignment-as-self-fulfilling
> The human race's best defense … is its lack of imagination.
"The most merciful thing in the world," eh?
Flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.
Bite my tongue.
Nuclear test ban treaty.
Fleeing from the blinding bright light of progress into the safety of a new darker and less radioactive age.
Do you expect there is nothing at all which is physically possible but not wise to do?
Like everybody else on the board, occasionally I have dreams about 2015-era SSC essays.
Last night, I had a dream about "Untitled" and re-engaged with it in a world where the grooming gangs in England are common knowledge and pulling the whole (played out) "Where are the feminists?" game.
Then I realized that this was (yet another) Marxism Brain thing (for lack of a better term).
In most circumstances, if someone says "I am in great pain because I do not have X", Marxism Brain's immediate knee-jerk response is "We have an obligation to get you X."
From each according to his something something, whatever.
But when a somewhat nerdy guy says something like "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship", Marxism brain immediately seizes up and the fight gets *WEIRD*.
"NOBODY OWES YOU A RELATIONSHIP!"
"YOU ARE SO (FREAKING) ENTITLED!"
"THIS IS RAPE CULTURE!"
That sort of thing. People with Capitalism Brain (for lack of a better term) read "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" and smile sadly and nod and say "yeah, life is like that... hey, you should do some things to change your life. Groom yourself better. Shower more. Work out more. Get an interesting hobby like cooking. Hang out in group settings where people hang out and make friends."
Why? Because they read something like "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" and do *NOT* immediately respond with "therefore we, as a society, have a responsibility to get you laid".
People whose brains immediately kick in with "therefore we, as a society, have a responsibility to get you laid" have to immediately start screaming "YOU ARE SO FREAKING ENTITLED!" at the guy who is, quite honestly!, saying "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship".
The screaming isn't merely at the guy who is appealing to a very important foundational emotional response, it's also the screamer screaming at themselves trying to tamp down the immediate knee-jerk response to have the government institute something like Universal Basic Girlfriend.
People with Capitalism Brain would never IN A MILLION YEARS imagine something like UBG.
People with Marxism Brain hear "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" and the first thing they think of is UBG and because this is an obviously odious conclusion, respond with arguments about how the person making the claim that they are in pain is *WRONG*. They are bad. They are undeserving. They have no right to a girlfriend at all.
Anyway, I woke up with that in my head.
Bummer…
You got me to crack open the Communist Manifesto again, where Marx (presumably) argues that there's no such thing as a loving relationship and communism will merely expose the truth of the ongoing orgy pile to the light. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
"Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
Presumably under Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, it will be simple and easy to find a gf, or you can ask your friendly neighborhood super intelligence who knows what's up with everyone for help.
I was sure that was going to be an acronym. Now I have to figure out an acronym.
Fully Automated Luxury Gay... Universal... Yommunism?
Full-Auto Luxury Lesbian/Gay Universal Yommunism.
I miss the days when one of the more silly political factions we had were feminist ideologues making hysterical accusations about "rape culture." Nowadays, they're the sane ones.
Let's not pretend these are isolated incidents. The right was galvanized in large part because they felt the need to permanently deal with these feminists.
Yeah. Generally, extremes feed each other; the typical reason people join one is that something made them fear the other.
As an extremist politician, the opposite extremists are in some sense not your enemies; they are rivals. When they get stronger, you also get stronger (because "they are getting stronger" is a great slogan for your recruitment). The actual enemy is someone who says: "uhm, guys, stop talking nonsense, we have more important things to do, let's focus on those", because when people start listening to that guy, both you and your rival start losing votes.
(Oh, and I have come to suspect that I had conflated Untitled with Radicalizing the Romanceless in my dreaming state. I feel like I should regret the error but, hey. I was asleep and my brain was doing stuff.)
I'd really like to hear more of what happened in your dream...
Also, what does UBG stand for? Universal Basic Grooming? United Breaks Guitars? Ugly Bald Guy? Upvoted Because Girl?
Oh, it's gone now. Poof. Out the window.
UBG == Universal Basic Girlfriend.
This feels like a Capitalism Brain take on a Marxism Brain.
To make the jump from "the state should transfer wealth from those who have it to those who don't to alleviate poverty" to "the state should transfer sex from those who can get it to those who can't to alleviate sexlessness," feel natural/inevitable, one first must adopt a key Capitalist Brain axiom - "interferences with my property are functionally the same as interferences with my body, because I use my body to labor to obtain property."
But the "Marxists" simply don't believe that. It's a popular take in Randian/Libertarian circles, but not Marxist (or even mildly left-leaning) ones.
Thus, a leftist simply wouldn't view "if the state should forcibly transfer wealth to solve poverty, then it should also (obviously) forcibly transfer sex to solve sexlessness," as a valid statement. They don't have this "my property is an extension of my body and thus my rights to integrity of both are mirrors of the other" thought pattern going, so they'd just say that the nature/importance of the two rights proposed to be infringed are fundamentally different. Doing the one need not imply doing the other. And most people would probably agree, at least intuitively - it's pretty safe bet that most would view welfare work requirements very differently if they were welfare sex work requirements, or if we tried to have people pay taxes in blowjobs.
It's not just about property, it's about status.
Yes, in capitalism, owning property increases your status. And high-status guys typically get laid more. But abolishing (the importance of) property wouldn't abolish status differences -- it would just change the relative importance of various human traits.
Things like "work ethics" and "careful planning" would probably lose some of their value. Not all, because you still need to do some household work, and plan your holidays or whatever. -- Unless we assume that the communist government would also provide 100% childcare etc. If you go far enough this way, then the only important thing about your partners becomes how enjoyable they are in bed. Which is still a wildly varying thing, because some people are prettier than others, some are more funny, or more adventurous. The communist utopia (without sex redistribution) would still have incels.
(Also, even if people still valued traits related to work ethics and responsibility in their partners, these would become more difficult to signal. In capitalism, you can sometimes see their accumulated effects. Things like "this guy can talk a lot about changing the world, but he can't even keep a simple job for more than a month".)
> Things like "work ethics" and "careful planning" would probably lose some of their value.
It will be like going back to the dynamics of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness.
Physical skill, demonstrated excellence, looks, high social skills? All get top marks. Athletes and salespeople will dominate that future's status pyramid.
I actually argue we're going to get here even before Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism - when everyone has a superintelligent AI assistant + life coach + super persuader in their ear, everyone has a super-ego that works, and things like "planning" and "work ethic" matter relatively less, because a much bigger slice of humanity is empirically demonstrating them (even if they were largely following an AI's plans and being super-persuaded to do so). So all those physical EEA things will move upwards in relative status even earlier.
That is a good point, but I think it can be easily rephrased to ignore the body-property collusion:
Just as a state may pay for higher education, health care services, food or accommodation of the less fortunate, it may also finance sexual services for those who lack such. This does exist to some extent, afaik in Germany and Netherlands disabled people can get prescriptions for receiving such, and that was the case in Australia between 2020 and 2024.
That being said, I agree that the description for the "Marxism Brain" by op is indeed how "Capitalism Brain" interprets it. I am myself also thinking in the terms of the second one, but let me try steelmanning the "Marxist" position:
There are oppressed and oppressors, we must help the former and fight/weaken the latter to better society. One of the best ways for this is to transfer resources from oppressor group(s) to oppressed group(s). Males as a group are in a superior position compared to women. Creating services for which the primary cost bearers are women while the primary beneficiaries are men increases the oppression and makes society worse.
Wouldn’t legalized hookers achieve the same end? There would be costs involved, but as the old saying goes, the difference between sex for free and sex for money is that sex for money is a lot cheaper.
Not entirely. It would most likely help, but some people would be priced out of it, just like in case of any other services (food, healthcare, education is legal after all, but there is still government support).
It is not a coincidence that in the mentioned German and Dutch examples (some) disabled people are the targeted group: Although any adult can already purchase sexual services (prostitution is legal in these countries), but if ones circumstances inhibit him/her from earning well, they likely won't be able to finance it for themselves. (Or even if they technically could, (social) insurance may support it by the same logic it supports non-critical medical/welfare requirements).
If I do not own my body how can I sell my labor-power?
I feel like I'm being asked to "steelman for all leftists broadly" a little bit here, but I think most leftists, at least in the American sense of the word, would enthusiastically embrace the idea that you own your body. See, e.g. basically all their abortion arguments.
Honestly, body ownership doesn't strike me as much of a left-right divide. I think Americans broadly would agree to that principle.
It's the idea that "because I own my body, the fruits of my labor-power are an extension of my body, which I used to get them. There's no distinction between my hand and the apple that I used my hand to pick, and therefore infringements upon the one should be treated alike to infringements upon the other" where the most libertarian parts of the right cross a bridge that most people on the left (heck, most people in general) probably won't go over with them.
For a certain kind of Randian, one can make the argument that a tax paid in dollars and a corvee labor tax are "the same thing," but for most people that argument will fall flat because they intuitively recognize that there is something different about infringing upon the money that was earned with the body's labor vs infringing upon the body itself.
I'm sorry to have contributed to your feeling that way: not my intention. I was just interested in your claim that most marxists lac the thought pattern: "my property is an extension of my body and thus my rights to integrity of both are mirrors of the other." Interested because it surprised me!
You're arguing against me as if I argued that "Marxists argue for UBG!"
But I did not argue that.
I pretty explicitly came out and said that their response to a guy saying "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship" is stuff like "NOBODY OWES YOU A RELATIONSHIP!"
Which is one of those things that I think is demonstrated in, for example, the essay I mentioned.
Sorry if I'm being unclear here.
>>People whose brains immediately kick in with "therefore we, as a society, have a responsibility to get you laid" have to immediately start screaming "YOU ARE SO FREAKING ENTITLED!" at the guy who is, quite honestly!, saying "I am in great pain because I do not have a meaningful romantic relationship".
>>The screaming isn't merely at the guy who is appealing to a very important foundational emotional response, it's also the screamer screaming at themselves trying to tamp down the immediate knee-jerk response to have the government institute something like Universal Basic Girlfriend.
What I'm saying is that a leftist doesn't have a neat kneejerk response to *every* problem that says that the governement should solve X with universal basic X. That's a common Capitalist Brain take on "what Marxist Brain wants," but it's not an accurate take. All they have to do is distinguish between property rights and bodily autonomy rights and there's no need for them to do the self-screaming you're under the impression they are doing.
So they aren't yelling stuff at themselves, they're only screaming at the guy who said "I am in great pain"?
That's less charitable to them than I'm being but... I'm willing to accept that.
More that the leftists doing the screaming are overclocking on the nutjobs their algorithms are feeding them of people saying that the way to solve male loneliness is stuff like taking women out of the workforce and restoring the sexual politics of the 1950s, master key vs shitty lock, etc, which is causing them to lash out as though your hypothetical lonely guy had said all that, when actually all he said was "I am in great pain," without really any indicator that he is "one of *them*."
People are pretty lousy at empathy when you lead with a flag that you might be part of an outgroup that is hostile to them. Not that he owes the world that kind of tiptoeing, but the vitriol from people who misread the signals is the shitty inevitable result of engaging with something vulnerable in a public forum.
And naturally, this being the internet, his algorithms are also elevating the worst of their responses to help him maximize his engagement as well. Great system we've got going for ourselves.
What a complex world we live in
That's pretty good, never thought of it that way. Fatal blocker in Marxism Brain, recognzining that people are supposed to exercise their agency, it's not all systemic.
Hmmm ... SPEAK cite only one reference for their headline claim "25+ arrests per day for online posts in the UK" and that's to the Daily Mail, a right wing tabloid that's earned such a reputation for inaccuracy that Wikipedia has a blanket ban on using it as a source.
Their "core principles" include "Direct incitement to violence" and "Repeated, targeted harassment of individuals" but not of groups or communities of people based on their skin colour, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation; an omission which would permit exactly the sort of indirect incitement to violence which leads to harassment of and stochastic violence against immigrants, refugees, muslims, Jewish people, LGBTQIA+ people etc which existing hate speech laws attempt to mitigate, but which their proposed free speech law would negate.
And most extraordinarily amongst the 'Cases" they list they include none of the almost 3,000 people arrested for peacefully holding up signs saying "I opposing genocide, I support Palestine Action".
> And most extraordinarily amongst the 'Cases" they list they include none of the almost 3,000 people arrested for peacefully holding up signs
That's fair but:
1) even if they don't mention them, their proposed reforms would absolutely make that not a crime any more, and that's already something
2) ultimately this is what somewhat healthy liberal politics should be about, people converging on principles they support even if they empathise with different victims of them. Not all cases they report are right-wing coded (the girl who posted rap lyrics, the woman who held a sign at King Charles' coronation), and even if they were, the actual contents of the reform suggested are very well-defined and anyone can decide if they sound worth supporting or not.
The incitement to violence is a point, but it's entirely legitimate to argue that the stochastic terrorism argument puts too much responsibility on the speaker. After all, the same could be said of any political discourse - if you say e.g. "the policy supported by <party> will destroy our country!" you are creating a potential compelling argument for someone to go and do a terrorism against that party's leaders. Saying that the oil industry is destroying the Earth could invite shooting the CEO of Exxon, saying that AI might kill us all could encourage someone to kidnap Sam Altman. Criticism of US pharma industry was obviously a big part of what radicalised Luigi Mangione. But it's hard to argue these things should be curtailed wholesale for fear that they might cause extreme reactions. Then the only argument left is "ok but these criticism are right and the ones based on ethnicity or religion are wrong" which is too subjective to be encoded into law.
> stochastic violence
Yes, this is so nebulous a category that essentially the POINT of all free speech advocacy is to stop the government using it as an excuse.
A worldwide database of AI hallucination cases. https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
Organized by case, nation, party (judge, lawyer, etc.), when, nature (citation, outdated, etc.)
And a course which seems to be a book's worth of material.
Has anyone here played around with grokipedia.com? It seems to work incredibly well.
As far as I can tell this is the first time an Llm has been successfully used as something like a judge/moderator.
When Grokipedia was announced, I went to check the article for Parliament for Finland, and it had the wrong numbers of seats. I just went to check it again and it continues to have the wrong numbers of seats:
"As of October 2025, the Eduskunta features eleven parliamentary groups, reflecting ongoing minor shifts such as MP independences or realignments since the April 2023 election. The election yielded seats distributed proportionally across nine parties: National Coalition Party (48 seats), Finns Party (46 seats), Social Democratic Party (43 seats), Centre Party (31 seats), Left Alliance (27 seats), Green League (24 seats), Swedish People's Party (10 seats), Christian Democrats (5 seats), with the remainder comprising independents or minor adjustments.[1] [71] This fragmentation precludes single-party majorities, fostering dynamics centered on coalition bargaining for government formation and policy passage.[72]"
This doesn't even pass the basic sanity check of the stated group sizes together being (something below) the total number of seats, ie. 200. One can see the actual numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Finland
Interesting! I also found errors but they were a bit more subtle. Have you tried reporting an error?
No, as I'm not particulary interested in Grokipedia itself or invested in its success.
I've tested it a bit as a Wikipedia editor and I was impressed by some things and not so impressed by others
+
1. Accuracy is generally okay, I don't have statistics but in the areas I know well I don't find many errors. Wikipedia is also not error-free but that's a topic for another day.
2. Some articles are much better than Wikipedia, especially those that a) require frequent updates and b) few people care about. See "Economy of Laos" for example
3. The UX
-
1. Everything to do with sources. Sometimes I get the feeling that Grokipedia treats citations as decoration rather than as fundamental building blocks of an encyclopedia. There are lots of instances of inline citations that don't support the content they purport to support. Many sources are self-published, using only online sources it excludes most academic sources. But see + #1.
2. Opaque rules. While Wikipedia has publicly available policies (for example on who is deemed important enough to merit an article) Grokipedia is a black box.
3. No images
see less obvious flaws here
https://x.com/AlexO_risk/status/2012272799507743020
Search for "elon musk" yielded 0 results
Going to his actual page, there's a lot of missing information.
Just seems like a really dumb and biased mirror of wikipedia with poor search functionality.
Looks like the search failure was temporary. It's working now.
Search is horrible + yes, we should think of this partially as a musk-propaganda tool.
Here is what impresses me most:
Try and find something on Wikipedia/Grokipedia that is obviously untrue and try to correct it. The Grokipedia experience is no doubt 10x better.
i think it's pretty likely that something like this (claudipedia? geminipedia?) will take over Wikipedia at some point.
Search isn't just bad, it seems to be completely nonfunctional. I got "0 results" for everything I tried.
In the hopes of getting *something* I tried clicking on the "recent edits" on the front page, and it gave me "this page doesn't exist yet."
I guess the only way to be sure you don't say anything woke is to say nothing at all...
Looks like the search failure was temporary. It's working now.
Maybe I am late to the game, but I just started using Claude Code over the last week. For the first time, I'm really excited about the possibilities of AI. In some sense, allowing Claude read/write access to a local folder is a minor innovation, and so is allowing Claude to write and execute command line prompts.
But the whole is much more than the sum of its parts: instead of relying on Claude to give a good enough answer based on its glance over a file, I can ask it to find the appropriate tool, write the appropriate command and then it'll ask my permission before executing it. I've had it write python code, run simulations, graph the results and write a dummy paper with introduction and references that I would probably accept if asked to referee for a lower ranked journal. I've more-or-less delegated my tax receipts to it. I intend to get it to update my webpage... these are not lofty goals, but I can see it has potential and it's exciting.
Have others used it for interesting projects? Are there even better tools out there?
Hi yes, soft plug: I am a very avid user of coding agents, regularly use 5+ at a time to build, and have used them to build my entire company's codebase of which virtually 0 of it is written by hand. Coding throughput is through the roof. You are very early to the game.
My company builds tools to help engineers and teams go from 'help i dont know what an agent is' to, well, doing what I am doing above. Claude Code is great but would recommend our cli and our configs to make it even better. In case you're interested, feel free to reach out!
Yeah! I have the same feeling.
So far I've built a tool for checking the accuracy of citations on Wikipedia and a cooperative-competitive game set up in a medieval Russian republic. Looks like I should use it more haha
I hear that with Claude Code in agent mode, you can spawn several agents and essentially have a team of software developers working under you. But I don't know about that, I feel it's reliability when coding is like 80 - 90%, you have to be aware of what it does, it isn't like giving the task to a human dev.
I've never supervised 5 software developers... but getting the humans I've supervised to 80% reliability would be a win.
Seriously though - I find the token limits run out pretty quickly on any moderately complex task so I haven't needed multiple agents. My next goal is to work out how to use Claude skills to efficiently carry out small repeatable tasks.
Is the rapid development of new music genres a thing of the past?
When I think back over the second half of the 20th century, it is naturally broken into well-defined musical eras. In the 60s, classic rock came about, with huge influence from British bands (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, etc.) The 70s was somewhat of an extension of that, leading to a branching out of rock genres (hard, prog, etc.) as well as disco. I’m not actually familiar with the origins of disco, I assume that it arose due to culture combined with technological advancements in synthesized music? Hard rock led to hair metal in the 80s. The 90s is known for grunge, originating from Seattle, as well as gangster rap, a product from black ghettos.
(This is definitely not a complete history and I left out a ton of genres.)
What has developed since 2000? EDM? That probably counts, and I guess it came about from a specific subculture (the rave community).
But I can’t really think of any truly new genres that have emerged recently. New music mostly seems to be a mix of stuff that’s vaguely considered “pop” with heavy hip-hop influences. Most genre-oriented innovation seems to be an explicit mashup of two or more existing genres (rap and country for example). The closest thing I notice is a slow evolution of stylistic details over time.
I also get the sense that whereas in the past, entire bands generally became famous (often with the singer or guitarist being most well-known, but other members still getting plenty of fame and recognition), nowadays it’s more often just solo artists/singers that are widely recognized. Certainly there are still famous bands today, and there were famous solo artists before (e.g. Prince), but by and large that feels like the trend now.
So, here’s my pet theory: I suspect that the emergence of a new genre requires a period of relative isolation in order for the sound/style to truly develop, and the modern way of sharing music and getting instant recognition/feedback from a wide audience via the internet is not compatible with that.
To give an example, gangster rap became hugely popular because a small, relatively isolated community (gangsters in the ghetto) spent years developing the craft. When it was good enough and got out, it was already at a high quality level and people loved it.
But could gangster rap arise today? If no such thing existed already, and somebody posted a track with the vague traces of gangster rap beginnings, what would happen? I suspect that if it was bad, the artist would get no feedback and few listens, and would likely try pivoting to something that incorporated more popular trends. And if/once it started to become good, the novel elements would quickly get copied and incorporated into other artists’ musical works, in a much more diluted form than what gangster rap is today. There wouldn’t necessarily be a long period of innovation and maturation before presentation to the rest of the world.
Similarly, I suspect that the internet provides new paths for young and very talented musicians to become famous and turn into solo acts, as opposed to before the internet, the best option was probably to find other talented musicians around you and form a band.
And for the record, I’m not necessarily complaining or trying to come across as “get off my lawn”. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, as much of the music I listen to nowadays isn’t even in the category of popular music (e.g. old NES video game soundtracks).
I’m sure none of these ideas are new, and this is all just my speculation, so I could be totally wrong. I’d love to hear some counter-examples (I’m sure there are plenty!) or other takes on this.
Very Interesting. I am reading Mark Fisher’s ‘Ghosts of My Life’ and he makes a very similar point in his book. It’s quite a tricky read for me, but I gather his main point is that it’s rare you now hear something and realise it’s the sound of the future to come. I wouldn’t necessarily agree, I think synthpop although maybe not novel as a genre has developed particularly in the last 2/3 years to bring that futuristic feel.
I think the same thing happened to subcultures. TikTok is constantly throwing up fake lab-grown subcultures like cottagecore that are really just aesthetics, but if a small group of kids in, say, Provo Utah came up with a really cool subculture with its own slang and fashion sense, they'd end up on short form video in a week and be 100% commodified by Shein and other fast fashion in two weeks. The only subcultures that can survive are those so insular or anti-tech that they have a moat to protect them from liquid modernity.
You might want to read some of the substack https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/archive - there's a lot of articles with data analysis of pop music history. To start try - 101 Things I Learned Listening to Every Number One Hit.
The number of new genres being created is empirically true. Even worse once powerful genres (like rock) are on life support.
I suspect the reason for the former is the lack of technological change, and not the acceleration of it. Genres in music are often downstream of technology.
I would diagnose the present situation differently. I think previously, there were fewer different strands going on in music, and so those strands could more readily be classified into "genres." You had whatever was mainstream, and maybe a couple different counter-cultures/sub-cultures. Now you just have so many sub-cultures running in parallel that it's functionally impossible to classify them all.
Analogous to classical music history, where there was the Baroque era, Classical era, Romantic era, and any music from these eras (100+ years long!) is very readily identifiably of that era, and has tons of similarity. And then we get on towards the end of the Romantic era and compositional styles get caught up in the tide of nationalism, and German Romanticism dominated while composers in other countries tried to create their own "national styles"—very much a culture/counter-culture dynamic.
Then we get on into the 20th century, and "modernism" arises, but modernism means so many different things. Strauss' later works (Salome, Elektra) are pushing German Romanticism to the absolute limit, while other composers in Germany, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, are pushing the boundaries of what people would even call music at all. France has Debussy and Ravel creating what gets called "impressionism." But you also have tons of masterful composers in this period who are totally singular, where you can identify just that composer by their sound world (Stravinsky, Bartok, Poulenc). Or composers who aren't so distinctive as to have their own style, but their style doesn't quite have a name either. You might hear a lesser-known composer like Ibert or Francaix and think, "oh, this sounds French," but there's not a name for that style. And even in the 1950s you still have tons of nostalgic Romanticism.
And that fragmentation and lack of definition of genres has just continued over time. For a time ivory tower modernism came to be pretty dominant, which did a lot to kill classical music for general audiences. But even all through that, more accessible works were still being written, and classically-trained composers were churning out beloved music in Hollywood. You can't point at the biggest names in classical music today and say what "genre" their music is. John Adams, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly... The word "post-minimalist" is forced to carry a lot of water, because basically everything good that has happened in classical music since the '80s has been influenced by minimalism.
The point being, identifying genres requires a certain amount of uniformity. You can have a thriving music scene full of new innovations and an interesting variety of styles without being able to label everything, because that labeling actually requires that a lot of people are doing the same thing as each other, and that they continue doing that thing for long enough for it to become distinctive. If everyone's doing different things, and keeps experimenting with different things, then labeling sub-genres becomes harder and harder. You can still listen to new music and say, "oh, this comes from jazz," "this comes from pop," etc., much like you can hear a new classical piece and say it's kind neo-romantic or post-minimalist or whatever.
The struggle to identify new genres is actually a product of too many disparate new styles, not a lack of new styles.
I was thinking something similar. You worded it better than I could have.
I think it's important to consider the role the internet plays in making musical innovation more 'fluid'. Instead of in previous years when musical innovation came from singular sources (like one band or geographic region), today, the internet allows artists to more quickly adapt techniques and styles from one another. I think this probably blurs the genre lines a bit and makes them harder to distinguish.
Musical innovation is still certainly happening, it's just happening more continuously.
Yeah I think about this too.
What's interesting is that musical innovation came to a halt around about the time that music production got democratised. Now instead of an expensive music studio you can produce music on your computer in your bedroom; music unshackled from the constraints of actual musical instruments, any sound you can imagine you can produce.
You might have predicted that this would have led to a huge explosion in musical creativity, but it seems to have been the opposite. Maybe the lesson is that creativity is driven by constraints, and once you're no longer constrained (e.g. by the instruments available to you) you're paralysed with choice.
One area where music has advanced a lot recently is in mashups, an area where you're very much constraint-driven in what you can produce (there's only so many ways you can combine Uptown Funk with Feed My Frankenstein).
> creativity is driven by constraints
This.
Dubstep was developed by a singular man, in order to stimulate women's tatas. Particular soundwave, particular beat, voila!
So, no, one doesn't need isolation, one merely needs a sellable product. And dance music that is arousing is better dance music.
You can see "bad cattitude"'s take on "why we don't have good music anymore", it's also instructive.
Also: the popularity of gangster rap was entirely artificial, and a reaction to MC Hammer having screwed over his constract-holders (and then being a spendthrift, which made them even more mad than getting gypped).
What new musical.genres have emerged since 2000ad?
ChatGPT said:
Since 2000 AD, music has splintered rapidly due to the internet, affordable production tools, and global cultural exchange. Many “new” genres are hybrids or internet-native scenes rather than traditional label-defined styles. Here’s a clear, structured overview of the most notable genres and movements that emerged or crystallized after 2000.
Electronic & Dance (Post-2000)
Dubstep (early 2000s, UK)
Heavy sub-bass, syncopation, sparse rhythms
Later evolved into aggressive “brostep”
EDM (as a commercial genre) (late 2000s–2010s)
Festival-oriented electronic music
Artists: Swedish House Mafia, Avicii
Future Bass
Lush synths, modulated chords, emotional drops
Artists: Flume, San Holo
Vaporwave
Internet-native, ironic, nostalgic
Slowed-down samples, corporate & 80s imagery
Hardstyle / Rawstyle (modern form)
Earlier roots, but modern sound emerged post-2000
Aggressive kicks, festival culture
Hip-Hop & Rap Evolutions
Trap (modern Southern trap)
Hi-hats, booming 808s, dark melodies
Artists: Gucci Mane, Future, Migos
Drill (2010s)
Dark, minimalist, violent realism
Chicago → UK → NYC scenes
Cloud Rap
Dreamy, lo-fi beats, emotional detachment
Artists: Lil B, A$AP Rocky
SoundCloud Rap / Emo Rap
DIY internet-driven movement
Artists: XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD
Rage / Hypertrap (late 2010s)
Distorted synths, high energy
Artists: Playboi Carti, Yeat
Rock, Metal & Alternative
Metalcore (modern form)
Metal + hardcore punk, refined in 2000s
Breakdowns, clean/harsh vocals
Deathcore
Extreme metal + hardcore breakdowns
Post-Rock (popularized post-2000)
Long instrumental builds, cinematic sound
Artists: Explosions in the Sky
Djent
Polyrhythmic, palm-muted guitar tone
Coined in the mid-2000s
Indie Folk / Indie Pop (modern wave)
Lo-fi aesthetics, intimate songwriting
Artists: Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers
Pop & Internet-Native Genres
Hyperpop
Maximalist, distorted, chaotic pop
Artists: 100 gecs, SOPHIE
Bedroom Pop
DIY home-produced pop
Intimate vocals, minimal production
Alt-Pop
Experimental pop outside mainstream formulas
Artists: Billie Eilish, Lorde
Global & Fusion Genres
Afrobeats (modern global form)
West African pop fusion (not to be confused with Afrobeat)
Artists: Burna Boy, Wizkid
Reggaeton (modern revival)
Became globally dominant in the 2010s
Artists: Bad Bunny, J Balvin
K-Pop (modern idol system)
Earlier roots, but global genre explosion post-2000
Latin Trap
Trap fused with reggaeton & Latin pop
Experimental & Niche Movements
Witch House
Dark, occult imagery, slow beats
Lo-Fi Hip Hop
Chill beats, study/relax culture
Phonk
Memphis rap revival with drift-car culture
Glitch Pop / Wonky
Emphasis on digital errors & instability
Please don't ask an LLM and post the response, it's as obnoxious as "let me google that for you"
I wish we could downvote comments here.
"To give an example, gangster rap became hugely popular because a small, relatively isolated community (gangsters in the ghetto) spent years developing the craft. When it was good enough and got out, it was already at a high quality level and people loved it."
This isn't the case.
If you're talking about the subgenre of hip-hop we now call "gangster rap," it was a pretty natural evolution of the already-popular hip hop scene. The people involved got popular pretty quickly within the already-existing hip hop scene (although the early breakouts were definitely incredibly talented.)
If you're referring to all of hip hop as gangster rap, well, first stop doing that. Second, yes it did have a pretty long incubation period, but that had more to do with the fact that early hip hop was people live-mixing disco, r&b, and early techno (Kraftwerk, etc.) It took a while for the genre to become different enough to differentiate itself.
I mean specifically gangster rap, not broader hip-hop. It grew from an existing genre (like how metal grew from earlier forms of rock) over a reasonably short period of time (late 80s to early 90s, I think)? Its lyrical themes focused around a specific set of topics (hustling, etc.), more focused and more exclusive than hip-hop more broadly. There are also some well-known feuds (East vs. West Coast for instance) which I imagine would rapidly fuel innovation, though perhaps if they were already "well-known", that's evidence against my hypothesis. And from what I recall, it fairly quickly became a huge nation-wide phenomenon outside of its original audience/demographic, e.g. every white 12 year old boy wanting to listen behind his parents' backs.
I'm no expert so I'm sure I have some details wrong, so please do correct me more as needed, but I'm not trying to conflate the two.
I'm sorry - I've seen people conflate the two before and had assumed you'd done so as well. Please accept my apology, my comment was a bit too snide.
But to your point - I do think I disagree with your overall hypothesis, my perspective is that we're currently at a high water park for musical creativity, even if most of it doesn't gain traction. The modern-day equivalent of gangster rap, drill, originated in the relatively isolated hothouse of soundcloud and had the same kind of incubation period you're describing.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of drill before, thanks for the counter-example. There are plenty of good alternative explanations people are offering, so I'm definitely not confident in my original hypothesis, or at least, if that is a factor, it's likely not the main factor.
If the same incubation environments do in fact exist today, why do you think "crazes" don't seem to come about anymore as they did in the past (i.e. it doesn't gain traction, as you mentioned)? I still think it must be related to the speed at which new creative works can be output (even if incubation environment itself isn't the factor being limited), meaning there is much more out there to compete with, meaning potentially less untapped space to grow into something truly unique.
My intuition is that most people consume music in a pretty passive manner. They listen to what's on the radio and/or on the charts and that's about it.
Pre-internet, the minority of people who do consume music actively, and seek out new stuff, were basically limited to the same radio stations and record shops as the rest of the population.
So, a craze would happen when the novelty obsessed people found a new thing and it jumped to the majority.
Today though, there's just not much crosstalk between music nerds and normies, so the information flow is much less robust. Music nerds are still out there finding new stuff, but because we've fragmented so much, there's no effective mechanism to get the new music out to the masses. Hence, pop culture is stuck right about where this breakdown happened (mid-to-late 2000s, by my reckoning.)
"Unique" doesn't mean "good". People enjoy novelty, sure, but that requires something that is both truly novel and actually good to listen to. Both creators and consumers have seen enough to understand what works and what doesn't. They aren't going to deviate from that without good reason.
Of course. But presumably there are still people out there who are talented enough to create both unique _and_ good new music. So the question is, why doesn't this seem to set off "crazes" as much as it did in the past? Possible answers could be:
- Those people are out there but aren't incentivized to be unique, just to be good
- There's so much unique but mediocre/bad stuff out there that even the truly unique and good stuff has to fight through a lot more to become widely recognized than it did in the past
- Maybe crazes do still happen and my timescale is too small
- Maybe crazes do still happen but appear differently and more fragmented than in the past
- Most of the low-hanging unique sound has been captured already so it's harder to come across. That's not to say that there won't be more low-hanging unique sounds in the future (e.g. synthesizers opened up lots of novel sounds that composers in the 1700s could never have predicted).
Or it's the maturity of the medium; are there new genres of novel or movie being invented? Video games still seem to be creating new genres.
> Video games still seem to be creating new genres.
Like what? The only thing I can think of in the last decade that could really be considered a new genre is auto battlers (pioneered by DOTA Auto Chess in 2019). Everything else is derivative of existing genres.
don't really want to quibble about what counts as a new genre and what is derivative, but I think genres like roguelikes, loot shooters, idle/incremental games, survival/crafting open world games are newer genres (and quite dominant in the current market) that are at least as comparable to, say, heavy metal being a distinct genre from rock, and a couple of them are at least as comparable to rock being a distinct genre from 50's R&B that it came from.
Bullet heaven was codified by vampire survivors in 2022, extraction PvPvE games were codified by Escape From Tarkov in 2016, "Metroidbrainias", if we are to guess at their formation would be outer Wilds on 2019.
For subgenres, Doom eternal style fpses, where resources are tied to aggressive play has only existed for five years.
I'm not sure I'd agree with any definition of "derivative" which somehow separates auto chess from say random strategy games but not bullet heaven. I'd be skeptical of definitions which rule out doom eternal style games as a subgenre (well, the fact that there are like 5 games total in the genre may be incredibly damning)
I think that's only true for popular music, you go off the beaten path, you do find entirely new genres like vaporwave:
https://youtu.be/uzs8eMVdECY?si=oBBoPU-VBs2QeKId
or dungeon synth:
https://youtu.be/F_toMWQCikI?si=4DgjRup9jVFykjlp
Or anatolian psychedelic rock:
https://youtu.be/OfFXa7EncQI?si=9I9BzX0FxPHSfPdt
Or whatever this is:
https://youtu.be/6p2yf3E_Z2M?si=8bMMCEU-Bj9ZQSDo
I do feel like popular culture has become more homogenized.
Consider that you might be in a bubble and not being exposed to enough new music.
Just from my own playlist, I would find the following hard to categorise in terms of the musical genres that were familiar to me in the 90s/2000s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYRdJo3cG2Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clq66AiEvSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slWcQORjPUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_uS0aT0bG8
I could probably shoehorn them somewhere but they wouldn’t be great fits.
On a somewhat tangential note... how are folks here discovering new music? I find myself kind of stuck in the genres that I found and liked as a teenager/20-something, plus a few others (not very many) that I've encountered by chance since then. I know this is pretty typical, but I'd like to think I can do better.
Finding current pop music is easy enough, but with one or two exceptions each year, I mostly don't like any of it.
On the other hand, I liked a couple of the tunes linked in this thread. But I have no idea how I might have found them, other than random comments on a blog (that really has nothing to do with music).
I guess I could find a college radio station to listen to, but whenever I've tried that, I get bored really quickly.
There must be a podcast that specializes in unearthing new genres. Or something?
Someone should start up a "weird new song of the day" service. That's probably about the right frequency for me anyway. If I discovered something really good, say once or twice a month, I'd be pretty happy. Does this already exist?
Sometimes Spotify gives me something interesting in Discover Weekly or whatever. The last time I went to a music festival, I discovered one new band and genre. But there's a lot less discovery these days compared to when I was young and would just download random albums off slsk or whatever.
I find Discord is good for this. Join the servers for one or more of the big music bots (jockie, hydra, rythm…) and lurk in the party channels when people are playing music; join the fan discords for artists you like, do the same there. People in these places are generally super happy to swap recommendations as well.
Another possible source is the”x reacts to y” genre of music videos. You’re probably seeing them in your feed right now if you’ve been clicking the links here: “Jazz musician reacts to Blastbeat Felafel”, “Composer reacts to G.O.A.T.” etc etc. These are not in themselves worth watching, at least for me, but the channels of the people making them are a treasure trove of music that their subscribers really, really loved, were desperate for the human connection of having someone they could show it off to, and yet is so weird that they had to persuade one of these guys to watch it to get their fix instead of just talking to their real-world friends about it.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Are these distinct genres?
Yup. (Unless one is old enough to just lump everything together into “weird stuff the kids are listening to” I guess :) )
I am probably that old. What are the genres?
Now that’s a much tougher question! The artists generally self-describe by listing their influences “blended into a unique new sound”. I’ve tried to pick tracks that are central to clusters of things - the similarities can be heard, and also you can see which works (and artists!) are in evolving conversation with each other (e.g. Henson has now collaborated on pieces with Marcin and also with Nito!). As for neat labels, however - ask me again in a few years once the industry has come up with some :)
Sorry, I forgot to include a disclaimer, which is: I realize that there's still plenty of variety out there being created if you search off the beaten path. I'm talking more about huge crazes that sweep the nation. The 80s is _known_ for hair metal, for instance.
In the 80s we had a few radio stations and a few TV stations, and when those played something new over and over again for a season, the nation as a whole couldn’t help but know of it.
This unifying force is now gone, and with it the cross-community cross-generation nation-sweeping effects. Popular things are popular in particular groups, and (just as with literature, politics etc) those groups mostly aren’t really aware of what is happening elsewhere.
This is just an isolated version of the common observation that society is increasingly fragmented.
Yeah, it's entirely possible that that's all this is, and it's not specific to music at all.
What these seem to be doing is adding complexity, which is certainly not bad but I don’t know if it’s something you can make a new genre out of.
Thank you.
The first link is excellent and unusual.
I picked it up from a discussion of whether new genres are forming, so there are two questions.
Does fit into older genres? Offhand, I'd say it's sort of progressive, sort of goth, and if movie music is a genre, it could be movie music.
The other question is whether there's other music which is enough like it to say there's a genre..
Onward to the second link, Igorrr Felafel.
This does sound like progressive with more variety of tone. A bit of metal singing (is that singing? yelling into the microphone?) and a fair amount of middle eastern influence.
Link 3: てねてね / 悒うつぼ
This is brilliant. Game music but more musical/less mechanical.
From the lyrics: "Unattractive evil is unattractive". So true.
4, Bullug Gegbug Ibgabiug Gixcure Dagabciea Fuic
Rockmaninof
Gets smarter comments than most. Eighteen minutes of goodness.
5. Infected mushroom
Good illo. March of the electronic weirdos. The bit at about 3:50 and gets quiet and clicks is really good.
I think you have a genre there, and I'm calling it complex caffeine for the ears. Or maybe caffeine for complex ears.
I am glad you enjoyed! I like “caffeine for the ears”, but I’ve actually been thinking of each of those as representative of their own class - for each one, I have more things that belong in the same bucket (cf. my links to the Ichika / Marcin / Maromaro pieces for the Polyphia bucket in the post below).
There’s also remixers/resamplers to consider: when does something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kmbrih45lg become its own class instead of being categorised by its sources?
As far as the question of where you can take the 8-bit game aesthetic goes, I think of Ujico / Snail’s House as genre defining; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nlSDxvt6JU
> The other question is whether there's other music which is enough like it to say there's a genre..
Here’s a couple more related examples by different artists for your consideration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2TzsEzp5mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKYuPrxfuzM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n4KH7o5F78
Your bubble filter should be able to take it from there :)
This is a question I'm interested in too. One hypothesis I've heard mentioned is that it's the algorithmic feeds like spotify. These algorithms only show people what they are already likely to like, and will almost never show someone something from a new genre, because a new genre is essentially unclassifiable.
I first read about it on Ted Gioias blog https://www.honest-broker.com/ however I can't find the exact article anymore.
Rick Beato has some videos discussing a related topic, namely that kids largely don't consume music the same way that they used to - they're generally not going out and buying albums, listening to the whole thing 20 times, learning about the musicians' background, etc. Even knowing the names of the albums, lead singer, band members, what instruments they play. I'm sure there are some that still do, but almost certainly the minority. No doubt this has an effect on the market, what becomes popular, etc.
30 years ago or more, people were driven to innovate by boredom. If the radio plays the same 15 songs on repeat and going to buy a cassette or CD is an experience once a month, then you're driven to start playing yourself, to seek out like minded individuals and to make some music. For every band that made it, there were a thousand that didn't. When I was in school (late 90s and early 2000s) it seemed like maybe 1/3 of kids played music in some form - I'm sure that this proportion has decreased, though I don't have stats.
I think a contributing factor is that we live in a world saturated in media. We don't have to seek out anything new - we're bombarded with new media all the time. It's slop, mostly. But no-one buys a magazine about music, reads about new bands and then seeks out their album to see if they'll like it anymore. No-one discusses music with their friends to see what the latest thing is. Making and listening to music is not a social experience anymore.
> No-one discusses music with their friends to see what the latest thing is.
Sure they do. It happens on social media, though, instead of where you can see it. Discord servers with streaming bots where teens hang out and queue up their latest discoveries to listen to together are a huge thing.
The alternative is that we've simply exhausted the possibilities of music that sounds good. There's plenty of modern, experimental music being developed today, but no sane person would want to listen to it, so in obscurity it stays.
The possibilities of music per se are pretty unlimited. The possibilities of popular music are less so, because of the requirement for simplicity. Arbitrary restrictions, like using only 4/4 time and major chords make popular music even more limited.
They're not arbitrary. Due to what I can only assume to be innate biological tendencies, people find certain types of rhythms and melodies more intuitive and pleasing than others. Most people want stability. They do not find it comfortable for measures to be uneven and changing all the time, nor do they enjoy dissonance.
4/4 time and major chords are very arbitrary. You find them intuitive because you're used to them.
Yup - in the Balkans odd rhythms and scales with minor 2nds are common and people there are used to them, but they will likely sound weird to you.
Ah yes, that music comprising random squeaks and gibbers, with the occasional crash of garbage can lids! No music is worthy of the name unless if can stir some kind of emotion in the listener, and it's hard to imagine that style doing so with anyone!
I have a theory that people tend to favour music opposite to their personality. So laid back or outright cold people like emotion-laden music such as Wagner, whereas highly-strung people find formulaic Bach fugues and late Baroque more soothing because of its somewhat dry lack of emotion.
Heroes of Might and Magic III got a lot of mileage out of "we found the bird chirps on the soundboard." And people love the soundtrack for that. I've seen other games using owl-hoots and other animal cries, and they're wonderfully atmospheric.
Also, "Happy Worker" -- a talented musician like Tori Amos can pull off a fantastic piece with truly weird instruments.
The phrase "working to prevent its creation" is the stuff of Greek tragedy.
The Dilbert pushback I've seen failed to recognize the half-dozen or so self-owns throughout the piece as well. Those self-owns make it clear that Scott sees Scott as type of himself. Perhaps this was too subtle for most people to notice, but many of his critiques were clearly self-directed as well!
Does schizophrenia typically start at a later age in women, compared to men? Are there any known racial differences?
Also, can a traumatic event, like a close friend getting shot, trigger its onset?
OK, here's what I know, fortified by a visit to GPT. The peak age of onset is a bit later in women: Male peak onset is late teens to early 20's, female is mid-20's to early 30's. the data on race are unclear. Appears that blacks are more often diagnosed with schizophrenia than whites in the US, but there are reasons to question that data. Did not see data about Asians. As for traumatic events, the common diagnoses for people who have a diagnosable response are anxiety disorders (panic disorder, generalized anxiety, depersonalization and PTSD). There's a thing called Brief Reactive Psychosis where someone develops psychotic symptoms that do not last long right after experiencing a traumatic event, but it is not considered a form of schizophrenia. Symptoms resolve quickly and do not recur. And it is not common. I have never seen someone with it.
As for somebody developing schizophrenia after a traumatic event: There is evidence that a first break occurs in association with stressful life events, but stressful events in this kind of study are things like leaving home for college, having a first sexual relationship, working on a goddam dissertation, etc. -- not mostly things like auto accidents, close friends getting shot, etc. And the psychotic state doesn't usually spring into being quickly. The picture is typically much more that the person over a period of weeks or months gets increasingly reclusive, uncivilized, and odd. They stop going to class, stop showering, make weird jokes and comments to their friends, etc. Then one day they tell someone a weird tale about new strain of Argentinian rabies that is spread by sex during daylight hours, and it's clear that they really believe what they're saying, and somebody takes them to the university health service.
Anyhoo, if you want to know more ask away.
Thanks!
I was asking about a particular media personality, not anyone I know personally, so all I was going off of was the evolution of what she's saying on camera.
36 is after the main early-adult onset peak for women and before the smaller midlife (peri-menopausal) peak reported in some studies.
Thanks.
You don't get any points for correctly guessing who I was talking about though. I made it pretty obvious. :D
There are a couple other paths to being crazy besides schizophrenia. One is being bipolar, esp bipolar manic. The lawyer in Michael Clayton who takes off his clothes during a deposition is quite a good representation of the quality of that kind of crazy. The other is being so committed to drugs that you're high all the time. Musk may have that going on. People becoming schizophrenic generally become low-energy and reclusive, so if a media personality is still showing up at work and spouting some wacko ideas on camera it's fairly likely they are manic or perpetually drugged rather than schizophrenic.
Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day: it comes at the wrong time of year. Too close to Christmas and New Year’s and not far from Presidents Day.
A much better time for it would be maybe the second week in August. This would help fill the long holiday gap between Independence Day and Labor Day. Instead of his birthday it would commemorate his famous I Have a Dream speech (August 28, 1963).
Agree, and having it be on/near his birthday is pretty arbitrary, shouldn't be hard to pick a time for the holiday and then backfill a justification. Surely there are plenty of anniversaries more relevant to civil rights, and more broadly the struggle for racial equality, than MLK's birthday.
E.g. along the lines of what you say, you could replace Labor Day with MLK Day, and then move Labor Day to spring where there's a big gap between Presidents Day and Memorial Day. Could have May Day as a holiday. Or Patriots Day.
Ironically, the rest of the world celebrates International Workers Day on May 1 to honor a labor uprising in Chicago.
Mid-April would be an ideal time for Labor Day as it would fill the three-month gap from Presidents Day to Memorial Day. Good Friday is too explicitly religious, though it’s a holiday in some states, while May Day has some lingering socialist connotations and comes too late in the gap.
Another holiday issue is that we have no Hispanic holidays even though they are now the country’s largest minority group (Cinco de Mayo is just for fun).
I always assume it's in February, during Black History Month, and am always surprised by its arrival.
MLK is overdue for cancellation anyway, apart from the whole mistreatment of women thing his entire schtick would be considered Colorblind Racism these days.
Time to commemorate a true hero instead, I nominate October 14 as George Floyd Day.
Be less annoying, please.
Yep fair call
You're behind the times. Now it's the right who is against colorblindness again.
Agreed. Terrible date.
Early April is better. There's a U2 song with the date explicitly included.
There aren't policy proposals that can fix the housing issue. Nothing fixes the fundamental problem of scarcity. Housing is a good unlike others in that you can't really create more of it. Yes, you can build more housing, but that's just chopping up existing land. The YIMBYers will point to places like Tokyo as an example but almost everything in Tokyo is apartments squished together. Do you think American families dream of owning a 500 square foot condo? Obviously not, which means that all you can really do is something like Dallas-Fort Worth where you expand outwards aggressively. But now your nice little suburban home is an hour away from your job, making your quality of life worse and there are practical limits to how far you can go out. Now anyone who wants more affordable housing has to chop up the land around you, meaning that there are fewer homes of the type Americans want. The government can favor existing suburban homeowners who want to keep their existing homes or it can favor prospective homeowners who are priced out. But you can't do anything to make them both happy.
But although it's not a policy, there is one outcome where everyone can get what they want: lower population. Existing homeowners get to keep their homes while new homeowners can afford to buy a house but that has its own issues.
We have a lot more land than places like Japan does. One solution is absolutely to build more houses. In terms of spacing, not every American wants to live in a suburb. Single family homes are a really inefficient way of housing people usually, but is still an option. Building more affordable housing to those who are completely priced out is also an option that YIMBYers advocate for.
In Seattle, developers are happily chopping up big single family lots in newly rezoned areas to build quad-plex homes and they sell very quickly, people really want housing they can afford in nice areas, even if the houses are smaller.
For that matter, people were enthusiastically buying really small Japanese style "apodments", kind of like upscale SROs, until the always-helpful city council made them illegal to build.
Do you live in a major city? Nyc residents have already traded the front lawn option for something else. But they are stuck in crummy pre war buildings with no laundry machine and no garbage disposal in the sink, barely functional AC. Those buildings could get a lot taller and a lot nicer with better policy and that would in turn create more room elsewhere for single family homes. I agree though that a tall building isnt a good substitute for a single family home, but its a great substitute for a 4 story walkup.
Sure that’s a policy issue that could be fixed if you didn’t have Mamdani as a mayor.
The inability to replace bad housing stock didnt start with mamdani. The policy fix may seem easy. But the politics of achieving it is hard and the whole purpose of the yimby movement. Hence: there are in fact housing proposals that can vastly improve housing in certain areas. They just havent been enacted. And it can be very frustrating.
Mamdani has surprisingly done a whole lot for housing in the past month, so you're kind of revealing your ignorance here.
Him and Hochul essentially ended environmental reviews and he started a task force to look at available city land for development. He's streamlined zoning variances already too. Also quite a lot of money for public housing, but I'm not really convinced how much of a difference providing cheap housing to disabled and poor people will make on overall housing costs.
The fact people are willing to pay $5,000+ a month to live in NYC shows that a significant number of people would like nice, dense housing. Concentration in cities frees up the suburbs as well for people who prefer that lifestyle.
One of his advisers helped enact an extreme rent control law. But he is also pushing for policies that lead to more violent felons in the streets so maybe that will convince enough New Yorkers to leave and make homes more affordable.
Yeah that's the biggest danger of his administration. The one thing you can't accuse him of is being anti-growth or anti-housing.
Rent control is one of the most anti growth policies you can have.
In theory, eventually, there's scarcity limits that can't simply be solved by building more... but I don't think we're *anywhere* near them.
I live one of the cities that's in the top-20 cities in the US by population and we really aren't anywhere near 'carrying capacity', either urban or suburban. At one point, I lived about a 10-15 minute drive from tech company I worked for and still drove past farms on my way into work.
And sure, not everyone wants to live in a 500 square foot condo (though... you know you can make bigger condos than that, too, right? Tokyo has a wide variety of sizes, while we've forbidden the small ones), but lots of people would, given the opportunity and we aren't building enough to meet that demand.
And the "hour from your job" problem assumes that your job is in the main downtown which is often not true, even assuming it's not remote - larger metro areas often have multiple "pockets" of more urban areas which often have offices, rather than one central urban hub that everyone commutes to. (e.g. the Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill "Research Triangle") And secondly "one hour from your job" depends on how good public transport is, which absolutely can be affected by policy choices.
>But although it's not a policy, there is one outcome where everyone can get what they want: lower population.
That's a good start, but there's another, complimentary way. It's about population density in the end, so you can improve the density not just by lowering population, but also by increasing area!
So is that finally the Grand Unifying Theory of Trump II policies? Lower the population count (deport brown people) and also increase available space (annex Greenland) to build more 'burbs because real Americans would rather change the world than change themselves. Enrich himself in the process because he's an urban developer. Be envious of Russia and China because of their huge tracts of land. It makes so much sense now.
This conveniently allows us to predict which countries Trump is going to go after next:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
Everyone below the USA (183rd) in population density can chuckle and be in danger. Venezuela (187) and of course Greenland (245th, dead last) about to go down, a few more to choose from. Notably, there are some more South American countries that would qualify, so they better watch out now. Also Canada (233), which is an ongoing interest of Trump's, but I repeat myself.
They don't need to stop at brown people, of course. Given that whites don't even make up half the population now, an aggressive ethnic cleansing effort could more than double the amount of living space available to Americans, even before expansion. Automation and off-shore labor camps can make up for the lost productivity.
>Automation and off-shore labor camps can make up for the lost productivity.
AI and charter cities, which is why Trump brought the billionaires and crypto bros on board. It fits like a glove, thank you for your contribution.
That is basically the main use case of charter cities that I can think of. It solves the issue of the citizenry getting upset over the presence of immigrants, and makes it practical to do manufacturing in a territory that the US controls without the worker protections that are meant for citizens getting in the way. Medical research also makes a lot of sense for the same reasons.
You've essentially reinvented the feitoria. Not that you're wrong, they worked pretty well for the Portuguese and the Dutch...
Huh, those really are just charter cities under a different name. Well, if we have a system that's proven to work already, that's good news for the future of charter cities as well.
It’s very reasonable for people to not want to live cramped like sardines.
“I don’t personally want this thing, therefore it should be illegal”.
The reason some people dislike the idea of living like cramped sardines is that they do not want to alter their present, habituated lifestyles, and these are based around suburban living. Or rather, their dislike is conditional on having habituated lifestyles which differ from the prospective ones.
This is to say, they have built their lives around things like gardening and lawncare, which can only be done in suburban areas. Change is frightening and people will do anything to avoid it.
However, if we look at this from the perspective of people who have habituated to dense, urban life, they would probably find the idea of giving up their urban lifestyles equally as detestable. Those people see the same fear as the first group, just reversed. The suburbs are their fear-specter.
Essentially, people become accustomed to preestablished lifestyles and their subjective preferences are merely contingent on chance.
You've never heard someone complain about the pipes having orgasms, I take it? One of the basic complaints of "living like sardines" is "I can hear my neighbors shouting and fucking."
This is a SOLVABLE problem. We can absolutely build sound-free walls.
Gardening can absolutely be done in a city, as can lawncare. Do you really need a full acre to be happy? Maybe all you need is a 10 foot by 10 foot garden (with fences to keep the deer out)?
Now now, don't get all defensive about your own insight. Own it! Run with it! Least of all, don't mistake my enthusiasm for sarcasm. Like everyone else, I've been scrambling for purchase in my attempts to plumb the depths of Trump's intentions, but you, if you'll forgive the triple metaphor, may hold the key after all.
You are very irritating.
Oh the feeling's all mutual. In a rational debate, little irritates me as much as choosing assertions that fit the desired conclusion, which I suspect is happening here: You declare all potential preconditions immutable, like zoning laws, the American Housing Dream, the size of a condo, the number of homes. All these things seem perfectly reasonable to change, yet "population size" is the only thing you'll admit. That seems VERY suspect to me.
Brandon: "The housing crisis is actually a space crisis."
You: "just build shoebox condos, dummy!"
Is it suspect to willfully misconstrue Brandon's thesis before accusing him of motivated reasoning?
Or you could just let builders build what they want and everyone gets to choose what they buy. If they don't build what people want then they go out of business. This is unbelievably simple.
That’s how you get Tokyo.
I moved from nyk to tky and got a bigger, nicer, cheaper place as a result. You may need an update as to what is available in tky. Its true that japanese seem to be fine with smaller homes. But other homes can and do exist there. Someone with a front yard and a basketball hoop lives 100 meters from my apt. Japan also has much higher population density to begin with. Tky policy in nyc would result in different homes than exist in tky.
Walk me through this, because an anchoring principle of your first post was that Americans don't *want* Tokyo. So why then, are you rejecting Fallingknife's proposal that American builders just build, and American buyers just buy, on the grounds that if that happens "that's how you get Tokyo."
Assuming you're right and nobody in the US dreams of owning a 500 sq ft condo, why wouldn't they punish a builder who created such a product by simply not buying it? Do we secretly long for the East?
Economics favor density.
Sounds like we secretly long for the East, then. Given the option to make a tradeoff, existing homeowners will sell their homes to developers for gobs of money, developers will build denser housing to allow new buyers to affordably trade off house/yard size against proximity to desirable hubs full of work opportunities, restaurants, services, social opportunities, etc, and new buyers will take the tradeoff and buy in.
That seems like an argument for YIMBY policy, though. Not so much "the government can favor existing suburban homeowners who want to keep their existing homes or it can favor prospective homeowners who are priced out," as, "the government can let the market settle into a natural equilibrium, or it can intervene to protect a specific subset of players, who like the disequilibrium they have and want to keep it going."
Chinese very famously do not do this. you can find very small houses being kept by homeowners as the expressways and mega-apartments spring up around them.
If you give an American prospective homeowner the choice between a typical home and a condo, they’re choosing the home. But the current land owner prefers to build condos because it’s more profitable, so without restriction that’s what you would get.
...Yeah, and? They don't have a housing crisis.
Yeah and the only option they really have to live in are these tiny little apartments.
Exactly. None of these actually exist: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&hs=HXCp&sca_esv=59623aa993e8ccae&sxsrf=ANbL-n54OKCrrvnFHvj_xUbgm_KaPJXzCg:1768940373668&udm=2&fbs=ADc_l-aN0CWEZBOHjofHoaMMDiKpaEWjvZ2Py1XXV8d8KvlI3p-ML-906rRL_m6h4jR-tdCH-vUIlZq9RzugLEcfjf51b4dfDKizXS4hTwRCZW2Tyeo_h9FK7Iw3R0k8aayAiwgxQtxaQNpn9K2zQZ41LPRF7NeaOQYIY1zqr3iyqiOoe9obydYrYEkk2yISZASm-Lfpad78H5IUt5i146gHHiFwFAlvUA&q=japanese+houses&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQu-e0-JqSAxWyPUQIHWyEOTgQtKgLegQIFxAB&biw=1670&bih=890&dpr=2&aic=0
There is plenty of houses available outside of the densest areas of Tokyo, and more than anyone knows what to do with once you leave it entirely. But everyone wants to live there because it turns out everyone living in the same place is extremely convenient for everyone involved. If it stopped being dense, suddenly it's no longer convenient, regardless of how much you reduce the population. Of course, if you want to raise your child in a nice home in nice school district, you can do that, because everyone isn't legally incentivized to sit on their house like their life depends on it.
How far do you have to go before you can find something that looks like a typical American home?
Obviously there are a lot of conveniences with Tokyo but it takes some things away. There are a variety of ways of living that are mutually exclusive with one another and policy can’t resolve contradictions.
Interested to see the free speech for the UK organisation. The main body already on the ground is the Free Speech Union set up by the extraordinary Toby Young. The FSU lobbies and provides legal and financial support and have won quite a few legal cases. He has been cancelled a million times but somehow still bounces back. Very sceptical on climate change and lockdowns (though not vaccines) and set up the Daily Sceptic website/newsletter. Hugely interested in education he set up the UK's first free school when the Tories made that possible. And I could go on for thousands of words and not capture his extraordinary career of successes and disasters. Oh, and did I mention, he just got appointed to the House of Lords? So he is now Lord Young. (His father was also in the House of Lords - Michael Young, the man who coined the term 'meritocracy'). Anyway all this to ask Scott to produce an article 'Toby Young - more than you wanted to know'. I think it would be great!
Was the pun intended? I would certainly be interested in an article "To be young - more than you wanted to know".
Has anyone used a cold essential oil diffuser and how was it?
I got a cheap little essential oil diffuser, I like it, and I hate refilling it every day. It seems like the cold essential oil diffusers just run for 4-6 weeks without needing more oil, which sounds awesome.
Whatever you do, my advice is not to buy this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B0D5H6GFVJ
I posted a longish review, which 13 people have found helpful, and gave it 1 out of 5 :
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R2AWFPTZBZZGNA?ie=UTF8
Thanks. That’s helpful!
How do you actually get European freeloaders on collective defense (Italy, Spain, Beligum, etc) to actually contribute and what does that contribution look like?
I was going to joke about European posturing on NATO breaking apart. "Sure", I thought, "Europeans can posture about NATO breaking apart but European security is guaranteed on the US nuclear umbrella. Without the US, the Ruskies have nukes and Europe in general doesn't. As long as Europe is absolutely dependent on the US for nuclear security, all of this is just a joke."
And, well, bravo, bravisimo to France and the UK. It looks like in July they actually sat down and are beginning to coordinate their nuclear strategy and arsenals. (1) And they actually have submarines with nuclear weapons, so they've got guaranteed nuclear second-strike capability. Yeah, it's mostly them forming a joint committee at this point but, well, that's just kinda how the Europeans do things. This is still awesome; finally some Europeans taking collective security seriously and coordinating their own key defensive plans.
And right now this looks awesome, again, bravo to the UK and France, but in 5-10 years...this still looks like Europe coasting on the Red, White, & Blue, just with 2 new flags instead of the old one. It's awesome that a European military force is arising but for the near future it looks like it will be carried, in both nuclear and conventional terms, by the British and the French. If the (no offense) the larger and richer US got fed up with European freeloading, how long until the British and French do to. Especially given the fact that the UK is outside the EU and France is...French.
But what do, like, Italian and Spanish contributions to collective defense actually look like. Is Europe really going to be comfortable with German remilitarization, including with the AfD in the wings? What can a country like Belgium actually do?
(1) https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/reading-between-the-lines-of-the-new-france-uk-nuclear-entente/
Another option is an alliance with Russia and China - which would be my preferred choice. After all Russia has invaded a sorta European country and the US threatens Denmark, a proper western country.
I’ve felt for a while that US is post western, rather anti western both on the right and left. The left is just obviously anti white/european, the right anti Europe.
>nukes and Europe in general doesn't.
I know we hate llm output on this forum but considering running your takes passed one if you are this out of your depth.
UK and France have nukes since the 60's, always have a nuclear armed sub with a credible second strike capability at sea. UK shares components with US but France's capability is completely independent.
If the US disappeared tomorrow there would still be no way the Russians could make a conventional or nuclear first strike without loosing Moscow, St Petersburg and the next ~10 most valuable targets. How much more credible do you want the European nuclear deterrent to be
The primary concern here is about unified control, structure, and guarantees. The French, for example, have had a very unique, very French, understanding of their relationship with NATO and how their nuclear forces will/should be deployed. That's what makes this arrangement with the UK such a big deal from my perspective.
Just as a quick refresher, the US nuclear umbrella is very well defined, very expansive, and has been in place since ~1945, as was the Soviet Unions. (1). This is especially important because both the US and USSR clearly understood the escalation ladder, ie what the risks were in a situation like the Cuban missile crisis and how to avoid an actual nuclear exchange. France, by contrast does not and has not participated in NATO nuclear planning and strategy. If you're someone like Poland, that makes a huge difference.
That's a big concern for border countries like Poland. If the US nuclear umbrella, which was very clear and well defined, goes away, under what circumstances will the British engage in a nuclear exchange and are those the same as the circumstances that would cause the French to fire their nukes. Are those circumstances clear to both the Russians (becuase we really want to avoid a nuclear conflict) and the Poles (who need to trust that the British and French will really risk a nuclear exchange instead of selling them out). In the abstract, the British and French have always had this capacity but actually establishing and coordinating MAD with a rival nuclear power is a non-trivial thing and I'm glad to see the British and French doing the hard work.
Also, you're a stupid poopy meanie head.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_umbrella
Considering the last time the Poles said "Russia bombed us! Invoke Article 5!" I think it would be better for the world if everyone decided to double-check before believing Poland. It is good that America geo-locks their weaponry before distributing it to mad dogs and the Poles.
Poland never invoked article 5.
What are you talking about?
Linked below. Poland, by ascribing the explosions (clearly missles, let's be fair) to Russia, was making a very serious allegation.
https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/collective-defence-and-article-5
Poland doesn't have enough military strength to defeat Russia. The only reason they were barking so loudly is "we can get all our friends to pile on." Either they were incredibly, irresponsibly twitchy, or they're just blatant warmongers (I find the later unlikely).
1) Are you withdrawing your lie that Poland invoked article 5?
There was only one time in NATO's history its collective defense provisions have been invoked, after 9/11 attacks.
2) Blaming this explosions on Russia was 100% kosher - also if these specific ones were for example AA missiles launched by Ukraine (as Russia invading Ukraine can be blamed on Russia, this includes reasonable collateral damage - and AA surely counts)
3) Also, interesting trick was used in at least some official statements about Russia-made weapons (and this covers vast majority of arsenal of Ukraine and Russia, made in Russia when it was USSR)
Are you talking about the August 2025 drone crash in Osiny?
https://en.defence-ua.com/news/evidence_points_to_another_russian_shahed_136_incursion_100_km_into_poland_warsaw_starts_with_denial_again-15539.html
Apologies! Apparently I missed one in my recollection. I was speaking of the one where Poland figured out about the geolocking, because they tried to send missiles into Russia (this was under Biden, so years ago).
What the heck you are talking about?
"they tried to send missiles into Russia" - you seem to confuse Ukraine with Poland.
Good attempt at a pivot. Given that you just learned UK/France had nukes today i'm surprised this is your core objection though. I'm not sure the US is any more or less ambiguous than UK on use of nukes. Article 5 is not if anyone takes one square foot of poland the nukes fly. Both UK and US say they will use nukes if they need to in service of the NATO alliance.
Maybe Us is slightly less ambiguous or slightly credible but I think the deterrence factor is similar
And maybe I am a meanie head but i'm a British meanie head who is a little tired of hearing how much we're freeloading and how helpless Europe are to stop Russia without the US
You have less of a standing army than Chamberlain did, and he went cringing in front of Hitler in order to buy time to arm up again. And you're reducing your police force as well, I hear.
Also, your tanks suck, and lose to shrubberies. Nato Combined Forces Doctrine does not have any solution other than "call in airstrike" (and pages of "what to do until airstrike comes"). Russia has overturned the "air superiority" model, and NATO has no "approved" solution.
I don't think you need to stop Russia. Russia just wants to sell gas and other natural resources at a fair price. You want to trade with Russia, and stop sending Germany out of business. (Why the Biden Administration found this completely unacceptable is perplexing. Russia is your natural ally.)
"Russia just wants to sell gas and other natural resources at a fair price."
are you aware of Russia invading Ukraine?
Russia is an imperialistic actor launching aggressive wars of conquest, and actively works to undermine democracy and freedom both at home and abroad by covert action and by exploiting free societies. Russia should be destroyed, or if not that diminished in its capacity to do so; the invasion of Ukraine shows that Russia is a villain.
>Russia just wants to sell gas and other natural resources
this is a lie; Russia wants a 'sphere of influence', wants to diminish other countries and is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of lives for this, including having kill-lists for civilians it seem might disagree with it. It routinely Gulags any opposition who then die in mysterious circumstances; there is no free speech; there is no justice; it is a society only marginally away from a dictatorship.
before you accuse me of falling for propaganda, please don't. I have personal experience of these things and others, and have materially supported Ukraine in resisting their invasion. I stand by these statements.
Your statements about tanks losing to shrubberies and the like are vacuous. Europe has been trying to play nice with Russia for decades, trying to see them as a rational actor who only wants to sell gas - but then you get nerve gas in capitals and countries being invaded.
Russia delenda est.
Would you apply the same metric to other countries? Ones with, say, better propaganda?
Yes, of course, Russia wants a "sphere of influence", every country wants that, except for countries too small to create a buffer zone (see Iran's buffer zone in Iraq, which it has for damn good reason). Ukraine has kill lists for civilians like Elon Musk, and even Donald Trump -- It's not that I object to the idea of a kill list (in principle this might even work for good... although it's a stretch), it is that the Ukrainian one seems remarkably ineffective and stupid.
I suppose I must confess to materially supporting suicide attacks waged by the Ukraine. Should I apologize?
Tanks losing to shrubberies is a description of materiel that fails without any enemy intervention. That is hardly a vacuous statement -- if European tanks cannot perform in the Ukraine, they are hardly ready for battlefield use in Poland. Were Russia to have tanks that had the turret fall off before getting to the front line, it would be equally stupid and funny (and I'm not saying they didn't.)
Europe is definitely going to rearm, but non-proliferation may be going out of the window at the same time, and future American presidents might well need to deal with new nuclear powers.
One of the advantages of the European pacifist spell was that some of the richest nations on Earth didn't pursue WMDs even as a side project, because they felt safe under the American nuclear umbrella. That set of incentives is now out of the window, doubly so for traditional adversaries of Russia such as Poland and Sweden.
Smaller states have always ridden along on the defense policies of their nearby allies. Belgium in particular has existed or not existed based on the views of the surrounding states.
The contributions of the smaller states will be to send modest amounts of money and provide deterrence by showing a large set of allied European resources that hypothetically could be mobilized if needed. A country like Spain has no incentive to maintain a larger standing peacetime military that could be deployed abroad on a NATO/EU mission at scale, nor does anyone else have practical authority to compel it to do so. The Med states if called upon in a WW3 scenario would contribute mostly (a) access to the Middle East, (b) food, and (c) labor. For reasons of geography and specialization, Germany and the UK would struggle to keep armies in the field and an industrial workforce producing absent substantial food and oil imports. France could feed an army, but would need help with everything else.
There is certain specialization in play within alliances. For example, Finland is really good at building icebreakers. The US likely lost its capability to do so, as it launched it last domestically built icebreaker fifty years ago.
That leaves the question of just who Europe needs to be protected against. Russia would have been the answer four years ago, but subsequent events have shown its military to be a sick joke unable to fight its way out of the proverbial paper bag. Iran doesn’t seem to present an immediate threat to Europe. The same is true for the more unstable Arab countries; in the US we’re afraid of Arabs because they wiped the floor with us 24 years ago, but most Europeans seem less fearful. Afghanistan is scary but is far from Europe and has shown no inclination to use force beyond its borders. *Maybe* a long-term threat would arise if Turkey goes fundamentalist, but I’d say the likelihood of that is very low if not necessarily zero.
The Russian military is embarrassingly bad, but even a bad military can do a lot of damage.
Russian conscripts are "embarrassingly bad" if you mean "pimped out by the military for money." This doesn't have much to do with combat effectiveness, where Russian materiel has been consistently outperforming Western materiel, dollar per dollar.
It's to the point where Israel no longer wants American-made foreign aid.
The Russian military *was* a sick joke four years ago. They've had four years of hard-earned lessons in what needed fixing in their military. And the Russian military has generally been pretty good at learning from its mistakes. There's a limit to how much rebuilding they can do while still actively stuck in a Ukrainain quagmire, but anyone who thinks the Russian military of 2030 will be a "sick joke" is smoking high-grade copium.
European militaries, outside of maybe Poland and Finland, haven't really learned the key lesson: war is a messy, ugly business with an enormous cost in treasure and blood, *that your army actually has to be good at, before the war starts*.
Russian military four years ago still was able to remove "air superiority" from the Ukrainians. NATO has nothing else, other than "call in an airstrike" in their manuals.
(This is aside from the usual European nepotism, which always gets pruned in real war).
Trump is busy proving that "limited interventions" can have outsize effects, if you do them precisely and with accurate foresight.
There were no nato flights over Ukraine.
Read the Nato combined forces doctrine manual. ask how it's supposed to help the ukraine.
Russian military isn't a joke. They are unable to conquer Ukraine in a land war, but they are very capable of wantonly destroying cities, power plants and grid infrastructure on a large scale from the air. Look at how Kiev looks every morning after the nightly wave of Shaheds and other flying bombs arrives. That is not a joke for anyone living there.
This could happen to Tallinn, Helsinki or Warsaw in the next round of hostilities. At the very least, Europe needs excellent anti-air capabilities, much like Israel does.
Russia simply doesn't want to conquer the rest of the Ukraine. They have what they need, and some comfort margin. That's good enough for a sleepy bear.
Given the sheer amount of bloodshed (Ukrainian military is encouraged to not report dead soldiers, so they get paid salaries for dead men), Russia could curbstomp the rest of the Ukraine (or, perhaps, I should say, the rest of "flat ukraine" -- mountains are hard, be they Afghani or not).
> Russia simply doesn't want to conquer the rest of the Ukraine.
but they continue conquering it
sorry but you are hilariously misinformed, to the point of trolling
It's all a question of "blood for land" right? How many more Russian soldiers are they willing to burn for the next ounce of land?
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-31-2025/
That doesn't look like "continue conquering." Maybe I am misinformed by too much Civil War and World War II wargaming? You think this looks like a lot of land to have taken in a year?
> How many more Russian soldiers are they willing to burn for the next ounce of land?
current situation, recent history, deeper history give answer: a lot of them
> You think this looks like a lot of land to have taken in a year?
1) I answered whether they want to conquer, not whether it is going well for them
2) Russia keeps pressure in hope of Ukraine collapsing
> You think this looks like a lot of land to have taken in a year?
fortunately, no - but it is not a reason for dump optimism and huffing copium too much
Russia is still moving, Ukraine is in weak position and if things go badly Russia can end occupying Baltics by the end of 2026 (not saying it is very likely, but it is not something that is unable to happen)
And if this does not happen, it will not happen due to lack of Putin's desires for it.
And europe is more than capable of responding?
Russia is vulnerable to Ukrain's airstrikes, what do you think will happen when squadrons of F35s start flying missions over Moscow which Russia is completely unable to deal with
> which Russia is completely unable to deal with
this is assumed in your question, but it seems risky assumption to make
"what do you think will happen when squadrons of F35s start flying missions over Moscow"
Trump switches them off remotely? No harm to his buddy and Peace Board cofounder Vladimir.
> Russia would have been the answer four years ago, but subsequent events have shown its military to be a sick joke unable to fight its way out of the proverbial paper bag.
What is the chance that the European army turns out to be equally or even more pathetic when shit hits the fan?
When Trump says: "NATO? what NATO? you still didn't give me the Nobel prize and Greenland. my good friend Mr Putin has a wonderful peace proposal that he gets the Eastern Europe, and you keep the Western part, and it's a very reasonable plan that you should accept, the best plan".
Russia still has millions of bodies it can throw at Europe, and China will happily supply it with parts for drones. Also Iran, if the regime stays. Currently, Europe is not even able to shoot down an occasional drone that Russia flies over their territory... the diplomatic strategy is to pretend that it never happened; we'll see how well that strategy works when there are thousands of drones flying towards strategic targets.
And on the side of Europe, Hungary and Slovakia and who knows who else will sabotage any attempt to actually coordinate on anything.
Trump's laying down better cards than -that-. Specifically, he's retreating the American umbrella to "Fortress America" (western hemisphere, down to venezuela and up to greenland). Perhaps when that's built out, the military will become more adventuresome again.
So, yes, if some strange time happened when Russia decided (against most of it's normal tendencies and proclivities), to romp over Europe, it could probably have the whole thing.
America doesn't shoot down chinese weather balloons, either. This is a "we could do that, but... why?" Spycraft has changed a lot now that drones are available -- everyone is in each other's business, and shooting down a drone says "you went somewhere we can't have eyes on" (which means "high priority spying target.")
> shooting down a drone says "you went somewhere we can't have eyes on"
Not if you shoot down *every* drone that enters your territory.
Oh, sure, and maybe that might work for Israel (on a good day. on a bad day Iran just sends "enough" to get some through). Russia is a VERY big place, as is the United States.
> What is the chance that the European army turns out to be equally or even more pathetic when shit hits the fan?
Why did the Russian underperform? Corruption, exegerting strength, new kit didn't live up to spec.
Europe has; a bigger economy, less corruption, better weapons (5th gen fighters, the best air to air missiles, the best air defense tech, much better tanks than the stuff Russia is pulling out of soviet era storage.)
Europe has around 1.5 million active personnel in basically peace time. Russia has about 1.5 after dragging every last convict they could out of jail and requesting assistance from North Korea.
Europe has another 1-2 million of pre trained, pre equipped reserve troops that could be mobilized in war time.
China will supply anyone with drone parts. European countries could shoot down drones if they chose to. They are choosing not to avoid escalation. The drone are drifting just over borders and landing in fields. There is no world in which a drone headed to Warsaw makes it there without being shot down.
> Europe has; a bigger economy, less corruption, better weapons
Yes to all... although the weapons might turn out to be obsolete for a modern drone war. Maybe spamming cheap drones with exactly the right abilities really fast is more important.
But also, Europe has a lot of internal political disunity, which will only get worse once the personnel starts actually dying. The usual bureaucracy will also slow things down -- imagine how much paperwork would be necessary for a tank to get from France to Russia's borders...
Those issues are real, but can we extrapolate them to a wartime scenario? I feel like (I have no special knowledge on this wrt to war specifically) that once shit hits the fan, things that usually take months suddenly become very doable in a day.
EU was never attacked on its territory, so we have no data here. Foreign military interventions were actions of individual countries (i.e. not EU as a whole); the few common activities were peacekeeping and training, not combat.
I wonder if EU even has common military trainings separately from NATO; if we are planning and training for the scenario if USA stabbed us in the back at the least convenient moment.
I don't necessarily mean "Trump joins with Putin and they attack us from both sides", because then I guess we are screwed anyway, but more like "Trump remotely turns off all American weapons and devices that European forces use, and everyone who uses Gmail or Microsoft Windows or Android finds that their secrets have somehow all leaked to Russia".
Russia underperformed because America always overestimates Russian capabilities. In the 1960s, we were absolutely convinced Russia was planning a full scale attack, when Russia couldn't have mounted one if they wanted to, and was trotting around a few old tanks just to "look good."
OTOH, State thought sanctions would crush Russia in 2 months. So russia overperformed as well, economically speaking.
Europe has a bigger economy. No, Europe has an "on paper" bigger economy with "added value."
Europe can't send their military anywhere because they don't trust their civilian populace (they also would have trouble if they put the troublemakers under uniform), and with good reason. Mr. Americani says "I Told You So."
> Europe can't send their military anywhere because they don't trust their civilian populace (they also would have trouble if they put the troublemakers under uniform), and with good reason. Mr. Americani says "I Told You So."
I have no idea what that means. What civilian population is not trusted by Europeans. If Europe needs to go to war it will go to war. Russia has managed to get a few hundred km into a country one tenth its size and gdp.
Obviously Europe is in a bit of a stupor right now but, in the abscence of a nuclear war, it would win.
The preferred solution is an alliance though, with Russia and China.
The Europeans have let in a substantial amount of non-Europeans, as refugees and economic migrants. Already, the number of non-Europeans has led to a mass cancellation of Christmas light displays across Germany, citing "security is too expensive."
Well, what happens if you give the non-Europeans guns? Or if you send the European boy-men to war, thus leaving only non-Europeans at home with the womenfolk? Nothing good (see the long-term coverup of rapes).
This was foreseen by Mr. Americani over half a decade ago. So, he told the Europeans, "You have a demographic problem, and you cannot raise a fighting force." He was told the "approved answer:" "Oh, that's racist!"
Now he just says, "I told you so."
Whose preferred solution is an alliance with Russia and China? Nobody wants that (except the Chinese), not even Russia.
I think you underestimate the effect of actual combat experience.
In the last exercise that Czech elite paratroopers performed with their Ukrainian counterparts, the Ukrainians wiped them out every single time with drones before they even came into close contact. Czech equipment was good, but the Ukrainians were better at using theirs, because they were actual survivors of a protracted conflict where you either perform at your best or you die. That is evolutionary pressure like no other.
As of now, Russia and Ukraine are the only two places on Earth that have profound, battlefield-tested knowledge on how to fight a drone war. Everyone else is just watching, much like the Great Powers of 1905 watched the trench slog of Port Arthur without actually adapting their militaries. Armies are conservative (including the Chinese and the American one), and their political handlers prefer huge purchases of expensive machines over anything else. It took a lot of grassroots organizing in UA to actually build up their drone force.
In a conflict between Europe and Russia, Europe would likely prevail in the end, IF it stayed united. (I am not that sure whether the French are ready to die for Danzig again, much less young French Arabs who sympathize with Putin anyway). But Russia would stand a realistic chance of conquering something tangible, the Baltics at the very least.
So, you expect Russia to completely overrun the European fortification of the Ukraine? (or simply go around it, see the Maginot line?)
No, I would expect them to try conquering the Baltics instead, if the political constellation is favourable.
Experience is a factor but not decisive. Before Trump, with the US strongly supporting NATO, no one seriously worried about Russia's troops overmatching the alliance despite NATO's lack of recent peer combat experience. Russia is more experienced now, but has significantly fewer tanks, shells, APCs, aircraft, and air defence assets than it started with. They may have more experienced 30-year-old men, but they have fewer 30-year-old men in general.
Even accounting for experience, I don't think Russia could take the Baltics. The Baltic states know the threat and train specifically around it. There are already European tripwire forces in place; British troops in Estonia, Germans in Lithuania, Canadians in Latvia. And the geography has shifted dramatically: Finland and Sweden joining NATO means the Baltics are now surrounded by allied airpower from multiple directions. Russia can't establish air superiority over Ukraine with its handful of aging Soviet jets and donated F-16s — the idea they'd achieve it against NATO fighters operating from Finland, Sweden, Poland, and Germany isn't credible.
The real question is political cohesion, but that was always the question. The tripwire forces are European, not American. If we trust that British deaths in Estonia would trigger a response, US membership wasn't the variable that mattered.
Air superiority is last year's war.
"No one seriously worried about Russia's troops" -- this is demonstrably false. If you don't think Russia has a plan to take over Europe, I assure you, they do. They probably also have a plan to take over China, and India... and even America (although I figure that plan is probably -really- wild, and may involve bears). This is standard planning, you lay out what cards you can use to take over any nation you could possibly manage. America does it too. Canada has a plan to take over America, and it's even pretty good.
> including with the AfD in the wings
I don't think that's really a concern. Germany is a European democracy: the AfD will almost certainly be banned before it wins, and if there's an unexpected surge and it manages a win, they'll annul the election and redo it.
Germany wants to call itself part of NATO despite... the treaty saying "you won't ban political parties."
> Germany is a European democracy
> the AfD will almost certainly be banned before it wins
Pick one
Why? I see no contradiction, and think they're both true.
EDIT: Maybe you're coming into this with Usamerican ideas of what "democracy" means. In the civilized world, a democracy is when the constitutional scholars and other experts in the judiciary decide who the most democratic candidate is, and then allow his party to form the government.
The US has a fairly active judiciary as far as I can see, so you may be missed a few history lessons. On the other hand in free countries, of which there are few enough, parliament is sovereign.
I can't tell if you're joking or just the world's most self aware liberal
People spend a lot of time talking about when AGI will be created. After it is created, what will we switch to talking about?
There's still climate change.
How could I forget?
Whatever you want to talk about. Do you expect to still be talking to real people at that point? Real users are a liability. Every comments section will be populated by threads personalized for each user in order to maximize engagement. You won't be able to tell the difference.
Well, there will be a long stretch where we debate "oh but is it *really* AGI"? Then after it becomes undeniable we'll start discussion when ASI will be created.
What will we talk about once we agree ASI has been created?
Whether or not there are spoons
One of the following:
“Who most overpredicted the impact of AGI?”
“How do I tie my shoes? My grandparents say people used to know stuff like this.”
“Me use rock to kill lizard. Me eat lizard.”
Velcro made people forget how to tie their shoes. They don't know how to read cursive or use flint and steel, either.
"Is it really true that people in the past used to communicate through sound waves?"
So, what you're really trying to say is... ... ... they're made out of meat?
Our relationship with it.
Why would mirror microorganisms pose a particular threat to existing life? What's their competitive advantage?
No predators and no immune systems would detect them.
Why not?
If the answer is that molecules can't detect their stereoisomers, then how will the mirror organisms detect the normal ones? If being anti-chiral comes with an automatic advantage then shouldn't that advantage work both ways? Wouldn't we be as much of a danger to them?
I looked at the linked LessWrong post so you (or some others reading along) wouldn't have to:
The short version is that there's a concern that mirror-bacteria specifically would be able to feed off substances that are achiral (i.e. have no handedness, and thus exist both for our biology and their biology), but be effectively invisible to our immune system.
There's some good conversation in the comments that suggests that our immune system would actually be able to handle it fine, but there's an additional problem that the kind of adaptive immune system that humans possess is not universal across all species, so many foundational species could be affected by pathogens of this sort.
The advantage of having a different chirality is a kind of first-mover advantage; bacteria that are like this would not have similarly-chiral predators, unlike bacteria of our chirality.
Caveat: I may be summarising this sloppily, I don't buy into this threat for a number of reasons (see more of the comments on the linked LessWrong article for some causes of scepticism, some of which I share), but I'm trying to do it some justice in a small number of words, because I too was curious and I'd like other people to have at least this basic context for the topic in this comment section without having to leave ACX for it. :)
Yeah, it sounds like this is generic risk-aversion on the basis of "this would be fundamentally different and therefore unpredictably risky". And hey, maybe that's the right attitude. I just think the disaster scenarios are unrealistically simplistic (as they always seem to be). Adaptation is tricky for any organism so I just don't buy the notion that a mirror version of E Coli would be a perfect superorganism. I'm sure there are subtleties in the way that the stereoisomers interact with world such that a well-adapted left-handed genetic sequence isn't the same as the equivalent right-handed sequence. That's just not how complex system work, ever. If it were possible to press a button and magically make a perfectly chiral copy of an existing bacteria, I would bet heavily that it would immediately die for reasons that would take decades to understand, and that tweaking its genetic code to fix those problems would be an evolutionary problem of a similar complexity to the creation of the same bacteria from scratch. But, like I said, maybe it's wiser to just assume that it would be ice-9.
Sure, life may be complex, but it's made of simple parts. The only two forces relevant to life (electromagnetism* and gravity) are very well established to have the necessary mirror symmetry.
Of course, there's the possibility that some chiral substance in the environment is toxic to mirror organisms, but evolving resistance to toxins is clearly something bacteria are capable of.
*In the case of electromagnetism it's also necessary, in the usual convention, to reverse the magnetic field upon reflection. With that caveat it works fine though.
>it's made of simple parts
But the complexity lies in the emergent interactions. I bet those aren't all symmetric. Some molecules are chiral in complex ways: they have both right and left handed parts. Sometimes several of each. I bet a universal reflection wouldn't preserve all of the relevant dynamics. I mean, I hear you about E&M and gravity being achiral ... I just bet there's something that wouldn't work. The weak force is chiral, after all. Maybe there's a yet-to-be-understood subtle consequence of that which would alter a biochemical equilibrium point enough to wreak havoc.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y8ysGMphfoFTXZcYp/biological-risk-from-the-mirror-world
This is another good introduction
Ok, I'm not a subject matter expert here, just relaying what a whole bunch of them said. You can check out this paper, I think it was meant for general consumption: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386988387_Confronting_risks_of_mirror_life
There are reports that OpenAI will run out of cash in 2027, the way things are going:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/openai-could-reportedly-run-out-of-cash-by-mid-2027-nyt-analyst-paints-grim-picture-after-examining-companys-finances
> Given how quickly the evolution of AI has upended technology across the globe and is affecting various markets, it's nigh impossible to accurately predict where anything might be headed. There's no shortage of predictions, ranging from utopia to ultimate doom for established industries. An NYT columnist, however, has one specific bet: OpenAI will be destitute in 18 months in the wake of its AI endeavors.
According to an external report last year, OpenAI was projected to burn through $8 billion in 2025, rising to $40 billion in 2028. Given that the company reportedly predicts profitability by 2030, it's not hard to do the math.
Altman's venture projects spending $1.4 trillion on datacenters. As Sebastian Mallaby, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes, even if OpenAI rethinks those limerence-influenced promises and "pays for others with its overvalued shares", there's still a financial chasm to cross. Mallaby isn't the only one thinking along these lines, as Bain & Company reported last year that, even with the best outlook, there's at least a $800 billion black hole in the industry.
I would bet heavily against this if there were a prediction market. Sam Altman has shown a virtually peerless ability to raise capital; the only scenario I can see OpenAI running out of cash would be in the aftermath of a massive downturn in AI-adjacent stocks *and* a massive disappointment in their next-gen models (or some other catastrophic product rollout of some kind).
I could very easily see ChatGPT 6 turning out to be a minor improvement over 5. Would certainly cause issues.
So? They'll raise more money. It's not unusual for a growth-stage startup to only have 18 months of cash at any given time.
I'm sure they'll have investors lined up around the block next time they want to raise money.
Thing is that they lose cash even on paid users. It's not clear how they can become profitable. Not really how early-stage Google, Amazon, Uber etc. worked.
There are good arguments against OpenAI - this isn't one of them. Amazon lost money until 2003 and even afterwards had years of sparse profits. Uber went public with huge losses and turned profitable in 2023. Google is the only one that rapidly turned profitable, and while you can dismiss approximately ~99.9% of companies with the line of reasoning "not as good as Google," it's not a useful way to view the world.
The current version of the product is not the real product. The current version of the product is just what they sell to help offset the development costs of the real product. The gamble is that the real product, when it arrives, will be worth enough to make all these other numbers seem trivial (and also that it doesn't kill us all).
> The gamble is that the real product, when it arrives, will be worth enough to make all these other numbers seem trivial (and also that it doesn't kill us all).
And to be clear, I've run some numbers on this and if you're able to counterfeit just ~50% of white collar jobs just in America for 1/3 the current price, the AI company(ies) that do this will be netting at least $13T a year, or a third of the entire present economy. And that's NET.
"The business plan is to create God and ask him for money", as Matt Levine put it.
Hilarious. I mean *I'd* invest in that business plan!
I hadn't heard that. Droll.
It's entirely possible that the real product would have been worth enough to make all these other numbers seem trivial...except Google, Anthropic, xAI, and Deepseek all have better and cheaper models, so nobody uses OpenAI's model.
OpenAI will run out of cash... if they don't raise more money. But they will raise more money, and easily, because every investor on Earth is desperate to get exposure to them.
Speak UK: despite claiming "25 arrests per day" they can only list 18 convictions in total, many of which are, by their own criteria, racist abuse directed at specific individuals (and some others are genuinely concerning cases of racism by serving police officers). Literally their only landing-page cited source is the *Daily bloody Mail*. I feel quite concerned that this is the bar for ACX grant recipients.
Worth noting that under the terms of their proposed instrument the doxxing of Scott Alexander would be protected free speech (specifically, harassment and intimidation are only prohibited if they're face-to-face or conducted repeatedly; one-off online publication seems to be protected regardless of the size/reach of the publisher or the vulnerability of the target).
I'm confident the ACX grant programme does far more good than it does harm, overall - but, well, it's difficult to be sufficiently EA-minded to think of it that way when stuff like this is so much closer to home than any potential successes.
(note 1: I concede that of their 18 cases many genuinely are miscarriages of justice where the defendant should have been protected by free speech laws but wasn't - I'd say this is true for perhaps half of them - but by their own statistics that's 25 arrests *per day* and maybe 9 miscarriages of justice *in total*: I very much suspect this is a better figure than most countries, the USA in particular, achieve...)
(note 2: Why are anti-bigotry and anti-harassment laws so broad in scope?
Because perpetrators become incredibly adept at judging the threshold for police intervention and staying only-just below it whilst still causing life-changing harm to victims. Every proposed way of solving this is terrible, but "legislating against even on-paper-light harassment and allowing the police/judiciary sufficient common-sense discretion as to whether to prosecute/convict" seems to be slightly less-terrible than other terrible solutions (as evidencd by Speech UK's own 9-odd cases of injustice overall from their own claimed 25 arrests per day).
For example, let's say there's a student group chat and every time the black kid posts in it, somebody else posts a photograph of a banana. This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so - but if you make it illegal then eventually somebody somewhere is going to be come to the attention of the police for innocently posting a harmless photograph of a banana that got misinterpreted by somebody else. Since it's essentially impossible to define in law whether a particular banana photograph is racist or not, current UK law gives the police powers to interview people who post banana photographs that come to their attention, and as a backstop it gives the judiciary powers to determine, in the course of a fair trial, which ones genuinely were intended to be racist.
This system is, I admit, terrible and it fails in awful life-ruining ways - but it is *less* terrible than the system proposed by Speech UK, and it ruins far fewer lives than their system of legally protecting almost all racism and online abuse would)
Itd probably be easier for you to just accept that SA has different values. As a libertarian leaning American, he and many of his readers think legally protecting almost all racist speech is good not bad. You can expound the reasons you think otherwise, but he'll keep giving to groups that champion free speech.
As for the scenario you are concerned about. Their website says they consider limitations including "Repeated, targeted harassment of individuals". So this behavior would potentially fall out of protection
Thanks for the reply! It's true: I agree that would be easier.
I think legally protecting most bigoted/harassing speech has helped make the USA into what it is today. If that's what Scott wants, fine, but I'd rather he stopped trying to make Britain into what the USA is today.
Prohibiting "repeated, targeted harassment of individuals" allows for one-off-but-large-scale harassment of individuals (such as the doxxing that Scott says was so harmful) and for the repeated long-term harassment of groups (including small and vulnerable groups). And for other edge-cases addressed by large bodies of statute and case law dating back centuries - Speak UK would have this large and well-established body of law torn down without anything similar to replace it (leaving those the laws were designed to protect left unprotected).
This isn't even just a case of Chesterton's fence: in this case we /actually have evidence/ for A) what public discourse in a free-speech-absolutist state is like, and B) how much freedom, democracy, and open public debate we have in Britain* under our laws prohibiting bigotry, harassment, etc.
* (Specifically, the UK scores 9.9 on The Economist's global democracy index; the USA scores 7.85)
Perhaps a less well trod area of discussion than the merits of free speech would be the morality of cross border political influence, which is what you are pointing out here. One could claim, its moral to try to induce free and fair elections overseas as that way the ppl can get what they want. Its even moral to influence the electorate itself as that is just the spread of ideas, but its immoral to attempt to lobby the elected representatives directly, its up to the ppl of that nation to tell them what they want. Funding Speak UK might be a little bit of both of the 2nd two.
I'm not sure I could call the former a well-trod area of discussion; one of the reasons I felt so strongly inclined to comment is that I see very vocal "free speech absolutist" libertarian types (whose views, as you pointed out, Scott seems to share) but nobody at all really espousing the merits of the UK's long-held policy of regulating those areas of speech where we have strong evidence of their harms, but little evidence of any benefits from leaving them unregulated - despite the country having successfully followed the policy for a very long time. That seemed rather too one-sided, to me!
For your second point, I would agree with the idea that trying to induce free and fair elections in another country indirectly (eg. by means of economic incentives, speeches in the UN, etc. etc.) is morally permissible - possibly praiseworthy, even - but I question the *efficacy* of trying to make a 9.9-index democracy more democratic by inducing it to emulate a 7.85-index democracy.
For your final point, I'd agree that directly funding a political lobby campaign (or otherwise purchasing political influence) in another nation, the consequences of which one won't be subject to oneself, is wrong insofar as it seems like it sets up perverse incentives, dangerous precedents, etc. It may of course still come out ahead in the utilitarian calculus - but I don't think it does in this particular case (which of course goes back to your well-trodden free speech vs. honesty/civility topic, upon which I'll spare you any further remarks..)
Thanks once again for the polite and well-reasoned replies. It's a pleasure to talk to you, disagree as we may!
"This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so"
It's only life-ruiningly bad because children are slaves who aren't allowed to leave their communities. If I find a community where everyone is extremely rude to me for no good reason, either online or in-person, I could just decide not to interact with their social network. But students and teachers can make schools (and student group chats) really horrible because runaways are forcibly returned by authorities including the police if they try to leave.
What Does Free Speech do?
1) Prevents Backstabbing -- imagine if that banana-posting kid simply sabotaged the black kid's work, so that the black kid couldn't ever get a passing grade, and got held back?
2) Prevents Isolation -- even the racist can find friends, and friends make the entire group easier to infiltrate, and also easier to defuse (Not All White Supremacists murder people).
3) Improves Honesty -- you no longer have a "lie to everyone" ethos, where people are incentivized to lie and nobody knows what anyone else believes.
4) Improves people's mental health. If you aren't Type A Hostile, and convinced everyone is sneaking around and doing things behind your back, your blood pressure is lower, statistically speaking.
5) Social interactions with the banana-posting kid may lead to them "no longer being so racist". But you have to target that kid first, yes? Otherwise, he might just avoid your "wellintentioned outreach." Imagine 200 interactions with the banana posting kid, gently asking him for sources, showing him "well performing" black students, etc. Maybe those 200 interactions stop a school shooting. Maybe many people don't die.
I think 5) is a very important function of free speech. You get to say your thing, and see how many people you respect say "yeah, that's right." If you get laughed at, maybe you improve your argumentation.
"This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so - but if you make it illegal then eventually somebody somewhere is going to be come to the attention of the police for innocently posting a harmless photograph of a banana that got misinterpreted by somebody else. "
And that's why it should absolutely not be illegal. The proper recourse is for the black kid to leave the group chat and get better friends (if the chat is private), or for the school to ban the harasser from the chat (if the chat is school run). The law's role is not to shield everyone from every unpleasant interaction ever. That is a sure path to authoritarianism, and I'd much rather be harassed by a kid in a group chat than by an authoritarian state with a monopoly of violence over me.
Maybe I don't understand how school group chats work and possibly I could have picked a better example! I have to admit I'm, well.. not exactly close to school age myself..
I'm imagining (perhaps mistakenly!) a group chat that is not run by the school but that the entire class (or form or year or house or whatever..) is a part of, almost-all online social interaction is initiated there, all event invites, sports, club and society info, all social news and chat, even essential school information is disseminated that way (eg. the teacher tells the head of the class "there's a test next week" and the head of the class disseminates it through the group chat). Telling this kid he should just leave the chat is basically the same as saying he can't have a social life for the rest of his school career. (And after he's left school school - even if I'm wrong about how school group chats work, workplace group chats seem to work exactly like this.)
I agree that if the kid *can* sort it out himself, or with help from friends, or the school, or parents, or whatever, that's *vastly* preferable to having the police involved. But I want the kid to have the protection of the law for when those preferred systems fail, as in some cases they tragically do, and I don't think having a law against racial abuse or harassment makes the country into some kind of authoritarian state.
What do you mean by "head of the class"? Would the "head of the class" be a student? Picking one student as the "head" and making all communication from the teacher to the students go through them, so that if said head doesn't do his job properly then the rest of the students miss key information, seems to me to just be a bad way to run things, even irrespective of any other issues we've been discussing.
And if the "head of the class" was a teacher or staff member, why would they be posting information in a student-run group chat, rather than using their own channels?
It's how it was done when I was in school? The teacher would pick one student, disseminate all information to them, and they would be expected to disseminate it to the rest of the class however they wanted - if they told the rest of the class but somehow failed to tell you, and you missed the test (or whatever) it was typically considered to be your fault for "not finding out".
There was no such thing as a group chat when I was at school*, but twenty-odd years later, when I went to sea, the system was exactly the same amongst cadets, except by then the dissemination was done via group chat.
(*Except for, y'know, a group of people, chatting..)
I'm dead certain that if the person was irresponsible and deliberately didn't tell someone repeatedly, there would be consequences.
Nope.
> It's how it was done when I was in school? The teacher would pick one student, disseminate all information to them, and they would be expected to disseminate it to the rest of the class however they wanted
I've never seen that happen. When I was in school, if a teacher wanted information disseminated to a class, they would announce that information in class.
Today, they may post an official statement to a website run by the school.
> For example, let's say there's a student group chat and every time the black kid posts in it, somebody else posts a photograph of a banana. This is obviously a case of racist harassment, and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible*
I think the problem with all this discourse is that it vastly privileges certain types of bullying over all others.
Why does the hypothetical black kid being bullied for being black deserve a massive state-level response, but not the short kid bullied for being short, or the rich kid bullied for being rich, or the kid with weird teeth bullied for having weird teeth, or just the kid who is bullied because his classmates think his reaction to being bullied is funny?
I find this argument pretty disingenuous, I have to say. You don't claim "people are starving in Africa, so my food should be taken away too otherwise we're vastly privileging my right to dinner over theirs". Yes, I agree that privileging racist bullying over other types of bullying (and bullying over other types of abuse) is a problem. I don't think the solution is to remove protection from racist abuse victims whilst doing nothing about any of the rest of it.
The point of law is to step in when other systems fail. The other bullies' parents should be raising them to not be bullies; where they fail the other kids themselves should ostracise bullies and protect the victim; where the kids fail the teachers/schools should prevent bullying; and so on. The law is kind of a final back-stop to stop bad things happening when everything else fails, so: if all those other systems have tried and failed and this kid is still being harassed and racially abused, *of course* he deserves protection under the law (and if you want to describe protection under the law as "a massive government effort" then fine: he deserves a massive government effort. Government, like Jungle, is massive and making that effort is what it is there for.)
If there's an easy uncomplicated way to extend similar protections to other sorts of abuse victims then great, I'd be most glad to. But it took us decades (centuries?) to make inroads into racism and sexism and they're the obvious stand-out ones so I'm not exactly confident on that score, and basic human compassion says that we if we can protect some kids we should do so, even if we can't protect everybody.
You find it so disingenuous that you didn't even bother to address it.
They are not "obvious stand-out ones." All the more in that this law has been used to bully people
You seem to have a different stance on the role of law than most. I, and most people here, don't believe that the point of law is to step in when other systems fail, but rather to govern a very narrow and minimal scope.
This is a great point that doesn't get mentioned enough. Racism is widely considered uniquely super bad, but other immutable physical characteristics are mostly fair game. The closest characteristic to get such protection is religion, but that's not even immutable. It's not logical, it's vibes-based morality.
Race has political significance. Modern societies have all sorts of disparate peoples coming together and mingling, and in order to maintain public order certain ethical behaviors or etiquettes need to be adopted in order to avoid conflicts between these groups. Back when religion was a major risk for group conflict, there were all sorts of laws and customs about regulating interactions between different religious groups. For instance, keeping them apart.
But that doesn't mean the races need to be treated equally. Given the wide gap in population and capabilities between the races, there minority races simply do not have any leverage to make demands. Even in the US, blacks didn't force whites to do anything. Their rights were given entirely willingly by the whites. It can be taken away just as easily.
" Even in the US, blacks didn't force whites to do anything. Their rights were given entirely willingly by the whites."
A massive civil war and nationwide protest movements are what "entirely willingly" looks like to you? I'd hate to see what "unwillingly" looks like.
In all seriousness, I think you must have gotten your history from very biased sources. Every victory in the fight for black peoples' civil rights was won by a coalition in which large numbers of U.S. blacks were extremely active and impactful participants. U.S. whites didn't just wake up one day and en-masse decide they wanted to be less of shitheads to their non-white neighbors and quietly vote in different laws. They were persuaded, gradually, by a thing called "activism." Much of it was carried out by black people. And much of it *does* involve applying leverage and making demands: strategically, in the places it will be most effective.
"It can be taken away just as easily."
The U.S. is currently in the middle of the most massive and prolonged wave of civil unrest in generations, largely due to certain relatively limited and targeted attempts to take away some of those rights. Again, if that's your notion of "easy," I'd hate to see what "hard" looks like.
> The U.S. is currently in the middle of the most massive and prolonged wave of civil unrest in generations
The difference is that this time, those in power have no sympathy for the activists. The whole point of the crackdown in the first place was to remove the influence these people have on society. We are about to see what the state is capable of when it actually wants something.
Modern commerce and urban lifestyles are easy to disrupt through terrorism and riots. Blacks did just that back during the civil rights era. They and other low-performing groups continue to do that periodically when their perceived desires go unmet, see the George Floyd riots or any of the post-2000's Paris riots.
The elites of society have a number of options. They could restyle society under the fashion of medieval institutions and lock all their wealth and assets up behind castles and other fortifications, sallying out only with entourages of guards. They could attempt to genocide all of the low-performing groups in society, although that would come at some cost.
Or they could do what they do now... Which is bribe and placate disgruntled groups to the point where things will mostly run smoothly.
This last option appears to be the least costly, and so this is likely why our society is styled the way it is.
Interestingly, the "uniquely bad" aspect was codified in American law as being targeted at a "discrete and insular" group of people. Racism was worse than sexism because a racist can go his whole life without ever needing to interact with someone of another race, while the analogous statement is obviously not true of a sexist.
The American legal system seems to have completely forgotten what their own standard meant; in recent Supreme Court arguments, the justices have been insisting that transsexuals constitute a "discrete and insular" class.
What about a gay sexist, though? Surely he/she could largely avoid interactions with the opposite sex, if so inclined?
I think the basic idea is he's still got a mom.
What about gay sexist orphans?
This is at least partly because the types of discrimination which are legally prohibited tend to be the same ones which used to be legally enforced, or at least enforced through the machinery of the law.
So until the mid twentieth century in many places it was legal to attach to the deed of a house a provision that it could not be sold to a black person or a Jew. (It was also generally possible for a seller to get such a restriction removed, but while it was in place it would be legally enforcable.) Later on, by the late 1960s it became illegal to refuse to sell or rent your home to someone on grounds of the race or religion of the prospective purchaser or renter. In an ideal world I think we should just prohibit the use of the law to enforce discrimination rather than make it illegal for private persons to discriminate, but I understand why people think this is a problem the law should solve.
I've not looked too deeply into the org, but on the surface I'd say most of those cases listed shouldn't have happened. I'm going to guess we may differ on the some of the racist ones - I don't think people should be racist, but I don't think saying racist things in a *private group chat* should be illegal. It's very 1984, in my view.
And I'd say the "daily mail" reference can't help but be a reverse argument from authority - ok, we don't like the paper because it's a low-brow tabloid, fine, but the only thing that really matters is whether the individual story in question is true.
I see lots of people (majority left wing) in the UK outright dismiss any reference to the DM - it's fully a meme at this point - but the general complaint seems to be "they draw attention to things I don't like having attention drawn to" e.g. immigrant crime, as opposed to any individual story in question being false. Of course they have an agenda in choosing what stories to run, but so does the Guardian and the BBC.
Other than that I agree with you that free speech in general is a non-trivial problem to solve, legally, and going too far in either direction causes its own issues. The one thing I'm certain of is that criticism, satire and mockery of religion must be protected and that the distinctions between race, culture and religion made crystal clear in law, lest it all be successfully swept up under the banner of 'racism' or 'islamophobia' i.e. blasphemy laws via the backdoor (or actual re-introduction of blasphemy laws, for which we have sitting MPs supporting at the moment, and only 8 MPs having supported a pro-free-speech, anti-blasphemy law motion tabled last year)
> but the only thing that really matters is whether the individual story in question is true.
It is not.
Or, rather, the headline of both the Daily Mail article, and the banner referencing on Speak's homepage, are complete lies. The Daily Mail article itself tells you its actual methodology in paragraph 14, and it does not at all align with the headlines or central claims above.
I agree that many of those cases shouldn't have happened (I'd say around half of them), but I think that Speak UK's proposed Act would leave lots of vulnerable people unprotected and to justify their proposal we would need A) a much higher base-rate than just nine bad cases would seem to suggest, and B) much stronger supporting evidence than a single Daily Mail article.
I'm not sure your criticism of Daily Mail dismissal (er, or your dismissal of Daily Mail criticism..?) is justified:
1) Most fundamentally, I think people who want to write new statute (and for that matter people who receive ACX grants..) genuinely ought to provide better-quality citations than a single newspaper article (from any newspaper), even if the newspaper article is technically true.
2) If they do cite a newspaper article, and that newspaper article is true, I think they ought to be politically aware enough to recognise that the newspaper in question is one that nobody takes seriously: citing the Daily Mail makes me think that either A) they genui cannot find any other source for their claim at all, which makes me suspicious of the claim, or B) that they don't actually realise the Daily Mail's reputation in the UK, which makes me suspicious that they might be somebody from another country trying to interfere with British politics (and have laws enacted that they themselves don't have to live with)
3) The information was supposedly obtained via a publicly-available freedom of information act request. Why do Speech UK cite a Daily Mail article about it (that doesn't itself provide the data) and not the FOI request itself? This seems deliberately obfuscating at best, and at worst as though they wanted to link to the Daily Mail's (frankly incendiary) report on it more than they wanted to present any actual data.
4) (Now addressing the truth of the article in question .. sorry to keep you waiting..!) The figures referred to (but not actually given…) by the Daily Mail seem (as far as I can tell) to count people arrested for racist tweets etc. together with people arrested for some cases of (eg.) offline sexual harassment, online sexual abuse, “revenge porn”, online grooming of minors, etc. etc. - presumably all things both the Daily Mail and Speak UK agree should be illegal - they’re counted by Act, not by nature of offence. I can understand the Daily Mail counting all of these together (but not explicitly saying they are, quelle surprise..) in order to make misleading implications about the number of racist tweet arrests, but I'm not okay with prospective legislators or ACX grant recipients doing the same thing.
[Irrelevant side-note, feel free to skip… I'm old enough to remember the Daily Mail Journal of Oncology (a list of all the things that the Daily Mail claim causes and/or cures cancer (now sadly offline). It ran to hundreds of mutually-contradictory items, was a running joke in medical circles, and shows how deeply misleading and untrustworthy you can be whilst still being entirely legal - which is kind-of my issue with the Daily Mail - and crucially was entirely apolitical..]
I agree that blasphemy laws (or other laws that ended-up being functionally similar) would be terrible for the country. I'm just not okay with a “solution” that leaves lots of vulnerable people unprotected against genuine racism, abuse, and harassment. If the distinction can be clearly made in law such that only the latter are prosecuted - great. If it can't be made perfectly and we need to accept some kind of imperfect compromise law, well, I think we kind of already have that and I struggle to understand the mindset of people who think the way to improve the quality, niceness, and usefulness of online discourse is to remove legal protections against online racism, bigotry, etc. I wouldn't exactly say our online spaces are in any danger of developing a shortage of these things any time soon….
What is your argument in favor of racism being illegal? That a picture of a banana would have life-changing consequences for a black person? I'm not sure I understand the difference there between racism and other kinds of insults, or are all insults covered by your proposed law against harassment and abuse? Do you think all insults should be illegal? What about harsh criticism? Could repeated harsh criticism have life-changing consequences?
I'm not proposing some new "law against insults", I'm defending our existing laws against harassment, abuse, racism, etc. The laws aren't perfect, but they do address every single one of the questions you ask*. You can read them here:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27/contents
*Except for "What's the argument for making racism illegal?", upon which I'll give my tuppence worth (since you ask!)...
I think there's a sort of matrix: if you say something that you'd like to say that doesn't hurt anybody else, that's positive on net. If you say something that you'd like to say but other people are (nontrivially) hurt by, that's net negative. If you're prevented from saying things that you'd like to say (but don't hurt other people) that's net negative. If you're prevented from saying things that you'd like to say but that (nontrivially) hurt other people, that's net positive.
Our goal in passing laws is to get as much of the positive and as little of the negative as possible. (To minmax, if you want to think of it that way..) But this is difficult because it's basically impossible to set out, in law, into which square of the matrix all the infinite different things a person might say should go, based on some impossibly-perfect weighing-up of whether they're positive or negative on net.
So, we try to use some heuristics. "This one type of speech almost-always does more harm than good so it should be restricted by law". "This one type of speech almost-always does more good than harm so it should be protected by law". "This type of speech could go either way so go away and figure it out amongst yourselves".
I admit these heuristics aren't perfect, but if we use them properly I think they get us closer to maximising the positive and minimising the negative than does the "free speech absolutism" strategy.
Because 99% (or whatever) of speech genuinely is net positive, and because "always free speech everywhere" is a much, *much* neater-looking rule than "free speech except for exceptions X, Y, and Z in circumstances A, B, and C", I think we're fooled into thinking that the free-speech absolutism position must automatically be correct. But if we carefully apply some (admittedly flawed and ugly) heuristics such as "free speech except for certain kinds of racism in certain places" I think we can get that 99% up to 99.9% (or whatever).
Put another way:
Racism is bad for society. It hurts people, hurts social cohesion, and leads to concrete measurable harms. Free speech is good for society. We unfortunately can't simultaneously have [free speech] + [nonracism] because people apparently choose to be racist. So, we have to choose between [free speech] + [racism], or [free speech except for racism] + [nonracism].
In private spaces, civilised countries choose [free speech] + [racism], on the principle that nobody else has to be in that space if they don't want to and if you want to be racist in your own space the freedom do do so makes your life better but doesn't hurt anybody else.
In public spaces (which includes much of the internet) and for public servants (such as policemen) civilised countries choose [free speech except for racist abuse] + [nonracism], on the principle that other people have to be there whether they like it or not* and the racism harms some of those people without really bringing any real benefit to anybody.
Just my tuppence worth, of course! I haven't thought about this for very long and I'm sure there are some flaws in the above, but hopefully it works as the basis for an argument in favour of restricting racist public speech?
I don't think the government has a right to tell me I can't express an idea, any more than I have the right to tell someone they can't express an idea. Obviously you disagree and that's a value difference, so no point arguing about that.
But I believe that valuing free speech is better from a utilitarian perspective as well. A world where the government has that power is a strictly worse one, even if it allows a few (more) people to say racist things.
For one, freedom of speech is a protection against tyranny. There is a slippery slope here, where, for example, restrictions on racist speech become restrictions on speech criticizing government policy, like affirmative action or immigration. A government and society that does not value freedom of speech will not value other individual freedoms (like a right to self defense), and have steeper gradient toward collectivism, utilitarianism, and literal mountains of skulls.
Secondly, a society where people are first off concerned about being politically correct in their speech is one where truth is not a priority. If you don't prioritize saying true things, then pretty soon you can't build bridges or rollout a vaccine during a pandemic efficiently, or you shut down your nuclear power plants, and people die, your economy suffers, and life is worse for everyone.
Third, for most people (not authoritarians like yourself) it is deeply unpleasant having a threat over you about what you can say or write. It insults your dignity as a person. And though I might not leave the house for two days and not care, if I was on house arrest and not allowed to leave, I would care very much. Humans value freedom, which is why it takes enormous amounts of state violence, or threats of violence, to keep it from them.
Fourth, arresting racists for saying bad things turns them into "martyrs" and radicalizes them. It doesn't stop racism and probably makes it worse.
Fifth, trusting the government to decide what counts as racist is naive. 1960s Alabama would have considered any criticism of white treatment of blacks to be racism against whites. 2010s progressives were extremely racist yet successfully painted themselves as anti-racist, and were not judged as racist by the state.
I'm willing to allow bad speech so it can be corrected. So someone can interact with someone with a dumb idea. Otherwise? The dumb ideas simply metastasize inside people's heads. And lonely people "make statements" by crashing planes into buildings.
Yeah it seems a bit bonkers to me, this idea that the government should be getting involved, or even has the ability to prevent people from insulting each other. It's a deeply authoritarian mindset.
Yes. The government does get involved in "simple assault" occasionally, but that's "credible threat of violence" not "you're a dumb-dumb"
As always it's interesting seeing the same people who are here arguing that UK laws on hate speech are an affront to liberty and civil society are the same people who were arguing that it's fine for police to execute an unatmed woman in her car in broad daylight because he was apparently terrified for his life.
I used to think the UK was crazy about free speech until the Larry Bushart case happened.
What's the hypocrisy here? Those are both cases arguing that the actions of the strong should not be restricted.
What rubbish. As we all know, the hate-speech laws are shamelessly used to intimidate and bully. Down to and including attacking people for publishing unquestionably true facts of obvious political importance, thus working to keep voters in the dark.
People who can conduct frontal attacks on democracy itself are the strong.
Yes, exactly. Which is why, in the US, the right has proven themselves to be superior by seizing power, and thus their agency is no longer retricted. People upset about this in the UK should try to do the same.
Try, and the police will arrest you.
Even Trump did it, why can't you? You all have no excuses.
Who are 'the strong' in the British example?
The people who feel that their agency should not be restricted. That is the root of the issue, yes? That people should not have their speech restricted in the interests of those who lack the leverage to make demands.
In what sense are those people 'strong'? Being oppressed is usually considered a marker of weakness, not strength.
And now in the US, they're not oppressed anymore. They always had it in them, they just needed to realize they could actually just do things. The spell of liberal morality is being broken, and now the natural hierarchy is in the process of being restored. Other countries will follow suit, I'm sure.
Lack the leverage? The ability to get people arrested for an entirely spurious claim of emotional damage is not lacking leverage.
Knock it off, you're doing the purely-tribal, reddit-level style of "debate" where every issue is the same and everyone who disagrees with you is a stereotyped strawman of your fantasy of "the other side". The kind of thing people come here to get away from, and that Scott has mocked repeatedly (e.g. "None of this “I’m going to vote Trump because I think Clinton is corrupt” followed by “Yeah, but Reagan was even worse and that just proves you Republicans are hypocrites” followed by “We’re hypocrites? You Democrats claim to support women’s rights but you love Muslims who make women wear headscarves!”" from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/).
Have you actually counted the number of people supporting each combination of stances?
She wasn't executed, she was killed as an incidental outcome of resisting arrest. Her death was much more an outgrowth of protest culture than it was of law enforcement culture.
Oh really? Got any data on how much overlap there is? And you aren’t really *interested* in the very high overlap (the one you believe exists). Actually you are gleefully contemptuous of the imagined hordes in your imaginary overlap whose thinking is so much less sharp and nuanced than you believe yours is.
The overlap might just be Wanda but she makes up for it in quantity
Your projector is brighter than his projector.
How does online racism and "abuse" ruin lives? That's just ridiculous thing to claim.
>and if you're the black kid it feels *utterly horrifible* - potentially even life-ruiningly so
No it isn't, words on the internet can't bring real harm.
Scott's entire villain ark is people being mean to him in college. Ask him how this stuff can possibly hurt anyone.
In the college - that means irl, in a place he has to attend to get education. Compared to the internet where you don't have to communicate with anyone who is mean to you and even visit sites where it is normal. How is it comparable?
And now he's far more powerful and influencial than any of them, to the point that they can't meaningfully hurt him anymore. What's the issue?
...that most of us are utilitarians, and are supposed to dislike suffering?
I really don't understand that whole 'these people are suffering massively in ways that will traumatize them for life, what's the big deal?' angle, here.
Like, if your utility function doesn't already include a term for that being bad, I don't think it's the type of thing you can be argued into. Just, you know, be aware that people will avoid you if they see you acting on that preference.
There's also the self-interested aspect of this, namely that the people who are very invested in the free speech rights to attack one minority are likely also interested in going after other minorities when they feel strong enough. Better to nip this kind of thing in the bud early on.
> ...that most of us are utilitarians, and are supposed to dislike suffering?
Uh... I think you're mistaken about that. Even Scott has admitted that he's not a hard utilitarian, and nowadays he seems more interested in virtue ethics.
> Just, you know, be aware that people will avoid you if they see you acting on that preference.
I wouldn't assume that everyone shares your brand of slave morality. It seems at least half the population of the US is interested in giving people the respect that they deserve.
For this to be so, I think you'd have to define "real harm" to preclude pretty much any form of mental health.
Scott himself has described serious tolls on his mental health owing to merely having his full name published online.
Moreover, it's trivial to find statistics on the number of people who've harmed or even killed themselves owing to online abuse. An NHS meta-analysis I just found in response to another reply puts the rate of attempted suicide following cyberbullying at 257% of the UK baseline.
Scott was harmed by doxxing, in the UK you just call someone some racist slur and it's enough to be jailed.
As for people harming or killing themselves as a result of "online abuse" they willingly subjected themselves to - how is it fair to punish someone else for the harm they inflicted on themselves?
> Scott himself has described serious tolls on his mental health owing to merely having his full name published online.
But that was entirely his fault for publishing under his full name on the internet, despite what an obviously terrible idea that is. He is of course free to take revenge on the press by pushing to get the whole industry shut down, but that doesn't change the fact that it was his error that left him exposed in the first place.
> Scott himself has described serious tolls on his mental health owing to merely having his full name published online.
OK, then. Since the same logic applies, I guess you will say that the worthless journalist who wrote that hit piece should be arrested and thrown in prison, right?
Well I do think doxxing should be illegal, if that's what you're asking, whether it’s done by online abusers or by journalists. As for “..and thrown in prison” I'm not sure I'm really qualified to pronounce sentencing!
Or you can teach people to not let their mental health be subject to the whims of anonymous haters on the internet. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". That was, if never quite perfectly true, at least aspirationally true. And it worked quite well for many generations, enough so to be one of the classic Copybook Headings.
Now, we too often teach our children to be maximally harmed by words, because that harm gives them status and power and forces the rest of the world to do whatever it takes to make them not feel bad.
Well, OK, not so much "the rest of the world", just the bubble within which that perverse ideology holds true. And that's not going to be enough to prevent great harm to the people you trying to protect.
My daughter told me her teacher said having hateful words directed at you can feel just like rocks. I was shocked how closely it contradicted exactly that metaphor. I stopped short of challenging the teacher to a rocks vs hateful words duel. But the rot is deep.
> Now, we too often teach our children to be maximally harmed by words, because that harm gives them status and power and forces the rest of the world to do whatever it takes to make them not feel bad.
That honestly might be a consequence of kids not getting hit enough. The source of the harm is the surprise of being given the treatment that they are entitled to, and no more. There would be no surprise if they come to expect it from a young age.
It is trivially easy to prevent online abuse from killing you. Simply don't kill yourself.
Also, attempted suicide is an easily gamed metric. The classic example of women having more attempted suicides while men have more actual suicides is instructive.
Which causes more harm to mental health: a picture of a banana, or laws and customs that characterize any insult as traumatic, potentially life-changing and illegal events?
Of course words can harm, teenagers have killed themselves from non-physical bullying. I know you say "on the internet" as a distinction from, say, real life, but for kids these days, is it? I see how teens are completely captured by social networks predatory algorithms and phones in general and imagine it's not so simple to just not use them.
Yeah, like you said: they killed themselves, so the harm was self-inflicted.
So what?
Hate-speech laws do not criminalize speech for driving someone to suicide. It doesn't even have to do any harm. Meanwhile, speech that does drive someone to suicide does not fall under the law -- such as falsely claiming to be harassed by someone else's speech and driving that person to suicide.
To cite such cases is to show the problem with the law.
I was responding directly to the "words on the internet can't bring harm" claim, nothing more.
I was responding directly to your doing that in a situation where it made not sense to do so.
What is the situation such that it makes no sense to dispute what one considers a highly relevant claim (on a rationalist blog of all places)?
>whilst still causing life-changing harm to victims.
Can you give a concrete example of this happening?
I have treated half a dozen men who were given the old, harsher version of Catholic education, where they were told by authorities that masturbation. was a mortal sin. Each had developed an anxiety disorder that lasted for years, sometimes for decades, that clearly derived from being told this terrifying story at around the age when young guys discover masturbation Example: One had spent several *years* in his teens bouncing a ball up against an outdoor wall for several hours after school to keep himself from going into his house before his parents got home from work. Once they were there he felt safer from his impulses. When I met him 10 years later he was still refraining from masturbating and had elaborate decontamination rituals for use on his bedding after nights when he had had a wet dream.
And do you think the appropriate social remedy for those harms are speech-limiting laws? Should those nuns now be in jail?
No. I don’t even think the nuns should be forbidden by law to say that stuff, even a law with a much lighter punishment. I don’t know what the appropriate social remedy is.
The appropriate social remedy is, in my view, to empower parents to control the social environments of their children. Meaning the state has as little impact on it as possible. No speech laws. School vouchers. Basic libertarian stuff, in other words.
The other remedy is to acknowledge that mental health is to a large degree genetic and to embrace the positive selective effects that stigmatizing it has for the population. We really need to stop coddling every little thing that can be construed as mental illness. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a social contagion aspect to mental illness. While we should be (somewhat) understanding, that understanding should come with firm guardrails around malingerers. In my view our tolerance has long since passed the threshold of incentivization. In the 50's we probably really did need a little more "hey we understand", but these days we need a hell of a lot more "suck it up".
Yeah, OK, but the guy I'm talking about wasn't anything remotely like a malingerer. After a godawful adolescence he went to college, and got a decent job, which he still had when I first encountered him. Far from getting lots of leeway and sympathy for the disorder he had suffered in adolescence, he totally went it alone. He did not tell a soul about his anxiety, & his rituals. He was profoundly ashamed both of his craving to masturbate and of the weird thoughts and rituals he had that were associated with fear of masturbation.. He described himself as a weird, lame bitter little twisted piece of shit, and he was one of the most anguished people I've ever talked with, and that's saying a lot.
As for the positive selection effect of having one's weirdness and fragility be stigmatized, i.e. seen as repellent rather than evidence that one needs help -- well, Wanda, my mind put me through a lot of bad shit while I was growing up, and I probably wouldn't be here if I hadn't gotten some sympathy and effective help, mostly from my parents, during those periods. I'm guessing Scott would say the same. You sure you want to throw the smart fragiles to the wolves? You wouldn't have my gibes to annoy and entertain you, and in fact you wouldn't even have the forum where it happens.
>The appropriate social remedy is, in my view, to empower parents to control the social environments of their children
What's the remedy for abusive parents, then?
I can't exactly, no. I can say that a large 2018 meta-analysis by the NHS found victims of cyberbullying to be 235% more likely to self-harm and 257% more likely to attempt suicide (both 95% CI) than no victims ( https://oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/orka/title/self-harm-suicidal-behaviours-and-cyberbullying-in-children-and-young-people-systematic-review ) but of course I can't prove for sure that even a single cyberbullying incident in that meta-analysis was below-the-legal-threshold in the way I describe.
I can think of three cases that *were* kept below the threshold in exactly the calculated way I describe - but I wouldn't care to share them publicly. (And even if I could, I'm well aware that n=3 doesn't exactly carry much weight around here..)
I suspect we probably disagree very strongly - but thanks for keeping me honest on this point, nevertheless!
Is your claim that all cyberbullying should be made illegal? If so, why the focus on racism in particular? Here in the US, there are tons of conservatives who would *love* to throw liberals in jail over the horrible things they say about conservatives on the Internet. If a picture of a banana counts as cyberbullying, calling people fascists, retards, and pedophiles who should be punched in the face *definitely* counts.
I think I agree with you on nearly all counts! I'm not too sure about “fascists” - that seems like it might be legitimate political criticism? - but if somebody is falsely accused of being a paedophile (in a nontrivial, potentially life-ruiningly way), or is harassed and abused for their perceived intelligence by being called a retard (again, in a nontrivial way that's dependent on the particular case - I'm not claiming that just using the word alone under any circumstances should get you automatically sent to Devil’s Island!) and if every single other system for protecting people in that situation from harm has unrecoverably failed then yes, I'd say that those people should have the full protection of the law.
Keep in mind that the direction of causality may run counter to your expectations there. Bullies may naturally gravitate to those who are already psychologically ill. I suspect that that's actually likely and that bullying may be interpreted as an adaptive social immune response to mental illness. The recent rise in mental illness may in fact be a symptom of a social autoimmune disorder caused by the artificial suppression of the natural immune response.
Even if bullying is responsible in a causal way, I still think that the remedy is worse than the problem. Suppressing free speech with the force of the state is far more destructive than making some small percentage of people feel bad about themselves.
You keep looking for harms though. Having draconian concrete laws to prevent vague ill-defined harms is a classic symptom of authoritarian overreach.
The rise in mental illness diagnoses is far too much for "lack of appropriate suicides" to explain, unless you're saying bullying at the right time can cure or otherwise pre-empt their development?
Yes, the latter. It functions as a "this is what acceptable social behavior looks like" signal. Yes sometimes it can be brutal but hey, life is brutal. Look at how brutal manhood rituals are in primitive societies. Obviously those exist for a reason. I think our psyches might be evolved to be in equilibrium with them. Absent firm behavioral guardrails I think people have a tendency to become neurotic. That's what happens with dogs: without a strong pack leader or owner they can get nutty. Purse dogs are frequently aggressive and neurotic because they're not properly disciplined. I think humans function in an analogous way. Some people just don’t develop properly if they don’t get their ass kicked in the right way.
I don't think you're ready for Vegas yet.
Bullies do not stop bullying when the victim engages in "acceptable social behavior." Indeed, they often double down on the bullying.
Given that people enjoy bullying, the obvious default assumption of anyone's bullying anyone else is that it's been done for the pleasure of it -- especially when your function obviously doesn't fit the facts.
If the problem is cyberbullying, what is the need for "anti-racism laws"? Surely what is needed is anti-cyberbullying laws?
*Because perpetrators become incredibly adept at judging the threshold for police intervention and staying only-just below it *
That's what we call "the rule of law." The point is that people can know what is and is not legal for them to do.
Also, it is perfectly legal for them to engage in "causing life-changing harm to victims" as long as they stay out of the forbidden groups. That shows that the harm is not really the justification, because if it were, it would be a lot more expansive. Anti-nerd bullying for instance.
I don't think that's a good way of describing the rule of law. I think a better way would be: that the rule of law is the concept that the rulering classes aren't above the law: in effect that the law rules, and the ruling classes are subjects to it just as everybody else is.
I know there are schools of jurisprudence which put this concept into a framework where having clear and well-defined laws is essential - but A) I don't think such a framework is universally accepted, and B) I notice we don't apply this to many other aspects of the law and most people (yourself included, I suspect) agree that's perfectly fine!
For example: the speed limit is perfectly clear, but the police have the discretion to choose whether or not to arrest somebody driving faster than it (and it would be awful if they arrested every single motorist that was driving 1 mph too fast without any discretion). The age of consent is perfectly clear, but the police have the discretion to choose whether to arrest two 15-year-olds who have sex with each other. Drug laws are perfectly clear but the police don't start breaking down doors every time they smell weed in the street. In all these cases, we accept the laws being clear but the police using discretion about when applying them is or isn't in the public good.
No, it's essence of the rule of law.
Furthermore, your examples undermine your case because you offer clear laws that draw clear lines in defense of having a law where it's impossible to determine what is legal. Since they are opposite, you are arguing my case for me.
Doubting myself in light of your claim (my last law lecture being over a decade ago..) I looked up the Wikipedia article on the Rule of Law and it does rather seem to support my definition better than it does yours. (But I'm happy to just say that we each have different conceptions of the rule of law and discuss the actual underlying idea rather than the mere definition!)
In that spirit: I agree that the laws I referred to (speeding etc.) are clear, yes - but I don't think the Equality Act 2010 (which I have read in detail) or the Online Safety Act 2023 (which I admit I've only briefly glanced at) are any less clear at all. The online abuse and harassment in question was unequivocally illegal under UK law, and all the cases cited by Speak UK were successfully tested in court*.
Speak UK say we should change the law to make them all legal (and many other things besides) and I say that doing this would leave lots of vulnerable people unprotected and instead we should keep the law close to what it is but have police guidelines (perhaps issued by the NCP?) such that the police use common sense and discretion in deciding which prosecutions are and aren't in the public interest (and ideally arrest less than 25 people per day for this, even if they do interview that many people).
(* Surely part of your formulation of the rule of law is that you accept judicial rulings?)
1. The WP article...seems to clearly support Mary's definition. "The rule of law entails that the law is clear, consistent and open", "secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power", "It entails that all people and institutions within a political body are subject to the same law." If the law can be in some sense written on the spot by a judge, in what meaningful sebse is the judge subject to the law? If whether your act is illegal depends on the opinions of the judge you happen to get, in what sense is everyone subject to the same law?
2. You seem to have significantly shifted your claim. First you described, as Mart quoted, "Because perpetrators become incredibly adept at judging the threshold for police intervention and staying only-just below it " as a bad situation. Now you say that the laws you're defending are as clear as the speed limit. So which is it? Either the laws are unambiguously defined, like the speed limit, such that people carefully staying just below the threshold are completely protected and their being protected is the law functioning exactly as it's supposed to...or the law should be vague enough that such people can still be charged if certain authority figures decide that in their opinion it was still subjectively bad. In other words, very much *unlike* the speed limit, unless you think it's fine for police to say "yeah, the limit is 60 and you were going 57, but *really* I feel like that was too fast as well, and the law is whatever I say it is, so you're going to jail."
Which is it?
(Thanks for numbering - very helpful!)
1) Gosh, I really don't want to argue about definions, but it's just so difficult to avoid! It seems unproductive for me to point out issues with your quoting or clauses from the article and I think it's probably best if we can say that “The law should apply even to the ruling classes” and “The law should be clear and unambiguous” are two different concepts in law, and I believe one is commonly referred to as ‘the rule of law’ and you believe the other is (and we should both encourage anybody else happening upon this exchange to read the article for themselves and decide which of us they agree with)? I'm sorry to disengage but I really don't want to debate the definition!
2) Good to clarify this - thanks for bringing it up. I definitely could have put it better! I intended to claim that the UK’s laws are broad - as in they give the authorities a wide scope of powers - not that they're ambiguous.
For example, let's say the speed limit on some motorway is 70mph. Under most circumstances you could do 90 along that road perfectly safely, but in other circumstances (perhaps it's raining heavily, there's lots of slow-moving traffic, and your 35 year old Vauxhall Nova is making a worrying noise) it would barely be safe even to do 70. It's difficult to define in law exactly which circumstances it'd be safe to do 70 and in which it's safe to do 80, so the speed limit is set at 70 for everybody all the time, and the police can arrest anybody driving at 80 even if they're doing so safely: in other words, the police have broad powers, not ambiguous ones.
And we do this because, under some circumstances, doing 72mph genuinely is dangerous and we want the police to be able to arrest people doing that, whilst leaving the people safely doing 80 alone.
The system is terrible - loads of people get speeding tickets even when they’re driving perfectly safely and loads of other people get away with driving at 80 even when it isn't safe to do so - but by-and-large the police do seem to use discretion and most people in the outside lane of the motorway do seem able to drive at 80+ most of the time without any problems, and removing the speed limit altogether would only make things worse from a safety perspective.
I admit that the laws limiting online abuse etc. are necessarily messier than speed limit (how could it be otherwise - the latter is literally just an integer!) but I'm claiming that the law is similarly broad in the sense that the legal bar is low enough that more-or-less all genuine abuse is illegal, even if some trivial abuse is also illegal (just as the speed limit is low enough that nearly all dangerously-fast driving is illegal, even if some safe-but-faat driving is also illegal), a perpetrator of abuse can't say “well everything I published on line was technically legal”, and we rely on police discretion to arrest the people doing genuine harm and the CPS to prosecute them if it's genuinely in the public interest to do so.
I agree this is an obviously flawed system and does obviously fail, but A) it seems to me vastly better than just blanket making all of it legal without exception, B) Given that we started writing laws like this in the 80s, if the campaign of opposition to the law can only find 9 obvious failures then probably it isn't *too* flawed? And C) Claiming the system is flawed in this way is different to claiming the law is ambiguous rather than broad, in any case.
That's Wikipedia's problem.
"Surely part of your formulation of the rule of law is that you accept judicial rulings?"
Why? Surely you have heard of judicial rulings where the judges ignore both the plain text of the law and all sanity?
I'm not saying that all judicial rulings are wise and just! On at least nine of the eighteen presented cases I happen to agree with you that the outcome was unjust.
I'm saying that when a judge says "X is guilty of Y" then, *whether or not you believe that Y should be a crime in the first place*, accepting the judge's right and qualification to give that verdict seems like a necessary part of supporting the rule of law (*Especially* in the UK where we operate under the Common Law principle of stare decisis...)
If you wanted to say "I don't support the rule of law and therefore I don't accept judicial rulings" I could understand. If you said "I don't believe that the judge's ruling was correct but I accept it nevertheless because if people ignored judges the rule of law would break down" I could understand. But you seem to be saying"I fully support the rule of law but I don't accept judicial rulings"!
So as long as you are not actually convicted, being arrested is trivial?
25 arrests a day for 18 convictions points to using it as illegal harassment.
Speak claims to want to change laws.
If the problem is not that the laws ban speech which they shouldn't, but rather that the police are arresting innocent people, then your cause should be police reform, not changing laws.
The capricious conduct of police in arrest is evidence toward the law being absurd.
That doesn't follow. Feel free to use more words if you think you can draw the causal line there.
Yes, it does follow. It's not proof, but it's definitely evidence.
> arresting innocent people
Everyone's guilty of something under UK speech law. That's the problem Speak aspires to solve.
IF that were true they wouldn't have dismissed all the charges against everyone they arrested.... which is the thing we were just talking about.
SPEAK did not post 18 convictions. They posted 18 cases that are abuses of justice in their view, from the past 15 years or so. It looks like about 6 of them resulted in convictions.
If we assume the 25 arrests per day figure is correct, that's over 100,000 in 15 years. If only 18 of them were notable miscarriages of justice, and most of those were dropped or overturned, it points to illegal harassment being relatively rare.
Tell Pjohn he got it wrong then.
Seemed unnecessary. It makes little difference to their point, and only bolsters it.
No, I don't think it's trivial, I think that, if true, it's too heavy-handed and the wrong way to police. I think if there are 25 arrests a day it's A) harmful for public trust and it'd be better to request interviews rather than interview under arrest most of the time, and B) probably very expensive and not the best use of the police's limited resources.
However - the only source we have for this 25 per day figure is Speak UK's citation of the *Daily Mail*. The Daily Mail doesn't itself seem to cite a source. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and without any such evidence I strongly suspect, give my knowledge about how policing is done in the UK, that actually there are 25 *police interviews* per day, not 25 arrests.
But even if somehow the statistic is true (and we agree it's bad if true) I do think addressing it by prohibiting by statue the police from arresting people for online racism and abuse will cause far more social harm than it solves.
What nonsense. If only because people have been driven to suicide by people falsely accusing them of "online racism."
Furthermore, the case of Germany shows that if you allow it, you allow punishing people for stating accurate statistics about a social problem. Consequently, you are irrevocably harming democracy by keeping people in the dark about the truth.
I think we have very different intuitions here on the tradeoffs of clamping down on speech "just in case" it's harmful.
And in particular, while I find the choices the NYT made in publishing their article on Scott ethically reprehensible, I would be *strongly* opposed to any law attempting to make it illegal for them to do so.
Infringing on actual, legitimate speech is far too dangerous and harmful to do as lightly as you're proposing.
Thanks for the reply!
I agree that we have different intuitions in the tradeoffs of legally protecting ethically reprehensible speech, true - but (perhaps more productively?) we might also have different intuitions of what constitutes "clamping down":
The Equality Act entered the statute books in 2010 and the groundwork was laid for the Online Safety Act in 2019. If since then we have a total of just 18 cases that Speak UK consider to be miscarriages of justice (and having read their list of cases I think the real figure is more like nine, but that's by-the-by..) would you consider this "clamping down"?
(nb. I'm not asking whether it's bad-but-justified or bad-and-u justified, I think it's clear we disagree on that, just why you consider that a "clamp down"?)
As Mary says, someone getting arrested, charged, etc is still immensely harmful even if they're eventually acquitted. And even more, you have people feeling pressured to keep silent because they don't want to risk being subjected to all that.
They're not being arrested, charged, tried, and acquitted; they're being arrested, interviewed, and dearrested without charge.
I agree such arrests are harmful - but I think they're less harmful than letting people say racist (or other abusive) things online with no consequences.
I have to admit that I struggle to see how a person can be so concerned with the wellbeing of an online racist but so unconcerned with the wellbeing of an online racism victim that they would rather the victim suffer abuse unprotected than that the abuser has to sit in a room and answer some questions before being allowed to go home.
I don't mean the following in an aggressive way, but I really think you need to be aware that your perspective on this is so fundamentally alien to the deepest values of many people here, that it's liable to provoke a not-dissimilar reaction to someone genuinely asking why democracy is better than dictatorship, or why slavery is always such a bad thing. People often have no idea how to respond, because the reasons seem so obvious and "in the water supply" and "the common premises of all people in a free society" that it's hard to explain these reasons to someone who so thoroughly rejects the premises of their basic values.
Now to be clear, the alien perspective is *not* "there are extreme situations where freedom of speech is outweighed by other factors" but rather "the right to speak freely and the right to be protected from unwelcome speech need to be weighed up, as basically equal considerations". This, I would suggest, comes across to many people, particularly on ACX, the way "in discussions of rape, one needs to weigh up the harm of being raped with the harm of being denied sex one really wants" would come across to the average woman, or how a discussion of criminal laws against homosexuality framed as "weighing up the fear of homosexuals of living under such laws against the disgust of conservatives of living in a society without them" would to most people. In all these cases, one can dispassionately argue that the harms are not equal...but the understandable reaction is often closer to outrage at the mere suggestion, at the complete failure to acknowledge that one of these things is so absolutely fundamentally not like the other.
I think if you're going to argue this equivalence, you should do so with a much greater explicit recognition that this is a pretty extreme position within the standard framework of a liberal society built on individual rights.
As to the actual problems with it...again, it's difficult to know where to start. For one thing, it's taking an extremely dogmatic utilitarian position where outcomes are all that matter and notions of rights, freedoms, limits on the state etc, have no value except in tetms of outcomes. But even within that utilitarian position it has so many problems, so many extreme asymmetries between the fear of hearing demeaning speech and the fear of being arrested for your speech. Such as:
-you can train yourself to be less affected by, or even immune to, insults and mean words. You can't train yourself to be immune to handcuffs and prison bars.
-you can fight back against offensive words, with your own words or otherwise; you can't fight back against the police and the state.
-if you're a minority within a given space, and thus vulnerable, you can recruit friends or other members of your demographic into that space to even the scales a bit. You can't do this against the state.
-you can, if you can't handle being subject to the power of aggressive bullies, avoid all spaces where you might be so subject, in a way that's difficult but not impossible. If you can't handle being subject to the power of aggressive or overpowered police, there may be absolutely nothing you can do, if no other country is willing to give you asylum.
-the power of the state to arrest people for their speech is unimaginably greater, unimaginably scarier, and unimaginably more open to enormous abuses than the power of bullies to insult and demean and cause mental distress.
These are the tiny tip of an iceberg of differences. And I want to reiterate that by engaging in the academic object-level discussion of the differences between too much regulation of speech and too little, I am in no way implying that this is a meaningfully different kind of discussion (as opposed to degree) than the differences between the advantages of democracy and dictatorship.
In my experience, most Americans don't actually have a deep respect for freedom of speech, only Freedom of Speech Of My Allies While Punishing Anyone I Disagree With To The Maximum Extent Possible.
(Not taken in a aggressive way - thanks very much indeed for the qualifier, it's thoughtful and I appreciate it.)
I admit I do seem to be in a minority on ACX - but if we take “current legislation in the West” as a yardstick ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country ), I don't think my position is anywhere near as extreme as you portray it.
Essentially every nation has restrictions on individual speech. Even the USA, which is famously more permissive than the rest of the West in what it lets its subjects say in public, has approximately twenty different kinds of speech that are prohibited by law. The UK (which this conversation was originally supposed to be about) has had restrictions on individual speech aimed at improving the overall civilisation of discourse dating back a century, and these were extended to online communications in the 1980s: I'm not advocating some weird new extreme position, but defending the long-term status quo.
One outcome of Britain's century-plus of restricting those limited forms of speech that seem to always do harm without ever doing good (such as racist abuse) is that the quality of public discourse feels (to me) higher here than it does in the USA. How it feels to me is subjective, I know - but there is data suggesting Britain is one of the world's least racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. societies - by some measures several times over more so than the USA: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/love-thy-neighbour.pdf
Finally, the weighing-up you criticise seems to me to be a necessary part of making basically any prohibition in law? For example, presumably(?) you support copyright protection as a restriction on free speech: in deciding whether to institute copyright protection lawmakers must have weighed-up the harms to society of absolute free speech (viz. people not creating so many works of entertainment, art, etc.) against the harms to society of copyright protection (viz. one additional restriction on speech)* and decide which is the lesser harm. This seems like how we go about prohibiting most prohibited things, and equating it to “weighing-up whether a rapist's right to sex is greater than their victim's right to not be raped” seems like a really weird and deliberately incendiary way of describing a perfectly normal part of the lawmaking process.
* (Lest you object that there are no harms to society from the restriction on free speech caused by copyright protection, there are a great many famous cases of copyright law being used like that. I have limited appetite for looking them all up online just now, so please excuse my sharing just the first web-search result; I admit it's just a listicle but there do seem to nevertheless be a few such examples on the list: https://listverse.com/2018/07/15/top-10-craziest-copyright-claims-ever-made
I'm probably going to bow out of this discussion now (though of course I’ll gladly read anything further that you write!) - thanks once again for the polite and friendly way you've disagreed with me (despite clearly hating my views!) It's very open-minded of you and I'm grateful for it.
> -you can fight back against offensive words, with your own words or otherwise; you can't fight back against the police and the state.
> -if you're a minority within a given space, and thus vulnerable, you can recruit friends or other members of your demographic into that space to even the scales a bit. You can't do this against the state.
Wait, what? People fight back against the state all the time. It's called a revolution. It just usually requires a majority. The fact that minorities have no means to improve their situation against a majority isn't exclusive to dealing with the state. You cannot "even the scales" when your demographic simply lacks the numbers or capabilities that are necessary for meaningful agency.
Now, the question is "do minorities deserve anything?" My answer is no, because nobody deserves anything, but I'm sure your answer is different.
Because if they get only 18 convictions out of the vast number of arrests, it is clear they are harassing the innocent in order to silence them.
Some news from the (culture)war: I was speaking to a guy I know in China recently in the course of some business
(in this case, they have some sort of magic injection formation: eight trigrams : seal of the five elements: our fiber reinforced plastic can be all sorts of weird shapes and it still turns out strong, so tariffs will not work in the short or medium or probably long term because the americans that are willing to do it cost 5 times as much and their product is shitty and the fucking finance assholes are going to plow 50bajillion dollars into another stupid fucking tech product instead of physical capital intensive projects that will expose them to the risk of having to pay people to do labor, the dumb cunts.)
(no, I'm not bitter that it's both cheaper and better to have parts stamped out in china and shipped across the world than to buy local, and that the problem has actually gotten WORSE over the last year.)
And the subject of Trump came up, he had some interesting mixed feelings about it:
On the one hand, he thinks that Trump is good for china long term in a zero-sum sense. He has so thoroughly discombobulated the US partners in the region that he thinks even a couple NeoLibDems in a row won't be able to undo the damage; and that within 20 years the pacific ocean all the way to Guam will be a chinese lake, as it were, unless (note in next bit).
On the other hand: China is in the Business of doing business, and things are so chaotic that he doesn't know which way to punch like he did 10 years ago; that even if China overtakes the US politically and economically --
(which he thinks is now entirely China's game to throw; the US has damaged itself so thoroughly with it's stupid financialized industrial policy and senile-mad-cow diplomatic policy that it would be impossible for them to catch up unless the Party blows a gasket and shits itself, which is always a 60/40 chance in any country and especially so where the process of selection is as closed and sclerotic as it is in China. Just because they rolled boxcars with Xi doesn't mean the next guy will be as good, type of feeling.) --
that the loss of the rules based order will be so destructive that even if China can establish local or regional hegemony that they will be worse off than they are now, and the fact that the laowai are doing even worse isn't that much of a comfort.
Interesting how quickly the world changes under your feet; all castles are made of sand, every vast leg ends up trunkless, etc and so forth.
> expose them to the risk of having to pay people to do labor, the dumb cunts.
I understand you're being facetious, but it seems to me that there are enough labor protections that it now indeed comes with vast amounts of risk and they're responding correctly to the incentives with which they've been presented.
Those aren't even the pressures I'm talking about!
I'm talking about the pure market forces of it all, of the fact that employing people who develop skills and institutional knowledge that results in your product being beyond competitive, that allows a firm (to pick a random name out of a hat: Boeing!) to completely dominate a field and crush all who come before them and to hear the lamentations of their shareholders, is bad actually. You fool. You fucking imbecile. You moron.
What we need to do is deskill as much as possible, outsource everything else, mistreat everyone who we can't eliminate so badly they check out completely or quit, and destroy our decades of market hegemony in a few quick years because WE are BUSINESSMEN doing BIG CAPITALISM and we are jealous of the guys who's labor force is fungible. Mcdonnell Douglas Delenda Est.
Basically: American capital holders would rather risk failing outright than risk having to deal with labor who's lack of willing, enthusiastic participation could affect the stock price.
It's been to my individual profit as someone who hasn't plucked out their own eyes to better appreciate the glorious light that emanates from Hayek; I've had the ability to see, for example, the glaringly obvious, but it is alarming as an ant that has to tapdance with the blind elephants.
Okay, but none of that matters if you have to pay your workers extravagant wages and let them work in humane conditions. As far as manufacturing goes, you need sweatshops and labor camps to stay competitive on anything but extremely high-end products. The fault for eliminating that lies with the state and its people, not the companies themselves.
This is straight up not true. I've worked in manufacturing, I've been to china, I've seen firms take a haircut for thinking like you. The people who are not fungible, as in the analogized passage above, get treated to safe working conditions, high wages, benefits, big checks, the whole shebang, anywhere in the world that has any labor market whatsoever.
This is because THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT FUNGIBLE. You CANNOT go out on the street and get a replacement level die maker, because there is no such thing. These are the positions that produce irreplaceable value for a firm, and these are the positions that capital hates the most because they can demand a portion of their surplus value and get it without organizing. If you mistreat the guy who sets up the dies and teeth on the stamping press, he walks out the door, gets a new job the same day, and your line shuts down until you can replace him unless you have some redundancy, which you don't because the MBA who makes the decision didn't get to use the braincell when they were laying off people on the floor instead of people in the C suite.
I rate this take: MBA brained, soft handed, never actually been part of a productive enterprise.
You can't say that someone is responding correctly to incentives without quantifying them.
You can say that worker protections create incentives which directly point away from using human labor, and that's true. So does ending slavery, and the fact the some human labor is ugly and it's unpleasant to have to look at them. None of these incentives prove a certain decision 'correct' until you quantity them, and compare to the marginal utility of the decision.
>The Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund is the main organization working to prevent its creation
I do kinda worry that this is basically a 'Lets do a lot of research into how one might build the Torment Nexus and bring the Torment Nexus to very wide public attention to make sure that no one builds it' sort of situation.
Was anyone actually trying to make mirror life before this? Is this group going to do a huge amount to advance the knowledge base and popularity behind this idea, and does that actually make it less likely than leaving it an obscure thought experiment that a tiny tiny fraction of the population has ever heard of?
>see also
>via OpenAI
>an unfortunately large bit of
>AI safety
I know the argument that it's zero-sum mentality and therefore irrational to believe there are issues with income inequality or the existence of billionaires or even trillionaires, but empirically, it does seem like it bothers a lot of people*, offending their sense of fairness. Everyone derides the idea of the new man of socialism, but it seems like the capitalists need a new man of capitalism that wouldn't have the natural tendency to think in zero-sum terms or care about income inequality...
*Not me, my material conditions are peachy, I don't care if billionaires or trillionaires exist, and I doubt their existence causes there to be poor and destitute people anywhere.
The argument I'd make (though not 100% confident about it) about billionaires (aside from the "buy the government/media" thing) is that if the money you make in a capitalist society is supposed to reflect your contribution to the economy, almost nobody is *actually* contributing enough to the economy to justify *that* big an income gap over everyone else.
Like if a plumber makes 2x as much as the average plumber, OK, he's better than most plumbers. Fixes tougher issues, works longer hours, whatever. But if he makes 10,000x the average, you wouldn't think he's the Greek god of plumbing, you'd think something more was going on, maybe fishy.
CEOs are supposed to be different than plumbers in this regard, but I don't think we should uncritically accept that idea.
E.g. Mark Zuckerberg; is he actually an order of magnitude better at designing social networks than other people?
Part of it is luck/right place right time; some is network effects and it's worth considering whether antitrust should play a role; some is that Facebook undercut traditional media by lying about advertising efficiency and video viewership numbers and maybe some copyright violation about hosting their content.
"E.g. Mark Zuckerberg; is he actually an order of magnitude better at designing social networks than other people?"
Not a Zuck fan, but all available evidence points to yes here. Most billionaire founders are at least good at the thing they founded that generated billions of dollars even after paying huge returns to everyone else who invested. They might be jerks or bad for the world or a huge cringey nerd or in the process of spending billions of dollars on bad ideas, but they're at least good at the first thing they did. If you're looking for idiots with unjustified wealth, there are better places to look.