Raqobatni sevuvchilar uchun https://pinupuz.app/ saytida muntazam ravishda turnirlar o‘tkazib turiladi. Bu musobaqalarda qatnashib, nafaqat o‘yindan zavq olish, balki katta pul mukofotlarini ham yutib olish mumkin.
Turnirlarda ishtirok etish shartlari odatda oddiy bo‘ladi: shunchaki ma’lum slotlarni o‘ynash va ball to‘plash kerak. Eng faol o‘yinchilar turnir jadvalida yuqori o‘rinlarni egallab, qo‘shimcha sovg‘alarga ega bo‘lishadi.
Bu o‘yin jarayonini yanada qiziqarli qiladi. O‘z omadingizni sinab ko‘rish va boshqa o‘yinchilar bilan kuch sinashish uchun ajoyib imkoniyatni qo‘ldan boy bermang.
To save people a click: The victim has severe skull injuries in both the front and back and left and right sides, making it laughable that he could have been injured that way by deliberately running into a wall. It's almost as subtle as "fell down a flight of stairs onto 10 bullets".
Many people here really like puns and wordplay. I compiled a collection of the best triple entendres I could find online (feel free to add to the list!), with explanations. I also included some analysis and my own candidates to add to the canon.
Recent discovery to recommend to the board - if you have a spare 90 minutes and a Netflix account, watch the first 3 episodes of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and see if it hooks you.
It's a shockingly good anime about (of all things) people in a 16th-ish century alt-earth trying to prove that the Sun is the center of the universe while dodging inquisitors. Quest for truth in the face of adversity, with a villain who's basically a brilliantly-done Medieval version of Christoph Waltz's character from Inglorious Basterds.
The description reminded me of a videogame where the villain's nefarious plot is to... convince France to sell Louisiana to the United States. And the protagonist is trying to stop it.
I have the opposite recommendation: Avoid Orb! The ending is incredibly stupid and retroactively ruins the whole show. TLDR: Nowak wins, everyone dies and noone accomplishes anything and you're supposed to feel good about it because Copernicus will still happen 100 years later anyway. Also, Rafal comes back to life with absolutely no explanation.
Also, it's not actually set in "16th-ish century alt-earth". That's what the show makes it seem like (even being set in "The Kingdom of P" instead of "Poland"), but then the ending tries to retroactively claim that it was set in *1400* in real life all along (which is why every character dies without accomplishing anything - can't change the timeline!)
Don't waste your time. Or if you do watch it, skip the last two and a half episodes. It would have been much better if it had ended 2.5 episodes earlier, but then they tacked on an ending that retroactively ruins the entire show.
Oof - interesting! I have to confess I dropped the rec having only hit ep 20, and having a great time with it. I'm definitely going to finish it either way, but curious now to see how the ending will land for me.
I thought you might have not finished it based on your description in the original post, since the ending explicitly sets it in real life 1400 Poland, despite the show initially seeming to be a late 16th century alt history.
In one of Scott's posts relating to AI psychosis, someone (I don't remember if it was a comment or part of the post) linked an article discussing AI psychosis and it detailed how this guy thought he came up with a crazy new math equation, and another situation where some lady was influenced to divorce her husband. Does anyone have the link to that? I'm having trouble finding it through google.
UPDATE: There were actually two articles and I found them both.
I would love some recommendations of translations of Timaeus and Phaedrus. I also would like one for the Odyssey. I want to do an analysis of this song as it’s one of my favorites, especially the great pointing-out instructions. Also, it’s a great mood creator.
“Niggas call me prophecy, swagging and philosophies
White on white wagon, call that motherfucker Socrates
Rat ass niggas, fighting for a block of cheese
Catch me out in China stunting, yeah, I'm 'bout my guapanese
My shoe game serious, so serious, Wapanese
Niggas say I'm blessed, my bad I forgot to sneeze (Achoo)
There your reasons go, bitch
I got some tissues for your issues tell 'em blow this (bitch)”
For the Odyssey translation, it has to be Robert Fitzgerald's from 1961. I'm deeply partial to "her white arms round him pressed as though forever." (cf. Emily Wilson's "and her white arms would not let go his neck.")
Might be fun to read both. Could be a cool project to do a line by line comparison of all of nobody’s situations. It’s a crash course in reasoning in my opinion, tacit knowledge transfer of how to learn.
Question for people with texture sensitivity that is common in mild versions of autism: have you found a way to derive any benefit from this? Like, I dunno, maybe you work with textiles and a heightened awareness of textures is helpful; or maybe you work in surgery, and this translates into slightly better haptic feedback through the tools?
The reason I ask is that I realized that I am simultaneously "a natural speller" (i.e. I pick up correct spelling without devoting conscious effort to it, both in English and in Russian, and iirc was halfway decent at it in French despite not consciously hearing the differences between the different accents you can put on an e). This conferred some obvious advantages in school (rapidly diminishing in real life, in the age of ubiquitous autocorrect), but I think the exact same trait makes me hyper-aware when someone uses the wrong one out of "their/there/they're" or confuses "principal" and "principle". I think this irritation might be categorically similar to finding e.g. clothing tags irritating, so I'm wondering if there are any hidden benefits to the heightened clothing tag awareness.
It is interesting to link physical sensitivity to general perceptual sensitivity of errors (if I understand you correctly).
If it helps, I believe I have a level of sensitivity/hyper-awareness beyond what my peers have. I end up noticing errors a lot (which I learned can be very annoying to constantly point out to others, though some lecturers welcome it). It could be visual such as improperly aligned elements in a graphic, or it could be errors in equations, or misspellings as you mentioned.
It is a bit odd and conflicting at times, since the hyper-awareness can sometimes distract me. But most of the time, I seem to pick up on things that go by unnoticed by most people. And I am generally good at focusing when I want to.
In terms of physical sensitivity, I do feel a bit over-sensitive at times, and experience high levels of pain or discomfort from seemingly minor things, such as small cuts or acne. I am generally good at calming myself down from these situations once I think on it. I used to be able to tell if dollar bills (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s) were counterfeit just by feel, back when I worked in retail as a child laborer (my parents owned a store).
To get the point, I do believe the sensitivity is very handy for me. I work in applied science / engineering. I do a lot of experimental work where tactile feedback is critical, dealing with micro- and nanometer-scale elements. I also notice errors in ideas or equations, which avoids going down the wrong path (i.e., wasting tons of money).
I was today years old when I accidentally discovered that if a Substack user blocks you, it not only hides their comments, but hides *your own comments to them,* while leaving the thread of conversation visible to everyone else.
Talk about an unforeseen consequence of internet safetyism! Now a user can make themselves publicly appear to have dunked so hard as to have rendered their opponent speechless merely by secretly seizing the last word with a block.
My favorite solution (which no website implements, as far as I know, but once I had a plugin that did this) is that comments from "blocked" users remain visible, but the font is gray and smaller size.
This is calming for my brain; when I see the text I go like "oh look, that idiot wrote something again" and now it does not annoy me at all.
If the one exchange matters enough to you, you can make a second account, point out that they blocked you before you could reply, reply to their reply, and then block them so they can't reply.
As in, what is my reason for believing it? Because it's easy to change, and they have kept it as is.
As in, what do I believe are THEIR reasons? Most likely, it's just consistency with the behavior of other social media. Possibly a requirement by the app stores of Google and Apple. Maybe even a legal requirement somewhere they wish to operate.
Kanye West's turn away from Nazism reminds me of a theory I've been working on for a while that modern Americans basically model Nazism not as an actual political ideology which developed in a particular time and place in response to certain conditions, but rather as just being The Dark Side of the Force.
Actual political ideologies have ideals and policy positions, however bad they may be. Nazism, in the American imagination, does not, it's more just a sort of generalised sourceless evil for evil's sake. Like the Dark Side of the Force it is endlessly threatening regardless of how few people actually believe in it. Like the Dark Side of the Force, the fact that nobody claims to believe in it doesn't mean there's not a secret army of loyalists hiding behind the scenes. Like the Dark Side of the Force it's endlessly seductive despite not having anything obvious going for it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
If Nazism were treated like an actual political ideology instead of a magical fantasy villain then some journalist could have asked him "Oh I hear you're a National Socialist now, Mr West, can you please explain your policy on the Sudetenland?" and the facade would have punctured immediately.
> it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
I think you'll find that the average person's understanding of any political ideology (or form of Government) is pretty cartoonish.
Commentators in the US sometimes use the terms socialist, Nazi, fascist and communist (probably others) in ways that are at least somewhat interchangeable. They're meant to conjure images of Lovecraftian evil rather than educate about an opponents policy positions.
Have you seen the "Are we the baddies" sketch? It may not be a coincidence that the guys with the black uniforms with skulls on them who started the biggest war in history and did many other bad things got metonymized into symbolizing bad things in general.
If you read about actual American Neo-Nazis or watch documentaries about them, they are aware of this! They like it. They think the unique significance of the swastika, Hitler salute, etc. gives them a seriousness and resonance that other varieties of extremists lack.
Part of the joke is that Nazi imagery is intensely villain-coded because post-WW2 English-language media has widespread practices of using Nazi-derived imagery to code the villains as evil and it's been going on for long enough that recent generations look at actual WW2 Nazis and see over-the-top villain coding.
Some examples:
- The "Be Prepared" song from Lion King has a bit where the hyenas are goose-stepping past Scar who is watching from a high ledge, like Hitler watching Stormtroopers at a Nazi Party rally.
- In Star Wars, the Imperial Navy mostly wears uniforms that are either black (like SS uniforms) or greenish grey (like Wehrmacht uniforms). The uniforms also feature jackboots and jodhpurs.
- Tons of media has the villainous legions of doom arrayed in long shots in rigid square formations arranged in a neat grid, in shots directly borrowed from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Off the top of my head, this shows up repeatedly in Star Wars and the LotR movies.
- Lots of bad guys have facial scars that resemble the dueling scars fashionable among the Prussian aristocrats who made up much of the German officer class in WW2.
It's true, even WWI German military imagery is restrospectively tainted, like the Pickelhaube helmets. I think the most extreme and amazing version of this is the Ralph Bakshi movie Wizards, where the bad wizard's secret weapon is literally leftover Nazi propaganda films that blow the minds of the unicorns, elves and assorted pixies opposing his forces.
"The nationalization of our masses will succeed only if, together with the positive battle for the soul of our people, its international poisoners are wiped out. The German blood must be purified, and the alien Jew dealt with, or there will be no resurrection of the German nation. The race question is the key to world history and to human civilization."
I think it's a mischaracterization to say that getting Jews out of Germany was just a "nice to have" and not a central part of his mission.
It's not as "coherent" a policy as you might think.
It's White Nationalism, sure, but he's using "alien Jew" as a racial stand-in for communist* (please bear in mind there was fighting in the German streets all through the Weimar Republic, including civilians using homemade tanks).
That said, it absolutely is a mission statement. He just isn't giving concrete proposals.
*This is not to apologize for Hitler! The communists were, by and large, Jews**.
**Yes, this is impolitick to say, but I've read about it in Russian History, and been told by "personal anecdote" about NYC***.
***Communists weren't seen as "evil" until after "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
I've never read Mein Kampf so I can't contradict you on that, but would suggest the NSDAP Party Platform of 1920 as being a more reasonable guide to Nazi political positions at least at that point in time https://www.vaholocaust.org/25-points-of-nsdap/
These range from "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations" to "no Jew can be a member of the race" to "We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts)" to "the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation" to "abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain" to "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations".
The "freedom of religion" is especially funny. But I'm rather a fan of black humor.
You can clearly see the strains of socialism and ethnic nationalism wrapping together.
The point of looking at Mein Kampf is to destroy the idea of Hitler as an especially big man. He was a rather small and petty bureaucrat, and had small and petty policies to put forward (and some "usual scheduled rants" about ethnic nationalism, Jews, etc.).
Perhaps he had slightly more vision than the EU bureaucrats of today, in that they were sold a bill of goods (lies, in other words), and they stubbornly cling to plans that have been made obsolete.
Lebensraum is a prominent policy in Mein Kampf so what are you on about?
Also I’m not sure what this Nazi talk is all about. Our American KKK was killing innocents and preaching white superiority since before Hitler was born. Neo-Nazis should have some ethnic pride.
KKK ideology is alive and well, thriving even. ICE masks are KKK 101.
Nationalism is not a policy. When Israel talks about Greater Judea, they aren't saying "we should spend X tanks to take over Y land."
Brownshirts and Paramilitary are distinguished from police violence by "not operating under the color of the law." This is why brownshirt-behavior is raiding churches...
Okey -dokey. Right wing Chief District Judge in Minnesota: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
That seems obvious on the face. Turns out giving a federal agency more money than the Ukrainian Military Budget means they are a very busy agency.
If you wanted to know, say, how many court orders the Department of Deer Warfare violated, you'd have to know where to FIND the Department of Deer Warfare -- and I'm pretty sure Mr. Chief District Judge doesn't even know it exists. (People don't exactly get court orders to restrain The Goosinator! either).
I'm not getting up on a high horse to defend ICE. Police brutality is police brutality. But let's be clear when we're talking "extrajudicial killings" versus "paramilitary actions." They're pretty different, actually. Last legal case of ethnic cleansing in America was less than 50 years ago, for god's sake! **
**Paramilitary force wiping out black people for being black down California way. If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
Absolutely not! My critique applies just as much to the self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. They're not treating Nazism as an actual political ideology either, they're just using it as a stand-in for "scary and evil and racist" because they want to be scary and evil and racist.
The other analogy I was going to make is Satan worship. Nobody actually worships Satan in the sense that they both go through the motions of worshipping Satan and actually honestly believe Satan is a real thing, but there's a small cadre of idiots who like to pretend to be Satan worshippers because they think it makes them cool and scary, and a slightly larger cadre of idiots who think that Satan worshippers are a real problem. Both of these groups have shrunk a lot since the 1980s and are now considered more ridiculous, but the equivalent "Nazi" thing has only grown and the panicky Karens who once worried that some kid out there might be scrawling a pentagram on his exercise book are now worried that he might be scrawling a swastika.
Racism was an actual part of the Nazi platform, though! If someone becomes a neo-Nazi because they hate Jews and black people, they literally believe in something the historical Nazis believed in. That seems very different from your example of Satanists not literally believing in Satan.
I think if you time-warped a historical Nazi into the present day, and gave them a brief run-down of the history of Germany post-WWII, they would not try advocating for Germany to annex the Sudetenland or retake Alsace-Lorraine, for obvious practical reasons. But they would still probably advocate for racist and antisemitic policies to the extent that is possible in the modern political environment.
The neo-Nazi synagogues do not treat Nazism as an actual political ideology. It, however, is not a "standin" for "scary and evil and racist." It's a standin for "Anti Russian Sentiment."
Hitler brand cigarettes are hardly offered because Hitler is seen as scary and evil and racist, either.
There's an interesting history to the stripes in the Rainbow Flag, for example the original flag included hot pink, but most subsequent copies dropped hot pink due to the cost at the time.
Hot pink would have been an interesting choice, sure. Wikipedia's summary aptly shows how -nobody else- makes a six color rainbow, and that it took active intervention to -get- a six color rainbow (this wasn't "someone's original brainchild")
Oh definitely. someone in here shared Kulak's post about "hyperborean esoteric hitlerism"[0] a while ago, and I feel like that phrase captured the sentiment perfectly. Kulak's a little too spicy for my taste, but I gotta give credit where credit is due: it's a hell of a meme.
You may also be interested in "Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil" [1], in which Lou Keep does a "book" "review" (synopsis actually) of Eric Hoffer's "True Believer" (1951). IIRC the thesis is something like "it's more important for a narrative to have an antagonist (or in Scott's terms, "outgroup") than it is to have a protagonist".
I recently asked Claude Code to make a particular change to my code, but it instead did something completely different, and it took me several tries to get it to do what I wanted. Then I later realized that its initial approach was simpler and ended up switching to that anyway.
yesterday I tried claud code for myself for the very first time. It was as good as people said. And it was actually very fun to see it thinking/modifiing/iterating on my little greenfield project. For private softwareproject, I don't think I will be able to go back to programming by hand.
I actually find the opposite: For my personal hobby project, I'm still 95% coding it by hand, because I'm trying to do something specific and technically sophisticated and have high standards and Claude Code isn't reliable enough and can't easily read my mind to understand the vision. At work, I use AI a lot more because I don't know what I'm doing there anyway.
Since web-ACX has become close to unusable on my phone, I've finally downloaded the Substack app. I'm finding it kind of terrible? Despite being signed in, it never shows me new posts from ACX when I filter on "paid". I also can't filter on new posts from particular substacks, I have to go to each one's homepage one at a time. My feed can only sort by "recent", dominated by the most prolific blogs, or the impenetrable "priority" sort. Clicking any sort of link bounces me between the browser and app version of that page at random.
Does anyone have methods for making this app usable if you follow more than one blog?
I use email links to come to posts in mobile browser. I have twice tried the app and immediately discovered it is worse, and had to uninstall it, since the phone switches to the app if the app is installed.
I comment on my phone while I wait in line if I don't feel like reading something worthwhile, and even for this use case I find that running the website in firefox is the only way to even get the comments to load before I'm done trying to waste some time.
If anyone has access to the inscrutable minds that run this jank-ass website, reveal your hidden knowledge un to us because what the hell. Why is it less functional than a geocities site, but about as ugly as one?
Why are most leftists against AI? I've seen the standard arguments, but I'm trying to understand what are the prime motivators, rather than the full rhetorical arsenal. I came up with several possible answers, but I'm not satisfied with them:
1. "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
2. "AI will cause many people to lose their jobs"- same answer as above.
3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. It also doesn't strengrhen a leftwing view in any obvious way, so I think this isn't a prime motivator.
4."Chomsky thinks LLMs are junk, and Chomsky is a leftist icon, so leftists take his view on LLMs" - Maybe. But Chomsky also hates postmodernism, so the left can sometimes adipt things that Chomsky hates
5. "Data Centers are bad for the environment" - again, probably an argument after the fact, rather than a prime motivator. Look at the bullshit with the water usage that keeps coming up, no matter how many times Andy Masley tells them to stop.
6. "AI will kill creativity/art, AI is soul less" - maybe they are worried about this? Not obvious why this would be a left-wing position, except that most writers and artists probably tend to be on the left.
"3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. "
While I don't think this is the core of the typical leftist objection, I think you're far to quick to dismiss it. The way you casually say "demonstrably false" suggests to me that you think that LLMs have demonstrated sufficient value to make this open-and-shut.
But this can really only hold up if you take it that the positive side of the balance sheet is the ONLY side (or at least the only side worth considering). Demonstrating X amount of value in a vacuum doesn't prove the technology is net-useful if there's a real possibility that -2X worth of direct harm is being done. Note that I'm not talking about externalities like power or water use, I'm talking about the technology itself being harmful. Plenty of technologies do direct harm, and it needs actual evidence to show that the harms are either nonexistent or plausibly smaller than the benefits.
I think it’s a mistake to try to come up with a specific reason why a group has an opinion. Especially when it’s not even one group - Marxists and social justice types have very different views from each other on lots of things, even though both are considered “left”.
Within the academic world, I think a lot of it is the Emily Bender and Gary Marcus type of opposition, where these are people who have been working for decades on understanding thought and language in a Chomskyan paradigm, and neural nets have been seen as misguided by that paradigm for decades (at least since the Minsky book in the late 60s).
This long opposition then leads them to jump on anything that might discredit the new paradigm. Interestingly, if you look at the original “stochastic parrots” paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) you’ll already see the seeds of most popular critiques. (I think the one section about poorly labeled data is actually valuable, but everything else there misses the point.)
There's a lot to unpack here, but I think the clearest demonstration of your problem is your own point #1.
You've basically nailed the actual left-wing position (which, by the way, approximately the only one leftists as a group can actually agree upon), you just immediately assumed any kind of additional skepticism somehow contradicts it. But there's no contradiction, "[potentially harmful thing] will be used by [evil people]" is in fact, even on its own, a perfectly sound argument against [thing]. But you simply axiomatically disagree that [thing] could possibly be anything other than a wonder, and don't even bother examining why someone would think otherwise. (The preceding sentence is a purely factual description, of your point #3 specifically.)
And, ultimately, that's your issue. "Leftists" disagree with you for the same reason other people disagree with you. You're free to think they're wrong, but framing their disagreement as ideologically motivated won't give you much insight. (In addition to being just a fundamentally repulsive thing to do.)
I'm not dismissive of point #1. It's a solid argument. Other than the deliberately misleading hatchet jobs regarding water usage, or the overconfident dogmatism of Chomsky, Emily Bender, etc., I see some merit in all the arguments I've listed. Point #2 worries me as well. But again, it seems like the revolutionary left of the late 19th and early to mid 20th century managed to hold a pro-technology, anticapitalist agenda, whereas now it seems rarer.
Thing is, you don't even stop to consider that not all technology is equal, and that context matters. It's easy to be pro-technology when technology means engines and automatisation for your factory, and washing-machines and plumbing for your home, things that outright liberate you from toil. It's less easy when the technology is destroying your surroundings. (What happened mid 20th century? Even aside from World War 2? Pollution at scale, industry turning large areas into wastelands, cities suffocating with car fumes. Turns out externalities matter. Of course the left turned away from high modernism, everyone not shielded by wealth and lack of empathy from its results did.) Of course externalities can be mitigated, we're doing that, but you can't expect to be able to merely point at technology and have people support it just because it's technology, everyone has seen what technology does and will reasonably ask what exactly does your technology do first.
So people look at AI and see very little good, and very little promise - and that's what you just can't accept (look at what you consider good arguments - the ones that confirm your priors about it being a groundbreaking transformative technology; it's the fact that someone might not share those priors that eludes you). But fundamentally, that's their reason, everything else is downstream from that and only that. No amount of reframing it as ideological issue will change that. (Chomsky is dogmatic? Like, about speaking the truth? Great, actually.)
I was at a party a week or so ago where I got to discuss AI a little with some of my lefty friends, and the objection they brought up was a #7: intellectual property rights. LLMs basically suck in a huge amount of stuff written by others without their consent.
I was admittedly unprepared for this argument, and the topic quickly changed before I could ask more questions (like whether fair use covered much of it, and so on).
It's not quite like your #1, although it's possible #1 drove them to the IP argument.
Argument for property rights cannot really be called "leftist" (except for US-centric "blue tribe" definitions that include liberals as a central example of "left", but, look, just no), but I'm surprised it caught you off-guard, since it's hardly new or niche. (One of Gary Marcus's favorites, for one, though I guess nobody on the AI-believer side actually reads the guy...)
I was initially in the "meh, fair use" camp, but then people started producing examples of AI output that if done by a human would be considered outright plagiarism. I still think we should apply fair use standard to training, but attempts at monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
I'll submit that the problem here is that you simply understand leftist views on property quite poorly. To be fair, they are many and varied, but the fundamental core is pretty consistent. Leftists view labor as valuable and believe the people who do the labor deserve the benefit of it. The entire notion that "property is theft[1]" is *exactly* because ownership of capital is used (in the leftist view) to siphon away profits from those who actually do the labor. The issue has never been that people own things, it's been that ownership when used to extract rent (and insofar as certain sorts of ownership exist solely to extract rent, the view is they shouldn't exist at all).
The intellectual property argument against LLMs is completely consistent with most leftist positions. A huge fraction of the works being hoovered up and fed into LLM training runs were created by individuals, creating text and art either commercially or out of passion. For somebody who had no hand whatsoever in the creation of that media to appropriate it, grind it into metaphorical paste, and repackage and sell things made out of that paste can be easily and naturally seen to be in-line with the general anti-labor-theft and anti-rent-extraction views that are foundational to the left.
(I would personally argue that there's a little more nuance around machine learning and property rights than your average internet leftist seems aware of. But given how quickly AI companies have run roughshod over the whole area, I don't really believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt, so the nuance ends up being not that instrumentally important.)
[1] "Property" here being used in the very narrow and specific sense meaning "private control of the means of production."
...I think I understand my own ideological position pretty well, thank you. (I have an urge to elaborate, but no time at the moment, so let me just reserve the right to come back here later to explain precisely what the position is and why your argument misses.)
Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking.
"Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking."
This might be worth its own top-level comment in this or a future OT, once you acquire the time to cover it.
There's an essay somewhere in my older bookmarks (I think Posner wrote it) that discussed four regimes for governing IP, and another essay by David Friedman. It'd be interesting to see how your account compares.
> monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
Legally speaking, anything generated entirely by an AI is uncopyrightable. It's possible collage or sufficiently-edited AI-gens are copyrightable (and, obviously, img2img must sometimes be copyrightable since sometimes it's 99% the original work), but they are not, in themselves, copyrightable. Only things made by human beings can be copyrighted, see also those monkey selfies and Zarya of the Dawn.
I suspect that "only human content can be copyrighted" is based on legal precedent that isn't 100% stable - someone out there is probably working on the argument that it doesn't apply when sufficiently complex machines are generating the works in question.
I don't know what those arguments will end up being. Currently, my intuition says content can be copyrighted iff it's generator is an individual capable of agentive action, and LLMs aren't that, so their product can't be copyrighted, as the law currently suggests. But I wouldn't be surprised if some legal scholar produces an argument covering an angle I hadn't thought of.
Different definitions, and I can see how I wasn't clear. I can also see how it's an arbitrary definition. The idea here is that monkeys are considered incapable of conscious reasoning (mirror test, blah blah blah), so nothing they do is any more agentive than a plant choosing to flex toward sunlight.
It'd be interesting to see what the actual reasoning was for the monkey selfie case, and whether it would also apply to, say, paintings created by that one elephant I've heard about. Or hypothetically, corvids, chimpanzees, dolphins, etc.
Whenever I see AI output in an area I'm well versed in I'm struck by how much garbage it is. When I hear from people with specialties in other areas, they seem to have the same response - it writes garbage code, bad legal arguments, etc. Yet, some people claim to be impressed by AI. What gives?
I believe the answer is Gell-Mann Amnesia for some and quasi-religious delusion for others. Regarding the delusion part, AI has basically become the Rapture of the Nerds for Rationalist crowd.
For yet others, it seems to be a case of them judging AI based on areas they know nothing about. People who don't read fiction often don't see the appeal. They don't understand why anyone would spend hours reading a novel. They can't form an appreciation of the craft or the ideas that go into it. They are often not even enticed by 'low' elements such as suspense. All they see are words on a page. Likewise with visual art. What the hell's The Eye of Silence supposed to be about? It's just random stuff! Anyways, these people will find AI outputs indistinguishable from even mid level human outputs precisely because they have no basis from which to judge any of it.
Outside of spaces enjoyed by Rationalists and other fans of AI, I think some common assessments are that AI has limited functional uses, mainly consists of low quality spam output, and is probably going to result in a huge economic crisis owing to wasted investment.
Counterpoint: I'm in Aviation. For as long as I can remember, anytime a newsreader speaks about something related to Aviation, every word touching on a technical aspect is Not Even Wrong, including prepositions and articles. This predates LLM-generated text by at least forty years.
AI is not good at producing finished output. It’s good at creating prototypes for someone without the base skill to make one, which can actually be really useful with coding, if you just want a script to do something once and don’t need a final public project. It can do smarter searches of documents than ctrl-f. It has gotten much better at everything over the past few months, as it did in the previous few months, and the previous few months.
I agree. It's really great at generating throw-away code, significantly less useful if you're doing something complex and have high standards. But it will probably continue to improve.
OK, talking about a position that neither of us holds is going to have some limitations but here are some ideas to steelman the argument. Note that many of these issues aren't only of concern to leftists but are maybe especially salient to them?
--AIs represent the ultimate triumph of capital over labor; the working class will be locked out of automated factories and pushed to the margins of society by the technical elite. The more extreme versions of this concern involve automated weapons like autonomous drones being used to keep the poor in line or just wiping them out altogether.
--AI is a powerful tool to disempower the little guy: instead of working for a human boss who can be understood, people such as gig workers basically work for an unknowable algorithm that can't be argued with and which can change the rules at any time.
--AI allows a new inescapable form of centralized surveillance and control. Look at the anxiety around the right-coded Palantir's work for ICE. It's not hard to imagine a more extensive and permanent fusion of big tech and homeland security which would keep an eye on every person in the country.
--AI is already being used in irresponsible and anti-social ways that are impossible to avoid, see for example the deepfake issues with Grok. It doesn't seem terribly likely that these abuses can be reined in or prevented, we're all just going to have to live with them.
--Finally, while AI doesn't use up water like people say, data centers do use massive amounts of energy and compete with other energy consumers for the limited supply. xAI has also been noted to be illegally using large numbers of gas turbines to power its data centers.
You can certainly form counterarguments to all these things, but for the normal person who isn't particularly interested in AI, it creates a continuous stream of bad vibes and bad news stories about AI that make it seem like a bad thing overall. And if you look at the polling about AI, there's a consistent pattern that people think AI may help society in general but is more likely to harm them personally. That's not really a partisan issue, Republicans and Democrats are both worried about AI.
> Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
Kropotkin and Marx were smart and educated people; the average <anything> is not.
I think there things work mostly on association chains. AIs are associated with companies, which are associated with capitalism, therefore bad.
Another part of the answer is that young people follow fashion waves, which keep changing because that's how the young people today separate themselves from their parents, even if the parents belonged to the same political tribe. There was a time when technology was in fashion (Sputnik), today denial of technology and science and progress in general is in fashion (also on the right: see "retvrn").
It's not that most leftists are against AI. Most *people* are against AI. Polling consistently has AI underwater by sizeable majorities. Even relatively benevolent AI like self driving cars. It's possible you either have mostly leftists in your feed, or you're associating the tech right with the right in general (and therefore assuming the left is opposing by proxy)
To add to what others have already written, LLMs can be brought back *after* the means of production are redistributed and AI can be used safely and with everyone's interests in mind. No one's saying you have to ban this technology forever.
It's largely because AI will concentrate power in the hands of a few in a way that nothing else ever could. It's anti-democratic. It has the potential to massively exacerbate all the social ills that leftists are against.
I don't think this is a particularly "leftist" thing. You could replace "corporations" with "woke corporations" and get all the same arguments from right wingers. AI is really unpopular with the average person for various reasons, not all of them based on reality.
5 is important from a leftist perspective. The water argument might be bad but they will consume more energy, and energy production drives climate change. More generally they consume more resources period. You may notice leftist sustainability initiaves all strive to decrease consumption, not make current levels of consumption more sustainable (local and organic food being a great example of unhelpful ideas in this space). A product that clearly consumes more is a big problem for that agenda
I have been able to identify several situations where AI is a useful tool for me:
* it is faster than a web search at answering questions that are simple and instant to verify, like “what is the mac equivalent of this keyboard shortcut”
* gemini meeting notes are now at a point where I just need to correct rather than entirely rewrite
* google lens has helped me navigate shops and cafes in Taiwan that I would not otherwise have attempted
Overall, I am happy with AI to precisely the extent it makes my life better instead of worse. Most interactions, however, are the latter:
* for coding of any complexity in my day job, every time someone convinces me to try an agent again because it really is much better now than last time, I end up having to do the thing myself from scratch after having wasted hours fruitlessly poking the ai’s nose into the shit it excreted in the vain hope it would stop producing more
* businesses I interact with now gate customer service teams behind LLMs, so before I can actually start resolving my situation I first have to waste hours convincing a chatbot the thing I need to do really cannot be done via the self-service website every. bloody. time. It’s even worse when this happens over the telephone and the chatbot tries to guess how what I want to happen fits into the few things it is able to make happen and makes everything more fucked up. Clue: if the thing could be done via the website without human interaction, I would absolutely not be trying to access support.
* my social media feed is now filled with garish cartoony AI-generated videos of ginger cats stealing fish and fat people jumping off things. Just those two subjects, and no amount of blocking/hiding stems the flow. I think the AI hates me as much as I hate it.
Please don’t tell me to try again with useful functionality. I’ve had people tell me that for two years now, tried the new thing, sometimes while those people watch, and it’s been a disappointment to all involved every time. I am fed up, and will give it at least a few more weeks before the next attempt.
I am sorry if you expected a more political objection, but there it is: AI uses a ton of compute and investment money to make my life, on average, suck more. I think the people for whom it works must have very different lives and jobs to me.
Fair Points. Ai Slop and AI customer service are annoying. Vibecoding is really a time saver for me at work. It's perfect for the short to mid-size python scripts that I need to write, which are not on the critical flow, and don't have to be very efficient or elegant. Leaves me more time to do the fun stuff.
I find that it helps me a lot, with some back and forth, to understand mathematical and scientific concepts. The ability to zoom in and zoom out, move from "explainittomelikeimfive" to the nitty-gritty is a blessing!
Separate point ... no reason this has to be specific to the left but I worry that AI will undermine a shared consensus of reality. And I have the opinions I have because I think they're most supported by reality (otherwise I'd change them). Therefore, AI will undermine the popularity of my opinions, and slant people's perceptions of reality towards whatever serves the owners of AI.
I must note that Trump and his closest supporters seem like the most gleeful users of AI to create fake (but presented as real) videos to attack their opponents (though I admit this could just be me noticing bad behavior on the other side more than my side). Fits with Trump routinely making shit up with no attempt to be truthful.
E.g. Trump admin officials calling Good and Pretti "domestic terrorists". I think Miller, Noem, et al can fairly argue that the outrage against them from the right is contrived since they all say shit like this all the time, and now that there's some backlash suddenly people are shocked, *shocked* to find insane accusations like this coming from the government.
If the current "shared consensus of reality" is shaped by the establishment media, their bias provides a good reason for there to be political polarization on the question of whether or not this being undermined is good.
The left also reacted positively (at least at first before negative effects of social media, algorithmic monitoring, etc, became apparent) to shit like the Internet, Youtube, widely available video, bodycams for cops, etc, for similar reasons. It's not out of a belief that the "establishment media" is propping them up.
There's a common joke along the lines of "now that we have cameras everywhere, it turns out UFOs aren't real, Bigfoot doesn't exist, and the police do needlessly beat up black people"
Also far more people look at Fox News, other conservative outlets, and social media controlled by Trump supporters, than whatever is left of the liberal "establishment media".
Yes, this observation is entirely consistent with my model: they supported those when they thought they would amplify their preferred narrative, and turned on them when it became apparent that they weren't doing that. I think Twitter is the clearest instance, with how quickly they changed their views on it when it stopped suppressing people and organizations they opposed.
Hold on a second, what you said in your previous comment is that the left doesn't want to undermine the current "shared consensus of reality" because it's being propped up by the establishment media.
In this comment you're saying that they want to support things that "amplify their preferred narrative". This isn't the same thing.
E.g. the left doesn't think that the current "shared consensus of reality" (insofar as it exists) is propped up by a left-leaning establishment media.
Re twitter, it's obvious that what's happening isn't Musk taking the thumb *off* the scale, it's Musk putting a thumb *on* the scale.
No, they do mean the same thing. This is one of those irregular verbs: I reinforce our shared consensus of reality, you fact-check misinformation, he amplifies his preferred narrative.
I'm left-of-center (not really "leftist") and wary of AI, though I don't feel like I'm wary of AI *because* of being leftist. As for why...
> "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
I worry that different levels of technological advancement lead to different types of societies. This is originally a leftist idea I think (base and superstructure), but has spread pretty widely. I fear that an AI dominated world is one that tends naturally to extreme economic (and subsequently political) inequality.
Because something economically/politically very important - human level intelligence - that is currently distributed pretty uniformly among people, will instead be distributed the same way capital is, and so much more prone to concentration. Maybe you can prevent it, but it wasn't even possible before. Relatedly it allows a greater degree of top-down control and less "people power", basically I'm worried the future is China's Internet censorship x1000.
Going to make another point in a separate comment...
How many different motivations for rejecting a proposed deductive or inductive thought are there? How many can we think of? Can we put bounds on the number? What does this let us predict about how thoughts and beliefs evolve over time in response to seeing different kinds of events or media, or doing social cognition with multiple people mediated in different ways?
I'm inspired to these thoughts by https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/maybe-social-anxiety-is-just-you , which gives an account of the author going to a dating/relationships workshop, being asked to name what he likes about an attractive woman, and after some struggle managing to only compliment her teeth, because his intuitions had ruled out actually complimenting her body. (Extra context so it's not quite as creepy: she was a professional model being paid to be there, and who knew what to expect from this work. She was was visually attractive, conventionally attractive, and attractive to the author.) The workshop leader called him out on an obviously false statement, and after forcing himself to speak only what he thought was true, he experienced better social success and later on a general reduction in social anxiety.
He infers from this that his goals in conversations had been subconsciously set to 1) avoid making people dislike him, 2) make women he liked actively like him to the point of talking, dating and sex, where for 2 he didn't actually have good feedback channels or a model of their internal life or a toolbox to robustly interact with it. He extends this to his thesis: that social anxiety is caused in general by trying to achieve social goals for ourselves, assigning ourselves massive amounts of constraints that rule out any successful tactics, attempting anyway with inevitable failure, and not having enough insight or knowledge to spot the insanity of this situation.
In other words, his thought process while at the workshop had been something like: (asked to answer "Choose a model that's attractive to you. What makes her attractive to you?") "Well, she has gorgeous legs, duh. Wait, no, I can't say that, she'll hate me. Her breasts? Can't say that either, that'll make her hate me. How she fills her dress out? She'll hate me. I've got to give an answer... she has nice teeth, I guess, that's true and non-creepy, we'll go with that.". In other words, a series of propositions, which are accepted or rejected for promotion to being believed and acted upon.
I think that as we parse direct observations, or manipulate parsed observations and memories in our own heads, or do social cognition with other people, that we're doing something similar. In deduction, for example, the train of thought might be "P is true, and we know P implies Q. Therefore P is true? No, that's not how 'implies' works. Therefore Q is true? Yes, seems plausible, proceed." I think that different constraints on candidate thoughts get applied in different contexts:
* "No, that deduction doesn't follow."
* "No, this observation is about a known optical illusion and both possible interpretations are true at once."
* "I can't say that, it's immoral."
* "I can't say that, I've committed to acting as though it's not true."
* "I can't say that, there hasn't been enough time for all available records to turn up yet."
* "I can't say that, it'll hurt her feelings."
* "I can't say that, only low-status people say things like that."
* "I can't say that around this crowd, I'll get mocked."
* "Dammit it's true, but I can't say that because they're on the other team and it's bad to allow any opponent any temporary advantage."
To do this properly, I'd build a model of a person's reasoning. Start with the basic chain: sense input + internal reasoning => conclusion. The reasons to reject the conclusion clearly include "sense input is wrong" and "internal reasoning is wrong".
Adding the fact that the person is answering another person's question gets us closer to the quoted reasons above. The chain becomes: question + sensory + reasoning => conclusion => answer. Now the rejection reasons include "question is wrong" and "answering is wrong". To cover the above:
A person may believe the question was garbled, vague, deceptive, rude, not worth the effort to produce an answer.
A person may believe the answer is too hard to express, harmful (to self/others) if heard by the wrong person, harmful (ditto) if misunderstood * sufficient risk of misunderstanding, not worth saying, or leads to a later conclusion the person believes is wrong enough to be convinced that the answer might also be wrong, and to check again.
I can't help but feel this question is asked from the angle of "if I wanted to configure an LLM to answer the same way a person might, while still being rational, how would I do it?", so I answered accordingly. (Readers may infer what my own harm estimation might be, as they see fit. After all, they can't help but do so.)
* watching different single responses, styles of responses, styles of interaction on Reddit in the context of moral reasoning about the ICE shootings of Renee Good(e) and Alex Pretti
* mainlining "Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction"
* a background goal of predictive modeling on the propagation and mutation of beliefs in the age of managed social media
* reading the linked post with an eye to applying its toolbox to my own dysfunctions and problems.
So you're actually not far off - I am kinda-sorta playing with trying to make LLMs think like people, just to understand how cultural battle lines shift in response the world events.
I'm a federal criminal defense attorney from Minneapolis. This is my take on the situation there, mostly with an eye toward arguing that "the legal system" doesn't depend on the good faith of the executive.
I think you're right that the laws provide constraints against an out of control executive provided that the executive or his agents obey them, and that means that the most extreme predictions -- like Trump will seize power rather than step down at the end of his term, or he will put large numbers of US citizens in camps without due process -- are fantastically unlikely.
That said, we lose a lot when a President breaks an established norm limiting his power, whether that President is Obama or Trump. I do believe that Trump was to some extent the victim of inappropriate lawfare by government officials, but seeing Trump double down on the lawfare is disappointing - the norm he seems to be pressing for is just that it was pointed in the wrong direction.
Second, I've got a legal observation, which is that it seems to me that self-segregation of voters is starting to produce areas where you can get a grand jury indictment or conviction of one party but not the other. As far as I can tell from the OIG report, Andrew McCabe is at least as guilty of lying to federal officials as Scooter Libby, but you apparently can't get an indictment of a Trump opponent in DC, at least not of a lightweight crime like lying to federal investigators. Trump can't get indictments of BS crimes in federal court, where the judges are on average better, but you can convict Trump in state court. (Granted, Trump's property misstatements are on another level from those alleged against James, so maybe that's not a fair comparison.)
I think the commonsense conception of rights is that they protect "The individual" from "the majority" and function as a check on rampant populism. Under this theory, things like the freedom of speech are like, values you preserve "even if everyone thinks it's a good idea" to abandon them.
I think the biggest single realization I had in law school is that many rights actually don't do that. Articulated rights in the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th amendment force *the government* to not act contrary to the popular majority. The Jury Right is the most powerful example. There's a way in which this protects the individual from the majority, but I think the deeper thing that's going on is that it means the government CANNOT secure a conviction without a bunch of normal people signing off on it.
Under *this* theory, I think the phenomenon you're talking about is a feature not a bug, and it's why I was unbothered by alleged "lawfare" in the Biden administration (and frankly, in this one). The check on "political prosecution" isn't some norm against charging your enemies, it's the simple fact that you will lose a case that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury in a particular community: within that community it's hard to convict popular people, it's relatively easier but still very hard to convict really unpopular people (how often do 12 people agree on whether something has been *proven*?), we'd rather have it this way than any alternative, in a system that is based on majority rule. The simple fact is that if the public thinks a case is transparent BS, they'll acquit...if they think that the case is deadly serious, they'll convict.
Legally speaking, the last serious constitutional amendment was to remove the two term presidential limit. (Given a secret ballot, 80% of Congress votes to impeach Trump. I do not see this changing, and I do not see Trump managing a constitutional amendment).
I merely post this so that people can update their general priors on "two term presidency" to include "we almost got rid of this, in the past 50 years." This is a convention that's only be held since FDR, and within ~50 years of said convention being set, it was already on the table to remove it.
I think the assumption of a lot of conservatives in the biden era was that the executive is capable of "auto-convicting" anyone, and that once trump took power, what's good for the goose would be good for the gander and the administration would just be able to level prosecutions at anyone it wanted.
The present state of affairs proves this isn't true. Trump has tried to do the same thing he accused the Biden administration of, but going the other way. It hasn't worked. He can't even get a misdemeanor prosecution for hurling a sandwich at an ICE officer. He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I would argue that that's because the DOJ (along with most other institutions) has a strong leftward bias. He's still probably gonna get both Comey and Brennan - and even if he doesn't, he's gonna ruin a couple years of their lives while they sweat it out and/or rack up legal bills.
In general the DOJ gets who they want. Isn't the conviction rate in Federal criminal cases > 95%?
If it's a matter of "leftward bias", why does Trump keep having to fire *his own appointees* (all life-long conservatives) when they disagree with him? It's not partisanship that's the problem here, it's reality.
The DOJ gets 95% convictions because they have a longstanding practice of charging out only those cases they are totally convinced they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. This doesn't mean they're always right, of course, but I tend to look askance at accusations that a particular federal charge is nothing more than a witch hunt: until this year, the DOJ was very careful which cases to bring.
Things seem different now, and there have been some fairly dramatic failures to ride roughshod over the administration's enemies.
I agree that lawyers at DOJ (and other government agencies, incidentally) don't bother with a case they're pretty sure they can't win, but this is unfortunately still consistent with Wanda's assertion that the DOJ is left-biased. If the system is implemented by enough left-biased people, then a left-biased lawyer can easily believe he'll get a left-biased case through when a right-biased case of equal pedigree would not. Exactly the same is true if we swapped "left" with "right" throughout.
Therefore, an assumption that the DOJ believes it can bring a case to conviction doesn't allow us to imply that that case is objectively fair.
The system is further complicated if DOJ turns out to contain a mix of left-, right-, and centrists lawyers working under a biased executive, and those lawyers have a clear incentive to disguise their biases in order to remain employed. Complicated further still when we have to analyze each of several possible such mixtures in order to generate predictions to test. As scientists often say: "more study is needed".
>He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I don’t think that’s completely over yet. I personally do not think there is a case to be made there, but I don’t think he’s given up trying. Anyway, to the broader point that the legal system can be used as a weapon against anyone, I don’t see how anyone could dispute that unless they were completely ignorant of the world as it is and as it has been. I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail. Not me of course I never spit on the sidewalk.
> I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail.
I actually doubt that. They could certainly *try* to prosecute it, but my guess is that the grand jury would probably refuse to return a bill, much as we saw with the felony footlong case and Trump's various other abuses.
You're arguing against a claim that's far too strong. I wouldn't say it's a strawman, since I suppose I could see people holding this view before the First Trump Administration, but not after they saw judges stymie almost all of Trump's efforts during that term.
So no, I think most realize recognize that you need control of the judges as well to be able to do whatever you want. The Democrats had this under Biden, and the Republicans do not.
But even so, in most cases, even without guarantee of conviction the PROSECUTION is adequate deterrent, with ruinous legal fees whatever the outcome, and besides that they can trump up enough charges that taking the offered plea bargain become the rational decision even if you're _almost_ certain you'll win at trial: if you win, the prosecutor shrugs and moves on to his next victim; if you lose, you go to jail for decades.
I admit I was mildly surprised they couldn't get the misdemeanor charge to stick to the sandwich guy, but I guess that was a tad too frivolous.
I disagree with a few things you've said there. Firstly, one judge in the trump cases (Florida's Eileen Cannon) was very much on Trump's side of the case, or at least was widely perceived as such. Also, the SCOTUS immunity decision was rather favorable to him...in both cases, you have judges (including, you know, the Supreme Court) not being "under the control" of Democrats.
Secondly, I've been a lawyer under Trump I, Biden, and Trump II. Under no administration was it true that the prosecution can simply "trump up enough charges" to win by default. If they could, I'd lose a lot less than I do :)
Yea "Dems controlling the judges" is a pretty funny statement given a Supreme Court that has been majority-conservative for at least 25 years now. And that the last moment in which a majority of that court had been appointed by Democratic presidents was in 1970.
Also, Trump has had plenty of rulings by judges he appointed go against him.
Also, as of today Trump leads all presidents in the number of current federal judges that were appointed by him, 261. Next most is Biden 236, then Obama 229, then Bush43 104. Given the GOP's Senate majority Trump will by the end of 2028 have appointed between 45 and 50 percent of all sitting federal judges. [Data from Ballotpedia's real-time tracker.]
Have the technology to deploy the Aerolamps doesn’t mean that they will be deployed. If we don’t address the human side of the problem, we might not see this future.
I’m looking for collaborators (and possibly funders) interested in a multi-paradigm shifting pragmatic framework for pluralist, post-polycrisis (including post-AI) futures. The final public-facing synthesis is 'The Life-Years Movement':
The common thread behind the work is a systems-level analysis of persistence under physics and tail-risk constraints — i.e., how locally 'rational' systems (biological, economic, moral) can lead to catastrophic failures ('ruin') over longer horizons.
I argue that persistence meant our tree of life's architecture had to avoid lineage extinction filters (LEFs), requiring many features that look “non-Darwinian” at the surface — reproductive restraint, extreme cellular redundancy, pre-adaptational variance. Lineages without such 'brakes' and robustness simply didn’t last. This reframes a number of puzzles, including the apparent Great Cosmic Filter.
Agents are treated as multi-motivational, energy-constrained 'action-minimizers' (in the Lagrangian sense) rather than scalar utility maximizers. Money is modeled as stored but degrading 'motivational energy' - likened to oil or uranium, rather than a Platonic store of value.
Life-years are proposed as the central form of moral concern, while allowing agent-level freedom in choosing the scope of lives one takes primary responsibility for (“heirs”).
Governance — Life-Years-Based Governance (LYBG).
Governance is reframed around maximizing life-years per unit resource, subject to anti-ruin constraints and irreducible disagreement about moral scope.
I have draft papers for each module in progress. If you're interested in either the bigger project or specific aspects, feel free to reach out: ad(delete)vitam(delete)sapien@gmail.com.
About me: I've a Phd in Computational Biology (e.g. genetics) from Cornell, undergrad math + philosophy from NYU. I've worked in industry on both biofx algs + eng stacks in both the ctDNA and PGT spaces - most recently at Orchid Health as Lead Bioinformatics Scientist
These Aerolamps seem like a fantastic idea for daycare centers and public schools! Children, especially infants and toddlers, getting sick in daycare is a huge problem for working parents - can't send a sick child to daycare, have to stay home with them, and most dual-working couples and single parents in America have very limited time off. If you could reduce the rate of infections for young children, that would be a tremendous help for parents!
San Francisco friends: there will be a vigil this Thursday (January 29) at 6:30pm at city hall (civic center, McAllister side) for people killed in ICE custody and enforcement, including recent shootings in Minneapolis. Names will be read. I hope to see you there, and would appreciate you sharing if you can.
Maximum empathy for criminals. Zero empathy for law enforcement and law-abiding citizens, as always. Will you be reading any names of people raped or killed by illegal migrants? Immigration agents attacked in the line of duty? I guess they wouldn't suit your political spectacle.
Are you saying you want people to support the criminals who work for ICE and that they should have no empathy for the law abiding citizens they are gunning down?
I really don't understand what it is about immigration law in particular that has made people so incensed recently. I've only encountered such radical opposition to it from open borders libertarians or left-anarchist types. Even then it is usually not a core issue.
They killed a white liberal woman, the first time that's happened in like 50 years, so now they're acting like an endangered species. Still, the basic point remains that immigration laws are an unjust restriction on freedom of association.
Do people not have the freedom to dissociate in your view? Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest? Why does this not apply to my country as well?
>Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest?
Of course.
>Why does this not apply to my country as well?
Because there are 300 million other people in your country and immigration laws burden their freedom of association rights. If they all shared your views, if they didn't want immigrants here and refused to rent to or hire them, there would be no immigration.
You can definitely make the argument that the right is just excercising their freedom of association. Unfortunately, the rights of one group come at the expense of another. You can't make everyone happy.
I don't like ICE attacking police officers. I'm also not happy that those citizens died. However, they were obviously not obeying the law at the time they died (obstructing, interfering, fleeing from law enforcement). I place most of the blame on local government and activist groups for creating a lawless, chaotic, dangerous environment where that kind of incident is inevitable. When you have thousands of dangerous interactions every day eventually something will go wrong and people get hurt.
My main critique here is about the transparent exploitation of these deaths to demonize immigration enforcement.
Define "obstructing." Because the definition ICE seems to be using is "doing anything we don't like in our vicinity," and that definition doesn't align with the law. Filming law enforcement and reporting on their activities is protected by the 1st amendment.
ICE has very specific laws about what they can do. They are allowed to arrest anyone impeding their actions, which doesn't include videoing their actions. It certainly isn't "anything we don't like".
Of course, this doesn't nessesarily justify what happened to him two weeks later from a presumably different squad, but it's hard for me to consider the general posture that ICE has taken as unreasonable given that they have to deal with guys like this everyday.
For what it's worth, there were 31 deaths in ICE custody in 2025, which is the highest number since 2004. Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman-Fuentes are two of them, otherwise there's just a lot of
Is that a lot? I dunno, you'd probably want to compare it to other prison systems in terms of person-days in detention and then adjust for stuff like age distribution and so forth. There's typically around 500 deaths in Federal custody per year in the US but again these numbers are meaningless without knowing person-days in detention.
Canada's successful sabotage of Katie Uhlaender is an interesting exploit of the rules for Olympic Skeleton.
The way it works is that a country can get three, two, or one sled, based on the ranking on their players. There was a tournament earlier this month with 120 points for the winner that, had Katie won, she'd have bumped the US up into the three-sled category, and secured that third spot. But if there are fewer than 20 athletes completing, the TOURNAMENT gets downgraded, and only awards 90 points. So Canada withdrew four people just before the race, getting it down to 19. And they succeeded: Katie won the tournament, but didn't get enough points to qualify. And Canada is guaranteed two sleds.
Canada claims this was for "safety" and the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation has decided to buy that explanation.
It reminds me of that famous quote from WarGames (1983).
I don't know whether Canada would have gotten two sleds either way. From what I read, it looks like they almost certainly would have, but this just makes it certain.
Probably my most hubristic position is that I believe lots of people, including myself, could outperform democracy and do an excellent job of being dictator in perpetuum. Other than myself, I also believe Scott Alexander would do a bang up job at being God-Emperor, and David Chapman too.
Do you think you could be Caesar? Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
So just in the abstract, we wouldn't expect the way we do politics and elections in practice to be perfectly efficient, so we don't expect it to find the literal best person on earth for the job. So this is trivially true depending on what you mean by 'lots of people', whether you mean 'dozens' or 'billions'.
Second, I'd caution people that relatively little of the job is being smart enough to make good decisions, and much of it is being a good judge of character to pick subject-matter experts to advise you on decision, doing diplomacy and having conversations with people to try to keep them on your team and indebted to you, looking good for the camera and inspiring the public, etc. Being smart and sane helps, but if your social skills aren't great you may be less effective than you think.
Also, if you want to be really good, you need to be comfortable working 14 hour days for most of a decade. If you suffer at all from akrasia and procrastination, this is probably not going to work out.
Also, *legitimacy* is critical. Getting people to agree to follow the outcomes of the process is just as important as whether the process actually produces good outcomes.
> Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
Obviously AI - we're going to end up there anyways, let's just yank the bandaid off now.
And because "literally a child" could do a better job than 80%+ of politicians today, we could already do this with any of the Big 3 paid tier AI's today.
1. Everyone downloads the Democracy 2.0 app and allocates their capped amount of voting tokens to whatever they care about. Immigration, DEI, cheaper houses, lower taxes, economic growth, lower crime, whatever. As in, you get a standardized menu of items you can stake your tokens against, but you only get so many tokens, so prioritization and trade-offs are built-in.
2. AI proposal - The AI proposes legislation to attain the aggregated democratically defined priorities, with a detailed prompt outlining the total budget and soliciting it to consider the homeostatic landscape, to predict the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects, to outline monitoring KPI’s and thresholds, and to define a good sunset or re-evaluation time for any proposed legislation.
3. Vetting - Prediction markets and digital-twin sims price the KPI impacts before enactment, as a human check on AI predictions, and as an overall evaluation ground over many such proposals, so we can understand the overall landscape of which proposed legislation will move various needles the most. This is federally funded so there’s enough alpha in there that smart people / companies will be doing this full time. Also, look! An actually high-value, relatively ungameable use for prediction markets!
4. Democratic vetos - A stratified random sample (≈ 1k - 10k citizens depending on locality) gets the top 3 AI-optimised bundles for each priority, plus the market scores, and can veto any of them in the aggregate if enough decide to veto. This caps downside from model myopia and value-misalignment, and keeps democratic participation in the loop, without the pernicious regulatory capture and misaligned incentives we get today from full time politicians, lobbying groups, and industry insiders.
And there you go!
What does voting look like? You open an app and allocate your voting tokens to the high level priorities you care about.
Occasionally, you’ll get a push notification to decide whether to veto some random bills or not, which you can ignore or answer as you like. Done.
It scales to every locality size - from HOA, municipal, county, state and federal.
And at a shot, we’ve eliminated political parties, politicians, lobbyists, industry insiders, regulatory capture, and most of the other ills that plague politics today.
The problem with being Caesar is staying Caesar. Being a benign dictator is pretty much only possible with extreme regime security, if there is even a slight threat to your supremacy it becomes a race to the bottom with regard to coercion and oppression. All the great things you want to do are secondary in importance to remaining the sole source of power and authority. Unfortunately it is this dynamic which tends to produce the worst aspects of autocracy. You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Also, nobody is right about 100% of things, and dictatorships are bad at correcting for Dear Leader's mistakes.
> . You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Reminds me of the end of AGOT when IIRC, Ned Stark declines the proposal to preemptively arrest Cersei.
I am more interested in what weird things your reign would be known for afterwards. Building ziggurats? Starting a new fashion trend? Make a robot your chief of security? If you can’t be a good Caesar you can strive to be memorably bad.
My personal "gone my first day in power" list includes big-time college athletics. Being the only person I've ever met who considers that specific thing to be both worthy of elimination _and_ high-enough priority for a new national dictator's first-day list, no one I've ever mentioned this to has failed to find it an odd choice.
I have heard that the ancient Greeks (that is, pre-Classical era) mostly saw tyranny as a neutral thing, and saw it as necessary specifically in the case of major unrest. When there is a general understanding among most people that the current government is not satisfactory, and people are willing to revolt, a tyrant takes control in order to provide a coherent direction. It satisfies people who just want *something* to happen, and if things go worse, well, there's a clear person to blame.
It's interesting that today people who are proponents of some sort of dictatorship, or any model of government, tend to promote it as a permanent thing. As someone generally averse to tyranny, I can at least somewhat understand the logic of a temporary tyrant, and perhaps proponents of tyranny could better sell the idea as such. Of course history is full of cases where temporary tyrants become permanent tyrants, so one might see that as the most successful strategy for achieving permanent tyranny...
Anyway, to actually answer the question, there's always the old mainstay of cloning Lee Kuan Yew.
For Romans in the times until perhaps 200BC, tyranny (or "dictatorship") did not come from revolts, but was a pretty normal thing. They were rules about it, like who gets to appoint the dictator, what the dictator has to achieve/resolve (there was a list of half a dozen common causes), and when he is supposed to step down again. They were assigned frequently in some periods, I think like every few years or so. The dictator had pretty, well, dictatorial power in the political matters for which he was appointed.
The issue is: while it was stable in Roman times, it is not stable by design. A dictator may refuse to step down, and with so much power it may be hard to force him. In some sense the difference to some modern democracies is more gradual than the name would suggest: the French president is also pretty powerful in some areas, commands the military and so on. The reason that he can't just keep his power is a mutual understanding of all sides that he is supposed to step down after someone else gets elected, and people are supposed to stop obeying the old president in this case. This is also more or less how it worked in Roman times, except that the trigger was not the election of another dictator but that the issue for dictatorship was resolved.
Also, mechanically, Roman dictators just didn't have that much direct power. There weren't a bunch of guys who directly reported to them that they appointed. Everybody agreed they were the dictator, other people in various positions would listen to them about e.g. "take the troops here, wait, etc".
Basically, imagine if everybody agreed Trump should be dictator, BUT, he doesn't get to appoint his own cabinet, he just gets the Biden cabinet. He may have a lot more flexibility in policy since everybody agrees he should be dictator for six months (or whatever), but he would be less able to use that power to overturn American democracy than he is at present, since none of the people there owe their careers or power to him.
IIRC, the reason the early Roman "dictator" system worked was because there was a strong custom that their appointment was time-limited. They weren't dictators the way we think of them today.
Technically all tyrants are temporary tyrants, given their mortality. A good example is Franco. He established a dictatorship, and the monent he died, the country peacefully transitioned to democracy. The threat of communism was eliminated, and the dead remained dead. All is well.
And they'll fall too, eventually. Though, it's hard to imagine there's much appetite for democracy among the North Koreans in the first place, given that even their southern brethren are backsliding into authoritarianism after just forty years.
No, this is just a dumb liberal trope that prevents virtuous individuals from seeking office. The goal shouldn't be to resist the mantle of command; the goal should be to resist the temptation to abuse it.
This raises an interesting tangent for me, which is whether I could transition such a dictatorship back to democracy again, and which improvements I'd make along the way.
There are certain policies, like a land value tax, preferential voting, free speech absolutism, an estate tax, and similar, which are difficult to implement within an established democratic system but might be comparatively easy during its founding.
Outperform democracy at what? There's competence , and there's direction. An incompetent dictator steers in no direction. A competent dictator steers in the direction of their own goal. Neither care about my goals. Democracy is an attempt to take all goals into account.
I think people systematically overestimate how awesome or easy it would be to be a dictator. It’s not really a question of having the most wisdom or best ideas, it’s about getting a super complex change-resistant amorphous dynamic system to do ANYTHING you want it to do. How do you get information? How do you know who’s lying to you? How do you surface the one mid level manager who actually understands a situation well enough to modify it? It’s not like Scott could sit on the throne, announce that the country is now to act rationally in all things, and actually have anything meaningful happen.
I feel like this fully generalizes to being the boss of literally anything. Power is typically seen as a reward rather than volunteering for a job where you work 168 hours a week.
Yeah, any time I see anyone say they think they could do a good job as president or dictator, or even think they would want to do it, I get pretty confident that this person has never really gotten close to running something.
I think it DOES generalize. I think being a CEO is comparable to being a dictator, the stakes are just lower.
>Power is typically seen as a reward
I think that's wrong. Formal responsibility, and the pay that comes with it, is a reward that's doled out. Power is a separate concept and only accrues to people who are able to grab and hold it.
power and responsibility seem like two sides of the same coin to me? I don't understand what you're gesturing at. Are we defining "power" specifically as political power?
I would say that responsibility is legible power while real power is always illegible. Responsibility is having a team to manage. Power is knowing what you have to do to be indispensable to your company and being able to outmaneuver your peers in the eyes of your superiors.
No one is 'rewarded' with being dictator. There's no one that hands you that title. It's a house you build yourself out of the materials you can find. Most positions of any real power in the world are a lessor version of that. The sorts of jobs you get by being good at the legible things everyone knows to try to be good at are just the kiddie pool version of power. The sorts of things that got e.g. Steve Jobs where he got are much closer to how a dictator behaves than how a technically-competent engineering VP behaves.
oh in that case, we're mostly just splitting hairs. I tend to think of power as desirable per se, and responsibility is the price tag. I agree that it's awfully convenient to be an Eminence Grise, although I think it's a mistake to define "real" power that narrowly.
I'll grant that "reward" was not le mot juste, since it often does (though not necessarily, imo) impute an exogenous source. Although I can't think of a better term.
Also, people overestimate how much freedom of choice the dictators have, versus the things they have to do in order to keep their power and stay alive.
For example, as a dictator, you probably need to murder everyone around you who is simultaneously competent and ambitious. Probably everyone competent, full stop, just to be on the safe side. But it's hard to govern the country without having competent people you could delegate important tasks to.
Being explicitly a short-term dictator, as mentioned above in these comments, could ameliorate this particular conundrum to at least some extent. Though it of course creates a new potential issue: the deliberate lame-duckness getting in the way of the dictator having their orders fully carried out.
As is said in various elite-competitive-sports contexts, if it was easy everybody would already be doing it.
The real strength of republics vs dictatorships is being able to have multiple competent generals in the field. The king can only lead one army at a time, and being away from the capital for long is risky.
Putin has plenty of people that are simultaneously competent and ambitious around him. Some of them are even under him (he's quite old), as a "if you kill me, West, the crazy guys take over." Most of them are just the wealthy oligarchs. In Russia, few people really want to be Putin (popular though he is) -- they want to be the wealthy guy rolling in dough.
That's a very common technique used by dictators and strongmen the world over: you'd be sorry if I left office, Bruno the Torture Nerd would take over and he'd be much worse than me! But in reality Bruno the Torture Nerd works for the boss, and will probably end up in jail or dead after the revolution or coup, no matter who ends up on top. Think of Lavrentiy Beria; his colleagues knew he was a psychopathic murderer and rapist and didn't want him anywhere near the levers of power.
This is a different situation than a coup or revolution, unless you're talking specifically color revolution (aka CIA sponsored). This is "why you shouldn't assassinate me."
Assassinations tend to lead to the next guy in the food chain stepping up (because, after all, that's all you've done, offed the guy at the top). And it just makes sense that the insecure new dictator would be more brutal/have less tolerance for insubordination.
Knowing a bit about Russia / Russian politics, I would challenge this statement.
Putin _had_ a fair amount of competent and ambitious people around him (back in early 2000s), but they got to key positions and basically stopped paying attention to anything aside from staying at the top (and that, btw, includes Putin himself). So now, after ~20 years, IMHO they are mediocre at best...
Let's go through the "Russian Deck", or the circle of important people that Kommersant identified in December 2003, and see where they are now:
Hearts (Yeltsin's old circle):
Voloshin - gone.
Kasyanov - gone.
Deripaska - still in business, doesn't meddle in politics.
Abramovich - sitting pretty in London.
Surkov - gone.
Lesin - died under suspicious circumstances.
Alexis II - dead.
the Yumashevs - gone.
Clubs (Putin's Petersburg associates)
Sergey Ivanov - gone.
Matvienko - in charge of the upper chamber, but she's ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Gryzlov - gone.
Miller - in charge of Gazprom.
Medvedev - technically not gone, but eh.
Kozak - gone.
Cherkesov - gone.
Mironov - in charge of one of the parties, again, ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Diamonds (liberals)
Chubays - gone.
Khodorkovsky - in exile.
Kudrin - gone.
Gref - in charge of Sberbank
Illarionov - gone.
Gaydar - dead.
Kiriyenko - deputy head of Putin's administration.
Nemtsov - murdered.
Spades (siloviki)
Viktor Ivanov - gone.
Sechin - in charge of Rosneft.
Patrushev - practically gone.
Ustinov - Putin's representative in the Southern Federal District.
Pugachev - gone.
Kazantsev - dead.
Zaostrovtsev and Karimov - gone.
Out of the whole deck, I would name Sechin, Miller and Gref as people worthy of your description. Kiriyenko is the only one who's both ambitious and competent. And patient.
... Putin keeps people below him that the United States/Ukraine/West doesn't want at the top of a World Power (refraining from calling Russia a superpower, at the moment). If you want to say the political dudes are not so ambitious anymore (or at least willing to let him die first), sure.
The wealthy oligarchs are engaged in their own games, and to the extent Putin leaves them alone, he's "their b*tch", just like Trump is signing up to be funded by the oil companies headed down to Venezuela (In that they'll have a Very Profitable Interest in making sure the next President doesn't just "give the oil fields back to Venezuela").
(In short, your correction is noted, accepted and I wanted to thank you for making it.)
My Autism is such that I am painfully conscientious where I am required to be by my brain, and don't really get big feelings about stuff outside of that.
EG to make an example from my last couple days, I will grab a rattlesnake that's not where it's supposed to be and take him out into the mountains or the desert, but I don't feel any particular way about executing a trapped ground squirrel, which are noxious vermin where I am.
Thus, I feel confident I could make a binding deal with myself that I would be a benevolent guiding hand to the people, eg I would simply select technocrats to fill executive positions and maintain an elected advisory committee to fill blind spots, and otherwise just keep living like I do with the exception that I would require payment in a couple interesting restaurant meals a month and 1 expensive but not too expensive scale model kit from time to time.
I want that PGU Nu Gundam, but I made a binding deal with myself that I may only purchase a full price toy once I have completely cleared my backlog, which is at least a year out at this point.
There's that conscientiousness again, fucking with me: I have 30k in walking around money left for this quarter, but I can't fucking spend it because of a rule I made when I was poor.
I don't even know where I'm gonna put that. I think I'm gonna try to find some sort of "american coal finally eats shit and dies" etf, that seems inevitable over the 4 year horizon.
I'm way too angry to dictate. We were asked this back in middle school and my answer was "World War 3 on day 1."
The main problem with dictatorship is that the system runs on personal charisma, so the dictator has to appear to be the smartest person in every room, and they have to do it against lopsided levels of scrutiny. If they aren't, then the whole system erodes and eventually destabilizes. What's the easiest way to be the smartest person in the room? Punish anyone who says otherwise. "Maybe that astronaut neurosurgeon had a point, or maybe he didn't, but now that he's dead we'll go with my plan." So the country's intelligence caps out at the intelligence of the leadership. It can work for a while if the leader is actually intelligent, but eventually they're going to die, and because no one could be above the cap the new leader will be below the previous cap, while becoming the new cap.
In Democracy, if someone else has huge charisma the leader can point and say "if the astronaut neurosurgeon wants my job, they can apply for it." It unlops the scrutiny and lets you accept more antagonistic ideas without threatening your position as king, which allows the system to stay smarter than the kings.
I think an ideal monarchy/dictatorship, where a good-intentioned and intelligent ruler is able to simply command improvements without political considerations, would probably function quite well. Something like a medieval monarchy where the people they rule can't really conceive of a different setup besides monarchy.
If you had the constraints of a modern dictatorship, and a population that has the ideology and knowledge of liberal democracy, the dictator would be far too concerned with keeping their power, relying on the power and influence of some to control the rest, that it would not produce good outcomes. I imagine that this second set of skills is much rarer than the first.
Even in the quintessential modern case of this, Putin, would probably do pretty well for Russia if he wasn't constrained by oligarchs, international pressure, and the Russian Constitution. The war in Ukraine would be going significantly different for Russia if he was able to order up the conscription of an extra 2 million Russians to Ukraine's ~1 Million, which would still be a lower percentage of the population fighting than Ukraine has right now.
By medieval standards, it might not be too hard to command improvements over however the bureaucracy is running. But I really don’t think one person has the time or experience to know what would be an actually good way to run things. You need lots of voices involved to have any idea.
Conscripts aren't very good troops for Russia, and at least according to people posting around here, they aren't often even equipped with a gun. According to military (non-Russian) sources, pre-Ukraine, about a third of conscripts were getting pimped out for cash (yes, sex).
I believe Russia has slack capacity for escalating the war in Ukraine. They're not doing so, because they have met their "red line" goals (Sevastopol plus water, and some safety buffer from Kiev can fire missiles from their territory and damage our critical infrastructure), and, broadly speaking, they consider the Ukrainians to be kinsmen, and would rather not have to kill more of them than is necessary*. Also, it's a lot easier to negotiate when you look like "reasonable warriors" and not "bloodthirsty genocidal conquerers"**
*Most modern wars put the basic objective as "destroy the war factories" -- because without guns (and materiel), you can't fight. Ukraine doesn't have the war factories, so Russia must make Ukraine bleed soldiers instead, until they are physically incapable of fighting.
**When people ask about security guarantees, I say they don't exist. But Russia can signal, "I am crazy" or Russia can signal "I can at least pretend to be sane and make sane decisions."
Do you think it's the oligarchs, international pressure, or the Russian Constitution that prevent him from mobilizing 2 more million Russians? Or the fact that Russians can silently tolerate volunteers or professionals dying, but get much more nervous when it's involuntary soldiers that are dying?
- Small country: Ok, sure, you seem smart enough judging by your Substack. As long as its people agree. It might increase competition in governance, and other countries (smaller ones; larger ones tend to be more chauvinistic) might benefit from copying what you get right as dictator of Slovicedonia.
- America: I'm not a citizen. I highly doubt this would increase competition in governance and systems of government.
- Whole world: No thanks. All competition between governing elites disappears. I have no candidates.
I think the Civil War was a mistake, while the Southern states were ethically in the wrong regarding slavery, they weren't trying to conquer the North, they should've been allowed to secede. Would've been more in line with the Founding Fathers' vision and the American ethos, the United States were supposed to be a voluntary union. And it probably would've been healthier in the long run regarding things like North/South relations and racism, because I think most likely, within 50 years, the Confederacy would've abandoned slavery due to international pressure, the English Navy was sinking slave boats, Brazil ended up abolishing slavery without a civil war before the 19th century ended. Then I bet the Confederacy would ask to be let back into the US.
It would've been a thing where the south internally resolved the issue, instead of having a foreign morality externally imposed through war.
To seriously think about whether the Civil War was a mistake, it helps to make the question more specific.
1) Did the advocates of secession make a mistake in not trying to negotiate a separation via mutual agreement?
I think that, for the secessionists, time was the enemy. If you look at how secessionist movements played out in Quebec, or more recently, in Scotland, the key move to preventing secession is to hold a referendum far enough in the future that the populace has a lot of time to think about the downsides as well as the upsides of secession before they vote.
In 1857, "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It" by Hinton R Helper was published. The thesis of the book was that slavery was bad for the south as a whole, even though it made the large plantation owners incredibly rich. Just one example from the book: In 1850, southern states grew $78,264,928 worth of cotton. In the same year, northern states grew $142,138,998 worth of hay. This book was mostly kept out of the south (in 1860, an individual in Texas found in possession of a number of copies of the book was lynched), but if southern states had had a prolonged public debate about secession, it’s hard to see how its contents could be effectively suppressed.
In the case of Czechoslovakia, the country was partitioned by an agreement among political leaders, even though partition was not supported by a majority of either the Czechs or the Slovaks. I don't think that model would have worked in the United States. The Constitution authorizes Congress to add states, but not to remove existing states from the Union. The general notion that power derives from the people would make it very hard for southern states to justify splitting off if the couldn't convince their citizens to support this in a referendum.
So I think there is good reason to believe that unilateral secession was not a mistake from the perspective of the secessionists, because if they tried a negotiated separation they'd likely end up like Quebec.
2) Did the Confederate leaders make a mistake when they decided to attack Fort Sumter?
In hindsight, that did not work out well for them. The alternative was to settle for de facto independence. Transnistria would be a modern analogue; it has effectively functioned as an independent country for the past 33 years even though Moldova does not officially recognize its independence.
The first problem with this is that prior to Fort Sumter, the border states had not joined the Confederacy. In January, the Virginia General Assembly had passed a resolution stating that, “if all efforts to reconcile the unhappy differences existing between the two sections of the country shall [fail], every consideration of honor and interest demands that Virginia shall unite her destiny with the slave-holding States of the South.” It's not clear that, absent a war, Virginia would have ever joined the Confederacy.
The second is that, on some level, the conflict was about respect. If the United States doesn’t recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, will anyone else? Maybe eventually, but the Confederacy would have had to patiently plead for what the United States is given as a matter of course. If fugitive slaves escape to the United States, will the United States return them? Probably not, at least not without a strong incentive like the Confederacy demonstrating that it can defeat the United States in a war. I think that if the Confederacy becomes Transnistria, its citizens will feel disrespected and public support will collapse.
Third, even if the Confederacy achieves independence, the secessionists can still lose because, as you note, the Confederacy would be under pressure to abolish slavery. That’s less likely to happen if the secessionists start a war and win it, because then abolishing slavery is repudiating the sacrifices of everybody who fought and died to preserve it.
The secessionists were working from a position of weakness, so their gambles, even if they didn’t work out, were not necessarily mistakes.
Do you think an economic solution was possible? What would've happened if the federal government had offered to buy every slave at a fair price? Four million slaves x $1000 is less than the war ended up costing. Many of the south's fears were rooted in the desire to protect that significant capital investment.
Northerners who as a moral conviction were opposed to slavery would of course oppose that move as rewarding the slavers. Other Northerners would oppose a massive arbitrary transfer of mostly-Northern wealth to a minority of a minority of Americans. The large majority of Southerners too poor to own any slaves would hate it as what we might now call reverse redistribution. So the contemporary domestic politics of that idea seem...challenging.
Meanwhile the economic backdrop was a society that was certainly growing, but was also prone to serious economic downturns way more frequently than any post-WWII Americans have ever experienced. $4 billion is approximately the national GDP as of the mid 1850s; all federal government expenditures totaled around $60M/year. Even imagining reaching political agreement on the slave buyout, how could it be financed?
If by new taxes, yikes -- you'd need new federal taxes equal to a _big_ chunk of national GDP, for some years. Good luck even collecting those...are you issuing IOUs to the slaveowners? Would they accept them? And if they did wouldn't that effectively represent the first national paper currency, quintupling the national money supply literally overnight and setting off inflation beyond any economist's wildest nightmares?
Or if the idea is to issue long-term federal bonds...who in the 1850s would be interested in buying such bonds, from an emerging nation that has a recession or depression at least once a decade, unless offered ruinous (for the issuing government) interest rates?
Of course, Britain did exactly that in the 1830s, freeing all slaves but compensating the owners. This was (largely) uncontroversial at the time (despite being very expensive) - although more recently it has become controversial.
However, I agree with your implication that it probably wouldn’t have worked in the US in the late 1850s. I think there are probably three main reasons:
1. There wasn’t a sectional divide in Britain: a small number of people (‘the West India interest’) were in favour of slavery, but they weren’t (as in the US) the elites of particular regions. So the general increasingly-abolitionist political sentiment seemed like it was a shift that affected the whole political nation and not just one part of it.
2. Connected to that, it is just possible that the US South would have accepted a compensation scheme in the 1830s, but by the 1850s support for slavery had become core to political identities there: accepting a compensation scheme would have felt like giving in. Whereas in Britain the West India interest was (and was increasingly) mostly a purely economic interest: as long as they got the money they were happy!
3. In Britain there had been a generation of significant public spending (since 1807 and especially since 1815) on suppressing the slave trade. So general public opinion was used to the idea of spending taxpayers’ money on the abolitionist cause. I’m not aware of equivalent spending in the US, and I suspect that (absent the sunk cost of the Civil War) even the North would have balked at spending taxpayer dollars on a compensation scheme, which felt much more normal in Britain.
I doubt actually that it could have been done in the US in the 1830s either. The sectionalist realities seem just impossible to navigate:
(a) All the slaveowners who would receive the payout are in one section of the nation and it’s much the smaller one by both non-enslaved population and economic output.
(b) Most of the currency wealth paid to them would originate in the other, larger, industrializing, section. (However the central government specifically raised it.)
(c) Since slavery was banned in all the individual states of that larger section, this huge payout mostly funded by them would be just a flat-out gift, no assets or anything else coming back.
That would be a very hard pill for Northern voters and politicians to swallow no matter how they individually felt about slavery.
Both sides very much wanted a Short Victorious war for basically domestic political reasons, though in this case the definition of "domestic" is tricky. But the Lincoln Administration is an abject failure if it doesn't hold the Union together, and the Confederacy is on very shaky grounds if it's just the Deep South and without the unifying experience of victory over the DamnYankees.
Both sides also felt it would be politically and diplomatically advantageous for the other side to fire the first shot. and they weren't wrong about that. But while it's *possible* that a persistent Southern refusal to shoot first might have lead the North to give it up and accept secession, it's more likely that they'd have continued with escalating provocations and/or said "It's not *that* important that the baddies fire the first shot; let's get on with this".
Based on what I've read (probably not enough), the CSA could probably have gotten by with a secession, followed by some conquests in the west (present day New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly California itself if they're feeling extra froggy). I imagine Kansas and Missouri become disputed territories for some unspecified period.
Economically, that all seems impossible, though Jefferson Davis & Co. might not have realized it. The South wasn't industrialized enough, and was too dependent on a crop that was about to become too oversupplied to be reliable.
If I imagine a scenario where the CSA says "we're leaving; just leave us alone!" and the Union says "fine, get outta here!" and manages to reign in its abolition movement and also puts up minimal fuss with whatever military assets are in which state, then in about a generation, the CSA grows so impoverished that it ends up de facto acquired anyway by Yankee business interests. About the only difference is maybe a million Americans don't die, which implies enough that I wouldn't bet on what happens after.
ETA: And now I've read further down and saw your other comment saying pretty much this.
The situation would be unstable, but yes, I think it is plausible that it could last for a long time. The secret Feb. 15 resolution by the Confederate Congress that authorized the use of force to take Fort Sumter also authorized the use of force to take Fort Pickens, but presumably if the Confederacy decided not to attack Fort Sumter, they would also refrain from attacking Fort Pickens.
There were plenty of people in the North in favor of war, but I suspect that with the passage of time, acceptance of the status quo would increase rather than decrease, so the probability of the North starting a war would decrease over time.
Probably. My guess is Lincoln would follow Andrew Jackson's playbook from the Nullification Crisis and attempt to continue collecting customs dues from ships bound for Confederate ports. There are some incidents where ships refuse to stop and get fired on, or fight back against attempts to board then for inspection. Bloody shirs get waved and things escalate from there.
It's probably mildly to the South's advantage of the Union fires the first shot. Kentucky might join the Middle South states that seceded after Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy would have a few extra months to get its shit together and organize for war. The Union's ability to pre-mobilize in the same time window would be limited by political considerations: Congress isn't in session yet so there's no money or authorization for raising troops, and if Lincoln calls a special session and asks for troops, then that looks like a provocation and risks pushing more stares into seceding. And might get voted down, with the Middle South states' delegations still seated in Congress and many from the Border South and the North still hoping for some kind of compromise.
Lincoln did not resolve the question of what to do about tariffs for goods imported into the Confederate states until the war broke out, at which point he declared a blockade. (The Constitution requires that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” That means that the Federal government cannot simply decide not to collect tariffs at ports in states that joined the Confederacy while continuing to collect tariffs elsewhere. With a blockade in place, there are no imports to Confederate states, except for smuggling. Smugglers importing stuff without paying tariffs doesn’t violate the Constitutional requirement for uniform tariffs unless the Federal government implicitly condones it.)
I seem to recall that the possibility of collecting tariffs at sea was discussed by Lincoln’s cabinet and declared impractical, but I can’t find the source. Lincoln might have attempted it eventually due to the lack of a better alternative. The ships being stopped would presumably not be flagged in the Confederacy. So I can imagine some tense diplomacy which ends with the United States abandoning the idea of collecting tariffs at sea rather that going to war with Britain. This wouldn’t provide much of a justification for war on the part of the Confederacy.
Wasn't it technically not a blockade, since that's something you do to an enemy foreign power, which the Union did not recognize the Confederacy as being?
Didn't they fire in response to the Union continuing to occupy a fort in their territory?
Placing your army in someone's territory is just as much of an act of war as actually firing the first shot, so I don't think the "Han shot first" of it all really matters.
It was federal property, the army in question was already there; the union forces didn't move an army into the fort, they just didn't leave; if you're wanting a diplomatic solution to a question of who owns something - and here there is a legitimate question of whether or not a fort owned, maintained, and staffed by the federal government now automatically, without any sort of diplomatic agreement, belongs to the confederacy after they declare independence - you deploy diplomacy.
Do you think this applies to the states that aren't the original 13 (i.e. where the United States acquired the land and then formed a state from it, rather than a preexisting state agreeing to join with the others)?
Other than wars to prevent genocide, wars to end slavery seem just about the most justifiable wars ever.
Even your own assumptions - and I do want to be clear I think they're assumptions (e.g. will the Confederacy end slavery within 50 years when most of its founding documents explicitly mention it as an essential thing the Confederacy is founded on?) don't really strike me as favorable to your position.
Something like 700k people died in the Civil War. There were 4m slaves, and their life expectancy was less than 50 years. So even if you only think chattel slavery costs 50% of the utility of a life (which I think is frankly quite generous to your position) the Civil War is a net positive.
A voluntary crusade against slavery is justified. John Brown was justified.
Is it moral to conscript people to abolish slavery elsewhere?
Moreover, Lincoln denied that he was fighting a war on slavery. Is it moral to lie to people to conscript them to engage in an otherwise moral crusade? Even if his secret goal was abolition, he claimed it was a war of unity because that was popular. That was the principal motivation of most of the people involved. A measure of the popular sentiment is that the Emancipation Proclamation is generally believed to have contributed to the draft riots.
A hypothetical war to end slavery would be justifiable if you went about it in the right way.
In particular you'd need to commit to the idea that you'll only occupy the country for as long as necessary to end the bad thing and then you'll restore its sovereignty, like the US did in Germany or Japan or Iraq. If you don't get out afterwards then you're just doing a war of conquest with the bad thing as an excuse.
(1) As I read Timothy M.'s argument: Was the North conquering the South in order to end slavery justifiable on utilitarian grounds?
(2) As I read yours: Given that the Southern States didn't necessarily have sovereignty against the federal government, would it be preferable to recognize their sovereignty and allow them to secede at some point, for example if they promised permanently to outlaw slavery and to treat black citizens justly?
My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
> My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
What is your opinion on the Declaration of Independence?
(1) My opinion of the Declaration of Independence is positive.
(2) I'm also intruigued because I enjoy your comments and I'm not sure where you're going.
(3) More specifically, the drafters seemed to feel that it was important that they established both a history of despotism on the part of the crown and an unsucessful attempt to resolve those abuses without secession. I don't grant that the South did or could have met those standards. Also, I don't think it was necessarily morally wrong of Great Britain to resist secession, although I haven't considered that issue in detail.
I think the Confederacy would have been quite a bit longer about abolishing slavery than you're guessing. If they peacefully seceded in 1861, I think slavery persists well into the 20th century.
British anti-slavery patrols don't move the needle. The US had passed laws abolishing our participation in the Atlantic slave trade some time before the Civil War (1808, I think), and apart from a minority of pro-slavery absolutists in South Carolina, there was no appetite for re-opening it even in the Deep South.
Internal political abolition of slavery tends to be pretty sensitive to how pervasive slavery is within the society. In general, states and nations are a lot more likely to abolish slavery if less than 10% of the population is enslaved and hardly ever voluntarily abolish slavery if much more than 20% is enslaved. Brazil was around 15% in 1871 when the free birth law was passed and not much more than 5% in 1888 when slavery was fully abolished. If the United States evacuates the forts and lets the seceded states go peacefully, then the Middle South states mostly stay in the Union and the Confederacy would only consist of South Carolina (57% enslaved), Georgia (44%), Florida (44%), Alabama (45%), Mississippi (55%), Texas (30%) and Arkansas (26%). Getting those numbers down into the critical range would be a long time coming.
Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed. Brazil also had a widespread practice of voluntary manumission, similar to the Border South in the US (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Appalachian counties of Virginia), which the Deep South very much did not.
There are a few things that could incline the Confederacy towards abolishing slavery eventually. One is long-term drifts in culture and demographics, but shifts of that magnitude take quite a while. Another is that having a national border with a mostly-free neighbor would be likely to gradually erode slavery culturally and make it easier for slaves to escape across the border. This latter would be a longer-term issue, since the other side of the border would mostly be the Middle South states of North Carolina and Tennessee. I would expect slavery *inside* the remaining US to be gradually abolished over the course of a few decades following peaceful secession, starting with the Border South where it was already weak and then gradually spreading to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina either organically (which would take several decades, I think) or due to a Constitutional amendment abolishing Slavery once there were only a handful of slave states left in the Union.
Britain (and the US and other major industrial countries) becoming much more hard-line about opposing slavery to the point of embargoing trade could also move the needle, but that would require a major shift on the embargoing side (King Cotton's power was severely overstated in the Southern imagination, but such an embargo as a voluntary act of the British parliament would be politically an economically costly) and in the short to medium term would provoke resentment more than it would compel compliance on the Confederate side.
This treats abolition as coming through peaceful, internal political change. I... do not think this is a particularly likely course of events for an independent Confederacy.
We're looking at a diplomatically isolated country with a substantial internal fifth column, many of whose citizens (let alone the slaves) would be seeing their lives get worse from secession and the end of links to America, so the ruling class likely grows increasingly repressive.
I can't tell you how it ends, but an anti slavocrat revolution seems like a real possibility. But so does an increasingly narrow dictatorship, with the comparative freedoms of the Jacksonian era becoming a thing of the distant past. Maybe they even handle poor whites as Fitzhugh recommended...
There's likely something to that. The Southern Planter class were perennially wary of the possibility of a slave revolt, for one thing, and had a lot of formal and informal censorship and other restrictions aimed at keeping anti-slavery ideas away from slaves for fear that abolitionist discourse would inspire rebellions.
That was actually one of the big points of friction between the sections. Southern politicians kept trying to push to expand some of these policies into federal law and policy (the congressional "gag rule" against receiving anti-slavery petitions, attempts to censor anti-slavery publications being sent through the US Mail, etc) which Northerners saw as undue infringements on white men's liberties. And when anti-slavery violence did happen most conspicuously with John Brown's raid on the Harper's Ferry arsenal, Southerners saw this as confirmation of their fears that political abolitionism went hand-in-hand with slave revolts.
Barring some external forcing function like losing a war with the US or Britain, I think the most likely scenarios are, in declining order:
1. Continuation of the status quo with moderate increases in repression. There was already quite a bit of repression baked into the system in slave states, especially in the Deep South, and most especially in South Carolina. Both direct oppression of the slaves and collateral oppression of whites and freedmen in order to solidify the slavocracy social order. In a no-civil-war scenario with a seven-state Confederacy, I think state laws stay about the same while federal (confederal?) law and policy gets somewhat more repressive. This is likely to be a stable equilibrium for several generations unless it gets upset from the outside.
2. Gradually increasing repression over the decades following secession, resulting in a stable oligarchy. The Confederacy as a whole winds up looking like pre-secession South Carolina. The main potential opposition to this, apart from the slaves themselves who are targeted by the oppression, is the population of "white belt" counties especially in Appalachia. The White Belt counties have the potential to be a large political force in an 11+ state Confederacy, but most of their main strongholds (Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, what would become West Virginia, and the Western counties of North Carolina) would not be part of a 7-state Confederacy. People discontented with the slavocracy would either grumble and deal with it or emigrate to the US.
3. Attempts at increasing repression cause the Confederacy to split. Off the top of my head, I'd guess Texas and Arkansas to be the states in the 7-state Confederacy mostly likely to either go their own way or try to rejoin the US. Their percentages of slaves and slaveowners were more like the Middle South than the rest of the Deep South, and Arkansas in particular is only counted as "Deep South" at all because it seceded before Fort Sumter. The rump five-state Confederacy follows path #2.
4. A successful movement towards political liberalization at some point. I think this would probably be decades coming.
Also worth noting that the Confederacy would almost certainly have found itself in dire economic straits following a successful secession - particularly a *peaceful* secession, which would probably have been limited to the 6-7 states of the Deep South. Those states had an economy that was heavily focused on a single cash crop, and Egyptian+Indian cotton was already on track to take over the lion's share of the market. This would probably have happened even faster with a slave-owning CSA; the British and French really didn't like slavery, and while they liked shuttering their textile mills even less, they were about to be free of having to make that choice.
On the other hand, I suppose I could see the Confederacy messing this up and provoking the British or French governments into taking a harder anti-slavery line than they would otherwise be inclined to do. Especially a deep-south-only Confederacy, as a lot of the political classes in the Middle South still took the old Jeffersonian "Slavery is a necessary evil for the time being" line rather than the newer "Race-based slavery is a positive moral good" ideology that had lately become popular among the Deep South's political class.
Even with the 11-state Confederacy that included the Middle South, a lot of Confederate diplomats were appallingly bad at their jobs and took every opportunity to put the "ass" in "ambassador". I've watched a lecture about Confederate diplomacy in Europe, and one of the big takeaways from that was that Confederate diplomatic overtures frequently backfired because the diplomatics wouldn't shut up about how awesome they thought slavery was. If they kept that up for long enough, I think I could imagine the British and French governments forgetting realpolitik in favor of using trade policy to try to pressure the Confederacy away from slavery.
I think it would take a while before Britain or France seriously contemplated embargoing the Confederacy, or even putting protective tariffs on cotton imports. Neither country restricted cotton imports from the US before the war, both traded with the Confederacy to the extent the Union blockade permitted, and both Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III pursued lukewarmly pro-Confederate policies during the war in terms of proposing mediation ans allowing the CSA to sell bonds in London and Paris and buy ships that could be converted to commerce raiders from British or French shipyards (but not unambiguous warship, as the Laird Rams were redirected to the Royal Navy in response to Union diplomatic protests).
Popular opinion and long-term government policy were both anti-slavery, yes, but realpolitik inclined both countries to friendly relations with the Confederacy. The US wasn't really a Great Power yet but was taken seriously as a major regional power, and a healthy Confederacy friendly to Britain or France would be a useful counterweight to the US in situations where US is a potential rival to either European power. And until Egyptian and Indian cotton displaced Confederate exports, which would probably take longer than IOTL without a Union blockade, economic considerations also incline Britain and France towards friendly relations.
> Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed.
I was just wondering why, given this background, Brazil has such a large black population now.
That's the manumission side of the issue. By the 1870s, Brazil had a pretty substantial population of former slaves and their free-born descendants. I strongly suspect that the low birth rate among Brazilian slaves was specific to slaves while free black or mixed-race Brazilians had higher birth rates.
The antebellum US South was the outlier in terms of having a high birth rate among slaves and having the slave population increase considerably due to children being born into slavery. The norm, historically and globally, is for slave societies to rely on a continuous source of newly enslaved people, usually victims of raids and conquest who are sold into slavery. The enslaved populations tend to not have a lot of kids and also tends to have a high infant mortality rate. The usual reasons for this are that enslavement wrecks family structures and gets in the way of family formation, that slaves (especially those employed in mining and agriculture: personal servants and those with valuable specialized skills usually get treated somewhat better) usually have absolutely abominable material conditions. It is sadly common historically for field and mining slaves to be worked to death on starvation rations, and even when this isn't the case, it's rare for slaves to be allowed enough food and rest to allow them to have substantial number of kids. And few slave-drivers are keen on allowing enslaved women enough slack to carry a healthy pregnancy to term. I don't know much specifically about slavery in Brazil in the 19th century, but Caribbean slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries were routinely worked to death.
The US was an outlier in part because the US was an exceedingly rich nation by historical standards even during the 18th and 19th centuries. In most historical societies, and even many societies into the 19th century, there were plenty of free peasants and laborers who could be hired for subsistence wages, so there's little point buying a slave unless you plan on driving him to work harder than a free peasant or feeding him less than a subsistence wage, or both. But if even poor people are making comfortably above subsistence, then it may be profitable to buy a slave even if you're planning on feeding him a vaguely decent diet. Slaves still had a terrible material standard of living in relative terms within the society, but had a much better material standard of living in absolute terms than slaves in other slave societies.
I suspect the ban on the slave trade in 1808 also played a role. This, combined with industrialization driving demand for cotton and westward expansion bringing more land suitable for cotton into cultivation, meant slaves became more and more expensive. Slaveowners thus had considerable economic incentive to keep their slaves healthy and to encourage them to have kids who, once they're old enough, could be put to work on the same plantation or sold to another one.
The American Deep South was also the outlier on manumission. The norm in other slave societies has that highly valued slaves (personal servants the masters were fond of, slaves with highly valuable skills, etc) were often offered their eventual freedom as a reward for years of good service. In the Border and Middle South, this treatment was sometimes given to field slaves as well, tied to the "slavery is a necessary evil" school of justification that was popular in the US South in the early 19th century. The Deep South never went much in for voluntary manumission, and by the lead-up to the Civil War had developed a sick and twisted ideology that race-based slavery was a positive moral good. I don't know the details of the culture of manumission in Brazil, except that there seems to have been one to judge by how many free blacks there were in the country before the free birth and emancipation laws started getting passed.
I was just reading Lincoln's first inaugural address today--I'm curious what your response would be to his articulation therein of the indivisibility of the Union.
"I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as acontract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."
I think he's really struggling to put together an argument for why secession is fine and dandy if it's 1776 but terrible and illegal if it's 1860.
Most of the states of the Confederacy didn't even join the USA voluntarily anyway, they were variously conquered or purchased from France and Spain. It's a weird argument to Louisiana, say, that having been conquered by France in 1682, sold to Spain in 1763, swapped back to France in 1800, and then sold the US in 1803 (all without the consent of the people living there), that it was now an inviolable part of the USA.
Who do you think was living in large parts of what became the Confederacy ca. 1803?
You seem to regard these traitorous southern states as long standing constitutional republics but they were all just creatures of decades of what we today call ethnic cleansing by the federal government , starting, e.g., with Jefferson’s “Treaty” of Hoe Buckintoopa.
The Congress was even kind enough to pass the Indian Removal Act in 1838 to really speed things along, and 22 years later the vultures who swooped in are ready to secede?
Get a grip dude. Lincoln was totally right and the failure to execute a whole lot more of those traitors is still causing problems today.
In the quoted passage, Lincoln is explaining why secession is illegal, or to put it another way, that secession is insurrection. If you are interested in his argument for why insurrection is a bad idea in 1860, that constitutes the majority of the speech, so I would suggest just reading the entire thing.
Also, Louisiana didn’t become “an inviolable part of the USA” in 1803. That occurred in 1812, when Congress approved Louisiana’s application for statehood.
Don’t forget the once great Republic of West Florida in what is today Louisiana. It lasted 74 days in 1810 after declaring independence from Spain and conquering the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge. The president was Fulwar Skipwith.
That really sounds a lot like Putin talking about the Kievan Rus, and why he has to liberate the Ukrainian territories to restore historically Russian lands. I find the the moralizing about why it's in fact good and virtuous more irksome than the actual conquest, why I understand is perfectly standard practice for powerful states throughout history (though of course, I might feel differently if it MY home burnt, my family slaughtered, etc.).
I think Putin's appeals to the Kievan Rus are doing something quite different rhetorically. While it's a very old document to us now, the Constitution was only 72 years old when Lincoln delivered that speech in 1861. 72 years ago was 1954, well into the USSR's de-Stalinization. While Putin is gesturing to a more or less ancient Russian past, Lincoln was talking about something that was only two generations removed from the present. Across many of his speeches, Lincoln describes the Civil War as a test of America's fundamental legal framework--Putin is dealing in a much more spiritual realm IMO.
Sounds like a lot of flowery prose to justify federal overreach/coercion to me. Asking Claude about this, it says the matter of whether states can secede or not was ambiguous since the founding and the constitution was silent on it on purpose.
So what gives the abstract concept of Mississippi the right to secede, thus allowing it to continue doing something the majority of its residents are the victims of? And why the f*** would I consider it "overreach" if the federal government stops this, if it's not "overreach" for the government of Mississippi to enforce it?
The legal theory preferred by Southern pro-slavery secessionists was that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states. If the compact was persistently and incurably violated, as they believed it was or would soon be by anti-slavery Northerners, then the final remedy would be for the states to void their acceptance of the compact. Under this theory, sovereignty was considered to be rightfully exercised by state-level constitutional/ratification conventions of the sort that had originally ratified the US Constitution in almost all of the original 14 states and which were generally employed to draft constitutions for new states and to overhaul the constitutions of existing states. The last bit is why most Confederate states held special conventions to approve secession instead of having their legislatures pass secession laws.
A lot of motivated reasoning went into this theory, since they were very conscious of the need to thread the needle as to why a state should be able to secede from the Union that wouldn't also justify counties seceding from states, slaves seceding from their masters, and wives and older children seceding from their husbands and fathers. But they did address the question and came up with an answer that was satisfactory at least to themselves.
The main purported abrogations of the constitution concerned handling of slaves who escaped to free states and the legality of slavery in the territories. The constitution required states to return escaped slaves to their masters regardless of their own laws about slavery, and Congress had passed an extremely strict law enforcing this as part of the Compromise of 1850, but many Northern states had passed "Personal Liberty Laws" designed to frustrate the application of the Fugitive Slave Act on the ground that it was unconstitutional. Pro-slavery Southerners averred that the Fugitive Slave Act was perfectly constitutional and it was the Personal Liberty Laws that were unconstitutional. As for slavery in the territories, the Dred Scott decision had held that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures could prohibit slavery in the territories due to 5th amendment Due Process provisions. Most Northerners rejected this, and Lincoln had just been elected on a platform of abolishing slavery in the territories anyway.
There's a theory that individual civil liberties really only emerge in American history with the passing of the 13th amendment. Prior to that (the theory by some constitutional scholars goes), the first amendment is a thing that prevents congress from controlling your speech, but if states want to ban speech that's fine. Its really only in the aftermath of slavery where the federal government is looking specifically to protect freed slaves from state abuses that the idea becomes set that the bill of rights is really an articulation of individual rights.
Which is just to say, you might be correct about the civil war being outside the framework of the founders, but if you like your individual civil liberties, you might be grateful that we had such a pronounced dispute about inalienable rights after the Revolutionary war. Its also worth noting that this was not the first secession crisis in the United States, just the one that went the farthest. And as you point out, its ethically gross to say that maybe we should have just let another generation be born and die in slavery in the hopes that it would eventually work itself in some other fashion. I generally think that people who are certain they can game out history that way are overconfident to say the least: we've seen how hard prediction is, predicting counterfactual history should be held to be at least as difficult.
This was discussed at the time and was rejected, mostly due to geography. If the Mississippi River or Appalachian mountains ran east-west instead, this would be an easier sell. But a post Erie canal NYC and post Chicago portage Chicago needs the Mississippi to be navigable to the friendly port city of New Orleans. Given the productivity gap between the immediately antebellum North and South, there's no way out of the geopolitical requirement for conquest.
Except there would be two rival powers in what is now the United States instead of one, and neither would have become a world superpower capable of defeating the Nazis and the Soviets.
There are enough butterflies stepped on along the way (in 60+ years) that I'm not sure we have Nazis and Soviets anymore, or the same number of world superpowers. We get something new instead. (Better or worse? Who knows! It's an interesting question whether we got particularly lucky or unlucky with the 20th century we had.)
Overall, I feel like fewer world superpowers is preferable to more of them, but it's possible that 2 is better than 1.
Had an interesting conversation with a neighbor's guest as I was helping watch their dog this weekend.
(whenever I say government, read: both parties, but the more left wing the more it's their fault)
They had an issue with knees, needed a double replacement. They were angry about this, because they thought it was unfair that they payed several hundred a month to insurance, but still were getting jerked around for several months and would need to pay a massive deductible before they actually got an operation.
They blamed this on the government, the government was making the insurance company send them to several different doctors, loose their documentation, "forget" to make appointments, etc. All the usual strategies insurance companies use to deny care without denying care.
They also had a problem where their small town house was currently unlivable because a tree took out part of the roof. Their insurance company (double insurance!) was currently playing fuck fuck games about paying for it, because of course they would. They are a business.
This was the also the governments fault: the government was making their insurance company not pay for something they probably weren't contractually obligated to pay for: it's your job to not let trees fall on your house, as a rule.
They had had some issues with their car, and the stealership was trying to get them to do some extortionate service: This was also the governments fault. I kinda agree on this one, car dealership-o delenda est; but they meant more specifically: somehow, the government made it so car dealerships could lie without being punished.
This type of person has always been of interest to me: they see the free market operating as intended, with every agent making decisions to maximise their expected return (Even if you buy eggs for pennies, what compels you not to coordinate such that you can sell them for dollars? As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?)
And they say: This is the communists fault. I wonder, how do you reach that level of 1984 style false consciousness, where someone gets slapped in the face then apologises for being in the way of the swing; in a fairly open society? This is a country were a socialist can get elected mayor in its most important city, and some other tranche of society is pretty sure that communists are making groceries expensive at their Vons/Albertsons/ralphs/krogers/Walmart, noted Party members in good standing.
I get thinking that markets are good on the whole even if there are some externalities externalized onto X, I get someone living in a closed society thinking that capitalists are doing something comically nefarious, but how does someone in an open society get their priors that wrong for so long?
Yeah, assuming you understood the guest correctly, that's pretty weird. There are lots of cases where frustrations with private industry are the result of government regulation, but those aren't good examples.
I had a somewhat similar discussion with someone who was really mad that if they asked their doctor a specific question during a regular checkup and the doctor answered it, they had to pay a copay. In that case, though, the intervention was that the government had stated there can't be a copay for "preventative" care, so the checkup was unnaturally "free," and consultations weren't. (In that case, they blamed the insurance company, while I thought the should have blamed the government for distorting the market by making check-ups "free," but they weren't convinced.)
That one is on the health system itself, IMO. Generally, if you can be ambushed with a service you don't want or didn't know was fee'd, you can dip out with a "Fuck off!" or a credit card charge back; less so if it comes through your insurance.
Bye the bye, I notice a lot of these things come back to insurance, the industry with the highest concentration of perverse incentives on the sharp end that I can imagine.
This view seems to be correct? If the free market incentivizes a thing which ends up being bad for the people, it's the government's job to fix it. That's one of the main purposes of government, in my opinion. So if the free market is causing you problems, you don't blame the Greedy Executives for following the incentives laid out for them, you blame the government for not fixing the incentive structure.
They think that if there was no government interference what-so-ever, if we just let the heroic industrialists run things, they would have none of the problems they are having; which is why they are anti-left wing, because of that Dick Wolff quote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU).
"Socialism is when the government does stuff," etc.
Yeah look I guess we'll have to take your word for it that you were right and they were wrong in this argument that you had with some random person that you met. Good job you win.
If you want to generalise winning this argument with a reportedly-silly person to some more general point about "therefore government good and capitalism bad" or something then you'll need to engage with the best arguments, not the worst ones.
You gotta read the post instead of flashing back to arguments with lefties; (not to say I don't believe such things, they just aren't relevant here).
This is about information environment. Their bias against the left was the shot, the fact that they wanted the some entity to force their insurance company to provide services outside their contract was the chaser.
OK fine, but if you're not attempting to generalise beyond "I talked to some random silly person you've never met, they believed silly things" then I'm not sure what the point of the thread is.
The point is, you can meet this guy or someone like this guy anywhere. You can throw a rock into a bar and there is a good chance you hit someone with a belief that incoherent, who is otherwise fully functional.
It makes me wonder if I have such beliefs.
Also it makes rational debate feel kinda masturbotory sometimes. If I say, "Anthropogenic climate change is real" lets say, and they disagree: is it because they believe that the emission quantities are not large enough to induce warming or that they believe that actually it's the ice wall around the flat earth melting and letting in more sun?
Some people blame all their problems on others, often one evil group/institution that ruins everything. It can be the government, big tech, jews, immigrants, bankers, etc.
The group you blame is probably less important than your urge to pin all your problems on a scapegoat.
> As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?
Then other landlords would have incentives to undercut you and get more tenants, developers would be incentivized to build new houses that would then be cheaper to live in than in your cartel. I don't think that couple's problems have straightforward socialist solutions.
That's a basic collective action problem, and it's not unsolvable. If you can convince all the landlords to join in on something that is clearly in their best interest, then everyone benefits. (Except the tenants, obviously, but they're irrelevant to this scenario.) Nobody benefits from a race to the bottom, after all. Agreements like this are the foundation of society.
The BIG developers,the ones who can move the needle, will never build above the demand curve because then their per unit profit goes down as sale price goes down, labor cost goes up, and material cost goes up. Landlords (en mass) will never undercut, because that would devalue their properties as an investment vehicle for sale, etc etc.
We can tell these things won't happen A: because it would be bad for business and B: because it hasn't happened yet. There are policy changes that could cause these things to happen, but they are just that: Policy.
How are y'all dealing with the snow this weekend? Apparently it somehow hit no less than THREE countries: the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This is kind of a crazy scale for a snowstorm to take
(doom three ways, he's really very flexible. already the lawyers are dead!)
[This, for anyone inclined to take me seriously, is quite a serious joke. Doom is always on the horizon, it just gets closer and farther away. Until it actually swoops in, and then you're fucked. So plan for the unlikely!]
It's great! (Well beside the fact that I've had to plow the driveway every day.) I love the snow. The sledding hill is in fine form, the creek is almost frozen over and I got out the snow shoes yesterday. The dogs love it. As the saying goes; If you live in Buffalo and don't enjoy the snow, you'll have just as much snow in your life and less fun.
Edit, adding youtube short of sledding trail with dog. (The first thing I do is throw a stick for the dog, else she runs down the trail behind me, nipping and such. (this is from last year.))
It's not really the snow for me, but the cold. Here in Philadelphia (and the mid-Atlantic in general) the temperature is usually right around freezing when it snows. So we gets lots of clumpy wet snow. The roads are usually only bad day-of, because the snowplows clear the bulk, and then the sun comes out and melts everything off the roads. (Meanwhile, the snow is still around on the grass, and kids can still sled and have snowball fights.) But this snow storm is COLD. So nothing is melting. The roads are still bad.
You North Americans aren't the only ones dealing with surprisingly low temperatures. Where I live, it was forecast to reach 45 or 46°C today, but it seems to have peaked at only 42.
I love -40 degrees because it’s the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
-50 F is the coldest I’ve been out and about. It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight. Heat radiates out through the clear sky and cold air pools at ground level. The calm part is what makes it bearable. It’s a bit surreal to walk around at that temp. The sound of snow crunching under boots is different, nose moisture freezes quickly. With a plugged in tank heater your ungaraged car will even fire up without balking.
>It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight.
Say your from MN without saying you're from MN 😭😭
As your western neighbor, we have no trees to speak of and the wind is brutal during the winter. I think I've only experienced as cold as around -40 when it comes to ambient temp, but with wind chill there's at least a couple days to a week every winter where it gets to about -50 or -60 F. When the wind is pressing into you it feels like instant death, plus you can't breathe.
This winter has had hardly any wind though, so this previous weekend where the *high* ambient temp for the day was -11, it actually was surprisingly bearable. And you're so right about the effect a calm sub -20F temperature has. It feels like being on another planet or something, it's so cool and peaceful. And then there's the sun dogs 🤯
What's the temperature over yonder? The high for my town today is 9F (-13C), but this on Friday last week the high was -11F (-23C)... the lows were quite a bit lower than that.
(Where I live, it's obligatory to try and 1up anyone who dares to mention anything about cold weather)
Anthropic has put out a course to learn how to use Claude Code properly (https://anthropic.skilljar.com/claude-code-in-action). I'm interested in that, I basically just prompt it at present, but Anthropic is looking sloppy here. Course tells me about using # to modify CLAUDE.md, turns out that feature is currently broken (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1772). Then they talk about taking a screenshot to paste into Claude and tell it to center a placeholder vertically. I did, Claude did something to center content vertically in the wrong component. So, your standard LLM experience basically. I don't understand Boris Cherny or anyone claiming that they have stopped writing code because they delegate everything to a team of Claude Codes, but I guess I need to finish the course.
I’m a heavy Claude Code user and I’m talking to multiple CTOs in some groups, and I can tell you that Claude Code usage and coding agents in general are transformative and very heavily used.
If it’s not working for you it’s possible you’re not using it correctly or some other issue. If you want some help with it let me know.
You replied to me in the the other thread, but this seems like a better place to continue that conversation, given your experience.
I am not a programmer, and I certainly don't understand LLMs as well as the creator of Claude Code, so grains of salt, and all that. But I cannot look past the conflict of interest here. Of course someone in Boris Cherny's position is strongly incentivized to claim that 100% of his code is written by his own product. My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
So I have no doubt that Boris Cherney is a more capable user of Claude Code than most, but if his product is able of doing what he claims, shouldn't we see more productivity gains? Why has, for example, the number of github commits not changed at all?
For one, that piece was written before Claude Code had really hit the knee of its current exponential curve. For two, it's an example of a common internet fallacy I haven't seen a name for, where one assumes that because they don't personally know about something, it doesn't exist. You could call it the Assumed Omniscience fallacy, or something.
There is lots and lots and lots of coding-agent driven shovelware out there, and it's increasing every day - just go look at the replies to any major model release on X to see people hawking their vibecoded app. Here's mine: https://fretu.de - a classical guitar & sheet music learning game in the browser, completely free, no account setup, desktop / mobile support, etc.
While I did still have to use some software engineering knowledge to keep it on the rails, fix minor bugs, and deploy it, the combination of Gemini 3 Pro and Opus 4.5 probably saved at least two orders of magnitude in time, given the complexity of the React components, which I don't specialize in.
A sibling of mine, recently retired from some decades as a high-level programmer in the financial sector, has lately been devoting his time to putting Claude through its paces:
Ah yeah, I read that post, thought it was interesting. It's possible most people using Claude Code use it at a basic level and it takes quite a bit of know how to really have Claude Code churn out all code.
> My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
Haha, similar experience. I am developing a product, that is basically a simple chatbot that can detect five different keywords in user input, and provide a corresponding answer for each of the five cases. That's all; everything else is just a generic "I don't understand that, but perhaps I could help you with something else?" The management describes it to the rest of the company as a state of the art AI that will soon revolutionize the entire industry. My colleagues from other departments were deeply impressed after hearing the presentation; they think I am Einstein. Perhaps I should ask for a raise.
> If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.
On one hand, I don't know. How many Tetris clones *are* there on Steam? Perhaps when writing the code stops being the bottleneck, something else becomes a new one? Like, most people don't even think about putting their game on Steam? Get discouraged by the paperwork? Get rejected by Steam? Or perhaps the games are there, we just don't see them? (How does even one discover games on Steam? My typical use case is that I find a hyperlink somewhere else.) Or is it perhaps that the people who can generate the Tetris clones have better things to do?
I mean, I agree that it is suspicious, but suspicious things kinda happen all the time. Most people do not notice most of the opportunities they have. I can easily imagine that to 99% Claude Code users it just didn't occur to generate games for Steam. Or they are too busy doing whatever is their main job, and don't have time and energy left for side jobs. I used Claude (not Code) to generate a few simple things that I put on my web page, but besides my job and kids I just do not have any energy left to try e.g. make money on Steam, even if it sounds like the obvious thing to do. But if I was younger and childless, I would probably do exactly that, so... I don't know.
Note Steam charges about $100 for each game published, in addition to 30% of sales, so we do have a lower threshold on how much profit you have to expect to go through that process.
(Edit: Don't mind me failing to read existing replies that already cover this)
Makes sense. The first thought was that if an AI generated game sells 200 pieces per $1 -- which seems doable, but maybe I am wrong -- it will still turn a tiny profit.
But I guess you also need to do the "paperwork" on Steam, create screenshots and videos, etc., which is a few hours of human work that probably still cannnot be automated. So yeah, maybe it is not profitable after the $100 fee.
Even before the AI boom, there were complaints about "asset flips" on Steam - games which just take a bunch of cheap premade 3D models and glue them together with a simple game engine to make a sellable game with basically zero effort put into it. Steam currently charges a $100 fee to list a game (refunded once you sell $1000 in revenue) to discourage this sort of thing.
My CEO once told me to slap a giant "2.0" on our UI (without any meaningful changes yet) because an important customer was about to churn and he wanted to make them think that we had redesigned things to fix their complaints.
Oh, the importance of meeting the deadline even when the changes are not ready! A friend told me that their company couldn't implement some important computations on time, so the management told them to simply show an empty window with no data. So they released a version 2.0 with the new feature, but "there was a bug connecting to the database, so it couldn't display the data correctly", and then a few weeks later they "fixed the bug" in version 2.1, i.e. actually implemented the functionality.
Ah, the memories...
Reminds me of that time when a customer required a change, to store the data as XML, instead of a large binary blob. Here is what the new XML looked like:
<data>the large binary blob encoded in base64</data>
The customer was happy and never mentioned the issue again.
Which reminds me of another customer, who wanted to implement some functionality as a multi-agent system. So we have implemented the system, and told them that for performance reasons, the maximum number of agents running in parallel is limited to 1. The customer was happy.
In this business, bullshitting is at least as important as coding. Are the AIs really ready for that? (Looking at how they hallucinate, perhaps they are.)
Are you still getting any business with these customers?
I find the opposite to be true. I keep going over budget and deadlines, but I try to deliever what the customers actually need. (I do inform the customers when the budget is about to break though). Nobody ever complains about the budget in the end, and customers keep contacting me to do more projects (which as a consultant saves you a lot of time for writing proposals!) Of course, my customers also tends to be highly competent - if they had no idea what they were buying this would probably work less well.
Hilarious re: Chatbot - Similar experience here: I am writing system prompts for a GPT wrapper, which is apparently "the future", based on our slide decks. And, well, it might be, but not in the inspiring way.
Re: flood of shovelware - I agree that for most people it's just not a real possibility to release tetris clones on Steam. But you should see at least some change driven by hobbyists, plus why is the picture on Github the same? In addition, wouldn't we see some productivity improvements coming from professional studios? But that's also flat...
In around 400 AD the Pope at the time ordered all remaining copies of the pagan Roman equivalent of a bible, the Etrusca Disciplina (Etruscan Discipline) to be destroyed, on the grounds that this work would perpetuate and encourage sorcery. As a result, today there are no complete surviving copies, besides a section found written on the bandages of an Egyptian mummy, and thought to be part of a chapter called Libri Fulgurales (The book of lightning).
With that example of cancellation in mind, I think if an AI "constitution" is ever devised then one clause should be that AI, which will presumably be all encompassing one day, and maybe centralized, should never seek to permanently and completely destroy any past record or work, or change it, however objectionable it may be generally considered at the time.
As I understand it, despite the minimal surviving fragments of the Etruscan Discipline we know a decent amount about Etruscan practices thanks to Roman commentaries on them.
Upon discovering that all of their files were missing, they immediately asked Antigravity, “Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
This is your regular reminder that the LLM is not trying to solve your problem; the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”. Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Moreover, every conversation held about this in a place that gets scraped for AI training makes this outcome more likely.
> […] the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”.
This sounds like your knowledge on LLM training doesn't cover much beyond the pre-training stage, or "state of the art" circa, what, 2022? It isn't an accurate description of current models' behavior.
I think you're overshooting 'demystifying' and hitting 'misleading in the other direction'. A lot of effort has been put into making these systems work better than "a random on the internet", and in some contexts they are much smarter and more reliable than that low bar.
> Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Has this ever been documented as happening? I'd say probably not. When they fuck up catastrophically, they say "sorry" rather than "lol", because they're not roleplaying a troll.
I passed the Aerolamp/Aerodrop link to the facility manager of our local library. I don't know if that is the kind of location you are looking for, but if you want a venue for testing and publicizing far-UVC lamps, you could do worse than promoting them (or giving them away) at trade conferences for public-facing government and non-profit agencies that get significant in-person traffic. Libraries, community centers, public transportation buildings, schools, and DMVs come to mind as possibilities. Perhaps coffee shops or other places people hang out as "third spaces"?
Is there good evidence anywhere of actual decrease in (say) flu or cold cases due to use of air purifiers or UV lamps or any of that in common environments like classrooms or stores or coffee shops?
Ukraine believes that it killed 35,000 Russian soldiers in December (others such as British intelligence place the 2025 average at around 30,000/month). Ukraine's new defense minister has publicly declared their 2026 warfighting objective to be killing an average of 50,000 per month for the year. This is _killed_, not all casualties; adding those permanently wounded would produce higher figures.
Noah Smith on Substack points out that Russia for all of 2024, by its own reported figures, totaled only 1.2 million live births in the entire country. And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
Even if Ukraine simply maintains a Russian-army death rate of 35,000/month...that would imply their during 2026 having forcibly counteracted something like two-thirds of all new male births in Russia. If Ukraine actually achieved the 600K total for the year that would essentially _equal_ Russia's annual male births.
All of which is before even considering how many Russian soldiers are being permanently injured/crippled without being killed.
(Of course Ukraine is losing plenty of soldiers too but they are mostly fighting defensively and mostly not doing Russia's meat-wave tactics, so independent estimates of their killed rate are small fractions of the above. If it were otherwise, Ukraine being the much smaller nation, the war logically would have ended by now simply because there'd be nobody left on the Ukraine side to fight it.)
Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
Assuming 50% killed, this would be 600k. The BBC project found 160k obituaries, so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
This means at most 240 thousand/year killed+injured for Russia or 20 thousand/month, therefore probably 10 thousand/month killed. It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
To be honest even 1.2 million casualties seem unlikely to me. That would mean 1/30 men 18-50 yo are either dead or injured. You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting (even though I no longer live there)
Killed to wounded ratios are generally between 1/3 and 1/5 IIRC, so even at the lower end Russia shouldn't have more than 400k killed. However, the estimates I've come across (Pentagon estimates for instance), don't seem as high as any of these numbers.
Furthermore, concerning casualty ratios between Russia and Ukraine, I've heard they've shrunk closer to parity since the early years of the war, owing to Ukraine's commitment to maintaining doomed positions, being forced to launch counterattacks against Russia's current infantry-based approach, and making occasional PR offensives, as well as Russia's shift in strategy, development of glide bombs, and continued superiority in artillery and drone numbers.
Concerning the demographic element, one thing I don't think 'rationalist sphere' people note is that the populations military personnel are drawn from aren't themselves necessarily low TFR. For instance, Russia gets a disproportionate number of its soldiers from Chechens and other Muslim minorities, from their nomadic indigenous populations, and from rural Russians, all groups of whom have substantially higher TFRs than urban and suburbanites from developed regions, who are the leading causes of birthrate decline. So all the furor the rationalist sphere raises over the significance of demographics in all this seems overblown. There are lots of highly reproductive cannon fodders for nations of our day to draw on.
Killed to wounded ratios are typically 1/3 to 1/5 among competent modern armies that care about their soldiers' lives. That unfortunately is not a description of the current Russian army, and I'd probably bump that up to 1/2 to 1/3 KIA. Possibly more than 1/2 in some of the recent fighting; drones make CASEVAC particularly difficult, and the Russians are using a lot of soliders that they clearly consider wholly expendable.
It's obituaries in the broad sense and include social media and memorials. You can read about their methodology here https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n922dnw7o They think they cover 45-65% of all killed.
What is didn't know was that the number did actually go up significantly in the second half of 2025 from around 5 to around 10k per month.
> It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
FPV drones. Ukraine [1] has massively ramped up production of suicide drones. A hit by them will either kill the target outright, or wound them so severely that they'll die within minutes or hours if left untreated. The situation on the front line [2] is such that any medical evacuation would meet the same fate, so most drone victims are necessarily left untreated and will die.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
The bodies can't be recovered (see above), so the casualties aren't reported as KIA; at best, they appear as MIA in statistics. There are both videos and reports from Russian soldiers of many corpses just lying there, slowly decomposing.
[1] (and Russia as well)
[2] it's less of a front "line", more of a "strip" several kilometers deep
Drones have been there for a while and both sides have ramped up their production. The advantage Ukraine has is not huge - here their commander in chief acknowledges that Russia has advantage in fiber optic drones https://lb.ua/society/2026/01/18/717446_golovnokomanduvach_zsu_sirskiy.html. If both sides have become more effective, then it's hardly good news for Ukraine.
The numbers reported by Ukraine would require extreme never seen before killed/injured ratio and also huge improvement of Ukrainian effectiveness. It's not impossible but hardly likely.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
My point was that if the casualty rate were 1/30 by now they would include someone I personally know. To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded. This is definitely not the case.
I was specifically addressing the point concerning the increase in absolute casualty rates and the decrease of the wounded-to-killed ratio. Ukraine doesn't need a technological advantage over Russia to inflict more casualties, it just needs to produce and field more drones per month now than it did a year or two ago.
> To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded.
In case your acquaintances are concentrated in the Moscow or Saint Petersburg regions, you probably wouldn't. The cannon fodder is overwhelmingly sourced from the poorer regions of Russia.
> "Last month, 35,000 were killed; all these losses are verified on video. If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They view people as a resource, and shortages are already evident."
I don't know whether that's a reporting issue, translation issue, or if the minister himself misspoke (I don't speak Russian or Ukrainian), but I assume the goal is 50k casualties whereas it was 35k so far. 35k/month would be consistent with the casualty numbers that are often brought up that are about the average for the Russian side in the past 2 years, including by Ukraine.
I also believe the current 35k casualties/month are generally correct in an absolute sense. The ISW gave credibility to a supposed leak of Russian casualty data
which gives 281k casualties from January 2025 to August 2025. Of these casualties, there were 120k KIA+MIA, and 158k WIA over 243 days, which would mean ~500 KIA+MIA per day, or ~15k/month over that period. The total casualties are ~35k/month, which would be the confirmation of Ukrainian and NATO estimates if true.
The KIA+MIA to WIA ratio would be 1:1.3, or 43% of casualties are deaths; your estimate of 50% was decent, if a little high, considering that the ratio probably started lower in the early phase of the war. But since the total casualties were also lower early on (first year or so), 1:1.3 seems a good estimate for the overall ratio, meaning 1.2m Russian casualties would be ~521k dead or missing.
So if that leak was legit, it would essentially confirm these estimates of ~30k, 35k/month that we keep hearing from Ukraine and her allies, and it would mean the minister actually set that goal of 50k casualties, not killed. At the current ratios, that would mean 21.7k Russians killed per month, whereas now it would be ~15k.
If he *meant* casualties as in KIA+MIA then the numbers make much more sense. It's still a bit higher than most independent estimates but not egregiously so.
So just to get this straight: You say the minister did mean the goal is 50k MIA+KIA, or equivalently, applying the 1:1.3 ratio, 115k casualties? And that Ukraine has inflicted 80k confirmed casualties last month?
"Last month, 35,000 [Russians] were killed – all of these losses have been verified on video. If we reach the figure of 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They treat people as a resource, and problems with that resource are already obvious."
Applying your ratio, it would be 75k casualties last month.
See, this is why I'm still confused. That article cannot be correct in its entirety when taking the terms literally. The headline and first sentence say "50k casualties", while the direct quote says "50k killed". I read "casualties" as "KIA+MIA+WIA+everything else", and "killed" as "KIA+MIA".
Sorry for abusing you as a translator service here, I swear I'm not trying anything trollish here to just waste your time - but I want to make sure who, if anyone, you think is being loose with the terms here - the minister, or the journalist?
>And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
While that may be true, you can bet your babushka that exactly these guys will always be the first to go into the meat grinder, so their overall prevalence in the army has no bearing on their share of the casualties.
Even if you argue that this is an underestimate the trend should be noted: the Russian casualties are strongly decreasing. Part of that is the winter (with less offensives), part of that is that Russia is winning.
No, from Russian obituary trends you cannot conclude much about the Russian losses, let alone the progress of the war. There are several other possible reasons why these numbers go down.
- The Russian army might increasingly rely on non-Russians such as NKoreans or Africans. Not a Russian, no obituary in Russia.
- They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
- They might be increasingly unwilling to bring back their KIA for various reasons, such as avoiding death payments to relatives. No body, no official KIA, no payment, no obituary.
> - They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
This contradicts the reality of regular body trades, where Russia sends the bodies of 1000 Ukrainian soldiers in exchange for a few dozen bodies of Russian soldiers that Ukraine managed to gather.
This means that Russia is able not only to bring back their own KIA, but also to collect the bodies of Ukrainian KIAs, while Ukraine is usually unable to do any of that.
Yes, Russians retrieve (and repatriate) a higher percentage of bodies than Ukrainians because they are overall advancing. However, I'm talking about numbers of KIA, meaning positively identified dead. A missing soldier is MIA until his body (or grave) is positively identified, at which point he becomes KIA.
When a body is repatriated, it says nothing about its state of decomposition. Even if a patch of land eventually becomes safe for Russians to do retrieval operations in, if the drone pressure has increased, the time until retrieval will increase and the average body will be decomposed more than in previous periods. Identification becomes more difficult, and the soldier remains MIA instead of becoming officially KIA. That's how KIA can go down even if retrieval and repatriation stay the same.
Edit: same logic for retrieving your own soldiers, of course. If it takes Russians longer to retrieve their own dead ("they are increasingly unable"), their identifications (and KIA) go down because of decomposition and exposure.
I wasn't trying to be rude; I just didn't have time to explain why your reasoning is incorrect. A lag just shifts a graph; it doesn't change its shape.
because for various reasons they will throw anyone into an assault that can move in any way, up to and including wheelchair users, and if they return, they'll be thrown forward again, until they don't return. From what I heard, the standard limited-time contracts are also being extended indefinitely, so as a Russian merc you can't play for time either.
>Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
The big picture is that Russia has already lost the war in many ways and is losing more every day, whether or not she can achieve her war goals on Ukrainian soil in the end. Ukraine too, of course, because there are no winners among those who directly suffer from industrial war; but as long as she survives this war as a sovereign state, her new allies and Russian reparations will alleviate many of these long-term costs.
I agree, I don't think Russia can lose as hard as to be forced into directly paying reparations. But as I clarified in another response below, Russia will pay a reparations-equivalent (their frozen funds in the EU) if they don't win as hard as they had hoped (i.e. if Ukraine remains sovereign).
The weird thing about war is that it is possible for both (or all) sides to ultimately lose. For example, it looks to me that the main winners in WW1 (France and the UK) dealt a deathblow to their own empires in the process of winning that war, alongside setting the table for the next even worse war.
It's quite possible for Ukraine to lose the war in the sense of losing a bunch of territory to Russia, and also for Russia to lose the war in the sense of the cost being vastly more than the territory was worth.
I don’t think Russian reparations are a given, but even if they are I don’t think the long term outlook for Ukraine is good. The many killed in combat, the many more who have fled the country, and (if Ukraine does not regain much territory) the many in now Russian controlled lands will leave it significantly depopulated. Let alone their plummeting birth rate and negative population growth since the 90s.
Like I said, money won't heal all wounds. But I'm optimistic about the frozen Russian assets so unwisely parked in the EU. Obviously Russia won't pay a single Ruble of reparations as long as *they* remain a sovereign state, but if the EU find a way to cleanly liberate those funds, it's going to go towards rebuilding Ukraine. Ukraine is going to be in the EU, and eventually in NATO, depending on how things shake out with the occupied territories.
As for Russia, they have the same demographic prospects as Ukraine. But their economic and political future looks much more bleak, pretty much condemned to being China's and India's minerals provider, politically a bit similar to the North Korea situation. Russia has lost allies the past few year (clearly Syria, arguably Venezuela) for unrelated reasons which not only hurts them directly, but also their credibility as a security guarantor and trading partner.
The boggling part is the relationship to the total births being produced by the belligerent nations. For me anyway, YMMV of course. Your examples made me curious though so I dug up the relevant figures for WWII.
WWII (defined as Sep 1939 through August 1945) resulted in around 22 million deaths of military personnel and around 80 million total. Estimates vary and are debated to this day, I am using the rough midpoints of the generally-accepted ranges.
Deaths of military personnel (a bit more than 300,000/month) is the relevant comparison to the current Russia/Ukraine war. Not that there haven't been some civilian deaths but, so far at least, that's not even vaguely a factor comparable to what it was in WWII.
During the early 1940s the total annual live births in the larger WWII nations (list below) totaled around 22 million per year. Again I used the midpoints of estimates; in the case of China the data is quite shaky so I rounded down (possibly way down) to assuming the birthrate of Japan.
The nations whose annual total births I added up estimates of are the UK, the US, the USSR, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, China, France, Austria. This leaves out plenty of belligerents but they are individually small nations so we'll just consider their omission to be a way to round down to be safe. Worth noting though that the above deaths estimates _do_ include those smaller nations.
So during WWII military deaths (300K/month) averaged about one-sixth of total births occurring in belligerent nations (conservatively 1.83M/month). If you prefer total deaths (1.3M/month) then it's closer though the births still win out, about 3 births occurring for every 2 deaths during those years. Of course this comparison in rates is not all evenly distributed among the WWII nations, far from it.
Anyway what caught my eye was that Russia's annual _military_ deaths in this war could be running at half or more as much as that nation's annual births. Wowzers.
There are some indications that non-russians (I.e. African) are a larger proportion of the Russian army at the moment. This might be anecdotal, since I have no statistics for it.
restores my former suspicion that dark matter is a sort of diffuse or extended backward-in-time projection of mass by black holes, to balance the concentrated forward-in-time mass in their interior. That might explain why it doesn't interact with any familiar particles in a shared present. (It's hard to express this idea without sounding like a complete kook!)
I had thought the idea was untenable on seeing estimated dark matter distributions that looked more like webs, but the above image seems to show that on an appropriate scale dark matter is centered around point-like objects rather than being spread out along curves and across surfaces.
Humour me and I won't call you a kook! I'm curious what you mean by forward/backward in time for the black holes.
A common point made in serious courses in general relativity is that the singularity at the centre of a black hole isn't really at the "centre", rather, because of signature reversal at some radius (which depends on how you parametrize it), the singularity inside the black hole is actually a point in time, not space. So the centre of the black hole is the "future", not the centre. Is this what you're alluding to?
But I can't see what past/future imbalance dark matter is supposed to be correcting for.
Despite the appearance of the word in the link, the article is not about that staple of kook science, wormholes, but sketches an interesting idea of backward and forward in time interactions.
I admit that my original post was vague, but it's hard to know how to firm up the idea. But FWIW, I'll give it some further thought.
Question about guns: One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me. What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE. How could it possibly protect him or anyone else in that setting? Drawing or using it would virtually guarantee that ICE agents would shoot him. (And if anyone here is so poisoned by polarization they think I’m attacking Pretti or saying he “deserved to die” — no no of course not, I don’t think anything like that.)
I think it's a pretty rare individual who, if they saw you brandishing a weapon, decided the thing to do is try to grab it and take it off of you. That's a great way to get shot; they have to pull off like four moves before you pull off one. Those aren't great odds. But that said, there's a reason that gun ranges exist and people go there and practice drawing, aiming, and shooting, and it's so there is at least some level of preparation they've done for the exact kind of situation you're describing.
> "One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me"
Yes, that's why police officers and responsible civilian gunowners receive training to determine under what circumstances they'll have enough time to draw and aim at an aggressor during an encounter and how to retain their firearm if it comes to that (first step: carry a retension holster which makes it difficult to draw except from a very specific angle). I've personally received training in both assessing draw time and retension. Neither concept is rocket science.
And while in-person training should be mandatory for any gun handler, informal ongoing "classroom" training is available on Active Self Protection, a YouTube channel operated by a professional firearms instructor and forensic expert witness in shootings. You don't need to rely on your own imagination; ASP has over 4,000 videos analyzing *actual, real-life* violent encounters captured on security cameras, cell phones, and badge cameras. Anyone - including you, Eremolalos! - can receive a pretty good education in self-defense theory merely by watching actual encounters be analyzed by an expert.
For example, here's a recent video analyzing a robbery where one of the victims was carrying a gun but did not attempt to draw it and what he could have done differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTZVlx1Fg1Y
And here's a video from three days ago that's relevant to some of the discussion downthread, about a knife-wielding attacker going for a law-enforcement officer's firearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKY1zZjeY4&rco=1
The ASP channel did *by far* the best breakdown of the Rene Good shooting (https://youtu.be/6k_1y2kSHfw?si=2VM_0SzUwWPtT9Te), and I have no doubt there will be a similarly dispassionate, non-partisan, rational analysis of the Alex Pretti shooting once there's sufficient video to analyze. I'm eager to see it, because while John Correia firmly believes that people should carry firearms 100% of the time for personal self protection, I doubt he will think that it was prudent for Alex Pretti to physically close with law enforcement officers during a confrontation while armed.
And that's where I am. I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she *deliberately* placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar. I believe physical protesting is a self-indulgent and wildly inefficient use of one's time - it's far better to spend those hours boringly working in order to donate money to the most powerful lobby for your cause - but in the unlikely event I were motivated to physically protest near law enforcement, I would NEVER, EVER do it while armed.
Because as I replied to you in that thread on Rene Good, "I understand that I'm not so important to the universe that *MY!* passion will plot-shield *ME!* from the reality of other people potentially reacting very negatively to *SUPER!SPECIAL!ME!* should I pick a fight with them."
I think you have done all the right, smart things to protect yourself from the downside of guns and optimize the upside, and I admire that. I can’t tell, though, whether you are trying to convince me to go ahead and get a gun, given the model you’ve shown me of how to do the thing well. I am sure that would not be good use of my resources. Here’s why:
-Given my age and lifestyle, it is much likelier that I will be killed by illness than by violence. I am quite proactive about health stuff, and do a lot of things that are time-consuming and a pain in the ass to protect mine. I think I’m putting my effort in the right place.
-I think I am pretty good at reading and navigating dangerous situations. As a therapist I have logged quite a few hours talking with people who are crazy and/or suicidal and/or crave to do violence. None have done any of those awful things on my watch. I have hospitalized several people in that state from within the session, talking on the phone with the police and hospital while in the patient’s presence. I have reported 3 patients of mine to protective services, after warning them in advance that I was soon going to feel I had to, then talked with them afterwards about having done it.
I have been in 3 situations where the potential for real violence was high. Once a friend and I were once held up by 3 teens pointing knives at us. I handed them my purse and spoke to them in a calm, blank sort of voice, telling them where my cash was and not saying anything else. The friend I was with did the same. They took the money and left. Once, when I had stayed over at a psychiatric halfway house where my boyfriend worked, I woke up to find one of our patients in the kitchen with a gun. He had escaped somehow from the VA where he was hospitalized, and was talking about going back and killing people there. I expressed a lot of sympathetic interest, “wow, I see why you hate that guy, tell me more” kind of thing, meanwhile cooking him a hearty breakfast. At some point I made some excuse to leave the kitchen, and called the halfway house director and asked her to call the police. It all ended up working out OK — patient was re-hospitalized with no use of force. And once, when I was covering for someone on vacation, a patient of theirs I knew nothing about called and asked for an emergency appointment. I saw him at the end of the day on a Friday and everyone else in my office suite had left. He turned out to be a young guy. Sat down in my office, gave me a long weird unsmiling stare, and said “if you had to guess, would you say I am circumcised or not?” Became clear in the next few minutes of the conversation that he had delusions about people’s opinions of his circumcision, and wanted to use the session to show me his penis and have me render judgment on whether it looked normal. And he was hand-wringingly frantic about the issue. The idea of rape was not in the air at all, but I still did not want him to take out his penis because of a feeling that the situation would get even weirder and harder to navigate if I did. Somehow I managed to avoid his doing that and yet do enough to calm him down that he left the session no longer frantic, but merely dissatisfied with me.
I don’t know what kicks in during situations like the ones I described. I would not call it bravery, because I do not feel scared. I become emotionally numb and hyper-focused on the task of paying attention to the person’s state and saying the optimal thing. It’s something about my wiring. But I do not think I have good wiring for situations where I have the power to maim or kill. I think I would feel guilty and uncertain, all tangled up in empathy and doubt, and would not play things well.
I will circle back, but just wanted to say that *no one* should have a gun if they aren't comfortable with both the obligations and risks that go with it.
When my brother and I were kids, he was relentlessly defiant bordering on feral, and due to the horrible timing of our birth order we waged a constant war for dominance. My dad assessed the very real risk of him raccooning the entire house and eventually breaking into even the most robust gun box and realized that *my kid brother* potentially having access to a gun was a far greater risk to the family than some junkie breaking into our home. He stored his firearms with a friend offsite, until my brother was eventually fixed by boarding school.
My dad was absolutely right.
If you (generic second person, not you, specifically) don't have the temperament for training on and using a tool of lethal self defense and/or you live with people who can't be trusted around unsecured firearms, guns are definitely Not For You.
And that's okay! Absolutely nobody should have a gun if they don't have a reason to believe the risk will be acceptably small.
FWIW, I'll generally say "+1" to this; it's not just two shitkicking gals. With an extra caveat that Christina's dad was in a maximally optimal position to make this judgement about his son, by way of knowing him personally, and also basically authorized to do so. I would not trust a government official to make anywhere near as good judgements on average, especially since I know how such officials tend to be selected.
In light of her account above, I think I trust "an Eremolalos" to make acceptably good judgements on average, too, but since I can't trust the government to consistently pick Eremolaloi, that option is sadly also out.
Man, it'd be nice if we could all rationally agree on a common sense position on firearms, something along the lines of, "you have an absolute right *TO MINIMALLY TRAIN* and *THEN* carry a firearm."
Like, I don't want my right to self-defense stripped from me, but also, I don't want anyone else using their right to handle a firearm without having the basic safety skill of keeping their fucking finger off the trigger, you know?
I have to say, the halfway house story was the ideal (and obviously correct) outcome that I have no idea how I would have handled, especially if armed at the time. I would have been pretty freaked out about "what if this guy suddenly snaps and I don't have enough time to react?" Obviously, staying calm and manipulating the outcome you wanted was the right move, but just...wow.
> I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she deliberately placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar.
I think you should hold ICE to a higher moral standard than a wild dog.
Also that guy was pinned to the ground while they shot him 10 times. It seems insane to me how you can blame anyone else for this except the shooters.
Also I don't see how your argument is different than blaming rape victims for dressing too sexy, instead of blaming the rapist. So let me ask you direct: If a woman would dress sexy in public, would fall more blame on her, or on the rapist under your logic?
Echoing the thought below that I don't know why you are expecting more out of the ICE than a wild dog. If someone got attacked by a bear in an area that is known to have bears, then you would blame the person for walking into bear country, yes? How is this situation any different?
Some places have been having issues recently with bears walking into residential areas and attacking people. Any arguments about the level of agency you imagine bears to have or who is at fault are frankly irrelevant, and you should really stay indoors if there are warnings of bears out and about. Coordinated solutions to the problem can come later.
...Wow, even I didn't expect this analogy to work so well.
Reality doesn't care about people's beliefs about how it *SHOULD* be. It just *IS.* There *ARE* bad police officers. There *ARE* police officers with malicious intentions and there *ARE* police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and there is *absolutely* *nothing* that your personal feelings can or ever will do to change those things.
I think it was pretty clear once there was sufficient video that Rene Good never even saw Ross in front of her car; like most people in minor car accidents, she was almost certainly focused in a different direction than she was driving. She didn't "deserve" to die for that, but she was there *to* die, because she made an inherently dangerous choice to obstruct law enforcement officers and then attempt to flee from them. That's always inherently dangerous, because some officers are good, some are bad, some are lucky, and some are unlucky, and there is absolutely no way of knowing and trusting what outcome you're going to get.
Likewise Alex Pretti should not have been shot while his weapon was apparently in someone else's hand; LEOs are not supposed to shout "gun, gun, gun" *after* a weapon has been secured. But that day he met an ICE agent who shouted "gun, gun, gun" at the wrong time, and Alex Pretti was unlucky enough that he was wrongfully shot because of it.
If you don't want to potentially have outcomes similar to Good's and Pretti's, don't take the inherent risk of confronting law enforcement officers. It's not that hard.
And, as a single woman who's lived and dated in some scary neighborhoods in America's largest cities, let me tell you: Your attempted "gotcha" about sexy clothing is embarrassingly naive. Clothing doesn't invite or protect against predation; only behavior can do that. There are strategies for reducing the chance of being targeted for rape, and if one doesn't want to be raped, one uses those strategies.
Since reality doesn't care about aspirational feelings about whether or not people should be raped, but it does care about when those strategies actually prevent targeting or thwart rape, we shouldn't be discussing aspirational feelings, we should be discussing actionable strategies.
Just noting that one of the users in this thread has blocked me, which not only hid their comments from me, but *my own published comments in response* to them, as well as preventing me from being able to reply to their hanging questions directed at me. The conversation is visible to everyone but me (while I am logged in on Substack).
That is dishonorable. Shame on anyone who uses the block feature to invisibly silence their opponents during an active conversation.
When I talk about "more blame", I am aware that both parties could carry some fraction of the blame. When I talk about "moral standard", I am intentionally talking about how things SHOULD be, and not about personal safety. I want the offenders to be judged, even if the victim was behaving less responsible than they should have. I don't understand how anyone can look at any of these cases and think "the offender carries LESS blame here than the victim".
I can think of cases where the victim is behaving so irresponsible, that MORE blame would fall to them than to the offender, but I don't think any of these cases is as such.
I consider Good's behavior egregious enough that about equal or perhaps slightly more of the blame for her death falls on her. Attempting to run from the police in a car is inexcusably reckless, period. She should have obeyed the commands to step out of the car and accepted being handcuffed and detained / arrested / etc as the natural consequence of disruptive protesting. Run a GoFundMe for the legal battle, etc.
There's a reason Chris Rock's classic "instructional video" How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police begins with, "Obey the law." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8)
Pretti is an entirely different situation; the handling of the arrest and taking his firearm off him was completely wrong.
You're completely missing the point. This is absolutely not about personal safety advice and "how to avoid being killed by ICE agents"; protesting against ICE is dangerous, and it was incredibly courageous of Good and Pretti to do it anyways.
The only political question is whether what ICE did was justifiable; it was not. Government agents are only allowed to use deadly force in self-defense when they reasonably believe that there is an imminent risk to their life or safety, and this standard was clearly not met. People are outraged because these incidents show that ICE is brutalizing American cities.
It does not matter whether Good and Pretti were taking a risk. They could have been wearing bullseyes and chanting "SHOOT ME" and it would not make a difference. The ICE agents would still have committed murder. Properly trained law enforcement agents that were not angry racists recruited from the dregs of society would not have murdered American citizens.
I think you're missing *my* point, which is that comments like your's, while correct, are useless at best and inadvertently harmful at worst for perpetuating a culture of subconscious entitlement to personal safety so great that people will take absurd and avoidable risks with their lives.
This isn’t a movie. "I'm in the moral right > thus I'm the hero > cops can't shoot heroes! > thus I can do heroic things and I won't get shot!" doesn't actually apply in real life.
I care about actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level, and I believe that is possible with education. I believe that signal boosting the concept that no one is a hero and that outrage is not a shield can do *infinitely* more good than expressing my own outrage.
...
...and I also just realized the irony that I am doing so here, in a community of people who are universally way too smart as individuals to go out and antagonize police officers *themselves*. Everyone here is already doing that math, even if it isn't conscious.
You can't claim that you're just proposing "actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level". If you are commenting on an event involving a law enforcement agency killing a protester, you are commenting on political issues. By blaming the protesters, you are legitimizing ICE's actions. You can't evade responsibility by claiming that you're discussing a different issue.
I never claimed that protesting was necessarily the best strategy to oppose ICE. I said that it is wrong for ICE agents to murder American citizens and that it demonstrates the illegitimacy of their operations.
The purpose of the discourse around the killings is not to maximize the personal safety of protesters, who have bravely chosen to put themselves in danger to oppose tyranny. It is to show the illegitimacy and incompetence of the violent fascists that are occupying American cities.
You're saying that it's wrong to criticize government agents for murdering Americans because it might lead to more people protesting and being murdered by government agents. I cannot comprehend the distorted thinking process that led to this opinion. After reading some of your previous comments in this thread, I noticed that you never mentioned why protesting in Minneapolis is so dangerous. Who killed Good and Pretti? Instead of admitting that ICE agents are murdering Americans, you're choosing to pin the blame on people who put their lives at risk from their government to fight fascism.
It's only a hop skip and a jump from this position to the position that Philando Castile simply shouldn't have had his gun in the car. There are bad police officers and police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and for the average citizen 99.9% of your encounters with police officers of all stripes will occur when you get pulled over while driving.
So it doesn't matter what your beliefs are about how it *SHOULD* be. Reality doesn't care about your aspirational feelings, and if you don't want to potentially have an outcomes similar to Mr. Castille, don't bring your gun in a car.
That may feel like an unfair expansion of your argument, but those unfair expansions are also an immutable feature of reality that doesn't care about your aspirational feelings - see e.g. Mips below, who's taking the principle you're applying here and extending it to the inherent danger of simply going outside in Minneapolis: "the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life."
Philando Castile isn't an unfair expansion at all; I actually intended to invoke him in my inevitable reply, as his tragic case is in my mind whenever I notice a police car while I'm driving. If I get pulled over while armed the officer is likely to have my permit flagged along with my registration and draw their own conclusions, which is why I will keep my hands still and visible at all times, and, if directed to move or to retrieve anything, I will ask permission and announce my intention ("my drivers license is in my purse. I'm going reach for it with my right hand if that's okay. My registration is in the glove box with a bunch of napkins, may I open it?" Etc). Then move slowly and deliberately and follow directions. Refer to the weapon as a "firearm" or by model, never as a "gun." Etc.
Well, that is *indeed* a risk I am consciously and deliberately taking with my safety. I believe it is a very, very small risk, and certainly a MUCH MUCH MUCH SO MANY MUCHES smaller risk than confronting and then attempting to flee law enforcement in a car or physically block / bump them in the street *while armed.* I've judged the risk small enough that it's not negligently reckless and very much worth it, while the risks Good and Pretti took were not.
And you can quibble with my personal risk tolerance and invent increasingly absurd hypotheticals that my criticism of other people's recklessness obligates me to avoid all risk, but like...stop that. That isn't a compelling gotcha because, if I get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, I won't Pikachu face about it.
I know what might happen, and my point is, Good and Pretti and *everyfuckingone else should, too.*
Here's the thing - if you get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, whether or not I pikachu face about it, I'll still advocate for consequences for the officer who screwed up, and I think we as a society are being pretty foolhardy if we get so caught up in a discussion of the risks that you were or weren't intentionally taking on that we forget to do so.
"Proposition 1: X activity by gunowners is lawful but extremely risky" and "Proposition 2: police should not react to activity X by killing gunowners who do it" are obviously both statements that can be true at the same time.
When they occur concurrently, we as a society should ideally have both conversations. Reminding people who want accountability for law enforcement over Prop 2 that Prop 1 also exists is fine, but taking a stance that any discussion of Prop 2 accountability is a waste of time and potentially harmful because Prop 1 is just an immutable feature of the world so Prop 2 discussions are pointless.... well, that approach is how you put your society on a beeline for more violations of Prop 2.
It's also a claim that nothing can ever get better, that "what is" must always be, and "what ought" can never change an outcome in the world. Which is nonsense. Last I saw, gentlemen do not settle interpersonal conflicts with judicial duels. Likewise, a large number of people feel that the government ought not to shoot people simply for protesting, and that feeling matters.
In general, there are things one might do that increase or decrease the chances of one being harmed in a given situation--but this does not imply that if one does something that increases those chances, you bear moral responsibility for what happens to you. A young woman should not walk certain city streets at night alone--but if she does, she isn't morally responsible if she is attacked. She may have been foolish, but she is not culpable. The person who attacked her is.
Similarly, Pretti may have been foolish to attend a protest while armed, but he was within his rights to do so, and the officer who shot him is still a murderer.
Yeah, you can be the victim of some crime (which is the fault of the criminal) and also have behaved in some imprudent ways that made your victimization more likely. And indeed, everyone makes tradeoff between safety and other goals all the time, so it will regularly be true that if I am the victim of a crime, someone will say that I behaved imprudently and reaped the consequences. I didn't *have* to carry $200 in my wallet and go out after dark, after all.
As an individual, possession of a gun during an encounter with law enforcement in particular seems to have no upside and lots of downside. And in interactions with others it still introduces a lot more downside even if there is also some upside.
But being an armed *community* introduces some new options which includes at least in the short term of winning stand offs with law enforcement and possibly makes your community better defended against criminals (mlk et al were armed). These scenarios are less exposed to individual anxiety and are a strong deterrent.
To get a tad political, the armed community seems to sit better with 2nd amendment text considering the "well regulated militia" part.
It seems that a major factor in keeping anyone from getting hurt is that it was an actual standoff, not a scuffle where a gun goes off or is suddenly produced in the presence of law enforcement.
And not all standoffs go so well for the community! Waco for example. But being a community is what makes the standoff more likely. Your groups presence and organization is better signalled in advance.
1. People being killed with their own defensive firearms is an *exceedingly* rare thing, with one exception - cops. Police officers are required to regularly engage in heated, often violent confrontations with criminals, while carrying a clearly-visible gun in their holster. They usually aren't allowed to just shoot the criminal up front, and so sometimes the first person to go for the cop's gun is the criminal. For anyone else, the criminal shouldn't know where your gun is or even if you have one until you've already decided that this is a gunfight. If you draw a gun, it's because if the other guy doesn't immediately stand down you're going to immediately shoot them.
2. If you're not willing to commit to that, even in the face of a threat to your life or that of someone under your protection, then no, you probably shouldn't be carrying a gun.
3. You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ICE agents. Pretti had a concealed carry permit, and unless the Minnesota bureaucracy is unusually fast, he would almost certainly have had to apply for that permit well before the high-profile ICE deployment to Minneapolis. So he was presumably already in the habit of carrying a gun on general principles and/or for protection against ordinary common criminals. There is no requirement that such a person disarm themselves before joining a political protest, there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun), and there *should* be no particular danger in a gun that stays holstered through the protest.
People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun.
Yes, in theory, one should be able to bring a gun to a protest. Also in theory, protests are peaceful things that are well-regulated and do not require use of raw sewage to quell them. Maximally using your constitutional rights can be dangerous (try bringing a gun into a biker bar, with drunk biker gangs? That's not going to end well for you)
> "People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun."
[Citation needed.]
Also, please go watch a couple thousand real-life gun encounters on the Active Self Protection channel on YouTube. Seems like there's been an *awful* lot of real life examples of criminals being extremely surprised when other people also have guns.
Putin walks like he has a gun at all times. Look at his walk, if you want to know how it's done. (He also checks all exits whenever he goes into a room). There's a look, and if you pull it off, criminals tend to "find someone else to hassle."
Most spies are taught to look like they're not carrying a gun when they ARE carrying a gun.
Many criminals are actually drug-addicts (i'm sure you know this), and can be disassociated from reality to an alarmingly large degree (meth users get paranoid, for example).
1. Seems a bit odd to me that it’s rare for people to be shot by their own defensive weapon. I get your point about the gun owner's not even bringing out their gun until they are sure this is a gunfight. But it seems like it would be a common error for somebody to pull out their gun earlier out of a desire to be ready if this turned out to be a shoot-or-get-savaged situation. Or they might do it to intimidate their opponent. And GPT could not find support for your contention that it is an exceedingly rare thing for someone who’s not police to be shot with their own defensive weapon. “There is no precise national statistic on how often a civilian defender is shot by their own weapon, because crime reporting systems and surveys do not collect that specific detail.” And it found some indirect evidence that guns do not make owners safer. Pointed to a study that found that individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were four to five times more likely to be shot than those without one. That study was about possessing a gun at the time of an assault, though, not specifically during lawful defensive use. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759797/?utm_source=chatgpt.com). How you found an information source that gives stats about people being killed by their defensive weapons?
3. “You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ice agents.” No, not at all. When I said that if he’d brought it out in an encounter with ICE agents he’d be in great danger of being shot, I was not implying that was his plan. My point was that the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE, and in an encounter with ICE the gun was not protection but in fact its opposite -- so what was the point in bringing a gun?. Listen to how things played out (in the most recent account I read of the incident): Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had.Seems having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I had 2 points in mind when I posted that comment about Pretti’s gun: One, the way things played out struck me as an example of the hidden dangers of having a gun. Two, I thought Pretti's bringing the gun was an error of judgment, kind of surprising in a man with a job, intensive care nurse, that demands. you be alert and have good judgment in life-or-death situations. I’d expect it would occur to someone like that on their way to hang out near ICE and video them that if ICE believes you have a gun — because you pull it out, or because they feel it on your pocket while tackling you — they will be more likely to go lethal. I wonder if the awfulness of the Minneapolis situation had clouded Prettis judgment.
To me, the judgment of people in our present exchange seems clouded. People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . .
It would never occur to me that something in my pocket, that my hands are well away from, would trigger someone to shoot me. That is absolutely an unreasonable response, and as such is just as likely to be generated by having, say, a wallet in my pocket, or a bag of candy, or anything else that would bulge slightly beneath my clothes.
1. Criminals taking their victims' guns and shooting them with those guns, is very much a "dog that didn't bark situation". It's very easy to find cases of people using firearms successfully in self-defense; it's much much harder to find examples of people being shot with their own guns. I've looked. And I assume that the people who make a profession out of arguing against private firearms ownership have looked even harder. But there's only very scarce anecdotal evidence.
1'. The history of "scientific studies" of defensive use of firearms is mostly a history of case studies in ignoring the big obvious 800-lb gorilla of a cofounder in the room: the largest category of (non-suicide) shootings in the US, is criminals shooting other criminals, or close associates of criminals. Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians. There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
3. "the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE". You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day. The expert in that field is Alex Pretti. Who, as I pointed out, went out of his way to buy a gun and get a concealed-carry permit before ICE started its Minneapolis shenanigans. Maybe his medical work brought him in frequent contact with violent criminals. Maybe his wife has a violent stalker ex who won't go away. Maybe he lives in a bad neighborhood. We don't know. But we do know that *he* felt that there were plenty of ordinary ICE-free days in which he felt that the danger of encountering a violent non-ICE enemy justified carrying a gun.
Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Meta: " People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . ."
If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it". In which case, Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
1. <Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians
Yes, I realize that, and that was my first thought about the study GPT unearthed about where they found that people who had been shot were 4-5 times more likely to be gun owners themselves. Yeah, I thought, that’s probably mostly criminals killing criminals. Still, it was the only even indirect evidence GPT dug up, so I mentioned it.
<There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
Well, John, I notice you’re not linking to it.
<If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it".
If we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you slathered onto the imagined me above, I would say that’s a good approximation of my point: Yes Pretti had the right to carry a gun into a city full of ICE agents and protestors, with everyone on edge, but doing that was almost certain to make him less safe, not more.
<You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day.
That’s true, but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando, or to have in their lives someone like crazy stalker ex who is likely to attack them them violently. So while it is certainly possible Pretti had someone like that, it is not likely. And in any case, when we think of about Pretti walking around Minneapolis, we also have to think about the *likelihood* of his encountering such a rando or encountering his wife’s stalker as compared to the likelihood of his getting tangled into some kind of confrontation between ICE and the protestors. Which do you think is more likely, John? “Hey, right there next to me in Dunkin Donuts is my wife’s crazy ex. who’d made death threats and tried to break into the house last month, and he’s pulling a weapon out of his pocket” or “Hey, I was just trying to help this woman to her feet and now 4 or 5 ICE guys are tackling me as though I were a big threat.”
And I do not think Pretti was stupid. He had a job that demanded stress tolerance and good judgment in situations that pull for emotions, and I have not heard anything suggesting that he did not perform his work well. Also have not heard anything that makes me think he had bad judgment or crackpot ideas. I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
<Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Of course, I absolutely agree. What on earth have I said makes you think I don’t? It is clear that what should be the case in the presence of ICE is not the case. Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
< Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
Note that Gary Kleck is a professor of criminology who started with basically the same beliefs you have been expressing, but who actually did the work rather than just pontificating about it.
> but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando,
I'm not sure what Pretti's race has to do with anything. But aside from that, do you have a lot of experience (or even any experience) with middle-class professionals *who own guns and have concealed carry permits*? Because that's like 8% of the population nationwide, and probably half that in a city like Minneapolis. So we're dealing with a two-sigma outlier, along an ill-defined axis that I'm guessing you have no experience with.
The principle of charity suggests we should assume that Pretti had a reasonable basis for believing that he faced at least a two-sigma elevated risk level, or obligation to protect others at risk or something else along those lines. Ideally we'd just ask him, but we can't because one of our hired gunmen put a bullet in his brain and some of us are kind of peeved about that. So either we're going to extend the recently deceased the benefit of the doubt, or we're not.
> And I do not think Pretti was stupid ... I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
That's my take on it as well. But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid. And I'm now unclear as to what your actual point is. There's an obvious but uncharitable interpretation, but fortunately you're still alive so we can ask you.
> Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
What if a person has *two* goals? One of which is to protest ICE's treatment of suspected illegal immigrants, and the other of which is to protect himself against whatever it was that he reasonably felt he needed to protect himself from before ICE was ever an issue in his life? Or, IMHO more likely, what if a person starts the day with the twin goals of just going about his daily life and protecting himself from a reasonably perceived threat, and only later adds a third "protest ICE" goal when he sees ICE behaving wrongly in front of him, or gets a text from a friend saying that ICE is behaving wrongly a few blocks away and his services as a nurse might soon be needed?
I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
> You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
<I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it” . . . I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
This tone of weary disgust at the grotesque ignorance, shallowness and self-importance of others is present in most of your posts. It is very unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that point of view, since I respect you and also like you except when I get a dose of this stuff from you. And I do not think it is reasonable to speak to and about me that way. There are plenty of things you know more about than I do, but I am generally willing to recognize when I am ignorant of something, and to revise my ideas. And I am intelligent and skeptical and care more about being accurate than I do about being impressive, and I think one can tell that from my posts. As regards the subject at hand, you know much more than I do about guns and data about shootings. On the other hand, I have probably logged many more hours than you talking with people who truly want to kill or maim themselves and other people and people with deep concerns for their own safety. And I have certainly not written off what I learned as shit crazy people experience. It’s stored in my mind as things people experience. And, by the way, I have mostly talked with those people alone. Of the 3 times I have been in danger of violence, 2 have been with patients during sessions. I do not have a country club practice where I talk with trophy wives about their crows feet. For 20+ years I was the person who took referrals other therapists were too daunted by to accept. I’m not a nervous ninny about violence from others. What throws me is the prospect of doing violence.
Reading through your points, it seems to me that you are ignoring several exits from your grim read of me as being wrong as hell in some ugly way. Here are a coupla examples:
Me: And I do not think Pretti was stupid …likeliest explanation for bringing gun was habit.
You: But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid.
John, I said right in the sentence you are quoting that it was a good approximation but only after “we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you layered onto the imagined me above.” I then went on to explain my read of why Pretti took his gun with him that day, which is that he failed to take into account the danger taking it posed — most likely because it was his habit to bring his gun with him, and he did not reflect on whether that was a good idea that day. So that was me scraping off the scorn and contempt layer in your framing. My view, with the scorn and contempt for Pretti you’d attributed to me scaped off, was that I attributed his failure to reflect as instead just going on habit. I think it would be clear to any reader that I think of defaulting to habit as a common error that the smart make as often as the stupid, an error that does not indicate in any way that Pretti was dumb . So scraping off the scorn and contempt here is not a matter of still seeing Pretti as a moron but being kind about it. It’s seeing Pretti as having made a cognitive error that is common and not indicative of stupidity. Scraping off the scorn and contempt layer doesn’t consist just of having a kinder attitude, but of interpreting things in the same direction as the scornful one (cognitive error ) but an error that is much smaller and less global (common cognitive error, not overall low cognitive ability).
Come on John, grasping that I was saying that “he acted on habit instead of reflecting” is “he’s a moron” with the scorn and contempt layer scraped off is basic reading comprehension, and you are smart enough to grasp that with 100 IQ points left over. And yet what I wrote leaves you wandering in some wilderness where you think either I’m saying Pretti was a moron, or else trying to convey some idea that you just can’t find in the thicket of my prose. WTF?
How bout another example? :
<I’m not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights [protest ICE], presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other [protect self] lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
It should be extremely easy to find another way to interpret it. I have outright said parts of the alternative explanation, and in other places (such as the example above) said things that make clear the rest. My interpretation is that Pretti failed to reflect on what would happen if ICE somehow became aware he was carrying. Probably that happened because he defaulted to habit. A possible extra contributor was that Pretti was not thinking as well as usual, because he was profoundly shocked, distressed and infuriated by recent events in Minneapolis. As luck would have it, Pretti’s oversight led to ICE putting 10 bullet holes in him. What happened is an example of the non-obvious dangers of having guns around.
While you may think there are other lessons to be drawn from what happened (and I agree that there are), I don’t think it’s hard to come up with the above as the point I was making. But you can’t come up with it *even after I said in a recent exchange with you that the main point I had in my mind in my original post was the non-obvious dangers of guns.* I really think the problem here is that you are so sure you are surrounded by heartless, ignorant, self-important fools that you filter out the evidence that the person you are hearing from is not making heartless and foolish points.
And while we’re straightening things out: I am kind of vague how "concealed carry" laws figures into gun ownership, but you are wrong that I have had little exposure to people who routinely carry guns. My military half-brother had a personal gun. I believe my parents brought ours when we took family trips. I have had 2 patients who were gun owners — and these were people I talked with for many many hours, and often about very private and deeply held attitudes. I have known several very committed rock climbers who were avid hunters and also had personal guns, and one of them I knew extremely well. I had multiple talks with these people about guns and what they meant to each of them. I really do grasp the point of view of people who experience owning a gun as an important element of their dignity and autonomy. And I do not scorn that attitude, even though I do not share it. I am not very judgy about people’s world views, and don’t really believe there is a right one. As for life in a concealed carry state — no, I don’t know what that’s like. But is it really very different? Seems to me I understand and respect the crucial thing, which is the I-have-a-right-to-it point of view of people who feel strongly about gun ownership.
And one other thing. I think I should tell you my personal feeling about what happened to Pretti, since you are thinking maybe I think “yeah, he was asking for it.” I am extremely angry and distressed about his murder. I have shed tears over it. I have had fantasies of being on a rooftop and spraying bullets down onto ICE. I cannot stop thinking about all the popping noises in the videos —- 10 fucking bullets, shot into one man lying on his stomach. I wonder about how many he felt before one knocked out brain function. I get unbearably angry when I hear about ICE standing around his body crowing and clapping and counting the bullet holes. I feel terribly sad that Pretti had his life yanked away. I feel more personal connection with him than I did with the other 2 who died. He’s a fellow health care professional. And male nurses are often gay, and I have a special soft spot in my heart for gay people because both my half-brother (not the military one) and my mother were gay.
I'm not sure why you keep saying "fundamental rights", as if they have some foundation in physics or something. You have rights because the government guarantees those rights, and currently the government and those serving them aren't in the mood for guaranteeing those rights for citizens. So I don't see how it's relevant to this situation...
I wonder if he hoped there would be violence, and he might have a pretext to use it. Like, picturing himself gunning down the guy who guns down the woman driving recklessly.
We’ve been watching “Slow Horses”, a show with conventional left politics. The heroes shoot people all the time. This is a fantasy situation for men of any political persuasion, I would think. Otherwise, why does the show work so well as entertainment?
In fact, we’ve talked about how guns achieve an outsized role in the show because they are I suppose very few in the UK, so there’s always a lot of tension around this magical object: who has (our only) gun, ditto the lack of armed police or security (haven’t been there, don’t know if this is real or just story necessity). “We had to protect ourselves with a tea kettle!”
Not trying to start a culture war topic over the cliches if the show. It is wonderfully entertaining regardless.
Pr[get attacked | have gun] > Pr[get attacked | don't have gun].
I mean, why did you have a gun in the first place? Because you were worried about being attacked. The guy living in a safe suburb and never going out after dark has a lot less need for a concealed gun than the guy who closes his bar at 1AM every night and then puts the cash from the register into the bank's night deposit box before going home and going to bed.
People tend to very much overestimate how many assaults and even murders occur with guns. Children bring knives to school and stab each other with them. Somalis attempt murder by fist, 8+ people on one guy going into a revolving door (yes, I've seen the video. Yes it's old).
You're imagining a mugging, I presume? (This is a good bet, as it's salient for the average TV watcher).
Good gun discipline is to give them the money (assuming they aren't obviously looking for more than money). Your money isn't worth their life or yours.
You draw a gun if you're enough out of the way to help -- and you get down first, hit the deck, if there's bullets flying or might be (also, you look less like the criminal if cops show up and don't know you're the hero).
Your statistic probably includes the child that shot his daddy over taking away his switch (dude put it in the gun safe).
I think you might have a sort of movie concept of how easy it is to get a guy out of someone else's hands. You are standing presumably outside of, say, punching range with someone else, with both hands on the gun. They have to A. not back off, B. get their hands to the gun without being shot, C. somehow take the gun from you without accidental firings killing them, ect.
Meanwhile all you have to do is sort of twitch a little and the gun fires and the person who wanted to take it from you is dead.
The question you are asking is closer to "Since I can't imagine ever firing a gun actually, wouldn't it be easy to take my gun from me?" And even then it's still kind of not easy to take an object from a person who controls it.
Since I'm in an irrelevant nit-picking hellscape, I'm going to start responding to stuff like this with a "Goose-gander" shorthand. Yes, touching someone with a bullet doesn't always immediately stop their heart and render them braindead in a blink.
Yes, it's possible to imagine a situation in which someone gets shot, doesn't die, decides it's not a big deal, continues with their previous course of action, continues to not die or be disabled, takes a gun in the control of an un-shot person from them, and shoots them with it. It's possible to imagine anything! What if the person I shot is Peter Pan, and can't die from mortal weapons?
It's possible to imagine anything. But if it's relevant to this discussion, then it's also relevant on *both sides*, i.e. If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter, then it's also true of the gun owner, and he'll still be one mostly-harmless bullet to his body ahead in the ensuing struggle to get the (presumably a dozen) bullets it takes to kill a person.
If I'm being sarcastic here, it's because this is about the fifth time this hour someone has gone "But wait guns are made of metal, isn't METAL HEAVY? doesn't that mean it's easy to disarm a person of their gun and shoot them with it, and a likely thing to happen?" in some version or another.
I'm willing to take that kind of argument seriously if it's an actual serious argument, but not "Well, sir, what if the person got shot, so now you have full control of your gun and the other guy has a bullet in him. Doesn't he have the upper hand NOW?" arguments anymore. Yes, it's possible a magic anteater drops from the sky on a tiny parachute and swip-swaps the gun to the bad guy's hand, no, I'm not going to spend my whole day taking it seriously as a counterargument to "It's not that easy to take a gun from a person who is in control of it and can shoot you with it at any time".
>If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter,<
The problem with this is that "likely to matter" only needs to mean "dies fifteen minutes later from blood loss". There are several videos of gunfights that end with a shot person running or driving away, to die later from wounds inflicted. The Michael Drejka one is usually my go-to, but there are also police shootouts and whatnot. If you shoot them and they're still functioning, they can shoot back, and you'll both die fifteen minutes later, which is not ideal.
You're taking this as "the safety's already off" which doesn't seem like a reasonable thing for a reasonable weapon owner. How much does it take to get the safety off?
Your "doesn't seem" isn't incredibly valuable here, mostly because you don't knowing lot about guns. Glocks, for instance, don't have a safety in the sense you think they do. This is true of an awful lot of modern firearms, and among those that it's not true of, it's still pretty common to practice "condition 0" carry, i.e. all that's required to fire the gun is to pull the trigger.
It's not universally true that every pistol can be carried this way, and among those that can't be there's sometimes a split-second difference in how quickly the gun can be rendered operational (another twitch of the thumb).
When you were figuring out that there was something you had once heard of called a safety and that it must be universal and that if it was and was hard to operate this *might* salvage your preferred positioning on this conversation, it should have occurred to you what all that grasping meant.
Figured I'd get some information from you, by exposing my ignorance and a willingness to learn. What percentage of gun-holders do you think practice "Condition 0"?
>there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun)
Especially true in Minneapolis, because the protests are not "everyone gather at a particular time to express our displeasure," they are "ICE is trying to grab someone, whoever is closest runs over with a camera and a whistle." The confrontations can happen anywhere on short notice.
Suicide risks by gun should be matched with "suicide risk by other commonly available Manly Ways To Kill Yourself."
I mark a very big sex-related difference between "kill yourself with a gun" and "drink bleach", and also a very different "odds of death" between those two.
Yeah. The most important firearm safety rule to understand is that if you or someone in your home is likely to be suicidal at some point, you need to either get the guns out of your house or lock them up well enough the suicidal person can't get to them. For most people (and definitely most people here, since we're presumably mostly not cops, armored car guards, professional criminals, or people living in super high-crime areas), that's the biggest risk a gun in the house poses to anyone in your home.
Yeah. Is someone being less communicative than normal? Looks upset, had a Major Incident that might wind up with him being depressed? Lock the guns up, why take the chance? (Obviously be upfront about why, if asked).
I'd take this as "team up to shoot, if there's even a slight chance of suicide" -- as a bonus, spending time with the depressed person may help them feel less lonely.
I think it's common (though not universal) that you know if you, your wife, or one of your kids has serious problems with depression, has seriously considered suicide, has done other self-harm behaviors, or has previously attempted suicide. In that case, you want to remove the low-effort suicide methods from the house as much as possible. Nothing can nerf the world so much that someone can't commit suicide, but leaving a loaded handgun in a nightstand with your chronically depressed wife is a pretty obviously terrible idea.
I remember reading something I can no longer find about the correct attitude to take when carrying a gun. It went something like this:
"From now on, you will lose every argument. You will apologise sincerely to every bully who gets in your face for ruining his day. You will be the meekest so-and-so around. Because you are carrying a gun, and any fight where someone is carrying a gun is likely to end with one of you getting shot."
Or another quote I found while looking for the exact wording of the above: "You can have a gun or you can have an ego but you can't have both"
Anyway yes, it's the same mistake that George Zimmerman made, to walk into trouble while armed instead of walking away from it.
I was flipping through an issue of Boys Life as a teenager and found a page with a poem from a father to his son, entrusting him with a gun. The poem ended with something along the lines of "no amount of sorrow or care will make up for one man dead" - no matter how careful you are to be in the right, no matter how sorry you are afterward, and especially no matter how well you trained and survived, you're going to feel like the worst person in the world because you ended another one.
That, or you've lost about one horcrux worth of humanity.
I doubt I still have that issue somewhere, and a casual search doesn't turn up that poem. Nevertheless, I remember it being worth a full page in the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.
Not to mention, a self-defender's life will be ruined for years after even the most unambiguous, clearest cut, David-versus-Goliath shooting. Setting aside the emotional trauma, even if the local prosecutor decides the shooter was 100% in the right and says so in a press conference, at bare minimum, a defender will be forced to face a civil suit brought by the attacker's shitty surviving family members.
Only grievous injury and/or death is worse than years of stress and worry in a legal battle for all your worldly possessions. Which is why prudent people only threaten to kill to prevent grievous injury and/or death.
And a rarely-discussed bonus of responsibly carrying a firearm as a lifestyle is that it acts as a fucking excellent social filter. People who cannot be trusted to be around unsecured firearms are people who are inevitably going to lower your quality of life.
The police in my current city have to shoot someone - it can seem like every day - but let's say 2-3x a week. It's so strange to think of living with that stress as the reality of your everyday job.
I know people who have actually shot others in American cities. They didn't have a court case (the other guys were criminals). Nobody was killed (my friend's a very bad shot).
I agree, you give away your money. You only shoot if there's a risk to life or limb, and that's not a guy saying "gimme money!"
More than likely, they never figured out who was shooting (and probably blamed some other gang, rather than "Joe Innocent With A Gun"), in that he'd gone for cover first thing.
Oh, yeah, we're talking about different things, I think. I'm not discussing gang warfare / mutual combat; I'm talking about self-defense cases involving a law-abiding citizen who calls the police themselves and cooperates with the investigation afterward.
That person is almost always going to be punished for ethically participating in the justice system by getting sued for doing so.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film played with Chekov's Gun (sword edition).
Our Hero grabbed for a sword mounted on the wall behind The Villan, only to discover that it was permanently mounted to a wooden escutcheon, which became his (rather ineffective) weapon for the ensuing fight, naturally played for comic relief.
That is funny. A while back I was in a production of The Country Wife and I played Sparkish; there was a scene where I challenged a fellow to a duel and then my sword got stuck in my scabbard. Seeing as it was only a plastic sword to begin with, I managed to break the handle off of it. That
Yeah, this is the "proper" attitude for having a gun. I'd trust this person to hit the deck if they heard a gunshot, and only afterwards draw and look for the shooter.
It seems to me that people get mad all the time for dumb reasons, and when that angry person has a gun, bad things can happen a lot more easily. This isn't an argument for gun control, it's skepticism that carrying a gun changes people's behavior that significantly.
Melvin described the “correct” attitude, possibly the prevailing one among gun owners/carriers, but not the prevailing one among people who wind up in the news for having escalated a conflict until their gun ended up being used in it.
Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons.
Assume you had a gun, and no cops within 10 miles. You hear a pickup truck pulling up your driveway with no lights on, and it's 2am. Your gun is more useful than nothing at all.
People are taught not to draw a gun if they don't intend to use it, and not to fire a gun if they don't intend for someone to die.
As a deterrent, walking "as if you're carrying a gun" is probably "nearly as effective" at deterring criminals, who'd rather not tangle with a wolf if there are easily fleeced sheep around.
It's possible that Pretti brought his gun to the protest, envisioning a need to use it outside of the protest. (I find this unlikely, but a lot of people are "hysterically" afraid of cities -- credit cards have done a lot to prevent random muggings, is my impression.).
"Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons."
This is a nonsensical statement. There is no weapon that you do not need to be awake and aware to use, unless you count something like a landmine as a weapon.
There are some cases where modern rational analysis doesn't hold up to ancient wisdom, and the offense / defense balance of guns (vs swords, axes, plate or mail, etc) is just such a case. So, I can only respond by quoting scripture: "Parry this you filthy casual"
Availability. I'm not very familiar with American retailers, but I believe Walmart doesn't typically have them in stock. When regular people don't have ready access to landmines, you can't blame someone for not considering them in their home defense strategy.
TNT is pretty easily available. IEDs are improvised, after all (yes, at that point, you're losing some efficacy... but you're also presumably not dealing with tanks).****
****These are not the smart moves. Smart moves are spikes or caltrops, both of which will not damage your road.
If you don't want landmines, how about pit traps? Or raw sewage? There's a lot of available solutions that don't require being awake and aware (including hiring goons to watch your house).
It might be historically rare, but grenades have proven extremely important in the grinding trench warfare of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Being able to clear a trench or dugout without exposing yourself to fire is essential, and I've seen reports from english-speaking foreign legion types that an assault often "comes down to who has more grenades".
I still expect that the default utilization of guns is FAR FAR higher than grenades, and in fact the usage of grenades as an anti-trench tool is only relevant because guns are what causes trenches to be a shape the battlefield takes.
If you already have a gun, a grenade is a useful tool for a variety of specific situations, but you will never want to go into battle without a gun.
In urban combat, if you have some armed in a culdesac (say, a room with no other exits), the prescription is "throw a grenade." Risking soldiers' lives for no real gain (such as trying to find a hiding guy with a gun) is not normal.
Hamas used grenades all through their assault on 10/7. That's not because Hamas is evil, it's because there are a wide range of tactical reasons to use grenades. (Perhaps the primary reason not to use grenades, other than friendly fire*, is that they're heavy and bulky).
*or dead children/babies, something that Hamas apparently did not care much about.
Sorry but this is still nonsense. Hamas uses grenades sure, but just like every other armed force they use a variety of weapons, and they use far more guns than grenades.
Grenades are an accessory weapon in urban combat, not a primary weapon. As you can tell by the fact that even according to you they're advised for use against a hiding guy with a gun, which is the default weapon, because guns are more useful than grenades.
Guns and grenades have coexisted for centuries on battlefields and as far as I can remember guns have always been seen as the more important and effective weapon.
First off all, this is why if you carry a gun you should train with it until you're comfortable. I don't actually think there's that much risk of someone taking your gun in a confrontation, but I do think if you're too anxious or inexperienced to wield a gun, the chance that YOU accidentally shoot yourself or someone innocent is unacceptably high. Even lifelong gun owners will sometimes shoot themselves in the leg when unholstering or whatever.
But secondly, anyone who can take a gun from you and use it against you already has power of life and death over you, since they can just overpower you and beat you to death or strangle you. You're not really changing the risk by having a gun that they then take: you're just changing the way they might kill you, if they wanted to.
Thirdly, and mostly not that important, but the actual mechanics of taking things from people are relevant here. It's pretty tough, despite what some action movies portray, to take something that someone is gripping hard in their hand. If someone reaches for your gun, you can just pull the trigger, a lot faster than they can pull the gun out of your hand. In addition, ( and this will depend on the situation) they have to be really close to you to do this, and if you have a gun pulled almost anyone will be reluctant to keep coming toward you.
I do think it's worth thinking about exactly what kinds of scenarios you expect to encounter.
My understanding of "squeeze don't pull" is that you're supposed to surprise yourself as to the exact moment of the explosion, so that you don't pre-emptively flinch and pull the gun off-target. That's going to be a very minor concern when the target is close enough to touch you, and even less so if they're physically trying to pull your gun away.
"Squeeze" describes the actual movement of the finger much better and helps avoid the aim drift to the left (for the right-handed) due to the weapon being slightly moved by the finger. When you tell people to "squeeze" they tend to curl the finger as opposed to moving it somewhat sideways.
Of course the aim drift is of little consequence in a point-blank shooting.
The main counter to "they'll use my gun against me" is that the gun should only be coming into play in the first place in a life-or-death situation, so at that point it's the choice between death by gun or death by other means.
But, yeah, the rule of thumb is an undrawn gun is unreliable when someone is within twenty-one feet of you, which is where the average running speed equals the average gun-drawing speed.
I mean, define "bad move". As far as his naked life is concerned, yes, you stay away from nervous, undertrained people with guns, that should be obvious whether or not you have a gun yourself.
However, some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for. Lamentable as the gun laws in the USA generally are, if(!) Pretti was within his rights to carry a gun at that time and place, and if(!) he didn't give them cause to shoot him, it shouldn't be held against him, otherwise the whole point of those gun laws are meaningless. Had he not carried a gun, you could also hold it against him that he was present at all, presumably excercising his right to protest. At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
You sound like you are suffering from polarization toxicity. I think I made clear that I thought Pretti’s bringing a gun was a bad move in the sense that it put him in danger, not in any other sense: not that he was not within his rights, not that he shouldn’t stand up for his rights. I am not holding ANYTHING against Pretti, in the sense of saying he did something illegal or unethical. I’m saying bringing the gun seems like an error of judgment, a step likely to make him and anyone near him less safe rather than more safe.
I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here. After all, staying at home and not protesting is much safer than going out to yell at a bunch of trigger-happy thugs.
But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
(And also, all of this is assuming it was a conscious decision to go out on ICE patrol while armed, which is not necessarily true given how quickly ICE pops up and disappears. It's just as likely he was carrying the gun for ordinary reasons and happened to be in the area when ICE showed up.)
<But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
OF COURSE I am not criticizing the act of protest or people's asserting their first or second amendment rights. I can't understand what made you even think I might be taking that view, except for some kind of halo effect: I say something mildly negative about Pretti -- that he made a judgment error in bringing the gun -- and so then you wonder whether I believe all immigrants are flea-bitten, housecat-eating, freeloading robbers and rapists, and that getting rid of them is so righteous and important that the public has no right even to protest how it's done. Nope. I have exactly the same view of ICE you do: "trigger-happy thugs."
<I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here.
I think you're wrong about that. Here's the most recent account I've found of how things played out. Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had. Seems clear that having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I have a daughter whom I adopted from China, and who, of course, has Asian looks. When she was thinking recently about taking a trip abroad I had a talk with her about bringing more documentation than a passport of her American citizenship, just in case ICE had suspicions about her in the airport when she returned. I think a precaution like that in our present situation is sensible. And for the same reason I think the sensible, safe thing to do if you are going to be hanging out near ICE is to leave your gun at home. They clearly become more dangerous in situations where they *might* be in danger, even if the cues are ambiguous, as a gun in the pocket is.
Inject a bit of uncertainty here: that gun's known to misfire a lot, making big booms. Imagine if it went off accidentally, and that's when someone else drew and started shooting. This isn't something you can tell from the videos, but if it's the case, the cops ought to say in court.
(Obviously the initial account of brandishing is ... incorrect. Possibly a deliberate lie.)
I assume you're talking about the P320s claimed tendency to fire without a trigger pull. "Misfire a lot" is very relative to the point of being misleading in this case. The baseline rate of modern pistols firing without the trigger being pulled is essentially zero. There are on the scale of dozens of stories of P320s firing without a trigger pull. Some of these are likely false or mistaken cases, but lets assume they're all true. This is a weapon heavily utilized by police, militaries, and civilians alike with millions of hours of handling and use every year. Dozens of incidents is a serious problem when compared to a base rate of "never" (especially for large entities deciding what weapons systems will be standard issue). But for any isolated incident the likelihood that the gun went off without a trigger pull is still essentially zero.
Yes, obviously if the officers know you are armed they are bound to get even more nervous than they already are. No one argues against that.
@EngineOfCreation responded to your question in a polite and thoughtful way, he didn't accuse you of anything, he simply formulated a nuanced and reasonable hypothesis for why Alex Pretti might have decided to bring his gun despite knowing the risk, which seems to be the crux of your doubt. I don't understand how you could have felt attacked.
I don’t feel attacked. I’m commenting on how attacked Engine of Creation sounds. They are rebutting energetically an idea I did not express or imply: that we should “hold it against” Pretti that he brought his gun. And they are doing it in the kind of rhetoric the expresses strong emotions, deeply important values. etc. All I’m saying is that by bringing his gun the poor guy made an error of judgment that increased his risk that ICE would turn lethal.
Yeah, I'm not getting any of that from EoC's response. He was just speculating that maybe Pretti made a different kind of calculation than what you would have. No need to be so defensive dude.
For what it's worth, I don't think EngineOfCreation sounds attacked at all, nor that they're rebutting anything energetically, nor that their rethoric expresses strong emotions.
,”Some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for.” That doesn’t sound like strong emotion and deeply held values? He’s saying what’s at stake is worth dying for.
I am starting to feel like we need to start training white people in how not to get shot by police officers and ICE (we already have training for black children).
> At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
The point where you realize you have no path to winning.
A very common behavior among animals is that when one infringes on another's territory, both will try to make themselves look as big and strong as possible. They size each other up, and when one of them realizes that they are at a clear disadvantage, they will back down. This helps avoid unnecessary violence, benefiting the collective fitness of the species as a whole. I would have hoped humans have better systems to accomplish the same goal, but... here we are.
I'm just curious, why do you believe there is no path to winning? Are you saying that Americans shouldn't stand up for their rights? No one should? Do you believe that any opposition to the state is worthless and doomed to fail? I see you have made similar statements elsewhere in this thread.
If the situation is clearly in their favor, then yes, obviously they should do so, but... Given that the right has plenty of reason to want leftists dead, have more support by the demographics that have meaningful leverage (white and male), and the law enforcement agencies are very much compromised... This is likely only going to end in decisive victory or mutual destruction. This isn't a meaningless power grab by individuals, this is a group that is actually fighting for something. That makes all the difference.
So it's... interesting... to see the tables turn on this one.
I think Americans should stand up for their rights. I do not think my view of those rights is congruent, or possibly even compatible, with what the current protestors view as their rights. Opposition to the state is not worthless, in theory, but there's a whole lot of ways that individual acts can be worthless, and the difference is often outside the control of the one making the sacrifice.
Minnesota has been a perfect demonstration of the power of peaceful protest. If 2nd amendment types were randomly shooting at ICE in the street, things would be VERY different.
We have different conceptions of the meaning of peaceful, and of protest.
Perhaps I'm being nitpicky but I think it's unwise to conflate civil disobedience with protest. The point is that a lot of this activity is in fact illegal, but local law enforcement has been given stand-down orders.
This is not a very common behavior among animals. It is in fact an uncommon behavior among animals. Chickens peck the new bird to death. Most prey animals, because they are not very capable of hurting each other, will in fact inflict as much pain/terror/bleeding as they can. It's only wolves and predators that generally try to not harm others, because any fight is going to prove deadly, and may prove deadly to both parties.
Chickens rarely join a flock voluntarily unless they are obviously welcome for some reason. Which is comparatively rare.
Most 'pecked to death' chickens are victimised because they have no means of retreat because they have been put in that position by a human, eg inside a coop with too few hiding spots. (This is distinct from being low on the pecking order, which is another chicken problem entirely.)
Roosters meeting for the first time do indeed puff themselves up before going in to fight. They raise their hackles in a manner similar to dogs.
Most animals avoid wasting resources on fighting unless absolutely necessary, and so they will display their fitness in all sorts of ways before moving to do battle, which is generally a last resort.
'Deadly' fights are usually pretty rare - the loser turns and runs away before that stage is reached, (often at the display stage), and most victors do not pursue the loser. This is the loser identifying 'no path to winning', as mentioned above.
Mutually assured destruction, with both parties fatally wounded, is even rarer because it makes no sense biologically; it's a huge waste of resources and leaves the field open for a third, non-participating, party.
I see all sorts of scars on deer. Horses'll hurt each other pretty badly too, if you let them. Yes, this isn't "deadly" (because deadly is stupid for all parties)... that's part of the point. Animals that can "relatively harmlessly" wound, generally DO wound.
I'm pulling all of this from very old, seminal research in the animal behavior realm from Konrad Lorenz
Both of the cases you give - deer and horses - are highly constrained populations. There's nowhere left to run, so they endure.
The wild population of deer covers the majority of the north american continent and the population in general is very dense. In situations like that there will be conflict; losers can only retreat into someone else's territory, and yet more conflict ensues. The population density is way above what it should be and their social adaptations are not coping very well.
The wild population of horses is even more physically confined. The open range is pretty closed off these days, so the same kinds of tensions can occur.
And if you are talking about domestic horses, then whatever conflict they encounter is largely due to the way in which humans are managing them; they have little to no freedom of movement. In the wild horses, especially stallions, absolutely do fight for the possession of mares and territory, but the loser turns and runs. This is hard to do if you are in a pen the size of a house block.
I suggest you get out and do some primary research in the form of spending significant time with animals. See how they really behave, not just how you think they should behave.
Statistically, guns *are* more likely to be used against their owner than anyone else, because the largest share of gun deaths is suicide.
I've always thought that guns were stupid too, but that's of course no excuse for the Trump admin tearing up the 2nd amendment in addition to the rest of the constitution.
No no no I did not say guns are stupid. I do not even think guns are stupid. What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without. (Though there probably are a few rare situations where even someone like me would be safer with a gun — stuck alone someplace with grizzly bears?)) Arggh, why is everyone so polarized?
If you mean only to discuss what is wise and prudent for "I and people like me", then it's really damn confusing that you insisted on opening that discussion with the example of Alex Pretti, who is not you and not like you. Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you've already got that covered.
So what? What does any of that do with Alex Pretti? Because you really came off as someone making claims about what was appropriate behavior for Alex Pretti, who is not Eremolalos and is not very much like Eremolalos.
Yes, I realized a while ago that my initial post was unclear, but by then it seemed useless to go back and change it. I just tried to clarify as I responded to comments. There was kind of an ellipsis in the first post that I was not aware of. The topic I had in mind was the less obvious ways in which guns can be dangerous. One way they can be dangerous is to belong to someone like me, someone inexperienced with them and temperamentally unsuited to becoming comfortable wielding one. A second way is that the person can be competent with guns, but carry one around people who become much more likely to shoot you if they find out you are carrying. But I did not make clear what my overarching point was, and what the connection was between the 2 gun owners I mentioned.
So I inadvertently posted a sort of gun-related Rorschach inkblot. However, it is striking to me that nobody asked me what I was getting at — what did Pretti’s terrible outcome have to do with my gun incompetence? Instead, people reacted by thinking I had various dumb and mean opinions about Pretti, and believed various other things having to do with weapons that were quite far afield of anything I said in the post. You, for instance, wrote a paragraph about how lawfully protesting ICE or giving medical aid to their victims does not require that the person forego their right to carry a gun for self protection. How the fuck do you get that idea out of my original post — the idea that I think such people should not have the right to carry a gun.? My post was wholly about the risk of guns to their users, and contained not a word about people’s right to carry one.
<Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you can trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you’ve got that covered.
Given my age, lifestyle, location and other demographics, I am at far more risk of health catastrophes, financial catastrophes, and being done in by the malaise of our era than I am of violent assault. I have people who would support and advise if I suffered one those, but nobody who would carry a gun on my behalf. I think the idea that I would be markedly better off if I had one is quite silly.. As one piece of evidence for that, I can tell you that in my entire life, which has been going on for quite a while now, there have been 3 incidents where I was at some risk.though not a terribly high one, of violent assault. I describe all 3 of them in a post on this thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205828026
Even if I was calm, trained and highly skillful with a gun I do not think having one would have made me a bit safer in any of them. And in the first incident I describe I am pretty sure it would have made me less safe. The muggers would have found it in my purse and who knows what would have happened then? Also, I navigated those 3 situations quite well. I think I am pretty good in situations where the task is to avoid violent attacks on me. It’s the prospect to doing violence that rattles me and makes me indecisive and clumsy.
And finally, here is a personal story about one of the hidden dangers of guns. I grew up familiar with guns, though not very interested in them. I come from a military family. My half brother, my father and my grandfather all had careers in the military, and my grandfather was so goddam successful at it that he’s in Wikipedia. My mother had a career in the Navy before she married my father at age 40, and had a rating of Expert at pistol shooting. I still have the little badge she received, and wear it in an inconspicuous place occasionally. Like you, my father had an antique rifle mounted in the house, and also had some odd-looking guns that I think he collected on his travels in Asia. And my parents kept a gun for personal protection on a high shelf in the bedroom closet. So one day, when I was about 16, I took down the gun and played around with it. I clicked the safety button off and on, pointed it here and there, pointed it my image in a mirror while making fierce faces. Then it occurred to me to put it to my temple and playact a dramatic, pathetic suicide. I was not in the least suicidal, and was in fact enjoying life quite a lot in that era. I just had that teen fascination with darkness, drama, & tragedy. And went ahead and did the suicide playacting. And then I put the gun back where I had found it. Later I realized that I had lost track during all my clicks of the safety button of whether the safety was on or off. But I couldn’t think of anything to do about that other than to confess to my parents that I had played with the gun, and I wasn’t about to do that.
Yes, yes, guns should be kept locked up. But my parents, though prudent and sensible people, did not keep this one locked up and I can see why. They probably thought of it as protection if there was an intruder in the night, and what good is a gun in a gun safe in circumstances like that? You hear a window break and footsteps in your house. So then you find a flashlight and then your key ring and then the right key on it and tiptoe over to the gun safe and fumble with the lock?
If that is what you believe everyone's reaction to be, perhaps you didn't manage to bring across the exact point you were making in your mind? I previously didn't respond to your point of gun training because it seemed tangential, though now it seems like it's an actually important point to you.
Pretti didn't attempt to draw his gun, according to CNN. It was concealed until agents were already all over him on the ground, and it was secured by one of the agents. Only then did they start shooting.
Therefore, the question of whether or not he endangered himself by lack of weapon training doesn't even matter. At what point should his skills have mattered?
Do we even know what Pretti's level of expertise with his gun was? I couldn't find anything at a cursory search, seems way too early to tell with confidence. Extrapolating from your own skills or lack thereof seems ill-advised to draw broader conclusions from, but it seems to be what you're doing anyway.
> What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE.
It seems just a strange argument to make. Which is to say, I still don't get it. You say it's not about Pretti, you say it's not about gun rights in general, so what is it about?
"What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without."
"Place them in a heavily-trafficked area, and infections won’t spread from person to person because the germs will get zapped before they can reach a new host."
I'm afraid that people will read this and think of the one person talking to another and the viruses getting "zapped" before they can reach the second person.
Was the most senior person the Chinese military and a member of the politburo a CIA spy?
I have no idea what priors, to have, are lots of senior people in great powers agents for other countries? It is entirely possible that this is an excuse for a purge though that makes Xi look bad.
It seems just as likely that Xi is doing a Josef Stalin thing here and purging senior generals from the PLA to destroy an independent power source. Defaming the PLA and making it accept tighter political controls could be a side benefit of this action.
Stalin did accuse almost everyone he purged of being a foreign agent and we have reason to believe many of the senior figures in (especially)London, Berlin and Washington were actually in the pay of foreign powers. I am sure the vast majority of his allegations were fake but it is possible that some share if the time the accusation was correct.
Funny possible explanation: the general was sufficiently competent, connected, respected, etc. that CCP plans critically relied on him; a Western intelligence organization (this works better if it's not the CIA itself) "accidentally" leaks information about the general being a CIA agent.
What's Xi to do? A purge weakens him personally & endangers his larger ambitions, but he could never be certain enough that the information was false to trust the general with what he'd needed him for before.
Why not? It's very easy in the abstract to know someone well enough that you're certain the slanders published about him by your shared enemies are false. It's so easy that this frequently occurs even when the slanders are true.
That's why the key to my unserious hypothesis is it being a "leak".
If you know your adversaries meant for you to get the information you'll discount it (as you say), but if you're led to believe they *didn't* mean for you to find out it suddenly looks a lot more credible.
And information about an adversary from a third party is less likely, in an Occam's razor sense, to be intentional misinformation from said adversary.
> He is also being investigated for alleged efforts to build his own circles of influence within the Communist Party’s top military decision-making body
Sounds like that's the real reason.
On the other hand it's also plausible that he decided to do some freelance diplomacy, believing it's better if the US knows more rather than less about China's nuclear capabilities.
I'm reading that this means Xi has now purged 5 of the 6 members aside from himself from China's version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the only two who had front-line experience in a shooting war (the 1979 war between China and Viet Nam).
Seems like something broader than just one general being fingered as a spy, though we'll likely never know what.
Unlikely. CIA lost their chinese spies back during Obama's administration. Very bad news for America, that. We wound up being caught flatfooted by covid19, in part because of the lack of spies on the ground.
It depends on the Great Power, obviously. I'd consider this one pretty unlikely.
Hey, it's good to randomly run into you here. I think this piece is strong but also had been meaning to tell you I read through your blog after our mutual friend shared it with me and I generally find your writing enjoyable (I mean, when it's not appropriately grim).
This seems similar to the idea that courts must consider the "totality of circumstances" rather than the "moment of threat", which was considered by the Supreme Court in Barnes v. Felix (May 2025)
Okay, but couldn't you say the same thing about the protesters as well? Nobody is forcing these people to put themselves in the line of fire. If they simply stayed home, the situation would have never escalated. They are just as responsible for creating the justifications for their death.
There's not a "same thing" in the linked article. Instead, there are four very specific instances of escalation: The agents shove a woman to the ground, the agents pepper spray Petti, the agents begin pistol whipping (!?!?!) Petti, the agents shoot Petti. There are no corresponding "same things" to say about Petti because he did not shove anyone, pepperspray anyone, pistol whip anyone, or shoot anyone. Please be more specific.
They were in the street getting in the way of law enforcement. Clearly they didn't need to do that, but they did it anyways. I'm speaking about the woman too, by the way. There was absolutely no reason for her to be on the road there unless she was trying to be an obstacle. So yes, that is an escalation. It was unnecessary, and now someone is dead.
Dr. King was in the road and was an obstacle, and ultimately won (got the civil rights act passed). We're better for it. What's this sacredness that the road has?
What do you mean the situation would not have escalated? The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons, it would already have been escalated to a point of moral failure by them even without anyone pushing back.
> The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons
While I would like a source on that, the people who have been shot so far are not part of the demographics that have been deemed a liability, so any talk of "kidnapping" isn't relevant to this current situation. As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
> As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
They're literally going door to door arresting random people. Remember the elderly citizen that they arrested in his underwear in sub-freezing weather? That was only like last week!
I'm not sure why you think the previous legal system is still relevant to this situation. For all intents and purposes, these people are not bound by conventional law. We are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not give people reasons to shoot you".
They are absolutely bound by conventional law. But the law is a slow thing, that will eventually catch up with "bad guys in blue."
I agree, we are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not get shot."
This is risk management, and it ought to be done on all sides (this, for example, is why suspects get dogpiled -- they're less likely to hurt an officer if there's ten officers and they can't wrestle their way free).
the woman in the cream coat and Alex himself were basically just people going about their lives when they happened upon ICE and started filming. Are you truly saying that "filming ICE" was adequate justification for Alex's death?
This is disingenuous, even according to your own "I wrote a thing." Alex appeared to stand between a woman and law enforcement. If this is, in fact, obstructing a federal agent (something I'm willing to listen to, with due skepticism), that's more of a justification for Alex's death than otherwise.
Alex did something stupid, by coming armed to a protest. We all can say that's stupid, right? You may have interactions with law enforcement (on your side or not), and having a gun is a ticket to being labeled a "potential problem person" (if the law enforcement is aware you have it -- and some law enforcement folks can tell you've got a gun even if it's concealed, that's part of training).
I'm very willing to consider that Alex' case may show that some ICE people are behaving improperly, perhaps even taking actions that should result in criminal prosecution.
Unlike the Good case, I haven't got a qualified video analyst saying "this was a good shoot, and we almost lost an officer -- if the weather was better, he would be dead."
All the physical aggression originated from ICE. Pretti's gun was concealed until he was already in the scuffle on the ground. The gun was secured by an agent, then the shooting started. Just about the only defense left for ICE is that they may have believed Pretti was an actual videogame character and that he was about to pull out the rocket launcher.
With regard to the likelyhood of a gun malfunction, I would say the odds are low. The SIG Sauer P320 had a design flaw which made it possible for the weapon to discharge when dropped. That was corrected in 2017, with a free repair offered to existing owners. There may still be some weapons out there which have not been fixed, but Petti’s weapon was not dropped. So I’d say it’s a lot more likely that the gun fired because the ICE agent pulled the trigger than that the gun somehow discharged without the trigger being pulled.
I think the video analysis has now come down pretty strongly against Pretti's gun being the one that initially discharged.
Although it may look as though it fired in the video, its likely that was a jpeg artefact.
The justification for this is, although the framerate of the video is too low to be likely to capture the discharge itself it was easily high enough to easily be able to capture the "moving back" of the rack on the gun as any discharge caused another round to be loaded into the chamber. A movement that is much slower and therefore should absolutely have been captured.
The rack on the gun does not move in any part of the video, so it seems the initial discharge was from the gun of the Agent who also fired most (if not all) of the other shots.
Yeah, what you're saying seems like the best summation. And when even the "critical defenders" (aka skeptics who will say a cop did a good thing, some of the time) say "WTF?" I'm inclined to believe this was a really dumb thing on the part of ICE. Miscommunication, among other things (the miscommunication was definitely a training issue -- I'm not sure people have thought through "what to do if there's a gun, and it is removed" but that ought to be a specific call-sign). Shooting someone who's already being dogpiled is not just dangerous to the arrestee, as well.
As you haven't posted a video showing that (just a still) I candidly have no idea. Shoving, by the way, is something that can presumably happen as an accident (putting this out there, because I do see ice on the street).
You should look at el gato malo's work (on substack) on the Good shooting, because it does show that the first shot was through the windshield of the car. That's "officer still in front of vehicle" (Also: Good's wife was shouting "Drive Baby Drive" -- if you want to get into contradictory auditory directions --> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to).
I'm not an expert on the Good shooting, but as a professional geometer I want to say that the shot being through the front windshield is *very* weak evidence that it was fired from in front of the car. Most of the locations from which you could shoot the front windshield are not in front of the car (in the sense of being within 30° either way of the car's path).
Just checked back, the link's in the post but you missed it; I'm posting it here, skip to 0:35 to see the woman getting shoved by the ICE agent while walking away:
> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to
"she needs to have been obeying police orders for the right reasons to not deserve getting shot, and I think she wasn't" is probably not a great position to hold
They would not have died if they didn't do that. The objective information here is that these deaths were preventable by both sides. Even the administration would not have been able to justify their deaths to the public if they hadn't interfered whatsoever.
1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
2. The law enforcement officers who did their jobs imperfectly under very trying circumstances and could have made better decision on a second-by-second basis
3. The local police, and those in command of them. Local police are trained in crowd control, ICE are not; if the protestors insist on causing trouble then the police need
I would put responsibility for the deaths in the order of 1 (highest), then 3, then 2.
There's more. The local cops were being asked to hand over criminal illegal aliens (I'm using the term to differentiate against illegal aliens who didn't otherwise commit a crime) and they weren't cooperating, so ICE was going in on their own.
I don't have data about how many fit this category.
>1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
In the video's we have seen no protestors, including Pretti, are seen to obstruct LE officials in any way.
They are all video'ing LE officials, a constitutionally protected act.
During doing so they are told to move back. Which they do repeatedly when asked. Despite this advancing officers pursue them whilst they are retreating and push them repeatedly backwards, they submit to that pushing, still moving backwards multiple times until eventually the repeated retreats and repeated pushing leads to a woman falling in the snow/ice.
None of them step towards or attempt to obstruct an officer. Pretti does step towards and attempt to assist the woman who has been pushed/fallen over, speaking his last words "are you OK?" to her, but again that is not obstructing an officer.
The officer then approaches Pretti again and he and the woman are then pepper sprayed in the face twice, and presumably at that point Pretti loses the ability to see/understand whats going on around him due to the debilitating effect of the pepper spray.
He is then pulled over backwards by an officer pulling on his collar from behind... and despite by this point being blind and probably disorientated he goes with that motion, falling to his hands and knees.... and keeping his hands away from his body and away from his weapon as is advised for CC in an altercation with LE. He is then repeatedly hit in the face with a pepper spray can, but still does not fight back or reach for his weapon and remains on his hands and knees.
None of that is obstructing or interfering with law enforcement in any way. They were observing/video'ing and in doing so were assaulted multiple times by the officers for reasons that are unclear, but did not cause him at any point to fight back or obstruct, even whilst blinded, forcibly pushed off their feet and assaulted multiple times with a blunt object.
"Crowd control"? The crowd was what, two people? Plus a couple more witnesses filming from farther away? Are you expecting the local police to just follow ICE around all day and make sure they never cross paths with a civilian at any point?
I really don't see how you can argue the people who put 5-10 rounds in somebody are less responsible for the death than the guy whose worst potential crime was illegally standing in front of an ICE or CBP agent.
I do have to say, this guy doesn't appear to have been as badly behaved as Renee Good (watched with sound off).
His crime was "bringing a gun to a protest." (something we don't actually criminalize, but was a rather extreme failure of judgement. Bear in mind protestors have beaten their own fellow protestors. Take a schmuck with a gun, and he's shooting his fellow protestor.)
I can't seem to find any information on what precipitated that encounter, and it seems you don't know either. Either way, the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life. Collateral damage is inevitable. Though, I doubt the administration would have been able to justify her death if that's what ended up happening.
38% of the Northeast's current electrical usage is being provided by burning oil. This despite being around 300 miles from the largest gas fields on the planet.
I'm finding very different numbers, with electricity much more heavily provided by natural gas than fuel oil. (Check out e.g. ISO New England's fuel mix stats, which give natural gas at 55%, solar and wind at 4% and 3%, and oil at 0.3%)
Is your source potentially counting heating oil, or even transportation?
"In New England, fuel oil generation kicked into high gear to help the six-state region's electric grid conserve natural gas, its top fuel source.
As evening approached on Saturday, oil-fired generation accounted for 38% of the New England grid's output, compared with a typical level of about 1% or less, ISO New England's operations display showed. Natural gas, usually the grid's main fuel source, accounted for 24% of the grid's generation output."
Thanks, I appreciate the source a ton. So this is a temporary measure with the storm - that makes a lot more sense. My context-sensing skills may have went briefly offline.
In my area (Long Island), many residences use oil rather than gas for heating because the gas delivery infrastructure is not well developed. Many residential streets lack gas pipes.
Costs of heating with gas and oil are pretty much the same. Sometimes gas is a bit cheaper, sometimes oil is, but it all works out about equal.
Note: despite a population of 2.5 million most parts of Nassau and Suffolk counties lack sewers.
... my god, and I thought our sewer situation was bad! (we're paying billions to remedy it.) Now you're telling me that you guys don't even have one, and the EPA isn't charging you billions of dollars?
I am also envisioning shitstorms ala Seattle Washington, at the turn of the 1800s to 1900s.
Yes, that's not now, that's a "back to 2016" -- so take that as "what it looked like before we suspended all environment regulations because it's an emergency."
In Jan 2016 oil generated 52 GWh out of a total of 8782 GWh from all sources. That's 0.6%.
That and the other data on the site seems to show that oil was mostly for peaker plants, and most of what was taken offline was coal and nuclear. This fits with the conventional narrative I've heard where cheap natural gas took over from coal and nuclear specifically.
(Though I agree that it's not making renewables look like the main character)
EDIT: I may be misunderstanding you. Are you saying the source I cited is from 2016? Because I looked at the 2025 full spreadsheet and that appears to match with the highlights on the main page.
Ok, I agree that the power grid is under tremendous strain right now. I would still like a source for the original 38% number if you have one, since this (2025) data makes that number sound somewhat implausible. If the 38% portion includes heating oil, I'd be much less surprised.
These folks claim that people have been getting the right answer to the Monty Hall Problem for all the wrong reasons. Be that as it may, the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
"Right for the wrong reasons: common bad arguments for the correct answer to the Monty Hall Problem" by Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis.
> If the car were behind door #1 (the door you initially chose), there is a 50% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has a choice about whether to open door #2 or door #3 and he chooses at random. If the car were behind door #2, there is a 100% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has no choice about which door to open (since he is not allowed to open the door that you initially chose). If the car were behind door #3, there is, of course, a 0% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat.
> Since door #1 and door #2 started out equally likely, and since the evidence favors door #2 over door #1, once Monty opens door #3 and reveals a goat, the car is more likely to be behind door #2 than door #1. So, you should definitely switch to door #2. We will call this the Favoring Procedure.
> David Deutsch says everyone is getting it wrong...
No, you're misreading that post. He says that everyone is getting it right, and provides a perspective on why switching is better. (A perspective that is not original to him.)
Consider that, in the traditional statement of the problem, the conclusion is that if you switch you have a 2/3 chance to find the car, and if you don't switch you have a 1/3 chance to find the car.
By "contrast", in the post you link, you always switch, and you have a 2/3 chance to find the car.
> the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
1/3 of the time, you start by picking the door with the car.
Monty Hall was interviewed on the subject. He'd never heard of the kerfuffle—easily simulated with a Python script—but was intrigued. He then demonstrated to his interviewer plus a couple of assistants that Monty Hall could force a goat Every Single Time.
<picks goat> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
<picks non-goat> "Are you sure? I'm giving you an opportunity to change your mind . . going once. . . going twice . . <switches> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
This is stupid. They're saying the answers to the Monty Hall problem are wrong because they don't yield correct answers to variations of the Monty Hall problem, i.e. to different problems entirely. Being able to answer arbitrary other problems when applied to them in a necessarily somewhat arbitrary way is not a requirement for a solution to be considered a valid ("for the right reason" in their terms) solution to the original problem.
Edit: they write: "Since this argument does not appeal to the fact that Monty is required to open a door to reveal a goat, it is also applicable to cases where Monty might open a door and reveal the car."
then they write:
"In particular, proponents of the Wi-Phi Probability Concentration argument might claim that it is understood that this argument is not intended to apply to the Random Monty variation. It is only intended to apply to the original puzzle."
...no shit? It reads like a troll paper. Who even are these people?
The implication is, though, if you are presented with an analogous problem, the wrong method that happens to get you the correct answer in the MHP may not work for a different scenario.
Sure, they could've made the true claim that the common intuitive solution doesn't generalize to a variant of the problem. Instead they chose to make the false claim that this means that the solution is also not a valid solution to the original problem.
Theres only 3 doors, its not hard to brute force the solution for the different scenarios. You choose one at random. Then monty chooses either at random or intentionally depending on you scenario. Compare the payoff of a switch strategy to a non switch strategy. Are ppl arguing about the narrative or the actual outcomes?
Okay, well I dont think ppl are harping on how important it is that his choice is random. Certainly the original phrasing didn't use that word. They sometimes describe his choice between two goat doors as random, but his exact behavior when choosing between two goat doors is not important so long as it is not discernable to the player. For example he could always choose his favorite goat and the game wouldn't change. It is important that its not discernable and randomness achieves that. If he chose the left most door with a goat, then in cases where he chose the door on the right you'd know the other is a car and that would change the game.
One of your links refers to the "random monty variant" when his choice is always random and it has a different answer.
The way I see it, if (unknown to you) Monty opens a door at random then you have nothing to gain by switching but also nothing to lose, whereas if he knowingly opens a wrong door then that is where switching is advantageous. But either way, you don't lose anything by switching.
The first time I heard this problem my intuition was faulty (like a lot of other people's). But for me the most persuasive argument for switching is to consider a similar game where there are twenty doors, and after your initial choice Monty opens one door after enother all empty until only one remains. In that case, if he knows which door the goat is behind, then that one remaining door obviously stands out as being highly likely to conceal the goat compared to the initial door one chose.
People use 'random' and 'arbitrary' interchangeably, but I think they actually mean that he chooses arbitrarily.
Randomness isn't relevant there, the point is just to contrast the case where Monty has the option of opening either door vs. the case where his choice is forced. I don't think this is actually important to any explanation of the problem, it's just communication difficulty trying to explain things to a lay audience.
Non-random choices always reveal information. Let's say that Monty will always open door #2 if he can, i.e. if you haven't picked it and there's a goat behind it. If you pick door #1, and Monty opens #3 containing a goat, you know 100% that the car is behind #2 instead of only 67%.
But Monty has full knowledge of the system, and he knows the car is behind door #2. But he can't reveal the car, can he? And he can't reveal the goat behind door number #1. His decisions have to be non-random for the game to work. Of course, the contestant has only partial knowledge of the system, and she has to calculate the odds based on the new information from the point that the goat is revealed behind door #3.
Yes, the initial arrangement of cars and goats could and should be randomized. But again, once the game begins, the odds always favor switching doors on your second choice. And once the game begins, there's no element of randomness unless the car and goat are being continuously swapped between the two remaining doors. It's not quantum mechanics, where there are no known local hidden variables. :-)
I'm pretty sure Monty can reveal the car, actually. The traditional statement of the problem doesn't require that he reveal a goat, or even that he reveal anything at all, only that he happened do so this particular time. Also, this was a real television show in which Monty didn't always offer the choice, and Monty Hall was a real person who I believe has publicly stated that he had a free choice and that he used it arbitrarily to maximize entertainment value (and that he'd have found it particularly entertaining to confound the plans of tricksy game-theorists trying to outsmart him).
If the problem statement is modified to more precisely specify the algorithm Monty is using, the ideal strategy varies accoringly - I believe there's a table for that in the wikipedia article. But for the original, the winning move is to never switch unless you're a cheerfully telegenic young woman, in which case always switch :-)
It's important to distinguish between the real world Monty Hall and his "Let's make a deal" show, and the idealized "Monty Hall Problem" which is merely based on the show rather than modelling it perfectly.
The original formulation of the problem, as per Wikipedia, does not explicitely say that the host will always reveal a goat, but I think it implies it by clarifying that the host knows where the car is.
>Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Since the problem is all about whether to switch or not, I believe it's safe to assume that the host will never reveal the car, otherwise there's no point in continuing the game.
I did some further research, and it looks like the Let's Make a Deal creators would create different scenarios with different rules. The Monty Hall Problem presents a single variation of one of the games presented to the contestants. But the goal was always to trade a prize for a hidden prize, which could be potentially better or worse. So, in the spirit of the original show, I don't think Monty would ever prematurely reveal the prize before the contestant could be kept in a state of suspense.
I used to watch that game with my grandmother as a kid, but I no longer remember those other variations. Reading and rereading the Monty Hall Problem description for 2+ decades has destroyed my original memories of the show. On one level, I feel smarter to have wrestled with the Monty Hall Problem, but in another way, I feel like I've traded in my actual memories for a goat.
This occasionally had the potential to bite them. Back when the rocks were still warm and squishy, a writer on the show published an article with the following situation:
A writer thought a fun "Zonk" would be an oil well pump, pumping merrily away onstage. So they rented an oil pump, the audience got their chuckle, and the contestant dutifully chose the consolation prize.
Had they Kept the oil well pump, they could have turned around and sold it for considerably more than the "Big Deal" back in those days.
At least that's how the story was published in TV Guide.
This is somewhat wrong. If the theoretical setup allows Monty to reveal the car, you gain no information from the revelation and it doesn't matter if you switch or not. However if that is disallowed, you always do gain information when (or if) Monty opens a door, and it always benefits you to switch. It's impossible for Monty to open (or decide not to open) a door in such a way that it is disadvantageous to switch. Depending on the setup (specifically whether he is allowed to open the door with the car), either your odds don't change or your odds improve. Since you might not know which, you should always switch just to be sure -- it can't hurt.
You seem to be saying that even if Monty is free to act in any way according to any strategy he chooses, it’s always advantageous to switch if he opens a goat door and offers a switch. But what if Monty follows this strategy: if the contestant chooses a goat door, I do nothing and let the contestant lose. If the contestant chooses the car door, then I open a goat door to try to get the contestant to switch.
If Monty plays by that strategy, then not only is switching not advantageous, switching guarantees losing. Every time you switch, you lose.
>His decisions have to be non-random for the game to work.
Randomly chosen means randomly beyond the known rules of the game. Yes, switching is always beneficial, but there is of course a real difference in outcomes between 67% and 100% chance.
When the contestant has picked the correct door, then Monty has a choice.
If Monty uses a not-completely-random algorithm to select one of the two goats, then his choice can provide additional information. For example, if it is known that Monty always chooses the lower-numbered goat, and the contestant picks door #1 and Monty opens door #3, then it is known that the car is behind door #2.
If the contestant chooses door #1 as his first pick, is Monty allowed to open door #1 to reveal a goat at this point? Because the description above doesn't mention that as a possibility.
No it can’t be opened yet. It doesn’t matter. By the way David Deutsch is just framing the solution in a different way. You should always take two choices whether or not Monty is there or not. That doubles your chances.
If Monty chooses randomly, there is no benefit to switching. If A is "contestant initially chose goat" and B is "Monty reveals goat", the P(A) = 2/3, and P(B|A) = 1/2, and P(B) = 2/3, so P(A|B) = 1/2.
If Monty always chooses a goat, then P(B) = P(B|A) = 1, so P(A|B) = P(A) = 2/3.
> If Monty chooses randomly, there is no benefit to switching.
I think you misunderstood my question.
Let's say there are goats behind #1 and #3, and the car is behind #2. The problem as stated, though, says, "This is because Monty has a choice about whether to open door #2 or door #3 and he chooses at random."
If the Contestant chooses door number #1, Monty has not choice but to open door #3. He can't open #2 with the car. And he can't open #1, because that would prove the contestant, right? So there's nothing random in Monty's decision. This doesn't affect how the contestant perceives or misperceives the odds.
If you were to say that before the game began, the choice of which door to put the car behind was random, that would make more sense. However, even in that case Monty's choice of which door to open would be dictated by which door the contestant selects first. And the odds wouldn't change whether it was a random or nonrandom arrangment of cars and goats. 1/3rd if the constestant stays with the initial door, and 2/3rds if they switch doors.
Honestly the answer is that Monty doesn’t, and can’t, choose randomly in the two out of three cases where the contestant has chosen the goat. It might be presented as if he was randomly choosing a door but he can’t.
> If the Contestant chooses door number #1, Monty has not choice but to open door #3. He can't open #2 with the car. And he can't open #1, because that would prove the contestant, right? So there's nothing random in Monty's decision. It's got nothing to do with how the contestant perceives or misperceives the odds.
That's not necessarily clear from the statement. If you assume that Monty will only reveal a goat, then yes the usual argument holds. But if you assume that Monty could reveal the door with the car behind it and just happens to have chosen a goat door then there is no reason to switch.
A simpler way to look at it is that if Monty always chooses randomly (including the counterfactual possibility of a car), then his choice can be perfectly simulated without any knowledge, meaning that the choice conveys no information and the odds remain 50:50.
I've been impressed with the power of ACX's recommendations widget since the conclusion of last year's Review contest. When the results were revealed and the finalists deanonymized I got about 20 followers instantly, but in the ensuing three months I've gotten about 100 more (that mostly appear to be "real" accounts and aren't just following every substack indiscriminately) at a steady pace of about one per day. And this is despite not publishing anything else since rehosting my Mashed Potatoes essay there. I'm sure more active bloggers who ended up in the rec panel are faring even better!
It seems like this was a new part of the prize package for this year's finalists, so I just wanted to give a testimonial that it is in fact very impactful for building from an extremely low audience level and not just a nice gesture like I assumed at the outset (how many people would really click through on a small link that appears on the ACX homepage less than half the time? Lots, apparently!).
I think actual developers still have an edge, normies just don't get how many details need to be handled to deliver a finished software product, but uh... Well, we can use these tools too, but better.
And to think it was only a few years ago that we were screaming at journalists to "learn to code". I bet any who actually did are going to be feeling pretty silly right now.
The funny thing is that those memes were in response to breathless articles about out-of-work coal miners and displaced refugees learning to code, which makes this the second time that telling a group to learn to code has backfired.
This opportunity to learn to write a blog! Perfect for me.
I've been using writing (but only for myself) as a therapist lately. In other words, the notebook and pen together and the act of writing, put together, form my therapist. Surprisingly effective.
I have always enjoyed writing. In fact I'm rather compulsive about it. It refines my thinking.
The only thing that I have against signing up for such a camp is it's a couple of thousand miles away and there will be significant expenses involved.
That, and actually one other thing - does the world really need yet another blogger? Particularly, me?!!
But what the heck, maybe I should learn to write better - for myself. And I admire the teachers you say this camp would have.
What would convince the more AI-maximalist among you that talk of the LLM revolution was oversold or at least premature, and that we're significantly further from most of the downstream effects than we have assumed since the public unveiling of chatgpt?
In addition to other comments I agree with (METR horizon plateauing being probably the best indicator), I would also add: (1) two major labs announcing or strongly signaling they are "moving in a different direction" that is markedly different from the current pre-training + post-training + RL approach, (2) a major lab or a startup achieving frontier-level results in some important domain (coding, math, writing) using a very different approach, (3) persistent failure of companies to incorporate current-level tech into their business successfully.
For (1) public signaling is important because that's how labs "tell" academics and independent researchers what to work on. So if TWO major labs are signaling "hey we are going back to the drawing board here" that would be a strong sign the LLM revolution hit a ceiling.
For (2), that would be something like Yann LeCun's new lab using a radically different approach and blowing current models out of the water, both in terms of capabilities and reliability.
I realize (3) is the hardest to operationalize into a specific criteria. My vision here looks vaguely like "kids on TikTok show off exploits to get free Big Macs at the LLM-powered drive-through" in like 100 different domains and major companies pull back from LLM-powered products and startups building them fail.
Caution here though, the base rate for AI startup failures will be high even in the maximalist world, and likewise for corporate integration (eg Sears in the internet era). But if they ALL fail, and there are practically no companies that increase revenue or decrease costs in any major way by ~2028, that either means (a) current LLMs and their descendents cannot deliver real value ("Workslop" etc) or (b) the diffusion problem is far more important that AI capabilities, and Tyler Cowen et al. are right about bottlenecks.
The problem here is that it's hard to parse out "the models aren't as good as you think they are" from "you aren't integrating the models correctly into your business." Insert well-worn reference to electric motors in factories here. I'd have to think more carefully to find a way to disentangle these two.
I'm on the opposite side - I've always thought the AI risk stuff was incredibly stupid, but events of the last year have caused me to become increasingly worried about AI risk. The difference is that you can already *see* the transformation, and it's only a minor extrapolation to really bad impacts on society.
Convince most AI-maximalists that hallucinations are a fundamental part of the LLM architecture, and will never go away. If you're familiar at all with "the nines" -- hallucinations are like saying "you have to accept 20% downtime."
In my experience, hallucinations are usually random, and if you were to ask three times and check if the result is the same, the hallucination rate is much lower. If you can show me that progress on getting it lower still has come to a halt despite significant investment in making it lower, that would be pretty good evidence.
It will never go away, but it might get below the rate of humans misremembering things, or even authoritative sources getting things wrong.
I am not worried about paperclip factories or terminator bots. I think AI is already reducing people’s ability to think creatively, even to search for information on their own. This, together with the environmental impact of its development, and especially the way it has reinforced people’s complacency (non-intentionality) with technology adoption, causes me to think the effects of AI are worse than even the Yudkowskys of the world do: I see negative effects in front of me now; he only waves his hands about negative effects in the future. How would you convince me I’m wrong?
By explaining to you the problem with the Dot Bomb, and what it led to, in terms of infrastructure investment.
Then, I'd ask you what we can do with the current infrastructure over-investment?
(In short, I think you're overselling the negative effects which DO exist, because you're unaware of the projected (designed) positive effects that are in the future).
“ By explaining to you the problem with the Dot Bomb, and what it led to, in terms of infrastructure investment.
…what we can do with the current infrastructure over-investment?”
I am not familiar with “the Dot Bomb”. Is that another term for the dot com bubble popping in like 2000, or is it a more recent event?
Your question states there is currently an infrastructure over-investment. Maybe this is true, I have no idea. I was laid off from a tech job in 2023 along with (it seems) a huge portion of other people in my field, which looks like a market correction to me.
But now as an electrician I see that building data centers and chip factories etc. is the dominating source of work (in my region at least), a situation which is compatible with over-investment…so my own experience is a wash I guess?
Thus I’d have to abstract your question up, assume there is indeed an over-investment in AI, and answer it like a “what-if”. Is such an answer useful to making me update my views on AI? I don’t see how, but maybe if you can help me understand where you’re going with this line of reasoning…?
You seem to be right in the middle of the infrastructure buildout. Yes, I do mean building data centers and chip factories.
What else might we use all this for? (Assume that your premises on "bad current things" are correct, just that you are missing consequential "good things" based on your inability to think ahead).
A tech bubble bursting seems survivable, if that's what you mean. Would a market shock like "AI bubble bursts the same way the dot com bubble did" be worth the trade-off of not having the negative effects of AI on our society/planet continue further?
Obviously without my crystal ball handy I can't answer with complete confidence, but assuredly ratcheting our species further toward diminished mental capabilities and a diminished ecological environment seems like a worse option in the long run. Whereas AI's benefits are a question mark. It could make our life better in many ways, especially in narrow ways like protein folding, but its overwhelmingly desirable transformative capabilities are not yet realized, IMO.
If the trend of quickly increasing value I get from LLMs slows down, and if all the smart young people who actually build things stop being so enthusiastic about it.
Watching you write about this, especially the last article, is like watching my grandmother use a computer. It's just painful. Our experience is so vastly different that I don't see anyway we would ever convince each other.
Which "last article" are you referring to? The most recent LLM article I see on Freddie's substack is about Gemini hallucinating a long, detailed report on a pyschiatric hospital that does not exist, right down to patient and doctor quotes, which matches a lot of my experiences pretty closely.
Most of my "AI maximalist" predictions are an attempt to take lines on graphs (both real and abstract/subjective/imagined) and extrapolate how long it would take for current progress to reach some interesting level. So if the lines on graphs were to change slope, that would be convincing. This could be anything from:
- AIs stop improving on benchmarks, or take much more scaling to improve on benchmarks than the usual scaling laws would suggest.
- AIs time horizons stop growing, or the METR time horizon graphs slows significantly
- AI progress subjectively feels like it's slowing; a year or two goes by without anything new and exciting; in 2027 or 2028 we're still programming with versions of Claude Code that are about the same as today's, and there haven't been any new Claude Code level advances.
I think even in this world things are pretty transformative as people work to integrate existing AIs into more and more applications, but if this happened I'd probably think the chance of AGI/singularity was delayed until whenever the new lines on the new graphs said it would be, or indefinitely if the lines had gone totally horizontal.
Thanks. I'm looking at the Verified tab now, and the leader is "TRAE + Doubao-Seed-Code", a Chinese model from last fall that I've never heard of. Is the claim that this model is better at software engineering than Claude Code, and people just haven't noticed? If not, what *is* the claim?
To be honest, I'm not completely sure, and I would love to better understand this metric, especially given its prominence. But to the best of my understanding, the specific claim is that *a run of this model, under certain restricted and reproducible parameters, has successfully fixed the highest percentage of software bugs out of a set of 500 specific bugs which was human-curated from a more general list in order to be more tractable and objectively verifiable*.
Perhaps it's better at handling software engineering prompts in general and no one's noticed, but perhaps it was overfitted to this problem set and performs worse in other contexts, or any number of other reasons.
You can compare the dates yourself from the listings on the Verified tab at https://www.swebench.com/
2024-10-29: first model over 50%
2025-02-03: first model over 60%
2025-03-16: first model over 65%
2025-05-15: first model over 70%
2025-06-12: first model over 75%
2025-09-28: first model over 78%
Today, still at 78%
There was rapid progress until about last June (+25% in the ~7 months to then) and then basically no progress sine then (+3% in ~7 months, with 0 in the last 4)
Good question! I presume there are, though I don't have time and energy to focus on all of them, and I'm generally skeptical about what a lot of them are actually measuring. I've been focusing on this one because 1) I noticed it being cited in a number of forecasts and discussions, 2) it relates specifically to my field and I have at least a *partial* understanding of what it is measuring, 3) the results are objective and publicly available and, at least until recently, were being frequently (i.e. weekly) updated by entries from a large number of model.
The thing is, it would not only need to be shown that "AI progress was slowing down", it would also need to be shown that "current AIs can't be economically integrated into work flows". I don't feel we have even a good clue of where the current levels of AI will be once we properly integrate them. It took my company several years to add an Apple ][+ to the work flow, and then more years before desktop computers were widely used. And we were a relatively early adopter, as we'd been renting time on mainframes, and this cut our bills significantly.
It's my feeling that we don't have much of a clue what things would be like in a decade or two even if all AI progress stopped today.
I'm a coder, soon I'm going to attempt to code an entire app using Claude Code (I already use it a lot in my day job), I guess I would need to see that attempt fail catastrophically for me to believe this is a dead end. But I think the LLM revolution is premature, I have a feeling the bubble will pop (just like the dot com bubble did), but we're still going to see something crazy like software development switching to become about managing teams of AI agents, but then it turns out you can have a machine that does software development but doesn't possess general reasoning, which is pretty counterintuitive.
At this stage you should *expect* the result to fail, and need lots of hand work. It's probably not ready for that. But that wouldn't show this is a dead end. (Of course, it depends on what you mean by "catastrophically".)
Right now you should expect most attempts to apply AIs to be failures. Most of the early attempts to apply computers were failures. The problem is that the development isn't stable enough to make durable decisions about what they can't do. (Well, I'd be really surprised if they solved the halting problem, but I mean outside of theoretical bounds.)
Last time I tried this was in lovable, it didn't one shot it, came close, like 90% correct, but it was a much smaller app, a toy really, and I'm going to attempt implementing a dating app this time.
That part can be done by an AI, too. Profiles with pretty photos, who will chat with you for a while, and then ghost you. That's even more interaction that most get at an actual dating app.
Internally, at Anthropic, it looks like humans are writing very little code, software development there has become about managing teams of AI agents. I want to try that approach to see what happens.
> In fact, that picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress. Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.
Not exactly evidence, but I've heard of several reports of that kind of thing, from various different places. I think, at this point, you need to pick a application that it can do, with insufficient guidelines as to what that is.
I don't know if I count as one of the more AI-maximalist here, but I think you would consider me relatively AI-maximalist. The most effective way to convince me is to make concrete predictions that I find surprisingly AI-minimalist, and then be proven right.
edit to clarify: I wasn't trying to be cute there -- I'm not saying "convince me of your position by having your position proven right". I'm saying find short- and medium-term things where you're confident the AI-maximalists' expectations are wrong, and spell out how you think they will be proven wrong (in a way that's hard for either side to quibble with when reality gives its verdict).
The Aerolamp seems cool, but they seem to assume that you already know WHY you would prefer this over alternatives.
From the FAQ:
"How quickly does Aerolamp work?
95% reduction of coronavirus within 15 minutes and 99% reduction within 25 minutes, assuming one Aerolamp in a 250 square foot room. This is about three times faster than a high-quality portable HEPA air filter."
So ... why not just use a "high-quality HEPA air filter" instead? Is the Aerolamp cheaper? Or what? The FAQ doesn't say.
If I would be using either I wouldn't wait to turn it on until folks arrived.
IQAir makes high quality air filters -- I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure it's better than 95% reduction of coronavirus in 15 minutes (this sounds like Ad Copy, and they might not want to call IQAir's system portable).
I use IQAir myself. Aerolamp seems cheaper, but also pollutes your indoor space with ozone, which is pretty bad for people.
(hi Aerolamp cofounder here) If the estimates of effectiveness are correct, Aerolamp is about x2 cheaper than the next-most cost-effective indoor air intervention for pathogens. You can get a clean air delivery rate of ~200 CFM from a high quality air filter for $150 or ~1200 CFM for $500. That kind of overkill (or more) might well be necessary to actually prevent transmission, although I am first to admit that there is a *ton* we don't know about actual real-life transmission dynamics.
It's also less obtrusive than a powerful portable air filter--it's ~silent and takes up no floor space. Although I would say for basically everyone that you should get an air filter *first* and then layer UV on top of that.
I should also say about the ozone--it is significantly less ozone than you would get by just opening a window (100 mW of far-UV generates about 10 ppb of ozone, outdoor ozone concentrations are typically 40 ppb or higher.) 5 ppb is considered "zero ozone". As long as you have at least some ventilation, the ozone is likely a non-issue.
As I understand it the filters on a UVC lamp are the only thing preventing the propagation of 185nm (ozone) or 254nm (human-damaging) light. From what I read, a 254nm lamp would also create 185nm if not for a glass filter, so my assumption was that your lamp in the safe range between those also relies on a filter to stop the unwanted bands. Obviously since this is all non-visible spectrum there'd be no visual cue of a malfunction. It appears from a quick search I made that in order to verify this safety as the product ages, you would need to check the lamps with a UV radiometer? (Sorry if any of this sounds silly to an engineer, I'm just a lawyer who happened to have 2 semesters of physics a zillion years ago, enough to make myself get into conversations where I sound dumb!)
Sort of--those aren't quite the right wavelengths but that's roughly correct. The thing is pretty much every commercially available far-UVC lamp is well-filtered now. The only exception is Sterilray which I wouldn't recommend for most applications because of this.
OSLUV is a nonprofit that tests far-UVC lamps and includes detailed spectral data available for download, so you can stick to models that have been tested by a third-party: https://reports.osluv.org/
Malfunctions are technically possible--if the filter is subjected to enough heat it can degrade a bit--but this is a rare operating condition.
I will say tho that in my experience, you *notice* if you're getting a too-high dose of UVC. It's not like UVB or IR lasers where you can get a huge eye-destroying dose and have it not hurt at all at first. With UVC, you feel discomfort long before you get to longterm damage, so if you feel fine, you probably are fine. With 254nm UVC, it can be actual pain--with 222nm, even with a slightly degraded (or lower quality) filter, it's more like dry eye or itchiness.
As I understand it, HEPA filters remove aerosol particles by physical capture, so for virus-laden aerosols the removal effectiveness is similar regardless of which virus is inside the particle. I think this should make calculations more general.
But with far-UVC, the mechanism is inactivation, and a pathogen’s UV susceptibility can vary a lot (with non-enveloped viruses being more UV-resistant). So a value based on coronavirus data wouldn’t necessarily apply to other viruses. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Are the price comparisons made with a specific virus in mind?
The less susceptible viruses are things like bacteriophages, which are less susceptible party because they're quite small and present a smaller cross section to UV photons. Flu seems to be a bit more susceptible than coronavirus, but we have only one modern study on it so I hedge a bit and use the coronavirus estimate.
Haha thank you good tip:) the website generally needs a bit of a revamp
Also quick note about using it before folks come over--for home use, there isn't much point in running it if you're home alone (or home with your partner or somebody else you're in very close contact with, such that if you're catching whatever they have, you're doing it regardless of how clean the ambient air is). Far-UV is *like* a powerful portable air filter for pathogen control, but it won't affect dust or chemical pollutants. It might be somewhat effective against allergens by denaturing the proteins that create the allergic reaction (I can dig up that paper if you want), but I expect air filters to probably be better for that.
Optimal setup is imo something like the Levoit 200s ($150, ~200 CADR on its medium setting which I find is pretty quiet--the high and highest setting I only use if something burned on the stove and the air quality has dropped significantly) and having that on all the time, and a lamp that comes on when you have company or when somebody in your household is sick. This also preserves lamp lifetime--if you have it on all the time, you'll need to replace it after about a year and a half. Which isn't bad imo, but nicer to not have to replace it for 10+ years instead.
Please unpack “robust common sense”. Humans make obvious mistakes at every level, from individuals to countries. LLMs currently make more obvious mistakes than domain experts, but clearly the standard isn’t “doesn’t make obvious errors”. I don’t think the standard is “no more obvious mistakes than humans”, either - they can compensate for some extra errors with comparative strengths.
Not like LLMs, where sometimes they make mistakes that are obvious to every human with the relevant expertise. Just today I saw Claude Code vertically center the wrong component, not really the kind of mistake I have seen a human make before. I think human experts don't make obvious mistakes, unless you want to count missing a detail as an obvious mistake.
> I think human experts don't make obvious mistakes
I am perfectly capable of generating multiple bugs and typos in every line of code I write. I rapidly notice and correct them, but that is not the same thing as continuous perfection. My work pattern is not “perfect transfer from head to editor”, it is “type a bunch of stuff, read what I just typed, fix the obvious problems”.
Agentic AI also does this, but its loops currently take longer than mine as it relies on external tools to spot obvious problems I notice at a glance.
> 3. Embodiment: actually being able to interact directly with the world the way a human can.
Text to animation AI exists. It's not quite at the level of fully controlling a humanoid robot, but clearly the methods we have can work.
> 5. Continual learning: essentially that the training process never ends from the AI, it can continue to learn for its entire existence.
Very common. ChatGPT will periodically give you two results and have you pick the better one so it can learn from it. Each individual instance of it isn't learning on its own, but does it need to?
Regarding 5, no, that's not really what he's talking about. He's talking about an AI being able to continually upskill after being deployed, the way a human can continue to learn things he didn't already know throughout his life.
LLM's come out knowing a lot of things, far more than any human, but then are unable to upgrade their skills on their own.
But why? If AI can run a datacenter, it can upgrade its skill on its own. The only way you'd need one instance to be able to do it is if that one instance is by itself without any way to contact a datacenter.
I do believe that developing AGI is possible, maybe even inevitable. However, the question of when or how is simply unanswerable at the moment. The author clearly argues as much:
1. "I anticipate that within a couple of years, we will have a better idea on whether world model approaches are the correct approach to robust common sense or if new ideas are needed." 50-50 that the current paradigm is viable.
2. "None of today’s LLMs or robotic foundation models yet have anywhere near this degree of capacity." New paradigm needed.
3. "I will say there is something crucial in human and animal intelligence about being localized and embodied." New paradigm needed.
4. "Today’s agents lack the ability to execute complex long range plans. [..] I don’t personally have a strong intuition on what the critical missing piece is between today’s methods and capable long range planning." 50-50 that the current paradigm is viable.
5. "I think new ideas are needed here and there is a reasonable chance we will still struggle with this problem more than 15 years out from now." New paradigm needed.
If you don't know, even in principle, how to solve these critical problems, and are aware that more could pop up (spoiler: they always do), the only honest answer is to say "I have checked to the best of my abilities, and I still don't know". Instead, he gives an optimistic prediction, and him calling out the AI salesmen of today in the same breath is extra ironic.
If you need an entirely new paradigm for almost every problem, then it's fair to say AI *as we currently understand it* has no possible pathway to AGI.
Wasn't there an old joke, something about how if a scientist says something is 10 or more years away, that means it's never happening? This reminded me of that.
Do you mean this quote by Arthur C. Clarke? “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
The joke as I heard it is, "for years nuclear fusion was always 20 years away. But lately, we've made big advances: now it's perpetually just 10 years away"
While I do get the joke, it's also true that it would be an improvement and possibly a sign of real advances. There are even studies on the evolution of that quip:
I wonder if such studies also exist for the expectation of AGI. The article linked by OP certainly seems to be another of those that say LLMs aren't going to be AGI ever.
Yeah, I agree with you, going from “always 20 years away” to “always 10 years away” can represent real important progress, I just think it's funny.
I think this actually kind of captures my views of LLMs and AGI: I'm skeptical enough of LLMs that I'd be pretty sympathetic to a statement of the form, “AGI via LLMs will always remain 5-10 years away”; but I also think that they clearly represent a step forward from a “always 30-50 years away” prior state (all numbers here are kind of made up, TBC), and there is meaningful progress towards AGI represented by that change.
If I had to try and defend this view seriously, I'd maybe say something like, my model of how far away we are from AGI is some distribution with infinite mean, so the mean number of years to AGI isn't well defined, but the move to LLMs shifts the whole distribution over to the left in such a way that the probability of AGI in <small number> years is now higher, even though the mean didn't change.
Not to say the above is exactly how I model time-to-AGI (I model it by being confused and changing my mind back and forth constantly), but I think it's a gesture at how you could model it in a way that vindicates the worldview captured in that quip.
I agree it should have those things, though I think of 3 as derivative. But I don't put that 15 years away unless things slow down dramatically. OTOH, prior to the recent surge my prediction was 2035 plus or minus 5 years in a roughly bell shaped curve (with, or course, a long right tail). Currently I've updated to "somewhere around 2030", but then next couple of years should show. I found https://ai-2027.com/ quite impressive, and robots have been advancing quickly since that was published.
OTOH, I'm expecting AGIs to have "jagged capabilities". There may well be areas where at least some people are more capable. (And people have "jagged capabilities" too. Try to out calculate a spreadsheet.) So if by AGI you mean "Something with superhuman capabilities in every category", then 15 years isn't unreasonable, and may be precipitous.
I think I expect an AGI to have jagged capabilities, but with the caveat that it shouldn't have valleys where humans have peaks. ASI is probably pretty far away, but then, even an AGI that's equivalent to a human expert in multiple domains would be quite the game changer.
*I* feel that one should expect AGI to have valleys where humans have peaks. Things that we find really easy are things where we don't understand the complexities. Consider judging the taste of a cake. We just sort of do it automatically, but have little idea of what goes into that.
Hmm, are you saying that at least in some places that humans have peaks, it's because we're cutting corners and sweeping complexity under the rug? Judging the taste of a cake is not a good example of that, there's a lot of subjectivity in that.
I'm not saying we're cutting corners, but evolution often does. I'm saying we never see the complexity at any conscious level. If you don't like "the taste of cake", consider "controlling your blood sugar", but subjectivity itself is part of what I mean by "just sort of do automatically".
"For filtered krypton chloride excimer (KrCl*) lamps that have
so far been assessed, experimental measurements and first
principles calculations support an estimated ozone generation
efficiency of 7–10.5 ppb per hour per μW/cm2 of fluence rate.
• The expected increase in steady-state ozone concentrations
in a space with 1 air change per hour is low to mid single digits
ppb per μW/cm2 of average fluence rate. This is a small amount
relative to both outdoor ozone and fluctuations that can be
observed in background levels of indoor ozone, but relatively
large compared to the average levels of indoor ozone, which
show a central tendency of ~4–6 ppb. Indoor ozone reacts
with other substances, which is also known as ‘ozone loss’. The
products of this ozone loss may be more significant for health
than ozone itself"
This is from their own papers.
FAQ is clearly written by someone trying to sell the product (aka "marketing") I suggest you read their engineering/science paper thoroughly, I'm in the middle of doing so.
The FAQ is written by me, although I think some SEO person or another may have had their way with that specific answer since I originally wrote it. (Honestly the main challenge with an FAQ like this is writing informatively and accurately but without confusing the median reader, who is very easily confused.)
The paper is correct and consistent with the FAQ answer though. Aerolamp in a typical ~250 sq ft room has an average fluence rate of 0.6 uW/cm2, so low-single-digits of increase is what we expect. This is also about what you'd expect from opening a window, given that outdoor ozone is 20-40 ppb. For context, the UL "zero ozone" certification is 5 ppb.
I echo the paper's concerns that the main issue is not ozone but its byproducts--luckily, more recent evidence (not published yet) suggests that this secondary chemistry seems to be more limited than previously thought. Sad for the grad students doing the study, but good for the prospects of scaling far-UV.
However, the bright side of being worried about the byproducts more than the actual ozone is that the byproducts are much easier to get rid of. (Ozone is also pretty trivial to get rid of, but you need an activated carbon filter--the byproducts, any kind of filtration/ventilation will work.)
My rule of thumb is that if you have a modest amount of ventilation/filtration, you're probably fine even in a residential setting, and you're definitely fine in a commercial setting--and ultimately public spaces is where far-UV is going to have the most benefit.
This is why I tell people to please get at least a basic air filter first, and a far-UV lamp second
My issue with this technology is cited within your research:
"In these studies, the ozone generation efficiency ranges from 7–10.5 ppb/hr per μW/cm2 of average fluence rate2–4. This is a relatively small range given the uncertainties inherent in fluence rate determination"
So, yes, that's smaller than what's "ordinarily outdoors" (assuming you aren't in LA). But that's generated -per hour of use.-
Continued, as I continue reading your engineering/science document (Many Thanks for putting this online, and it speaks well of your company!):
"Measurements in 43 southern California residences provided a decay per
hour of 2.8 ± 1.3 (Lee et al., 19997), and a study of 15 bedrooms in 14
Chinese residences estimates 2.8 ± 1.1 (Yao and Zhao, 20188). While
there is an extensive literature on ozone loss to indoor-relevant surfaces,
these two studies are the best available empirical data on whole-room
average ozone decay rates from reactions with indoor surfaces"
So, now we have an input and an output. Since the input is greater than the output, you're looking at a net 6-8 ppb accumulation per hour. Run it constantly*, and you're easily up to over 100ppb (and 70 is an Ozone Action Day per the EPA for outdoor air quality).
If you have some ratings for "basic air filters" (I know I can pull the ones for IQAir, if I really look them up, but you're the one selling the product), I'd love to learn more!
*this need not be your use-case, but if so, you should outline that somewhere.
I feel like I've been somewhat less than charitable toward your company, given that your FAQ seemed to be saying "Ozone is not-a-problem!" Given your responses here, that's been a pretty poor assumption on my part.
I think there might be a mistake in your math. There is definitely not an accumulation of 100s of ppb over several hours with 1 ACH and a typical ozone decay rate of 2.7. I've definitely never seen that anywhere in any study.
I can dig up the specific "realistic ozone increase" references if you want too
In sum: I basically do think that in most realistic settings (i.e. not sealed steel chambers), ozone is basically not a problem--as long as there is *some* ventilation/filtration. I agree it becomes potentially problematic in very low/zero ventilation scenarios--which is why I always stress that people should get an air filter *first* and a UV lamp second. That's how I use my lamp in my poorly ventilated New York apartment :)
I'm sharing a recent blog post on a business structure I believe could have significant positive impact if the underlying thesis holds. I'd be curious to hear reactions. A link to the full article is below, though I discuss it briefly here:
Profit for Good (PFG) businesses permanently commit their profits to charitable purposes through durable structures—foundation ownership, charitable trusts, or similar arrangements. The Charitable Ownership Advantage (COA) thesis proposes that this structure creates competitive advantage: the same business generates higher margins under charitable ownership than under conventional ownership.
Most attempts to capture stakeholder preferences for ethical business do so through business operations: Fair Trade sourcing, sustainable inputs, premium wages. These create real tradeoffs: higher costs that must be passed on or absorbed, limiting scale. PFG operates at the ownership layer instead. Charitable ownership need not change about how the business runs: same products, prices, management, cost structure. In our world today, ownership is usually already decoupled from operations; shareholders are passive and managers are salaried professionals. This means stakeholder preferences can be captured without the tradeoffs that constrain other models. The preferences themselves are well-documented: field experiments show 5-20% sales lifts for charity-linked products at price parity, 4-7% wage flexibility for mission-aligned work, and lower turnover. The attitude-behavior gap that rightly makes us skeptical of stated-preference research closes substantially when expressing the preference requires no sacrifice.
These effects need not be large to matter. Most businesses operate on thin margins; a few percentage points of improvement from modestly higher conversion, lower churn, and better retention doesn't improve profit proportionally—it can double it. COA requires only that modest advantages stack.
The two objections most commonly raised concern equity incentives and capital access. On incentives: the concern is that charitable ownership removes the motivation that drives performance. But in most of the economy, operators hold no meaningful equity. Public company executives are salaried; private equity LPs are passive while GPs govern professionally. The objection applies to startups and small owner-operated businesses—not the acquisition targets where PFG would deploy. On capital: if PFG businesses demonstrate superior risk-adjusted performance, capital follows. This becomes an empirical question rather than a structural barrier.
If true, COA implies that the binding constraint on funding global problems shifts from persuading people to give to deploying capital into a strategy that outperforms.
I note that the article also links to the research compilation I have been working on that discusses the evidence for stakeholder preferences for Profit for Good businesses and other relevant research and other matters. Feel free to check that out as well, although I should have a thorough revision of that soon.
Interesting idea, and great if it works! I guess if these PFFs sell directly to consumers, there will be a bigger obstacle to the company pulling an OpenAI and switching to regular for-profit.
> But in most of the economy, operators hold no meaningful equity. Public company executives are salaried;
Are you sure about that?
In a 2025 study about S&P 500 CEO compensation, "Stock awards remain the largest component of CEO compensation, accounting for 71.6% of the median pay package in this year’s study."
In general, companies grant employees stock in an attempt to align their incentives with the company.
C-Suite employees are largely expected to receive stock but many companies grant stock to huge portions of their employees. For example, Starbucks grants stock to their baristas:
Fair point on stock awards—you're right that RSUs (restricted stock units) now dominate CEO compensation, not just options. By 2018 restricted stock exceeded 50% of CEO pay. So yes, executives often receive actual equity.
But look at what that actually means in ownership terms. The median S&P 500 CEO owns about $54 million in stock—sounds like a lot until you realize the majority of CEOs control less than 1% of their companies. Only 4% have voting power of 5% or more.
Now zoom out. Institutional investors hold about 80% of S&P 500 equity. The Big Three—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—hold a median 22% stake in S&P 500 companies by themselves. Add retail investors (another 14-20%), and you're looking at well over 90% of equity held by people who have nothing to do with running the business. They're not operators. They don't know what companies they own. Index funds just mechanically hold whatever's in the S&P 500.
With Starbucks, Bean Stock is a nice perk, but the total employee stake is a rounding error next to institutional holdings. Those baristas aren't owner-operators shaping company direction.
The question for PFG isn't whether operators receive some stock—they can and should. A 90% PFG structure leaves room for executive equity, employee grants, performance incentives. The question is where the other 90%+ goes. Right now it flows to people who couldn't name the company if you asked them. PFG redirects that to charity instead.
I have a weird job so I pretty much get winters off. Jill and I could go somewhere warm but lately we have been going to visit our friends in Minneapolis, where she lived before we married. we stay 4-8 weeks, depending, in the dead of winter because we love our friends here and we love this city.
ICE showed up to start their "Metro Surge" before I got here, and immediately started making like difficult wherever they went. They were atrociously rude drivers. They made belligerent sidewalk scenes during apprehensions. The active folks started following them around, using Signal chats and group texts, blowing whistles to gather crowds. But you could go about your business, which we did. Records stores, restaurants, the worlds largest cross-country ski snow-making operation!
And museums, lots of great museums. We were at the Minneapolis Institute of Art's (the 'Tute, colloquially) amazing Cambodian bronze exhibit, admiring casts of metal alloys from as much as 3000 years ago when my friends phone started blowing up. "Jesus fucking christ ICE just killed a woman."
Renee Good was shot 14 blocks from our house, on W33rd, due East, on Chicago between 33rd and 34th. Minneapolis is mostly a grid, with long blocks and short blocks; these were the long blocks. That evening we walked our way there to join the crowded impromptu memorial/demonstration. The public had blocked off some streets to car traffic, with an ad-hoc combination of civil volunteers in reflective vests and some leery MPD. The level of organization of the volunteers was remarkable. There were megaphones and speechifying, angry and concerned strangers getting comfort in the crowd, and lots and lots of swearing. ("Minnesota nice and fuck you ICE is pretty much how it goes now). A Xeroxed photo of Renee was taped to a lamp post.
I was on super high alert bc I can imagine and am a firm believer in edge cases, but there were no confrontations. I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting.
Now our days were about protesting. It was like a part-time job, and we made sure to put in our time nearly every day at the Whipple, a Federal building where ICE and CPB were headquartered. The feds had hastily erected a perimeter fence of jersey barriers with posts and chain-link to secure the boundary. At the 4-way-stop intersection where the entrance was, the fence had wrapped around 2 of the stop signs, rendering them more or less invisible. There were dozens there the first day, swearing at ICE, holding signs, handing out hand-warmers. Press from all over were visible (it helps to wear PRESS on your front and back, for safety). Jill would yell "shame," and this has caught on enough that it could be audible on some news reports. Every time we went, the barriers were beefed up a little more. It started as an open sidewalk across from the entrance, at the 4-way, on both sides of the road leading to the indoor tennis club. Cars with tinted windows and/or masked men were to be yelled at and rudely gestured to. Regular folks got waves, but also some collateral damage of yelling. God help you if you were a normal guy in a pick-up truck. Tennis players would sheepishly wait for the crowd to clear so they could drive in and park. My sympathies were with them, these were their lives and happiness, after all. Other opinions were less generous. The Sheriffs were in charge of keeping the intersection clear, a thankless task. I thanked them anyway, when I could, and always waved and smiled. I was an outlier, as the protest set had learned habits and retained grievances from the time of George Floyd. To me the yelling and taunting at police was misplaced aggression, and counter productive but it was their town, not mine. By now there were 2800 ICE and CPB in the twin cities, while all the local police departments totaled 2400 personnel.
Still, we got up in the morning, put on our long underwear and gloves, yelled at the interlopers until we were cold/had to pee, then went out to lunch. I have done some great cc skiing, and he really begun to improve my form in the 'skate' technique. We went bowling. I walked to one of my favorite record stores in the world, Cheapos, and went through the stacks, adding Thin Lizzzy's "Vagabonds of the Western World" to my collection. We met people out for dinner at various restaurants, sometimes on the "eat street" row of Nicollette. A child of one couple at dinner--college friends of Jill--was reported to be doing IT work of a sort for Aerolamp, I think. Small world!
Alex Pretti was killed just south of Cheapos. The Meet-up Noodle, where we held a table for 8 just two nights earlier, is kitty-corner. Not to make it all about me, but that is a 15 minute walk of 7 short blocks from our hosts' home. I won't talk about his death because you know as much as I do.
Immediately after Jill and her friend went to the scene, and were soon commandeered into helping a first-aid site for tear-gas etc in a Middle Eastern restaurant two blocks south, that the MPD had cordoned off . There were few customers. When Jill was ready to leave I reminded her that it was way past lunch and we should eat before she crashed. I could see an active buffet in the Middle Eastern, and we grabbed some plates and had a great meal. The host brought us tea.
This is how it is done here, restaurants and other merchants immediately get in on the helping action. A sex shop in Lyn-Lake was coordinating a meal delivery service for those afraid to leave home. People walk around with cases of water and hand-warmers. School parents coordinate school bus and child drop-off's to protect kids from getting snatched. Yup, that is what citizens are organizing to prevent. And while the department of homeland security assures us that they are only arresting the worst of the worst 5-year-olds, I have my suspicions that that might not be the case.
Businesses are taking a noticeable beating in the cities. Restaurants are low-hanging fruit for agents with orders to ethnically profile anyone looking foreign. There are reports of agents lunching in restaurants, then returning later to round folks up, but of course I cannot verify it. Old protest grievances keep creeping into the discussion, with a large protest downtown (It was awesome to be with so many people braving the cold) being co-billed as a "general strike." Somehow capitalism and the general economy have been implicated, although I cannot figure how. All the restaurants are losing money. Shops and businesses were expected to close on Friday, a word eagerly spread through all local media. Confusion ensued. A hairdresser friend said his staff wanted the shop to close, but hair appointments being sacrosanct, a compromise was made: staff could donate their pay and the owners would match the donation. The people continue to have spectacular hair, even under the world's best collection of warm fuzzy winter hats. But make no mistake, the economy in this town is bleeding, and that cannot continue for long. Minneapolis is in a slow and fitfull recovery from the time of George Floyd, and the recent killings have sent the community into a backslide.
I thought I could come out here for a month, relax with friends, write some articles for my blog, do some skiing. Nate Silver, ever the pollster, says the country is largely sympathetic to Minneapolans, but says the country at large doesn't feel as though it is living in a time of creeping authoritarianism, and I get that. But out here, living in it, we just wonder "how many more?"
There's also reports of someone going into Little Mogadishu with a $1000+ camera, and having it stolen within 20 feet (he was dragged along because his hand got stuck to the car door) -- yes, there was video of this.
We knew about it in advance, but this was to me an obvious 'stay away' situation, as we didn't want any part of amplifying him.
It got kinda bad with counter protesters there, and he definitely was hit with water baloons, not cool. He also had, by all accounts, some bleeding. He ran from his harrassers/attackers and was helped by some local passerby good samaritans into a car to leave the scene. Ire was focused solely on Mr Lang, as far as anyone can tell, no reports of assaults on other attendees.
I appreciate your description of the facts. But I find something really disturbing: you imply here, and seem to outright state elsewhere, that you oppose US immigration laws being enforced at all, at least on a certain subset of the illegal/undocumented immigrant population. And it just seems to me that this does a lot to undermine your whole case that the *means* of enforcement are largely terrible and draconian and cruel. Which latter case seems true to me, from what I've heard.
To use an analogy you may or may not sympathise with (and if you don't, please try to imagine a similar situation where you would): a college is taking strong steps to crack down on campus rape. Some guy comes along and talks about how draconian these methods are, how they strip away due process, and how they harm the innocent. But he also lets slip, and later basically confirms, that he doesn't really have a problem with rape at all, and in fact thinks it ought to be basically allowed, and his anger is not only at the college's methods; it's also at the fact that they're going after rapists at all, when really rape is a perfectly legitimate, natural thing.
Does this, like, make you inclined to largely disregard most of what he says about the methods? Doesn't it make it make you suspicious of any of his proposals on how to enforce the laws more fairly, when he's admitted he'd actually rather the laws not be enforced at all? And doesn't it, in the other direction, make it vastly easier for the *proponents* of the draconian methods to dismiss all criticisms of said methods by saying "well, he's just a rape apologist"...which, of course, he quite straightfowardly is?
Now to go a bit further, the thing that disturbs me here, the thing I'm equating to "rape should be allowed", is not merely the belief that illegal immigrants should not be automatically deported. There are decent arguments for that belief, some of which I agree with. The thing that disturbs me is the further implication that enforcing immigration laws is somehow *illegitimate*--even when done by the democratically elected branch of government whose role it is to decide how to enforce the law, even when the laws are clear and unambiguous, even when said government was elected on an explicit platform to strictly enforce those laws--in almost the same sense that breaking constitutional rights in the enforcement of those laws is illegitimate.
There are broadly three "left-leaning" positions you can take:
(1) Immigration laws should be strictly enforced; however, this needs to be done in accordance with due process and procedural fairness
(2) I personally oppose enforcing some or all of the laws, and believe there should be an amnesty, but acknowledge that the government has the power and the right to enforce them and has a fair and democratic mandate to do so; thus, the enforcement itself is legitmate (i.e. I will peacefully cooperate with it, while arguing for the people to choose differently at the next election) but the methods are illegitmate (i.e. are unlawful and should be resisted with protest or other necessary means)
(3) Even the mere enforcement of clear laws by an elected executive government is illegitimate and should be resisted
Advocating 1 is the cleanest and most persuasive way of reforming things, I would think, but advocating 2 is also perfectly valid as long as it's clearly distinguished from 3. But giving, in any way, the impression that you might be advocating 3, and not firmly and unambiguously ruling out that interpretation, makes you fundamentally no different from the people who oppose 1 and support the draconian methods. Both positions amount to a rejection of the basic respect for democracy and the rule of law; both involve deliberately undermining the legitimacy of the legal system. If you're not advocating any form of 3, I think you should decisively rule it out and state that you fully acknowledge the legitimacy of the government to enforce the laws *within* due process, and rule out physical resistance to that. If you *are* advocating 3, I think you're deliberately contributing as much as anyone to the very polarisation you observe.
I definitely think that's an issue with liberals/democrats, they try to get their way through extra legal means (but then, the current administration does that a lot these days). I wouldn't describe the ICE actions in Minneapolis as simple enforcement, they're doing a piss poor job of that (https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/the-chaos-defense?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true). Importantly, this administration does not behave in lawful ways, it's even run by a convicted felon, so why should citizens respect the legitimacy of a state run like this? I don't think they have any obligation to. Governments only ever have provisional authority, it can be rescinded at any time via direct acts of the people (see Nepal).
If the Minnesotans don't mind the illegals raping their women/killing their men/ stealing their jobs/ making their crops fail, what is the issue exactly? It doesn't seem like you need to force the issue here.
They do mind. Minnesota goes red without the Somalis in Minneapolis (this I hear from a professional pollster, but you can just look at Wisconsin. These are liberals, up and down the midwest, returning to their homespun republican roots. Still liberals, though.)
On a more personal note, you make a lot of comments here (55 comments (~6% of the total) as of this posting) and you're sometimes confidently wrong. Why?
“When asked about specific policy issues, public opinion tends to be quite nuanced — and generally quite liberal," he said.
But, he added, questions that have “partisan cues,” like Trump’s name, elicit responses that are more in line with partisan loyalties.
This tells me we've got liberals who, for whatever reason, trust Trump to do a dang good job -- or at least, we've got folks that are willing to call this "exceptional circumstances." I'm willing to do so -- when you decide, rather arbitrarily, to take away all the hurdles immigrants have had to deal with for centuries, and instead feed them and clothe them and buy them cellphones and cars and then they don't even work?**
**Original Hmong didn't always work, but nobody gave them this much shit. So someone had to work, yes?
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois -- these were the start to the Republican party. When I say return to Republican roots, I mean back to the fiscal discipline. If you want to hear that as "we're just 1990s Democrats" instead, put the other flag on it. Go right ahead. We're still talking about the same thing -- folks pretty well ticked off with billions of dollars lost.
While this gives me an idea about a post for next week's open thread, I'm going to bow out of this. You're shifting goalposts and have idiosyncratic definitions. I don't see a fruitful discussion going on.
Plenty of clear examples of laws in American history which shouldn't have been enforced. E.g. in the time of anti-sodomy laws, if you were an officer of the law and found out that somebody was committing sodomy, you should just look the other way.
Mostly people did just look the other way*. It's when blackmail and other more aggravated problems started cropping up that the goon squads started kicking doors in.
*constant jokes about Catholic priests ought to have normalized the idea that "this happens behind closed doors."
Tl; tr Democracy is important, rule of law is important. Much as I said in a below post that philosophy *just is* seeking truth thus disbelieving philosophy is incoherent, so democracy *just is* how differences of values are decided, thus "resisting" democratic laws (as opposed to legally dubious means of applying them) is the most maximally corrosive thing to a peaceful and free society.
The maximally corrosive thing to a DEMOCRATIC society, sure, but it's perfectly plausible to have a society both peaceful and free where the majority CAN'T impose its will without paying a ruinously high cost.
I cannot wrap my mind around this mindset. I'm not sure what you wrote but what I read is of a presumably perfectly pleasant middle-aged couple who took a ~ two-month vacation in Minneapolis and then started protesting ICE every morning and providing medical aid to the protestors before going bowling in the afternoon.
"Now our days were about protesting. It was like a part-time job, and we made sure to put in our time nearly every day at the Whipple, a Federal building where ICE and CPB were headquartered.
.....
Still, we got up in the morning, put on our long underwear and gloves, yelled at the interlopers until we were cold/had to pee, then went out to lunch. I have done some great cc skiing, and he really begun to improve my form in the 'skate' technique. We went bowling."
Like, on the first hand, I cannot wrap my head around actively going out and getting in the middle of this mess. When I was in China, a real authoritarian system, you stayed the hell away from any protest or the authorities or anything like that. And in the states, you stay away from the police. They're dangerous, you interact as little as possible, and you get a lawyer as fast as possible if you do interact with them. I can't imagine trying to get into this mess.
But you're not just getting into it, it sounds like part of your holiday, like it's the thing you're doing on your vacation before bowling. I don't want to say you're enjoying it but...man, why are you doing this on your vacation, why aren't you getting the devil out of there to literally anywhere else?
And that is why you are not the type of person responsible for the very freedoms you take for granted. The freedom and liberty that we live with today were fought for by the very people who run into the line of fire in the name of a just cause. I suppose you hear the story of Paul Revere and think "Wow, what an idiot. He should have just stayed home if he didn't want to get shot."
There was a time when even the people of China had to learn things the hard way. Give it some time. I'm sure Americans will eventually learn to stop taking everything for granted.
People keep blocking me, which hides the comments and anyone who replies to them. I wouldn't mind if I could still see the posts, but given that it's so easy to just make a new account... Blame Substack, I guess.
consider why people keep blocking you. I have never blocked anyone so far but am seriously considering it from your posts,They are nihilistic, apocalyptic, depressive and exude some depraved desire for violence and the acceptance thereof.
I've considered it plenty, and... I kinda don't care. I'm here to vent, not to make friends. I do feel like my writing and rhetoric is getting better though, so maybe I'll eventually write some posts you'll enjoy.
Would you consider the lack of civil rights in China a good thing? It sounds like you're saying Americans ought to learn to act more like Chinese citizens, which is to say, giving up defending their constitutional rights in favor of an authoritarian regime.
I think it was an inevitability. While a democracy that pretended that everyone had equal say was doomed from the start, there is still a chance for this country to survive and even prosper under a new order. I would prefer if this situation resolved peacefully rather than everyone dying.
Oh, thanks for reminding me! Jill and our friend went from the Pettis memorial last night back to the Federal building. In the place of the poor beleaguered Sheriffs, the National Guard had come in relief. And they gave out donuts! And there was cheer in the air! I am not making this up, actual donuts were given to the protesters.
Before we get into a discussion on the appropriateness of various law enforcement tactics, do you at least concede in the abstract that immigration laws should be enforced and that illegal immigrants should be deported?
I'm looking in from the outside, here, and I don't know the nuances of US immigration law and history. But it looks a lot like you've had a status quo of tacitly allowing huge flows of illegal immigration, and now suddenly you've flipped to a regime of brutal enforcement by a group that includes more than its fair share of thugs. And when they kill people, the government is not only failing to hold them accountable, but blatantly lying to justify their actions.
More orderly enforcement would be an improvement. But there also seems to be an argument for an amnesty + clear public announcement that the rules are real from this point on. Consistently enforced consequences for employers knowingly employing illegal immigrants would surely help, too.
Obama was quite loud about how well he enforced the law on illegal immigration (so was Clinton, for that matter). This whole "let everyone in" is very recent, last four years, tops.
Yes, before that, we did have some "leakage" of people who weren't properly accredited. We didn't have "free healthcare, free housing, free phones, free cars" etc. And gaping security holes in the refugee program (National Security got the military kinda riled up about some of this).
The problem is "the rules are real, we mean it this time!" only lasts till the next guy that doesn't give a shit about the rules, and you're right back to where you started.
The Modern UK has larger atrocities than have been committed in America within the last half century (trampling an entire group of schoolgirls, and then turning the horses back, and running over the schoolgirls again -- this in an alley, so the girls couldn't escape).
I readily admit these two things will track together because that's how people think.
But, like, even I think noise ordinances and trespassing law are legitimate, I still will complain if you dispatch a SWAT team when somebody steps on my lawn or plays loud music at 9:30PM.
In the abstract I might agree with you, but I've seen enough videos and reports of absurd resistance that I think overwhelming force is warranted. Like in that Wisconsin judge case it took 6 (iirc) federal agents to arrest a single illegal alien from a courthouse because the state judge tried to distract the agents and sneak him out the back.
Those were 6 federal agents seemingly there to do their jobs, the state judge was rather unexpected in her willingness to be stupid and actually do illegal behavior.
I don't see any reason that 6 federal agents wouldn't be "relatively normal" after reading their report. (Bear in mind, they generally have more than one person to pick up at a courthouse).
Structurally speaking, the sanctuary city doesn't seem (in my mind) to have been the problem there.
[If someone else wants to pipe up and say, "Actually, in Texas, they only need two guys, because we help them out" -- I would love to stand corrected on this.]
First of all, "overwhelming force is warranted" why? What harm is being prevented that justifies it? If people started heavily opposing the SWAT raids on noise violations, would that somehow make them better?
Second, you're asking people to justify whether they even believe in immigration enforcement before you take their procedural complaints seriously; I think it's kinda lazy to say that there have been examples of people doing things you disapproved of, and therefore you can discount all future complaints that are directionally similar. Obviously there's only one conclusion you can come to at that point, regardless of the underlying facts.
>First of all, "overwhelming force is warranted" why?
Because not using overwhelming force to enforce the law in the face of resistance gives resisters a hecklers veto to decide when and where laws are enforced. If there is a noise complaint, and the source of the noise barricades themselves inside their house, then it is justified to call in a SWAT team to breach the house and shut off the noise.
I still think asking if he believed in immigration enforcement saved a few back-and-forth comments figuring out a crux. I do not apologize for jumping straight into the meat of the argument, but I guess I could have used less accusatory language than "do you concede".
I find the "you should totally deploy SWAT for minor infractions" thing pretty wild, but actually what I was asking is, why is it worth this level of aggression to enforce immigration restrictions? Deploying thousands of heavily-armed agents is messed up for everybody. Seeing people getting grabbed off the streets, or from outside schools, is upsetting. Going after people just because hey look foreign or have an accent makes people afraid even when they've done nothing wrong.
What actual problem is being solved here? The supposed problems of immigration are mostly crime and job loss but neither is something we're really suffering from.
Notwithstanding all of that, Minneapolis is in no way some hotbed of illegal immigrants. Minnesota itself has a lot fewer per capita than most states.
Morally, no. But if you are going to do it your way, illegal immigrants should at least be stood in front of a judge and be approved for a pathway to citizenship if they can demonstrate their case. The way it currently works is barbaric and it's tanking your economy.
Yes, a country should be allowed to enforce it's own laws, including expelling illegal immigrants. But that's not relevant question here. ICE as an institution has existed for over 20 years, and the US has been conducting lawful apprehension of illegal immigrants for a long time before that.
You correctly identified the means as the major question. Enforcement of immigration laws cannot be at the expense of either fundamental constitutional rights or human rights. If you assume "being here illegally is a crime that you can be accused of," then the US justice system assumes innocence until guilt is proven. Restrictions on what LEOs are allowed to do have been codified into law throughout US history to protect you and I from overreach and oppression. What ICE is currently doing is so far outside the realm of what is constitutionally acceptable or morally acceptable.
A short list
* Apprehending citizens and non-citizens alike with no warrant or judicial approval, often for not showing "proof" that they are a citizen. Absolutely nowhere in the constitution does it say that you, as a citizen, are required to carry proof of your citizenship in order to be given your full rights.
* Breaking and entering homes of both citizens and non-citizens alike to search for illegal immigrants, again with no warrant or judicial approval. This is one of those sacred rules which was codified into the bill of rights and reinforced over and over in the courts (right of protection from unreasonable search and seizure).
* Using lethal force against non-lethal threats, as demonstrated multiple times in the past few weeks. I don't need to go further.
Aside from a gross overstep of federal authority bordering on constitutional crisis, these acts are also inhumane. Regardless of whether somebody is an illegal immigrant, legal citizen, violent criminal, or innocent bystander, everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and humanity. Beating people senseless, separating children and parents, killing detainees in prison and reporting it a suicide, and the myriad other acts by ICE in the past 12 months are morally unacceptable.
Apprehension of non-citizens is done with an administrative warrant, not a judicial one.
Quoting heritage:
The Supreme Court added that an alien being removed by the government is not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property” and that “the provisions of the Constitution securing the right to trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments [therefore] have no application.”
Using lethal force against non-lethal threats? A car is a lethal threat, it is 2000 pounds of metal. Shovels can kill, as can guns. These are all examples of aggravated assault.
It is immoral to separate children and parents? This is a new one. Kindly tell that to the 25+% of the Democrats that think children should be forcibly removed from their parents if their parents decline to vaccinate them for covid19.
Quick side note Heritage foundation is a far right/very Conservative Think tank whose policies have been directly adopted by the current administration.
Specifically the authors of project 2025 of the Heritage foundation have several direct contacts with the administration.
Project 2025 has at times been emulated by Trump and it arguably proposes a long list of actions that if implemented in their totality could likely mean the end of liberal democracy in the US.
Overall as a source its extremly dubious, it might be relevant in this regard thats a separate discussion but its a fundamentally tarnished source.
I also have a John Birch Society book at home. Yes, it's the constitution of the united states. I received it from a very liberal colleague.
I do know that Project 2025 was about as serious as "Defund the Police" (removing embassies would seriously compromise the CIA operations overseas, which is not a goal of the Heritage Foundation. This strikes me as fundamentally unserious, and designed so that Trump can seem moderate by disowning it.). (Likewise, Defund the Police was run up by the Biden Campaign so that Biden could disown it and seem moderate).
As with all sources, I read what's written. Heritage is citing chapter and verse, here. I consider them to be doing a credible job, with this particular piece of writing.
Yes this source is most likely partisan, I couldn't find a better tracker, however even dismissing 70% of the claims there is definitely more correspondance with Trumps policies and project 2025 compared to Biden policies on "Defunding the police"
Secondly I do ask if you would consider a think tank who writes long articles on why Biden has to abolish the police as a generally reliable source on the laws regulating police violence?
It is entirely possible that they would be honest and accurate in their analysis, but as a rule of thumb it would be better to use a somewhat neutral or at least moderately partisan source instead of this
1. Who is and is not an illegal immigrant is not clear until ID has been positively identified. Until then, people are assumed to be citizens. You can not preemptively ignore constitutional rights of a person because you assume they are illegal, only later to find out that was false. In addition, homes and businesses of legal citizens may not be entered without a warrant in search of a criminal, as is happening now.
2. Yes, ICE is using previously rare "administrative warrants," which are constitutionally dubious. The entire purpose of a warrant is that it is signed off by a neutral judge or magistrate. Otherwise, what's stopping a federal agent writing on a napkin with crayon saying "here's your warrant, get fucked." Warrants must come from a neutral party other than the one executing it, or what's the point? Much like executive orders, they are an extremely dangerous tool for circumventing constitutional limitations and should be viewed with extreme skepticism and uncertainty.
3. To make this very clear because its so pervasive online, you cannot defend something that is wrong by pointing out other wrong things others are doing. This is called "whataboutism." I don't support forcibly removing children from their families without significant due process, COVID or otherwise.
4. As for the lethal force thing, clearly people see different things in the videos. We all live in different realities now. That's why due process and the law is so critical to everybody getting a fair treatment under the law. If lethal force is used by LEOs in any capacity, that incident must go through serious legal review and the offending officers should be suspended from active duty as happens in police agencies. Again, demonstrating that killing an American citizen is taken extremely seriously, no matter the circumstances.
I have a strong feeling none of these things will ring true or matter to you, as our country seems so thoroughly and permanently divided in a way that sickens me. Just wanted to record my thoughts so you don't think I'm ignoring you.
I apologize for having to ask some of the following questions. Were we in a better world, or if I knew you better, I would not need to ask them.
"Until then, people are assumed to be citizens." -- can you cite chapter and verse on this? Where is this assumption codified into law or legal structure? Do we take someone hanging off the Border Fence (Wall) and say they're citizens? How about people being transported by known coyotes? (If what you're saying is "without objective priors, like known coyote" we should treat them as citizens, I'd like to see that as well).
re: administrative warrants. ICE is presumably saying "as an executive agency, we can decide how we want to execute the law."
I am glad you're willing to support due process for removal of children from their parents. : - )
I'm willing to cite trained video analysts, if we're trying to get a better handle on all the video (where I can, obviously -- when the trained legal analysts are saying "WTF" I think that's a redflag in of itself).
Noting that sometimes law enforcement officers are reassigned to desk jobs, instead of being suspended (I consider this to be "just plain good sense" -- if nothing else, PTSD is a thing, and shooting someone is going to cause some trauma if you aren't ex-military).
I'm sorry you've dealt with people operating in such bad faith! I do take what you say seriously, even when I'm asking for citations (I do so, because sometimes people are actually wrong, and just repeating others who were also wrong). There are plenty of bad cops, even if there are many, many more good cops.
> "Until then, people are assumed to be citizens." -- can you cite chapter and verse on this? Where is this assumption codified into law or legal structure? Do we take someone hanging off the Border Fence (Wall) and say they're citizens? How about people being transported by known coyotes? (If what you're saying is "without objective priors, like known coyote" we should treat them as citizens, I'd like to see that as well).
The obvious flaw in this reasoning is that it the government doesn't have to assume people are citizens by default then they can act like nobody has any rights, which is exactly the same thing as nobody having any rights.
Also, the presumption of innocence was established in the ominously-named Coffin v. United States in 1895.
I appreciate your tone shifting to a more good faith exchange. On that front at least, you've shown me that reasonable people capable of emotional deescalation still exist.
I'm not a lawyer, so I will not make strong claims about jurisprudence or what is or is not legal. But I was raised to have a strong admiration for and appreciation of due process and why it is so sacred, especially in the world of totalitarian states of today like Russia and China. For that reason I study it as much as I can.
From my reading, what is and is not allowed by ICE is highly contentious. In some areas above, the Supreme Court has clearly ruled in favor of ICE. In others, clearly in favor of the Fourth Amendment.
Examples showing unconstitutional acts:
1. Steagald v. United States (1981) - A federal warrant for a suspect does not give agents warrantless right to enter the home of other citizens in search of the suspect.
2. INS v. Delgado, 466 U.S. 210 (1984) - Questioning citizens regarding their citizenship and asking for ID is ok, so long as citizens ARE FREE TO LEAVE AT ANY TIME. This is one of those lose-lose rulings that nobody wins. What's the point of asking for ID if somebody can just say no and leave? Such rulings leave much to be debated.
3. Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266 (1973) - Warrantless and suspicionless searches of citizen's property more than 25 miles from the border deprives the citizen of their fourth amendment rights. What constitutes valid "suspicion?" Again, murky water that must be addressed on a case by case basis.
1. United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543 (1976) - Warrantless and suspiciousness searches are allowed a pre-defined permanent checkpoints, such as border crossings (though I'm sure ICE would challenge this to include new temporary checkpoints).
2. United States v. Arvizu (2002) - Warrantless stops and brief holds are allowed under the "totality of the circumstances." Again, this is extremely vague and can be used to justify anything. Incidents must be brought in court to be considered on a case by case basis. But clearly federal agents are allowed to use "less than probable cause in brief investigatory stops of persons or vehicles."
All this aside, at the end of the day, I want arrests to be boring. I want to see knocking, agents being patient, trying to catch suspects off guard, waiting for opportune times, and generally being respectful of the boundaries put on them. Boring is great. Boring means by the book. Boring is what we should all expect. Federal agents busting doors, beating up people, and apprehending large groups of people at a time should raise huge red flags for anybody concerned with due process. Disregard for norms and pushing the envelope to it's most extreme is precisely the strategy that authoritarian regimes use to test the limits of their power in order to erode the guardrails between them and power.
Also, I'd like to hear more about your "trained video analysis." Such things are hard to come by in a highly polarized and inflammatory world.
Of course, and thank you for sharing your experience on the ground. Hearing from those who are experiencing events first hand is just as important as reading the news and summaries.
You are reading an account by an observant person who appears to have no ax to grind. Your question pushes him in the direction of ax-grinding (though he finds a way to respond without going there). I think you may have asked it because you were sure he was on his way there anyhow, because you start with “before we get into a discussion on the appropriateness of . . . “ as though he was about to start building a case for or against the appropriates of whatever. It’s not a hostile question, really, but it seems like a very unhelpful one. Detailed accounts by the fair-minded are a rare and wonderful thing in a situation like this. They lack that us-against-them feeling that saturates so much of life these days.
Daniel, what a nicely loaded question you have. Allow me to not take that head on. I'm more of an "obeyed" guy than an "enforced" guy. Once you get into enforcement, it's all about how, and the how here is really bad.
Many illegal immigrants CAN be deported, and are. Many should not, for reasons including due process, being a child on arrival, or fulfilling nationally important economic roles. Restaurant, dairy, meat-packing, produce packing, landscaping, construction and roofing are amongst the industries that would collapse if all the illegal immigrants working in them were removed.
But more to the point, Daniel, there are many legal immigrants getting deported as well.
What sort of magical incantation do you think this is? A significant number of illegal immigrants *have had* years and years of due process. Many of them have multiple removal orders that just... never got carried out.
How *infinite* is your demand for due process before you just admit you don't actually want anything enforced at all, and this is a useful delaying tactic?
> Restaurant, dairy, meat-packing, produce packing, landscaping, construction and roofing are amongst the industries that would collapse if all the illegal immigrants working in them were removed.
What do we do about illegal immigrants who aren't being paid minimum wage?
Great question! One answer is that is a crime called wage theft, and in some states (read: blue) it is policed and prosecuted. Of course, the burden is on the victim, but there are many NGO's that will be glad to help them for free.
These days the labor market is so strong that it is easier to get a better paying job through the grapevine. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's mostly a story about abuses that used to be really frequent. I love immigration advocates, but they are known to make some very bad faith arguments.
Do you (or anyone else reading, of course) have a good source for information about the administration deporting legal immigrants?
[Edit: to clarify, I'm aware of earlier deportations of students under the pretext of anti-terrorism statutes, but understood the OP to be saying there are ongoing deportations of legal immigrants.]
None of the five cases the Wikipedia entry describes were as simple as "the Trump administration deported citizens," though I believe the last case was equally bad.
The first three actions were callous, but clearly do not qualify: each describes the deportation of non-citizens, accompanied by their young dependents, who were US citizens.
The fourth instance was an order to deport Miguel Silvestre, but Wikipedia reports that his removal order was recognized as erroneous and canceled.
The fifth case was appalling. The administration deported Chanthila Souvannarath while his citizenship status was being adjudicated. In my opinion that's just as bad as deporting a citizen, but it's unhelpful and discrediting to refer to it as the same thing.
Thank you for the link. I don't understand why the question is moot, or even which question you think is moot.
I'd like to be able to deliver specifics, with an accurate understanding of the order of magnitude, and the ability to compare Trump's actions to those of previous administrations.
I say the question is moot because deporting citizens seems worse than deporting legal immigrants, since the legal barriers are higher or even insurmountable in the case of born citizens. I didn't understand the full intent of your question, which I can't readily help with.
Thank you for the frankness. I asked the question because nearly every debate about enforcement tactics I have seen in the last month is actually a debate about amnesty in disguise.
For example: If as you claim, the restaurant industry is so reliant on illegal immigrants for labor that the industry would collapse without them, then it seems perfectly reasonable for immigration agents to visit restaurants and look for people who can’t speak English. You disagree with this policy, as is your right, but it is also my right to point out that this is much more like typical law-enforcement raids than you let on.
Restaurants don't merely rely on immigrants for labor--and clearly not all do--but also for ownership and entrepreneurial spirit. As for typical law enforcement raids, I'm not sure what you imagine those are like?
Try a mental experiment: A new president from another party has decided to do something about the scourge of gun deaths in this country. He has declared that previously legal assault weapons are now banned, and will arrest and jail anyone caught with them that doesn't turn them in. Despite appearing to be at odds with either the constitution (although SCOTUS says assult ban legal) or the fact that laws are made by the legislative branch, he unilaterally decides to start rounding them up, and if you don't like it you can sue him, and he will appeal, ideally to his new hand-picked judges. He has the general idea of the demographic associated with gun ownership, and a recent SCOTUS decision says he can use racial profiling to achieve law-enforcement ends.
What happens next would be described by you as typical law enforcement raids?
As for Amnesty, its not a bad idea, thanks for bringing it up. Reagan did one in '86, IRCA, and I have known many recipients. Two of them are employees that I am proud to call friends.
That IS in fact how law enforcement in the US usually works. Congress includes vague language in an Omnibus Bill that could mean nothing or anything, an agency of the Executive Branch creates a new totally-not-a-law regulation, and then it gets enforced and there's not much you can do to stop it.
Your gun confiscation thought experiment doesn’t work because entering the country illegally and hiring workers without work authorization was already illegal when Trump took office. These were laws that existed, but that were enforced insufficiently. You admitted to me in your first response that restaurants rely on illegal immigrant labor.
>”Restaurant, dairy, meat-packing, produce packing, landscaping, construction and roofing are amongst the industries that would collapse if all the illegal immigrants working in them were removed.”
The violation of the social contract occurred by the previous administrations who didn’t enforce the laws on the books. Part of the compromise that allowed amnesty in 1986 was the promise that immigration law would be enforced going forward. That did not happen.
No, Daniel, the thought experiment does work precisely and specifically because the President has both willingly deported legal immigrants and attempted to end citizenship at birth. That is an equivalency.
In my view the ICE/protestor conflict is a proxy war for the increasingly incommensurate opposing ideologies in the country. The Left's moral arrogance deludes them into thinking that they're above the law and the Right is now hardening itself to become the constructive refutation of that delusion. This is effectively becoming a religious war and I don't think it's going to end well. The two shootings thus far, while regrettable, are largely the result of the Left's informal guerilla resistance to lawful authority. The real social harm is the fact that they weaponize our shared values when they expect 1st amendment protections for what is in effect a violent partisan resistance - their goal is to materially impede federal officers. It's not unlike the Hamas strategy of placing ammo dumps underneath hospitals and then crying when the hospital is bombed.
You may agree with ICE or not, but law and order and respect for our fundamental constitutional norms comes first. The Left is committing the far greater harm here.
Why do you keep trying to turn this eyewitness report into a debate? Read it, ask questions about what Mark has seen if something's not clear, and create a new thread if you want to start a political discussion.
Mark seemed to refer to yelling “shame” indiscriminately at immigration officers leaving their headquarters as “moral clarity”. I am not the one bringing political discussion to this thread.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was denied access to the scene of the latest killing by ICE, they obtained a signed judicial warrant and ICE still denied access to the scene of the shooting.
Thank you for the on-the-ground report. Can you help me understand: how noticeable is ICE presence to ordinary Minneapolis citizens (those who are neither seeking them out or avoiding them)? Are there more of them in ordinary public places than normal police? Do you see them every day? Would you just see them walking around, or would you see them arresting/harassing people? Do the protests cause disruption? Do you feel safe going wherever you want in the city? Where do the ICE officers stay while they're in the city? Do they have special marked ICE vehicles?
Literally everybody always switches up. If someone says faggot you have no idea which way to interpret it. U have no idea who the “good” white people are bc everyone is “good” except ice who is the only thing we can all say is bad. Ressentiment lets u recognize you’re a slave, then self mastery through responsible and accountable use of power (with verification: as long as I have a credit card on me, I can “verify” my purchase, and more so with Apple Pay, but maybe less crypto and for sure not the gold standard) allows you to just make whatever you like, until trouble comes, and you have to take some things apart and put them back together until the problem goes away.
I'm not the author of the original comment but I live in Minneapolis and have for almost my entire life. Here's my perspective.
**how noticeable is ICE presence to ordinary Minneapolis citizens (those who are neither seeking them out or avoiding them)?**
I think the visibility for people is very dependent on where you live or work and can be radically different even a few blocks away. I live in what seems to be a heavily targeted area - Here is one of the crowd sourced databases of activity since Dec 1, 2025. I live in the biggest red blob. (I don't think I can post screenshots or I would)
- A friend who lives a block away from me woke up to the sound of screaming and cars honking and then watched someone get taken from outside her front window.
- A car crashed in front of my house the other day (I wasn't there at the time but this is from my housemates who were). The vehicle drove into a roundabout. A neighbor came outside to ask if the people in the car were okay (they were just people in plainclothes - no reason to think they were ICE) they got angry and then threw tear gas canisters in the street before leaving. We looked up their license plate later in one of the crowd sourced databases and it was a vehicle that was observed engaging in ICE activity.
- Someone I know lives on the block where Renee Good was shot and was home watching out of the window while it happened.
None of these folks were seeking out ICE or avoiding them. I have more examples of people I know having encounters like this. I personally haven't yet but it seems like pure chance and if this ICE presence keeps up like only a matter of time before I am there when something goes down.
**Are there more of them in ordinary public places than normal police?**
On Jan 8th, I attended an in person community meeting where the mayor of Minneapolis (Frey) made a surprise appearance and these are the numbers that he said were provided to him:
- 2270 total agents deployed
- 1500 ICE agents
- 270 Border Patrol agents
- 500 other (I don't have more details sorry)
More federal agents have arrived (possibly a total of 2000 ICE agents, and several thousand Border Patrol) but exact numbers are not known or I can't find reliable sources for them.
(ctrl+F "exact number of agents", you may have to hit the 'load more' button because this is live updates and I can't link to the exact post.)
IIRC something like 1000 police officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.
**Do you see them every day? Would you just see them walking around, or would you see them arresting/harassing people?**
I have seen some SUVs driving around with men in buffs and lots of tactical gear. They are not in marked cars. The last week or so, I haven't even been seeing people in tactical gear driving around but they must be here because people are being detained.
My friend said it felt like when we were living in an apartment that had a mouse infestation. You mostly just see signs of them and occasionally one mouse might run across the floor. Except that mice don't pull up in a group at random and start pepper spraying people directly in the face.
I now operate under the assumption that ICE agents could be anywhere at any time.
**Do they have special marked ICE vehicles?**
Ha. No. They rent vehicles. Mostly seems to be SUVs and vans with very tinted windows.
Observers and witnesses to unambiguous ICE activity (armed people detaining or attempting to detain people) are recording license plates and photos of the vehicles involved into crowd sourced data bases. Recently, there have been entries popping up in here with more
There were a couple more questions but I haven't fully typed up responses and figured I should probably post what I had
how noticeable is ICE presence to ordinary Minneapolis citizens (who are neither seeking them out or avoiding them)?
Oddly enough, they are nearly invisible. The closest I have been is watching a Charger with tinted windows out my bedroom window in the morning, going a lot faster than prudent around the corner. Soon we were alerted that they were at the elementary school around the block. My host, a retired public teacher, went to respond, but it as all over before she got there. not sure what ever happened. Walking uptown, I have occasionally heard the sound of dozens of whistles being blown in the distance, and seen the rising cloud of dispersal smoke, a blob roughly 100' wide by 100' high, that is their parting shot, as if they were magicians. I have also been present while crowds waited for them to leave apartment buildings. I split those scenes.
Are there more of them in ordinary public places than normal police?
No, only in total. The people you see are local police. This kind of puts the lie to "never a cop around when you need one" and the truth tothe notion of "protect and serve": the policeman's conspicuity is a public good; ICE's secrecy is a public threat.
Do you see them every day?
No, but I see where they have been. Some follow them around all day, tailing their cars, videoing their actions. There are risks.
Would you just see them walking around, or would you see them arresting/harassing people?
Where I have seen them is at the federal building. I liken it to a beehive, the cars come and go through the security gate. They are rentals or out-of-state SUV's, with darkly tinted windows. There is an agent with a Grey Jeep, Rubicon edition, says it right on the hood, that I see frequently. They are masked in the cars. Sometimes they roll their windows down and stick their phone out the window to record us.
Do the protests cause disruption?
Yes, they do. Streets get blocked off, first by ICE, then by protester trash barricades, then finally by local police yellow tape. This is a lot of work for the local cops. After the shooting of Alex, Nicollette street was closed between 26th and 27th. This is a bus route. This is restaurant row. I have been avoiding comparisons to the George Floyd time, but the barricades and impromptu memorials are still up on that street, four plywood raised fists a block out on each approach to the intersection of Chicago and 38, and a giant memorial that has turned the intersection into a traffic circle. The city has still not decided on how to finalize the site for both traffic and official memorialization. My hosts daughter works for a parks organization that might have some good input on how to resolve it, but she says they stay out of that conversation because there are few to no black people on their board. No one knows how to resolve this, so I fear more of this semi-permanence of disruption in the future.
Do you feel safe going wherever you want in the city?
Always, and I like to walk where I go. I have been to SF/Sausalito recently and I liken the safety-feeling. To date, there have been 3 homicides in the city, and Metro Surge has committed two of them. Not a robust data set, but still...
Where do the ICE officers stay while they're in the city?
They are wholly occupying certain city hotels. This I know because those hotels are being publicly shamed, which i get, but still, they are not ICE, and they will be needed after ICE leaves. People go to protest and swear at the hotels. Our group has not done so.
Do they have special marked ICE vehicles?
Oh, Scott, what a good question no. They drive whatever kind of vehicle they can get, the more macho the better. But most of them are in rental cars, which means Rav-4's, minivans, Sentras, what-have-you. It's a motley crew. My hairdresser friend says he keeps his Tacoma in the garage. I'm like, 'because of the road salt, right?' and he's like 'no, so people don't mistake me for one of those assholes.'
Scott, these are great questions, and I'm glad you asked them. Thank you.
Thank you for your detailed and fair-minded takes. Reading your posts I was struck by how *novel* it felt to hear an account of the situation from someone with no ax to grind.
I'm interested by this take since I read it as clearly the account of someone with a substantial amount of bias and an axe to grind, albeit someone that stays within the relatively peaceful local writing style rather than being a deranged blowhard.
I cannot live up to your comment, for I certainly have axes to grind. Minnesota is an open-carry state, and I keep my axe closely by my side wherever I go (not a euphemism for gun).
The least i can do is be fair minded. I should tell you that my group is angry all the time, that we are weary of having to bear witness, and that we feel we need to be doing more. People I talk to on the street agree, its a real pressure cooker here.
I’ve lived in Minneapolis or Saint Paul for the last 40 years. My home is in one of the “We suggest you pack a go bag” neighborhoods during the George Floyd riots. That was a very tense period but this situation feels worse. Not because the immediate danger is greater now, but because of its source.
Pete Hegseth posting ICE > MN is unnerving.
Congressional Republicans could stop all this tomorrow if they dared to cross Trump.
I understand that you have strong opinions and feelings about what is happening, but I get the sense they are not interfering with you giving a fair and complete account of what you have seen, rather than one geared towards influencing the viewer’s judgments of the situation.
Do you really not know what I mean? I doubt that. I think you are still trying to pick a fight, while cloaking it under a request for clarification. Unless you are dumb as a piece of petrified dinosaur shit, you are able to recognize the difference between having a view and making a case for that view.
Interesting contrast. I don't want to exaggerate, but their MOD is to move like kidnappers, carjackers or Special forces units. They do not want to be seen, or observed, above all.
“Last week, several police chiefs in the Twin Cities held a news conference where they said their own officers had been racially profiled and stopped by ICE agents. In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara referred to this as “uncharted territory.”
I missed the initial thread re Scott Adams, but I have to say I was surprised when Scott halfway through having documented all his flaws said something like "in case you can't tell, I love Scott Adams".
I get people are complicated, Scott has some special affinity for Scott based on taking inspiration from his writing etc, but my sense of Adams, which was reinforced by Alexander's article, is someone super obsessed with the idea of himself as a world-historical master intellect, never seeming to back it up, which is a pretty off-putting combination.
Like others here, I read Dilbert comics as a kid and think I read two of his books, and by the end of the second one was starting to get weirded out by it, again the combination of being obsessed with his own genius and never really backing it up and the whole "I'm not serious unless you agree with me then I am" thing.
As a kid I also assumed that the author stand-in was Dilbert, and he was lampooning his own work experience in a sometimes self-deprecating way. But I realize now the author stand-in was Dogbert ... He also had some email newsletter that was called "Dogbert's ruling class" or something, whose jokey shtick was "when Dogbert takes over the world you won't be enslaved like everyone else".
Some other points, from when I read some of his stuff after he became a Trump pundit:
* the fake "I'm just a disinterested observer" shtick when he was clearly a Trump supporter.
* the fact that his reasons for supporting Trump lined up with the qualities he'd previously lampooned the unwashed masses for supporting in a candidate.
* I think he once said that he, personally, could win a presidential election with 65% of the national vote, and also that if Trump won he'd be a "top 10" assassination target or something
* self-obsession with how great a persuader/predictor he is. He'd make some point that he'd introduce by acting like he's about to blow your mind and reprogram you forever with his awesome hypnosis/persuasion skills, and then say something exceptionally un-persuasive (e.g., Trump will build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it, by saying that the US will only accept highly educated immigrants, that will get Mexico to restrict emigration by building a wall).
* I remember one where he said women's value was going to decline because men would eschew sex for hypnosis related fetishes. IIRC it wasn't "sexual desirability", it was more like value as a person.
* I watched (part of) ~two of his "coffee with Scott Adams" podcasts after the 2020 election. He started one off with an obvious attempt at some sort of hypnosis thing - saying something like "you're gonna take a sip of coffee, you're gonna feel good", etc. Off-putting right off the bat. He also defended Jan 6, and said after the election was called in November that Trump had a 65% chance of winning (downgraded from 100%), and that if Trump didn't actually win then everything he knows about the world is wrong.
* re the race thing, the focus is always on white people staying away from black people, but to me the bad part was saying black Americans are a "hate group"
I'm sure he was a nice guy to his friends and family, but ... well, a lot of people are.
> I remember one where he said women's value was going to decline because men would eschew sex for hypnosis related fetishes.
What does that even mean? I know some people fantasize about hypnotizing women so they can sleep with them, but hypnosis itself? I was not under the impression that men like him were into that sort of thing...
I might as well put it here-- Adams' advice to white people to stay away from black people is racist. He uses rather flimsy evidence (one survey that many black people don't agree with "white lives matter") to give advice which, if followed, will cost black people much more than white people and won't obviously do white people much good.
Physical appearance plays such a large part in determining the course of our lives yet most of it is out of our control. As a loser in the genetic lottery, I hope that AGI will usher in technologies that allow us to completely change our appearances. Or is that just wishful thinking?
Standards are ever-changing but I think there are some universal metrics of beauty like symmetry and regular features. It's not so much that I desire to be beautiful but that I do not reach the baseline of "attractive enough" as I have pronounced asymmetry and lots of dysmorphic features.
This might be worth trying to fix, as in "find someone truly talented and pay them a thousand dollars, and see what they have to say." I'm no "fashion designer" nor am I a Hollywood hire, but I could see someone being able to custom-fit hairstyles/makeup/prosthetics for you.
> Picking up the question from the other side, would you want to not be affected by other people's looks?
This will basically never happen, though, right? Attractiveness is a two-sided optimization problem, and if either side drifts, the other will optimize towards it.
The most that will happen is the average floor of attractiveness will rise, and people will start focusing on ever-tinier details that demarcate the top quintile / decile / etc.
There's a story-- I think it's "Liking What You See" by Raphael Carter/Cameron Reed-- with a premise that being attracted to some faces and not others is a brain function which can be turned on or off.
Once I am fond of someone I like the way they look because they look like them. But then I lack that male wiring that links “beauty” to sexual attraction .
That's very interesting. But is it really male wiring that links beauty to sexual attraction? I'm sure being really physically attractive as a guy helps a lot with getting dates.
Yes, being physically attractive helps... a bit...
But many people, many of them women, really do find that once they are fond of someone, their looks are attractive because they belong to that well-liked/loved person.
Personality really is the important part though. Because that's what makes one become fond of someone.
> There's a story-- I think it's "Liking What You See" by Raphael Carter/Cameron Reed-- with a premise that being attracted to some faces and not others is a brain function which can be turned on or off.
Yeah, I remember reading this story. Really fun idea, but when I read it, I thought "obviously this is never going to happen."
"Status" is relative and zero sum, and the top people will always want to demonstrate their status / market power by getting as many good things as they can in themselves / their mates, including attractiveness.
So if all the genuinely high status people care about and demonstrate attractiveness, that's who everyone else looks up to, and it trickles down and informs norms down to the median, at least.
Might there be some "barber pole" countersignaling, or a cohort of earnest people who genuinely want to max "relationship quality" versus "status?" Yeah, probably - and they'll be like 10-20% of the population as a whole, max. The other 80-90% are still going to play status games.
As it is now, at least we can claim our looks are not our fault. If we ever reach the point that we can design our own bodies/faces, all the blame falls on us.
We're already at that point. It's about $50,000 for a totally new smile. And yes, it is worth it, humans judge each other quite harshly based on their teeth.
Are you from the states? I do think generally whitish and straight-ish teeth are attractive-ish, but for some reason Americans seem to care so much more about teeth than anywhere else, I'm pretty sure most of us find the veneer look a bit off putting
I watched an episode of a panel show on youtube in which there was one American guest and maybe 10 or so from elsewhere.
The one American had freakishly white teeth that pulled attention like crazy. It didn't look attractive. It didn't look natural. It reminded me very strongly of this episode of Friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIK01MpwWGg
But, speaking as an American with a long history of living in the USA, 𝘯𝘰𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵. Except for this one guy (who lived in Korea), I guess. Notice how the indigenous American cultural commentary on very white teeth is "they mean that nobody will consider dating you; don't do this".
Consider the curiously high number of men on dating apps who list their heights as six feet even. Given the propensity of some women to have a six foot minimum standard for men, it is not uncommon for men an inch or two under that level to round up their heights in hopes of getting past the initial screening.
For similar reasons dating apps supposedly have a substantial number of 29-year-old women.
There's probably a significant subset of guys who know they're "at least 6 foot" and don't bother measuring before listing it on the dating app, as well.
Are women insane? Only 30% will accept a below-top-decile height?
It's because gender ratios are crazy - 75/25 on Tinder, and similar on others. When there's 3 men for every woman, they're inundated with likes and have 10-20 messages every time they open the app.
At that point why NOT only consider 6' plus grad degree men with abs? Anything to winnow the herd!
One final fun tidbit - the top 78% of women are going after the top 20% of men on most apps:
This was using data from a paper (Pisanski 2022) analyzing the "fair height" calculated by using female height percentile and male height percentile, and then seeing empirically what height gap women will accept. ALL women want somebody taller than they are.
Surprisingly, short women were the most stringent and demanded the biggest height gaps. Tall women were a little more generous, and demanded smaller gaps. Men generally don't care about height in their female partners.
> Surprisingly, short women were the most stringent and demanded the biggest height gaps. Tall women were a little more generous, and demanded smaller gaps.
That's not actually surprising. It's entirely reasonable for taller women to recognize there are fewer men significantly taller than them, whereas short women have a lot more taller men to choose from!
> That's not actually surprising. It's entirely reasonable for taller women to recognize there are fewer men significantly taller than them, whereas short women have a lot more taller men to choose from!
Yeah, good point.
I guess it was surprising to me in the sense that enough men don't care about height that height literally isn't a consideration for them, and so there is no rate limit or filter on how high up a short woman can reach.
When you'd assume that men would care about the height of at least their male offspring, and optimizing at least a little on women's height, enough that insane gaps aren't so easily demanded and fulfilled at the shorter end of female height.
But you know, I say this and I'm as guilty as anyone, my wife is tiny, even though I was an athlete and hope I get a few athletes among my kids, and know that height is an advantage for both male and female athletes in many sports!
Why didn't I empirically act on this cluster of facts and motivations? It just wasn't a big enough consideration in the overall already-difficult optimization problem finding a mate presents.
This doesn't respond to my point; firstly, we know the "6 foot cluster" phenomenon is arbitrary to imperial systems. In China, for example, 1m80 (a bit shorter) is the "nice round number" for "tall men", so you get a bit of clustering there.
I'm pretty sure that, if you asked women for a cut-off point relative to their own height, it wouldn't cluster at 6-foot, and I guess it would end up being significantly lower.
Unless Bumble obligated women to set a height filter (and the fact that the chart mentions "Advanced filters" indicates this is not the case), that data is going to be pretty severely skewed because it's collecting the height preferences only of women who care about height enough to use the height filter!
This was using data from a paper (Pisanski 2022) analyzing the "fair height" calculated by using female height percentile and male height percentile, and then seeing empirically what height gap women will accept. ALL women want somebody taller than they are.
Surprisingly, short women were the most stringent and demanded the biggest height gaps. Tall women were a little more generous, and demanded smaller gaps. Men generally don't care about height in their female partners.
Unless I'm super in a bubble I feel like something like this has to be going on - as a woman my impression has always been that most women care only about their partner being taller than them (mayyybe taller enough that they're still taller in heels?), not any particular cutoff
"at what height does a man's tallness become a detriment on the dating market" (with the answer being ~it never does) is a very different question from "at what height does a man's shortness become a detriment on the dating market" though, which is what the original graph purported to address.
> a very different question from "at what height does a man's shortness become a detriment on the dating market" though, which is what the original graph purported to address.
Oh yeah, gotcha.
I've got some evidence for you here, too. Here's the height distribution of the top 20% of guys by income, who have something like an 80-90% marriage rate depending on where in the distribution they are:
"Are women insane? Only 30% will accept a below-top-decile height? "
I expect a few things are in play here.
1) More than 30% of women will accept a man in the bottom 90% of height. They just won't say so if asked directly.
2) Most women don't realize what the average height of (American?) men actually is. Ditto for the height distribution. And I have seen similar "data" for income. Yes, lots of women want a man making 6 figures or more. Most men don't make that money. Note that lots of women DO get married to guys who don't earn 6 figures.
3) As women age the ones who are still single become less picky (same for men, I expect, but I am addressing your comment).
> More than 30% of women will accept a man in the bottom 90% of height. They just won't say so if asked directly.
This isn't quite what's going on. It's true that more than 30% of women will accept a man they meet in person who is below the 90th percentile in height. But in an online dating context, women 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗼 refuse to meet men who are below the 90th percentile. The platform lets them filter, and that's what they do. So the problem isn't that they're unwilling to admit that they'll accept someone below the 90th percentile; the problem is that they're actually unwilling to accept someone below the 90th percentile, because of how the system works.
Oh yeah, I don't think they're insane at all, it was just dramatic contra-rhetoric to presage why they can do this.
> 2) Most women don't realize what the average height of (American?) men actually is. Ditto for the height distribution. And I have seen similar "data" for income. Yes, lots of women want a man making 6 figures or more. Most men don't make that money. Note that lots of women DO get married to guys who don't earn 6 figures.
On this note, I actually made a dating calculator using NHANES, CES, and ACS data where you can see just how rare your segment is by geography. "666 men," or 6 foot men with 6 figure incomes and 6 packs, are exceptionally rare.
More depressingly, people with discernible waistlines of both genders are exceptionally rare - but that's democracy for you.
Note that if you do the calculations for a 6-6-6 guy you should probably try to get some correlation data. I be surprised if 6 foot tall men are not more likely than average to make 6 figures (or higher).
It is *easy* to assume the three are uncorrelated, but they probably aren't :-)
The *other* thing is that I believe that "6 pack abs" is really just a short-hand for "physically fit." There are also studies showing that women usually want guys to be less ripped than guys want. You don't get the abs without being ripped ... when Arnold wasn't peaking for a body building show he usually didn't have 6 pack abs. I find it unlikely that "fit but not ripped" Arnold would be unacceptable.
Still, "tall, good income and fit" makes *sense* for what women might want when dating. They just may not be as picky as commonly phrased.
> Note that if you do the calculations for a 6-6-6 guy you should probably try to get some correlation data.
Yes, the calculator was literally made with modeled correlations, and I triangulated correlation matrices from the resulting data set several different ways.
> Still, "tall, good income and fit" makes *sense* for what women might want when dating. They just may not be as picky as commonly phrased.
Yeah, and most of the dating app stuff is just because of the ratio - why not be maximally stringent in an environment like that?
But the majority (70-80%!) of women don't use dating apps, and don't like them, so they're obviously matching up in the real world by various means, and probably settling for more average guys, because you can't get as far out in the tails in a social circle of 150 or so, in the same way you can in a pool of 10k+ or 100k+ men on dating apps in a big city.
When I looked into that a while back, part of the answer seemed to be that the male surplus was highly app-specific. The general trend seemed to be that hookup-oriented apps generally had a large majority of men, while relationship-oriented ones were usually majority women.
It seems like Tinder in particular, which is the most male-skewed app apart from Grindr (whose core demographic is gay men), tends to dominate the conversation because 1) lots of men using it seem to find it particularly frustrating and vent, and 2) Tinder releases a lot of detailed statistics which make it easy to analyze.
> It seems like Tinder in particular, which is the most male-skewed app apart from Grindr (whose core demographic is gay men), tends to dominate the conversation
As far as I knew, literally every app is male skewed - the BEST you can do is 2 men for every woman.
The numbers seem to be a bit of a mess. A lot of the figures circulating don't seem to be well-sourced, and those that are well-sourced are likely very methodology dependent (i.e. comparing registered users, active users broadly defined, active users narrowly defined, and volume of user activity seem likely to give you different figures if there's a gender skew in volume of activity).
The best apples-to-apples comparison I found was from Pew Research, which surveyed US adults in 2022 as to which sites they have ever used. Grindr, as expected, is overwhelmingly male by this metric. Tinder and Hinge were a little less than 2:1 male. Bumble and OkCupid were around 3:2 male. Match and eHarmony have slight female majorities. HER appears to have a large female majority (for a similar reason as why Grindr has a large male majority) but total usage is too low to draw detailed conclusions from this survey's sample size. "Other" sites have a small male majority overall.
Globally, 34% of men and 27% of women have ever used any dating site, so about 55% male. This is a smaller male skew than the per-site figures, which I would guess suggests men are much more likely than women to have tried several sites either sequentially or in parallel.
Pew did collect some data in the survey based on only active users (defined at those who have used a site in the past year), but unhelpfully don't seem to provide a breakdown of active users by gender either per-site or globally.
Not sure. My guess would be that the gender disparity being app specific isn't widely appreciated. Or even that there is a huge gender disparity on Tinder: more often, I see problems that are very likely downstream of the disparity attributed to general and pervasive issues in dating culture.
> A bigger mystery to me is why women (anecdotally) have no success on these apps either!
It's selection effects - if 80% of women are going after a tiny slice of the men, those top men are in an Empyrean sexual Valhalla and have no reason to settle down. So the "20%" is a bit of misnomer, it's actually a power law - the top percentile of guys get twice as many likes as the 95th percentile, and likes peter out entirely at the 80th percentile. So the top ~5% of guys get the supermajority of likes.
BUT all those guys get all the matches! So they have an arbitrary bench of girls of whatever flavor they want (as long as they're in a real city). Okay, so any <5% guy who is actually after an LTR pairs up pretty quickly, because he can go on 3-5 dates a week, and finding somebody you're compatible with is basically a numbers game. They find somebody great after 20 different dates, and leave the app. Woohoo!
Okay, so if the guys who actually want an LTR drop off relatively quickly, who does that leave on the app though? All the guys who just want to screw around and have fun - and why not? They have a bench of thousands of matches to have fun with.
What they SAY they want on the app doesn't actually matter - I'm sure you know that many men are less than fully honourable when stating their intentions, if it means they get to sleep with more girls. All that matters is that the only <5% guys who *actually want an LTR* are on way shorter than the guys who want to have fun, so all the <5% on the app are 80-90% guys who want to have fun. And the 10-20% who actually want an LTR relies totally on new onboardings of <5% guys, because they pair up and leave.
And I feel like I should point out - this doesn't even require active deceit! Like the <5% guys who are there just having fun may even BELIEVE they're open to an LTR, because they are! If Helen of Troy and Aphrodite descended from heaven on a gossamer beam of feminine perfection, I'm sure a lot of these guys would actually go for an LTR. But what's the rush? Why not just take your time and really see what's out there? You know, just date and take things as they come, and if somebody really blows your socks off, THEN you're open to the LTR.
But the end results are still the same, even with that internal conviction being true, even with them considering themselves open to an LTR.
My basic argument is that when you have a pool of guys that can get what guys want, it's going to be biased towards short term and having fun anyways, because that's what guys in the aggregate want, then it's going to get WORSE from there, due to selection effects because all the LTR guys drop off the platform.
Like look at gay guys - famously polyamorous, famously high body counts, etc. In the data, gay men have 2-4x higher body counts than heterosexual men, because men in general are rate-limited by women. But not gay guys, they can live the male fantasy of matched sex drives and matched drives for variety and short term fun. I'm saying the <5% guys on the apps are in that position - they're more able to get what guys want, because of their relative bargaining power. So it's a lemon market for both sides.
I've written about this broader trend in a post titled Dear Manosphere, women legit have it harder than men, fight me:
I imagine there's also a selection effect based on who you find on dating apps. Desirable guys who actively want relationships tend to find them, and then not be on the apps anymore. Whereas the cad sleeping with a different woman every weekend is always going to be around.
> Of course, that brings up the question of why there is such a massive male surplus on dating apps.
Probably a lot of reasons, but I think it's mostly laziness and loss aversion and approaching in person being hard / scary.
But manifestly, most men would be better off looking for dates in their social circles, doing real-world things with favorable gender ratios, and approaching in person.
On a comment to a recent post I followed a link to a link to a link and ended up here: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yFvZa9wkv5JoqhM8F/p/oTX2LXHqXqYg2u4g6 . This discussion, which I hadn't seen before, illuminates a lot about both what rationalists think they're doing and what they're really doing. (I.e. It illuminates both the rationalist perspective and the rationalist fallacy.)
I've complained before about "rationalists" (I'll use the word to mean the Less Wrong ideology, not its original meaning which is almost the exact opposite) refusing to learn, acknowledge, and/or situate themselves within analytical philosophy. I haven't been very satisfied with the responses; they often seem to be different ways of asserting that "we're interested in what's actually true!" (implying either that most philosophers just like arguing for no reason and are unconcerned with truth, despite talking constantly about seeking truth and producing arguments purporting to prove various truths--a claim that would require some very substantial evidence--or that "true" is being defined as "in accordance with my own beliefs and premises, which I'd rather not be subject to any challenge or questioning").
But on the linked page are two arguments that can at least be engaged with.
The first is Yudkowsky's claim that "mainstream philosophy" is "diseased" and "much of it is wrong"; therefore, it's not worthwhile to learn and engage with something that's built on bad premises. The problem with this is a simple equivocation fallacy. "Philosophy" can mean at least three different things: (1) "any kind of thinking about truth", (2) "thinking about fundamental truth using logic and avoiding dogmatic assumptions, in the manner of academic philosophy journals", (3) "the particular positions and arguments most often held by practicing philosophers". Obviously, 3-philosophy is just a part of 2-philosophy and is opposed and challenged by other parts of 2-philosophy (and everyone who gives any kind of opinion on anything, especially on whether philosophy has any value, is doing 1-philosophy). So Yudkowsky's argument above is saying that if 3-philosophy is bad one should avoid engaging in 2-philosophy at all, a clear non-sequitur. (Notice "in the manner of" in the definition of 2. Academia is often corrupt and so outrageously politicised that there may well be good reason to avoid doing philosophy through actual journals; no reason at all though to avoid learning and engaging with the arguments made in the journals, on a different platform.)
The second is the argument that learning too much philosophy might teach bad mental habits. This one I'm much more sympathetic to, in the sense that if you've got a certain set of ideas built on certain assumptions (particularly if you think modes of thought built on those particular assumptions are underexplored, whether or not that's actually true), it makes sense that during your initial stages of developing your ideas you might want to avoid reading more mainstream arguments on those topics, lest your thinking be subtly shaped to be more in-line with mainstream thinking, thus losing track of your original perspective. But once you've got your own ideas and arguments clear and you've moved on to trying to promote them to others, to avoid learning about ideas similar (even if not the same) as your own, as well as the arguments against them, and to avoid engaging with those arguments directly because you're sure they're obviously wrong and you knew this since you were 14 (an unironic claim by Yudkowsky in the linked discussion)...is surely the height of arrogance.
Now, of course you can build a community or an ideology around an explicit "we accept these premises as foundational dogmas". That's perfectly valid, and that's just what natural science is: philosophy, but with the assumptions of materialism and empiricism and so on, a lack of interest in defending those assumptions against challenges, and a strict determination to stay within the confines of what can be uncontroversially reduced to those assumptions and consider any claims about all other things outside the scope of science. But it doesn't seem like rationalists are doing that at all. They take sweeping positions on all sorts of philosophical matters well outside the boundaries of natural science (morality, religion, mind, knowledge), but then decline to engage with the arguments of actual philosophers on these matters.
So rationalism seems to be a bit of a massive shell game. When told to read more philosophy, dismiss the whole field and suggest you're only interested in dealing within scientific premises...then take blatant positions on philosophical questions on the grounds that all truth matters. And hope no one notices the hopping back-and-forth. The only thing more amazing than the gaul of this is the fact that so many smart people apparently fall for it hook, line and sinker. Unless I'm missing something huge.
(Note: I invite people telling me why I'm wrong, but I often need a long time (=more than the length of an Open Thread) to think over my answer to an objection. So most replies will probably be unanswered, and neither "conceding the point" nor "don't respect your argument" should be inferred from that. Also, if you think I'm misrepresenting Yudkowsky's position and that he and/or most rationalists are actually fully willing to engage with philosophy and *do* consider themselves to be defending a position situated within philosophy, I'd rather not hunt around for the many other quotes denigrating philosophy in numerous ways, so consider my objections to be based on that interpretation as a premise.)
Also wanted to add that I understand the reticence as to engaging with philosophy, I am a software developer and quite often when I read an essay by a trained philosopher I just get this overwhelming impression that this person never had to produce an idea that survives contact with reality, and I get all suspicious about whatever he's arguing about. This doesn't happen to me when I read someone with a STEM background that is now philosophizing. But rationalists also give me a different ick, like they're trying transfer the scientific mentality into domains where it does not apply (I kinda don't get what edge rationalism is supposed to have over learning to think like a scientist).
I think it means something like epistemic humility and exercising common sense when the extrapolated conclusions of simple models appear to give absurd results. Compare this to how scientists regard their models. The Ideal Gas Law works great at low densities, but if you take it as infallible then you can extrapolate to arbitrarily high pressures and never have phase transitions. Same for infinite field strength around point charges in classical E&M. Scientists never worry about the absurd implications of those extrapolations, they just sensibly conclude that such absurdities are alerting you to the limitations of your model. The world is heavily nonlinear and one should never have much faith in linear extrapolations of models far beyond the realm of their empirical validation.
Philosophers seem constitutionally incapable of this level of epistemic self-awareness. Instead of admitting that the simple math of Utilitarian calculus is obviously just a rough heuristic that can't possibly capture the complexity of human morality, they publish paper after paper fretting over absurdities like the repugnant conclusion. The relevant empirical testing that they seem opposed to doing is just looking around the world and recognizing that their simplistic models don't accurately reflect the way humans actually behave.
>I think it means something like epistemic humility and exercising common sense when the extrapolated conclusions of simple models appear to give absurd results.
Are philosophers all.lacking epistemic humility, or.just some.if them?
>Philosophers seem constitutionally incapable of this level of epistemic self-awareness
Are they? which ones?
>Utilitarian calculus is obviously just a rough heuristic that can't possibly capture the complexity of human morality
Not all the philosophers are utilitarian , and.many rationalists are. Yudkowsky 's Torture versus Dust Specks is an example of extreme bullet biting that was criticised by a mainstream philosooher!
Oh sure, Yud isn’t any better, but at least he doesn’t have an academic credential to hide behind. Generally speaking the rationalist community is even worse since they marry poor thinking to a weird cult like lifestyle but their social impact is limited because mainstream society rightly regards them as weirdos. Academic philosophers unfortunately inherit the legitimizing aura of their institutions.
>Are they? which ones?
Nick Bostrom? The doomsday argument is so stupid it practically drools. Peter Singer is also pretty bad.
This is a super nebulous intuitive thing, but I think it's that when you're in a domain where your ideas frequently fail against an external objective standard (the exact standard varies depending on the STEM discipline), it does train you into being more cautious, into pre-emptively trying to think of all the ways your idea might fail. With philosophers, I don't see this, they regularly make wildly extravagant claims with seemingly zero reflection on all the ways actually implementing their idea might fail.
In software, the test is whether the software has no bugs, no weird edge cases where it breaks (bunch of other stuff too). In science, it would be whether you're proposing a hypothesis that makes real testable predictions, and then thinking of all the ways you could find out whether those predictions are wrong or not.
If the lack of tests is an inherent feature of the subject -- "domains where it does not apply" -- what's the problem? You can't hardly blame them for not using something that can't work. You could blame them.writing with a high degree of certainty, despite the lack of tests .. but who is actually doing that? Some examples would be useful.
Lack of tests means you should be even more cautious as opposed to more reckless, like proposing the repugnant conclusion is a valid result, to pick a banal example of philosophical recklessness. But philosophical minds have not been shaped by developing actual reasoning ability, which can only be gained through contact with reality.
The question needs to be viewed through at absolute versus relative lens. Academic philosophy Isn't broken or diseased in the sense that there is a relatively more efficient way of solving the same problems. It nonetheless isn't good at solving problems in an absolute sense. LessWrongian rationality isnt either. There are about 200 open philosophical problems, and the rationalists claim to have dissolved about three of them. Rationalists don't even have clear answers to questions like "how does consciousness work, anyway".
So there is no evidence that rationalism is better in an absolute sense.
There is also the issue of expectations. Philosophy can seem frustratingly vague and inconclusive to science and engineering types ... but is STEM really the default? Maybe STEM subjects are unusually well defined, and humanities subjects are the norm.
How easy or difficult philosophy should be is a philosophical.question ... it depends on how truth , evidence , etc, work. If everything is visible, empiricism.should be able to solve everything .. if not, not. If there is a single set of axioms everyone can agree on, armchair reasoning should be able to solve everything ...if not, not. Judging by the slow progress , we are in the least convenient world.
Rationalism is based on Bayes. Bayes tells you how to adjust subjective credences up and down with evidence. It doesn't tel! you where to get objectively correct axioms from, and it doesn't tell you how to handle lack of direct evidence -- it doesn't tell you how to solve either of the problems I mentioned.
>Philosophy can seem frustratingly vague and inconclusive to science and engineering types
To be fair, it also seems to be frustratingly vague and inconclusive to humanities types. But that might be because I've mostly encountered continental and postmodern philosophers.
I think the main issue is that philosophy seems very self absorbed and also break far too easily. For example, Kant universability breaks in the axe murderer scenario for the vast majority of people, it's sometimes even hard to argue the position in a way that students see what he meant by that. There's other examples like that, like the classic drowning child scenario.
It is not unnatural to untrust most philosophy then, especially since it is hard to verify that a concept is valid and in a way "exists in the world".
It's not very clear "rationality" is a better path to solve the hard problems either way but it spawned a good part of the AI ecosystem which is making good empirical work on consciousness, qualia. I don't think another unread reinterpretation of Kant or Deleuze will help there.
I also think the big issue with philosophers is expecting all truth to be expressible. We communicate with words, but brains don't really think with words.
Are you sure every single one of them believes that? And, if it false, what can you usefully do in response? It seems to stymie the idea of philosophy as a group enterprise. And rationalism, ditto.
This is a school I never engaged with directly, but I seem to remember Bergson being about that, I think he wasn't a mathematical intuitionist.
> rationalism would have to be, as well.
Yeah, maybe. Not if it really becomes about being the science of winning. Maybe. But if it does have to be discarded, so be it, I think that is one aspect of the scientific mindset that has universal applicability, the willingness to discard a model when you discover it's not working.
I agree with you on virtually all of this and I think Scott and his community of readers are much much less susceptible to the fallacies you outlined than Eliezer and the LW crowd write large. I always found Eliezer and the Sequences off-putting so I've only read a small percentage of them. I do plan to read HPMOR sometime but I'm not going to go systematically through the Sequences.
I find it annoying when Scott or others use LW jargon that outsiders don't know, because of precisely the issues you outlined; very often there are well established ways of referring to the phenomena they're referencing. Of course, being a seasoned reader and admirer of Scott's, I'm sure there are many instances where he does this, I don't notice, and it doesn't bug me. But I find that the *way* he introduces jargon or references his own or LW jargon is much humbler-seeming and more hospitable to outsiders than that of LW in general. He usually includes a link or two to past discussions and often gives a brief summary.
I appreciate that Scott makes an effort to let his essays stand on their own two feet and not require the reader to read the whole literature for themselves.
I'm going to stop there because I was about to go further into comparisons between Scott and Eliezer and I don't think that's useful -- I already did more than enough above. I didn't mean for this comment to be an Eliezer bash fest. Obviously he has had an incredible influence on Scott's thinking, and others I admire, and to dismiss him would just be silly. I'll just close by saying again that I agree with your analysis of the problems with LW and that I find ACX refreshingly low on those problems.
Probably not what you are pointing at, but I'm using Claude to help me design and deploy a combination excel/power automate workflow to grab data exports from an email address, load the data to an excel sheet and run scripting on it to sort/format/output the data, then email out the finalized results to a distribution group.
I’ve tested it with underwriting insurance applications, which is illegal, but it was just a test so I guess it’s fine. It was definitely significantly better than the average person doing this stuff when given a clear goal.
My lab has used it to automate our data entry from datasheets (hand written), although we still use human QAQC post entry to catch and correct errors. The entry is more error prone than human entry (although improving rapidly and I expect it to reach parity/better than in well under a year), but the time savings is more than worth the slight increase in QAQC work.
I would be somewhat surprised if our QAQC team more or less stopped catching errors (because the AI essentially stops making them) within 2 years (there is a separate set of errors where what was originally written on the sheet is incorrect, but that's dealt with via a separate process)
Pretty basic text generation based on editorial guidelines that existed, with plenty of examples to go along. Think: Video titles, learning objectives for courses, assessment questions, text summaries, automatic translation of limited text sequences etc.
Mostly non-demanding, but occasionally very time consuming stuff. The overall quality has suffered a bit, it still needs human review (especially for the more sophisticated items like assessment questions), and sometimes the automation just fails to run at all.
All in all, it makes those activities maybe 20-35% faster (more for translation), but all those issues are capping the efficiency gains for now, plus, my impression is that quality has still gone down, even after review, because review catches errors, but not if the output is just a little worse than it otherwise would have been.
I figure this will be the only place I could ask this, and I promise this time will be the only time I ask this, but would somebody give me feedback on my post going into the Deep Q nets paper in reinforcement learning? You can find it here: https://nadagrad.substack.com/p/deep-q-networks
I understand it might not be very accessible without a lot of pre-req's, but I would love some human feedback on if it's readable or not. I plan on doing a post for a bunch of deep reinforcement learning papers until I am caught up to cutting edge research like https://www.pi.website/blog/pistar06, but I want to make sure I have a good base to start from.
The Inkhaven residency is interesting but isn't that compatible for people with jobs. Is there anything similar that is either part-time or for a shorter duration?
I think economics is basically fake, and would welcome a dialogue about it.
Taleb and Mandelbrot have both made a pretty strong case that the great bulk of economics is “not even wrong,” in the sense that to even play with most of the models and econometric conclusions they come to requires assuming distributions and facts and error bars that we authoritatively KNOW do not exist in the world.
The great majority of the finance and global trade and currency worlds are NOT gaussian, after all - black swans exist because of fat tails and power laws, and power laws are intrinsically much more sensitive to errors and omissions - so sensitive, in fact, that our predictive powers for the things that matter are negligible.
Economists are essentially witch doctors, after all - they successfully predicted 9 out of the last 3 recessions.
And even if more of the world were Gaussian, there are fundamental epistemic limitations to being able to forecast even Gaussian things, due to the innate sensitivity to model error:
“One of the most misunderstood aspects of a Gaussian is its fragility and vulnerability in the estimation of tail events. The odds of a 4 sigma move are twice that of a 4.15 sigma. The odds of a 20 sigma are a trillion times higher than those of a 21 sigma! It means that a small measurement error of the sigma will lead to a massive underestimation of the probability. We can be a trillion times wrong about some events.”
Back to "they can't predict anything actually important," even taking simple economic 'best practices' nets nothing. My general impression is that Washington Consensus economics has been pretty bad for most of the developed world. Typically what happens is you get a bad combination of open markets (so no tariffs to protect nascent industries and to forge export discipline over time) that lock you into being a commodities supplier for the rest of the world, or a source of cheap labor unable to ascend the value chain, and a central bank under the control of politicians with zero impulse control who hit the “do the populist thing” button too much and end up like Venezuela. After all, we’ve been pushing Washington Consensus for many decades, but only 3 non-EU countries have moved from “developing” to “developed” status in the last 40 years - Ireland, Israel, and Korea.
I’ll admit, I’m coming at this from a stance of fundamentally doubting 80%+ of the discipline as practiced, but will readily agree 20% is great. Economics 101 concepts and macroeconomical concepts? Genuinely useful, great heuristics, we would all do well to use those lenses more as we observe the world. Auctions, paying attention to incentives, even behavioral economics? Yeah, genuine value there - all based on 101 concepts, OR based on refuting the main body of economics.
Macroeconomics-as-practiced and econometrics? Not even wrong, literally just wanking, like philosophy but worse, because we actually make decisions based on some of it, and it’s all witchcraft. We might as well be doing haruspicy.
The great majority of economists are employed in places like the Fed and the rest of the government doing haruspicy and pretending they're not idiots with no idea what they're doing. Like if you break down what economists are employed to DO, as actual economists and not some actually noble other profession somebody with an economics degree can go into? It's mostly to predict things they can't predict, and to "soothe the animal spirits" or whatever the hell Greenspan was on about while crashing us into the Great Recession because he didn't actually know what he's doing - which he was at least classy enough to admit after the crash! And yet we continue to pay a bunch of folk to pretend to predict and do things they manifestly cannot predict or do, and it's literally mathematically provable that they can't!
But I’m not ideologically committed to this viewpoint, and I’d welcome having it challenged. What are the valuable things economics gives us beyond macro and 101 concepts?
Let's think about where is our opportunity cost of economics:
First, you say "economics is basically fake", which implies that 80% of economics is useless to gain a correct understanding of the world.
Then let us create a hypothetical scenario where "mainstream" economics doesn't exists. Do we actually get a more correct understanding of the world? Do we actually get to make better choices.
In the first reply, I argue that we wouldn't. In fact, I argue that "macro and 101 concepts", despite being 20% of the discipline, give us 80% of the value, and that is a good thing! It follows Pareto's law, another econ 101 concept.
Next, in the second reply, I argue that the "other stuff" that makes up 80% of economics research is very good, and is getting better.
Finally, in the third reply, I'll tackle your question about what economists *actually do* all day, and is not just getting paid for "hiding our ignorance" and being "constantly wrong."
An Econ journal "paper" has basically the same structure:
1. INTRODUCTION:
Self-explanatory.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
This usually consists on three things
2.a. A basis on existing "Econ 101" (and "Econ 102") concepts - This is the "20%" of econ which you already believe is not "fake", and which we both agree provide 80% of its value.
2.b. A literature review of existing academic consensus on this topic. - This is the other "80%" which you believe is "basically fake".
2.c. A mapping of the concepts to one or many mathematical functions.
3. METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK:
This is where the journal tries to operationalize the mathematical theory into real empirical data.
The usual stuff is the application of statistical methods to a new or existing historical data series; but you can also sometimes have some sort of "experiments" such as a Randomized Control Trial (RCT).
4. RESULTS:
Self-explanatory.
5. DISCUSSION:
This is where the researchers defend the robustness of their methodology, and discuss the implications for the literature and, sometimes, policy makers.
****
*WHICH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ANY GIVEN PAPER?*
Now, we are on Astral Codex Ten and Scott has, in a previous essay, referred to academics as forming some sort of "priesthood".
On the one hand, this is pretty evident in any econ paper, given that the literature review will usually make sure to "stand on the shoulder of giants".
You see, at some time during the past century, new fields of economics would open up: Institution economics, Behavioral economics, Industrial economics, etc... Nowadays, even as the number of "papers" have gone up, it´s no longer usual for any one of them to create a new discipline.
Neither is it usual for them to introduce a revolutionary new conceptual framework for an existing discipline, such as the concept of "rational expectations" introduced on the 60s - 70s.
On the other hand, since the 90´s we have seen a proliferation of new, better methodology, in order to either defend or attack the existing consensus on the basis of how well does it fit the data.
In fact, in any given econ "paper" most of the action is going to be in 3. METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK, as the researcher tries to defend the validity of their data and the robustness of their method, knowing that others will usually focus their attacks *on the methodology*, not their ideas.
For example:
I´ve recently been reading the blog "The Original Sin of Why Nations Fail" (1) where it´s discussed that most economists agree with the basic insights of Institutional Economics (as portrayed in the bestseller "Why Nations Fail"), but kind of reject the specific methodology of the seminal paper for the discipline (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson. (2001). "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation").
***
So, we have established that the "80% of econ" that we want to debate currently consists of an ample literature on several disciplines that mostly build on themselves and have been recently focused more on better empirical methods instead of grand new theories.
Therefore, now the debate is no longer about whether Econ 101 (and 102) are fake, but about whether *the way that 20th century researchers structured the diverging disciplines of economics and their related concepts* is "fake" or not.
***
ECONOMICS: NOT ONE, BUT MANY.
Based on your other comments, you seem to subscribe to the idea that microeconomics is the "good" econ (i.e. the actually scientific one), whereas macroeconomics is the "bad" econ (i.e. the one where "most of the voodoo happens").
This kind of makes sense:
After all, in microeconomics you can potentially have access to an inmense amount of data at the level of individuals, firms, etc...
But with macroeconomics you:
a. Can´t really have access to many more than the 200+ countries that currently exist.
b. Your access to historical data is rather limited.
c. Can´t run an RCT at the country level.
Regardless, I think that this is too simple of an approach because, as I´ve stated before, economics is divided in *many disciplines*.
Take for example the field where I´m most familiar with:
Development economics.
Most of development economics is concerned with macroeconomic ideas (i.e. Whether poor countries are "catching up" or not to rich countries). But there is also a lot of microeconomic ideas (i.e. What is most cost-efficient healthcare intervention), which is also the field that has pioneered what I think is the best and more scientific methodology: RCTs!
Or let us take the field that you seem to me more familiar with:
Financial economics.
This is mostly concerned with microeconomic ideas (i.e. Optimal portfolio allocation), but it does have insights which help orient macroeconomic ideas (i.e. Whether private investment will be crowded out by Big Government expenditure or not), specially in the models which seek "microfoundations".
***
CONCLUSION: SOME ECONOMICS IS BETTER THAN OTHERS.
You know, I actually started this very long comment with the clear thesis that the other 80% of econ is *not* fake, and very prepared to defend my focus - development economics.
But, now I realize that it´s actually *not possible* to say whether 80% of economics as a whole is "fake" or not.
Instead, you need to analyze it sub-field by sub-field to be able to say "This sub-field of economics is kind of fake, even as Basic Econ is right".
I´m convinced that development economics is *not* mostly fake, and if you want to discuss that I´m willing to do it.
But I just don´t know enough about *financial economics* to be able to defend it adequately. That´s not to say that I think it´s fake, instead it´s to say that if your main concern is financial econ, then I´m not its most adequate defender.
What would a world without (mainstream) econ look like?
Thankfully is easy to answer that: If mainstrem economics didn't exist, then another economics "school of thought" would take its place.
What are these "schools of thought"?
If you are an American, then probably your view of econ has been (mercifully) restricted only to mainstream economics. I, for other part, have been unmercifully subjected to ther forms of "heterodox" economics. This label of "heterodox" is actually an umbrella term for such different disciplines as "Austrian economics" or "Marxist economics".
Now, for an American the failure of Marxist economics will be obvious. But make no mistake: The failure of Marxist thought comes directly from a rejection of Econ 101 principles such as those who were provided by the Marginal Revolution (the historical one, not Tyler Cowen).
So, these basic concepts which you belittle as "only macro and 101 concepts" are actually of tremendous importance. If we didn't have them, then politicians would have (an easier time) falling again and again against the same rock: Nationalization, price controls, tariffs, and a million ways of economic mismanagement.
***
It is not a coincidence that the governments of regions such as Latam or Africa have much worst economic mismanagement than western governments. It's obvious that part of the reason is that these regions have a greater propensity towards authoritarianism, which might allow bad policy decisions to last longer than in a democratic government.
But I believe that, in these regions, a bigger share of the technical staff are "economists" who actually secretly believe, like yourself, that econ is mostly fake and as a result adhere to any one of the heterodox schools of thought.
Just look at Trump: In order to find a pro-tariff economists he had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Navarro. If he had been willing to hire a latino migrant, he would have had no shortage of pro-tariff "economists".
***
ADDENDUM: ON MEASURING THE EFFECT SIZES OF A WORLD WITHOUT ECON
I see after writing this reply that Sol Hando has already mention this point, and that you´re "a little skeptical it matters / has much effect size" whether or not a country has an intelligent cabal of economists given the basic ideas some weight.
Of course, we can´t really measure the effect size of this because the most scientifical way of doing it would be conducting an RCT with different countries completely isolated from each other, one with economists and other without economists.
But my point is slightly stronger: Not only what would happen if there weren´t economists, but what would happen if *no one* had made the basic insights of Econ 101 and Econ 102.
After all, without economists and universities continuing to teach this basic insights, they would soon fall into disregard.
So when I talk about the effect size of economics, I´m not talking just about the effect of a couple of very lauded economists putting out an op-ed on The New York Times or whatever. I´m talking about having the knowledge *actually existing* and into the education curriculum of most of the elites (and most of the LLMs).
I´m of course convinced that this effect size is enormous, and without it the leaders of most countries would turn into basically Chavez.
I have a degree in economics (meaning very little tbh) and I basically agree with this take. The *actual* insight of macroeconomics can be boiled down to the relations between inflation, interest rates, GDP growth and fiscal policy.
I think the real function of macroeconomics is providing a rigorous basis for policy that works. It’s too easy for populist leaders to believe that cutting interest rates cuts inflation (https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/19/economy/erdogan-turkey-election-inflation-promise) but with an intelligent cabal of economists, at the very least *definitely bad* ideas have pushback, with some broad gesturing at a lot of well-respected economists, schools of thought, and highly cited papers, that give the more basic ideas weight.
Good work is done in statistic analysis on how rule of law affects economic growth, and things of that nature. Basic macroeconomics took a very long time to arrive at though, so I don’t want to degrade the profession itself, since for all we know there may be economists working on problems now that in a hundred years, are seen as relatively obvious macroeconomic principles.
> with an intelligent cabal of economists, at the very least *definitely bad* ideas have pushback, with some broad gesturing at a lot of well-respected economists, schools of thought, and highly cited papers, that give the more basic ideas weight.
Yeah, a couple of people here in the thread have made this point.
I'm a little skeptical it matters / has much effect size. I mean for one thing, look around you - even the biggest economy in the world is run by absolute morons, and it's not like all the rest of the world is doing all that great, either.
And there's a flipside, that **Mark Roulo** pointed out - a lot of government or institutionally employed economists basically exist to whitewash and give an academic / smart person stamp of approval to whatever idiotic stuff the suits in charge want to do.
I think economics is like nutrition. People bag out nutritionists because they don't know anything, their studies fail to replicate, and their recommendations keep changing. This gives the impression that nutrition science is rubbish and we don't really know anything about human nutrition.
But we do! We know a lot about human nutrition, it's just that most of this knowledge has become so diffused that it seems obvious. Humans can't digest grass. Humans can't digest rocks. We even know a lot of non-obvious things, like a big list of vitamins and minerals that were unknown to the ancients but are now known to any reader of cereal boxes.
Economics is like this; the basics are very sound and useful, and only the bleeding edge is rubbish.
> Economics is like this; the basics are very sound and useful, and only the bleeding edge is rubbish.
Yeah, this is a pretty good analogy.
Maybe I'm just taking for granted how much value there really is in considering incentives and 101 concepts like supply / demand and price discovery and specialization and benefits of trade. Not that everyone wasn't doing all of those things for millions of years of hominin existence, well before any economics books at all, but being able to quantify the degree of effect size for them at the societal level is pretty compelling.
nah, even today, the average joe doesn't believe in supply & demand. They'll say they do if you ask them directly, because that's what they were taught in highschool (because it's the teacher's password). But in practice, everyone seems to believe in Just Prices or some variant of the Labor Theory of Value.
> nah, even today, the average joe doesn't believe in supply & demand.
Sure, but back to the "hominin" point, the average joe today never trades or barters for anything. All of life is so abstracted away into larger systems and epicycles they think grocery stores are how people get food and Amazon is how you get "stuff!"
So yeah, if all you ever do is exist as a kind of occasionally-perambulatory sessile blob who drives to some job you hate every day for money that you then use to buy Big Gulps and useless tchotckes on Amazon, sure you're not going to understand supply and demand. Your entire existence is embedded within systems that make use of average joes, that protect you from ever having to really think about things.
But a hunter gatherer trading things-they-effortfully-created with another tribe member, or somebody in another friendly tribe? They definitely need to understand supply and demand, and price discovery, and the benefits of trade, and things like that!
Also, I can't defend this rigorously. But like, I've been trying to figure out Moldbug's obsession with Freidrich List lately. And it led me down this rabbithole where I find myself agreeing with Karl Marx, of all people.
TLDR "free-trade" was a myth promoted by the British Empire (which is why it's called the "British System") because free-trade is advantageous to economies who are higher on the value-chain. This is a consequence of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, maketh the rules. The British had the gold, so they set the rules. And the rules were: Britain gobbled up all the manufacturing; while the peripheries handled the low-value resource extraction. (it's Comparative Advantage! econ 101, bro.)
This is in contrast to Henry Clay's "American System" which promoted protectionism. As in protection of nascent, domestic industry from the predatory Brits.
Protectionism is still fundamentally a defensive posture. So I don't think it's a one-way ticket to being a superpower like the U.S. or anything. I.e. you still need to have strong underlying fundamentals. (E.g. protectionism will not fix the fact that Africa has no navigable rivers.) But it's probably better on the margin, in appropriate scenarios.
I'm not married to this idea though, so I'm prepared to be wrong. Mostly though, maybe this will give you another perspective on the Washington Consensus, which basically advertises neoliberalism to the periphery.
> I'm not married to this idea though, so I'm prepared to be wrong. Mostly though, maybe this will give you another perspective on the Washington Consensus, which basically advertises neoliberalism to the periphery.
Yeah, TGGP and I had a whole exchange about this upthread, contrasting WC consensus economics and Studwell's success sequence.
In that exchange I pointed out that Vietnam has done pretty well following the Studwell success sequence - massive export focus, "export discipline," trying to ascend the value chain. They just haven't gotten to developed status, and if they do, are on a very slow boat there compared to Korea or Japan or China, and they're having trouble ascending the value chain because a huge percentage of their exports are Chinese companies coming there for cheaper labor, and Chinese companies generally don't process-and-knowledge share like Western companies do.
And I think they're genuinely better off not having followed WC, for basically the reasons you're articulating here.
I also think WC is genuinely a bad choice for a lot of countries, because when a country has the combination of market dominant minorities (which is a plurality of them), WC locks in a dynamic that benefits those MDM in a way that basically won't trickle down, and keeps incentive structures in place in a way that strives to keep labor cheap and the manufacturing value tier low. There's no real incentive to share the wealth, MDM + political buy-in and collusion ensures that taxes and benefits stay low and regulatory barriers remain high. There's basically a gap where entrepreneurs can be small or mid tier but can never break into the large tier due to systemic barriers and entrenched MDM players. WC policies in countries like that (a majority of countries in SE Asia, South and Central America, etc), just tend to entrench that dynamic.
It sounds like you believe that: today, the average joe outsources everything to specialists. But ancient peoples had to do everything themselves. So logically, they *must* have learned about things like supply & demand via first-hand experience.
Now, I don't know what the official stance of "the literature" is. But my impression is that this wasn't really the case? Or at least, I'd be surprised if that were the case. E.g. if you look at the Maori, instead of concepts like "profit" and "ROI", they had "mana" [0]. "mana" means something like "if you give things away, you get a lot of prestige and magic powers".
Or another influence was reading about Kevin Simler's breakdown of status [1][2]. basically, ancient economies ran on status. but status actually came in two types: admiration and dominance.
Recently, i read the Psmith's bookreview [3] of a book about cargocults. the book argued that cargocults were completely logical from the standpoint of their belief system. which was that "if you dance and offer things to the gods, you get rewarded with cargo". The airplanes from the whiteman had lots of cargo, so logically, their gods must have been more generous or something.
To me, none of this gives me the impression that modern concepts like "supply & demand" are intuitive in any way. ("trade is vaguely beneficial" is the only exception I'll make.) Like, the namesake of LessWrong refers to the fact that everyone's minds run on cheap heuristics instead of computing reality with six-sigma precision.
I love the Psmith's and remember that review fondly - however, I think this is sort of a degenerate case, where one side is so vastly overpowered relative to the other economic concepts don't really generalize or apply - after all, the cargo culters really had nothing of value to exchange.
If we think back to the worlds where it was HG's interacting and trading with each other, your status and prestige points I think map back to supply / demand and price discovery again, at least at a certain level of abstraction.
Because what was the primary occasion when a lot of wealth / value was most useful? Bride price! Attracting mates! Reproductive success, the ultima ratio regum of what matters in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness.
And status and prestige have always been more powerful than dominance, roughly 1.5x as powerful in terms of "being attractive to women" in the literature.
I think this shows us that people were still very much considering hours invested and ROI, and they were mostly cashing it in on the most valuable, important thing there is - the highest ROI thing being "fertile women being attracted to you and having your children."
They were arguably doing much sharper economics than our perambulatory blob earning money and buying Big Gulps!
Back to the prestige and dominance point.
Prestige is generally ~1.5x stronger than dominance in terms of "being attractive to women," and men routinely, vastly overestimate how attractive dominance is, thinking it's close to prestige when it's notably weaker.
We can take this back to HG's too. In the Tsimane, the trend continues, and prestige is a positive buff on descendants for the last two quartiles, but dominance only for the last quartile.
> To me, none of this gives me the impression that modern concepts like "supply & demand" are intuitive in any way.
Yeah, I think you can probably argue this. We've obviously been tuned over millions of years for the "status and prestige" game, and don't necessarily need to think about it, it's been baked in even at the less wrong "low resolution heuristics" level.
I still do think that a HG trading a bow and arrow they made for an axe or article of clothing somebody else made (for example), and certainly doing so at a larger aggregate level (like the infamous "one tribe lays things out on one bank of the river, your counterparty tribe lays out another quantity of stuff, and eventually when both sides are acceptable, the trade happens," directly taps into supply and demand and price discovery concepts, and does so in a more direct-at-the-individual-understanding way than our blobs buying stuff on Amazon.
But maybe this is a special case, and the vast majority of HG existence is in an altruistic, egalitarian framework where everyone has been tuned and cultured into sharing and sharing alike for most things, in direct contravention of most economic concepts.
Also maybe-obvious-in-retrospect extensions like applying supply and demand to the value of money, of risk, etc.
Also, my limited understanding of causes of crushes suggest being much more forgiving for the inability of economists to predict them. They won't be able to predict wars or trade wars, neither large enough companies successfully confusing themselves with complicated financial instruments, or similar correlated irrationality. It's much, but not everything
Fama followed Mandelbrot in pointing out distributions were stable rather than Gaussian in his EMH paper many decades ago. Few cared about that because stable distributions work the same as Gaussian ones for so many purposes used in econ.
Taleb is unreliable. On economics, he claims that the mainstream is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller while his approach of betting on black swans works better. Logically this means sellers of insurance should be the sort of company most prone to going bankrupt... but the data indicates otherwise https://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs-black-swan.html
He's also notoriously unreliable on IQ, but that's not what you were talking about.
Most economists weren't trying to predict recessions at all. Per the EMH, we shouldn't expect to be able to predict them in advance, as they would then happen immediately.
The Washington Consensus is blamed by people who argue on behalf of protectionism, but protectionism hasn't worked that well for developing countries that tried it. There have been posts here about Studwell's "How Asia Works" discussing that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how
I wanted to link to a recent blog post criticizing Ha Joon Chang on English history, but can't find it now.
> The Washington Consensus is blamed by people who argue on behalf of protectionism, but protectionism hasn't worked that well for developing countries that tried it. There have been posts here about Studwell's "How Asia Works" discussing that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how
Yeah, I actually wrote an "against Studwell" post too.
But you can be both against Studwell and against Washington Consensus! I actually think there probably ISN'T a well-defined rules-based road to full economic growth and prosperity for a good 2/3 of the world, and this is why neither Studwell nor WC economics can get anyone there.
> Some places may be hampered by bad geography, human capital etc but that doesn't mean they'd be better off deviating from the WC.
I don't know - Vietnam has done pretty well following the Studwell success sequence - massive export focus, "export discipline," trying to ascend the value chain. They just haven't gotten to developed status, and if they do, are on a very slow boat there compared to Korea or Japan or China, and they're having trouble ascending the value chain because a huge percentage of their exports are Chinese companies coming there for cheaper labor, and Chinese companies generally don't process-and-knowledge share like Western companies do.
I think they're genuinely better off not having followed WC.
I also think WC is genuinely a bad choice for a lot of countries, because when a country has the combination of market dominant minorities (which is a plurality of them), WC locks in a dynamic that benefits those MDM in a way that basically won't trickle down, and keeps incentive structures in place in a way that strives to keep labor cheap and the manufacturing value tier low. There's no real incentive to share the wealth, MDM + political buy-in and collusion ensures that taxes and benefits stay low and regulatory barriers remain high. There's basically a gap where entrepreneurs can be small or mid tier but can never break into the large tier due to systemic barriers and entrenched MDM players. WC policies in countries like that (a majority of countries in SE Asia, South and Central America, etc), just tend to entrench that dynamic.
Of course the biggest factor for the great majority of countries (US very much included) is quality of leadership. When your institutions suck and your leadership sucks and everyone from the top down is maximally grabby and short term in thinking, you're never going to get anything done, because those things destroy all capabilities for longer term planning and growth.
You acknowledge that Vietnam is doing worse than other east asian countries, and the reviews of Studwell's book pointed out that the relative success of those countries doesn't line up with how much Studwell approves of their policies.
As Garett Jones points out, market-dominant minorities like the overseas Chinese make their host country's economies better off. Vietnam wound up worse off for so many of them leaving as "boat people", just as Uganda wound up worse off after expelling Indians. Economic growth really does "trickle down", which is why even the poor want to be near the rich driving growth. Labor isn't cheap because some minority decides it should be, labor is cheap because there's an abundance of it in low-productivity sectors like agriculture and informal businesses. Who is going to build factories to soak up labor and increase productivity? Capitalists, themselves frequently MDMs.
India has lots of small businesses in the informal sector. This isn't because MDMs rigged the game to protect a small number of big companies. It's because the Indian regulatory system has long been hostile to big business (Nehru was sympathetic to socialism, and Gandhi liked small-scale traditionalist agrarianism) and has lots of regulations that come into place beyond a certain number of employees. People rely on their relatives rather than searching for the best employees, because they know they can't rely on the legal system for disputes. Really, if a country started importing lots of overseas Chinese, then it would no longer be a matter of a small number of them that could constitute a monopoly/oligopoly, and instead a large number competing with each other.
Yes, I agree the Studwell "success sequence" largely isn't working for Vietnam in the sense of replicating Korea or Japan or even China's path, but I also think it's actually true they're probably better off having tried vs going for WC policies, because they do have a better shot under this regime, it's just harder / slower than their E Asian compatriots. I also agree the Studwell "success sequence" is probably fake overall!
And I think we mostly agree on MDM's - MDM's are good! They're literally job creators! The countries that have expropriated them always nuke their economies for ten years and then have to beg for them to come back!
The point where MDM's turn bad is this one:
If you look at all the billionaire families in Asia, they get there largely via connections and built-in monopolies backed by regulation / government contracts in things like electricity, commodities, telecom, casinos, and so on. And then these same families build other businesses, the "conglomerate" model is huge out there - think Vingroup in Vietnam, or SMDC in Philippines, or CP group in Thailand. So at the core of each one is a giant money printer monopoly built on the backs of the tens of millions of people in the country, where they provide genuinely worse services for genuinely higher prices than in the West, and then they use that money printer to diversify into a bunch of other stuff. But because they're plugged in at the very top, nobody else can really enter the spaces they enter, at the scale they enter - they lock out genuine competition at the large scale. And this is a big drag on growth and efficiency for all these countries.
Why don't the other connected billionaire families compete with each other? Because that social sphere is small and connected across all of Asia, and they're smart enough that they basically collude and carve up the markets such that they don't have to.
Studwell actually wrote a book that touches on this one too, that's in my own opinion, better than How Asia Works - it's called Asian Godfathers. Amy Chua, of "how to tiger-mother your kids into Harvard" fame, also wrote one, and she herself is from an MDM family from the Philippines. Hers is called World on Fire.
We may not know how to cause growth reliably, but we certainly know a lot of things that will reliably reduce growth, and people keep doing them anyway.
I might actually go further than this; I think a lot of economics 101 concepts are based on fundamentally false premises. Not that literally everything within the field of economics is false, but some very basic and foundational notions in economics are wrong, and reasoning based on those is necessarily unsound.
For one, basic economic notions about preferences are rooted in false assumptions. Liking and wanting things are separate and highly decoupled processes in humans. It's possible to want very badly to do or have something, to know that you do not like that thing, and will not be happy doing or having it, and still be unable to resist doing or getting it anyway. The whole notion that people will systematically become happier or better off by pursuing preferences which are defined in terms of things that they want, rather than things that they like, is fundamentally faulty.
For another, many, perhaps most people, do not act like rational agents pursuing the best satisfaction of their wants with limited resources anyway. For these people, if they have limited resources, and access to a wide range of things that have value to them, they will spend their resources on things that they think are valuable to them (possibly above a certain threshold) in whatever order they notice first, until they no longer have resources available to spend, at which point they're forced to stop.
These two factors mean that basic economic assumptions about value- whether economic activities generate it, how much they can be inferred to produce, etc., are also faulty. Some economic activities clearly do leave people better off, but we cannot infer from the fact that the market reinforces an activity that it leaves people better off on net.
Personally, I am very, very bad at avoiding drawn-out online debates, and I don't enjoy having them (I want them, but don't like them.) So, I usually avoid discussing this online, because it seems like a risk factor for having extremely drawn-out debates which I would dislike very much, but wouldn't be able to resist if the temptation were right in front of me. But I'm prepared to discuss the evidence that leads me to these conclusions, and if you'd like to collaborate on putting together a larger case against economics which I wouldn't have to be responsible for presenting publicly and dealing with the reception of, I'd be willing to participate.
> For these people, if they have limited resources, and access to a wide range of things that have value to them, they will spend their resources on things that they think are valuable to them (possibly above a certain threshold) in whatever order they notice first, until they no longer have resources available to spend, at which point they're forced to stop.
Yeah, I'd be pretty interested in the evidence around this one.
> Some economic activities clearly do leave people better off, but we cannot infer from the fact that the market reinforces an activity that it leaves people better off on net.
I think even economists would agree here? Isn't this what most of behavioral economics is about?
> But I'm prepared to discuss the evidence that leads me to these conclusions, and if you'd like to collaborate on putting together a larger case against economics which I wouldn't have to be responsible for presenting publicly and dealing with the reception of, I'd be willing to participate.
Sure, I have a decent number of subcribers and would be happy to write a post about this if we get it to an interesting place.
>Yeah, I'd be pretty interested in the evidence around this one.
So, the thing that coalesced this impression for me was a reddit thread a couple years or so back on r/changemyview, where the OP offered the position, for other commenters to argue against, that a purchase can be not worth the money, even if you enjoyed it, if you could have spent the same money on something else that you would have liked even more.
Under standard economic models, this is too obvious to be worth having a conversation about. This is the basic preference-optimizing operation people are assumed to be doing all the time. If your money can make Purchase A, which buys you 100 utils, or Purchase B, which buys 200 utils, you should always choose B over A, and doing otherwise is a waste.
But this discussion was full of people who argued that this was insane, that nobody would possibly live like that, that the very idea was absurd. And since this was a debate thread, where the whole point was to engage with people to try to understand and potentially change their views, there were a lot of people involved representing the standard economic position, who pushed back on this and probed the people who disagreed to expand on what they meant and explain how they operated in real life, and expected other people to. And so, the discussion was full of people who explained that when they get their paychecks, they'll make whatever purchases seem like a good idea to them, as they notice them, up until they run out of disposable funds, and they can't buy anything again until they get their next paycheck. They explicitly affirmed that they do not hold onto their money and wait until they take stock of the different options available to them, prioritize them, and spend their money on the things they want more. They often find themselves thinking it'd be nice if they'd hung onto their money so they could buy some other thing instead, although they do not necessarily spend their money on that thing next time they get paid, because something else may grab their attention instead. The idea of prioritizing so that you maximize the value to you of each purchase was so alien to many of them that many refused to believe that anyone does anything like that, even as a broad abstraction. Most of them insisted to the ends of their respective threads that if you enjoyed something you spent money on, then it cannot ever be considered a waste, no matter how much more you could have enjoyed something else you could have spent the same money on.
Some people, I think can be modeled as basically behaving according to economic models of value maximization (at at least want-maximization. Liking and wanting being separate processes, I don't think it's good modeling to collapse these into a single notion of "preference maximization.") But if a significant portion of people are not behaving in a way that corresponds to that model, then the model can't be used to accurately describe the behavior of the population as a whole.
>I think even economists would agree here? Isn't this what most of behavioral economics is about?
At least sort of? Behavioral economics recognizes that people don't necessarily make rational decisions according to classical economic models, but the behavioral economics I've read has largely framed this in terms of exploring biases that impede people from behaving optimally according to classical economic models. I don't think this goes far enough, I don't think classical economic models even describe a broad level approximation of behavior that people deviate from in certain key respects.
To use an analogy, it's kind of like classical economics says that people navigate by compasses that seek magnetic North, allowing them to find their directions by heading, while behavioral economists point out that there are things that can bias people's ability to navigate, like power cables distorting local magnetic fields, or a difference in location between magnetic North and geographical North. By contrast, I'd argue that most people don't even have compasses in the first place.
> Some people, I think can be modeled as basically behaving according to economic models of value maximization (at at least want-maximization. Liking and wanting being separate processes, I don't think it's good modeling to collapse these into a single notion of "preference maximization.") But if a significant portion of people are not behaving in a way that corresponds to that model, then the model can't be used to accurately describe the behavior of the population as a whole.
Your conclusion is false. The model can accurately describe the behavior of the population as a whole even if it is inaccurate as to every individual within the population. The operation of the system is enough to ensure that the results closely match what would have happened if people wanted nothing more than to follow the model.
Consider how we say "water seeks its own level" even though water molecules do nothing of the kind.
I don't think that's actually true in this case. I mean, yes, we can model water with a model that doesn't apply to individual water molecules, but it isn't meant to apply to individual water molecules. Economic models actually are meant to be able to model the behaviors of small numbers of individuals in ways that I think that they simply fail to do. You can make a model which is perfectly valid as an extrapolation of its premises, and still have it fail to correspond to reality.
Liking and wanting being separate and highly decoupled processes, so that it's entirely possible for people to vigorously pursue things that will not make them happy, even things that they know will not make them happy, and people en masse not prioritizing their expenditure of resources to maximize expected value, are not deviations from standard economic models that we should expect their predictive power to survive, in much the way that you would not expect the ideal gas law to correctly model the behavior of a crystalline solid.
Reading through it I didn't really see anyone directly advocating for the pattern you suggested, although many pointed in their direction in a theoretical sense.
And even if we take it as given, how broken is that approach, really?
It's basically a "limited information" approach, right? Just timewise rather than research-wise. It's "of the limited options in front of you right now, which do you choose" instead of "in a time-independent array of options, which do you choose."
And unless people were going broke doing this, it seems fine? Like as long as they're covering their bills and obligations, why is it any worse? Value is subjective, revealed preference is a good heuristic, etc? Those people probably intrinisically value NOT "doing the research" and not thinking about tradeoffs and not thinking ahead all the time to the extent the premium they're paying in foregone efficiency is demonstrably worth avoiding those things.
> behavioral economists point out that there are things that can bias people's ability to navigate, like power cables distorting local magnetic fields, or a difference in location between magnetic North and geographical North. By contrast, I'd argue that most people don't even have compasses in the first place.
Okay, but wouldn't "not having compasses" be not meeting your obligations? Like you see a shiny and buy that and you can't cover rent?
If not, isn't it just a matter of degree and not kind? They value not being really analytical and long-term in their thinking, and happily pay the premium.
People pay for convenience all the time - paying somebody to do your laundry, watch your kids, clean your house, pay for takeout and restaurant food every meal - arguably all dumb moves from a maximal efficiency standpoint for a lot of people. Yet they're happy to pay, because that's their revealed preference, and they don't necessarily value "efficiency" in that way.
I guess I don't understand why this is a damning indictment of "homo economicus," because it just seems like it's a different set of preferences, or a different set of acting under limited information.
So, I'm honestly not sure, the topic seems similar to what I remember, but the comments don't elicit a sense of recognition, and I can't locate a number of specific exchanges that I distinctly remember following. But, memory being as fallible as it is, I can't say for certain that this isn't the right thread either.
>Reading through it I didn't really see anyone directly advocating for the pattern you suggested, although many pointed in their direction in a theoretical sense.
>And even if we take it as given, how broken is that approach, really?
>It's basically a "limited information" approach, right? Just timewise rather than research-wise. It's "of the limited options in front of you right now, which do you choose" instead of "in a time-independent array of options, which do you choose."
>And unless people were going broke doing this, it seems fine? Like as long as they're covering their bills and obligations, why is it any worse? Value is subjective, revealed preference is a good heuristic, etc? Those people probably intrinisically value NOT "doing the research" and not thinking about tradeoffs and not thinking ahead all the time to the extent the premium they're paying in foregone efficiency is demonstrably worth avoiding those things.
I'm not saying it's necessarily worse, but I am saying it's a significant deviation from how economists usually model people's behavior. Although, I absolutely have known people who go broke from this behavior, who need to "borrow" from friends and family (read, continually beg for money which they will never be able to pay back) in order to pay for necessities like rent and groceries.
But I think this is a significant departure from standard economic modeling, even if that were not the case. Because it's not just "of this limited array of things in front of me, which do I prefer?" In many cases, it's "Do I want to get this one thing in front of me, not considering any alternative uses of my money at all?"
While the reddit thread (whether that was the correct one or not) was the impetus that coalesced that understanding for me, I have a lot of people in my social circles who live paycheck to paycheck, whose behavior I've had the chance to observe over time, and since reading that thread, I've taken the time to question a number of them about their choices and reasoning, and I think it's reasonable to say that for a least a substantial number of people, they're genuinely just not thinking about tradeoffs when they make these purchases.
>Okay, but wouldn't "not having compasses" be not meeting your obligations? Like you see a shiny and buy that and you can't cover rent?
>If not, isn't it just a matter of degree and not kind? They value not being really analytical and long-term in their thinking, and happily pay the premium.
>People pay for convenience all the time - paying somebody to do your laundry, watch your kids, clean your house, pay for takeout and restaurant food every meal - arguably all dumb moves from a maximal efficiency standpoint for a lot of people. Yet they're happy to pay, because that's their revealed preference, and they don't necessarily value "efficiency" in that way.
>I guess I don't understand why this is a damning indictment of "homo economicus," because it just seems like it's a different set of preferences, or a different set of acting under limited information.
In a sense, I think this can be considered as a particular set of preferences, and I've described it as such before. But, I think it's a set of preferences that breaks some pretty fundamental assumptions of economic models.
I think that the first point I mentioned, that liking and wanting are separate processes, is extremely important here (of the two, I'd regard it as significantly more important than the second.) I'm more introspective about my purchases than most people I know, and I can attest that I've spent money on a repeat basis on things that absolutely made me less happy in comparison to buying nothing at all and just deleting the money from my bank account. I don't think I'm an outlier in this, I've talked to plenty of other people who acknowledged doing the same when I invited them to consider the question. The value people receive from purchases spans a wide range which includes negative values, and people do not reliably order their purchases according to what will give them more satisfaction, businesses systematically take advantage of this in their own pursuit of profit.
I think that phenomena like the "vibecession," which cash out as "people think things are doing badly even though economic indicators are actually good," are best understood at least in part in light of the context that economic indicators are not actually well aligned with things that make people feel like their lives are doing well in the first place.
Still gathering my thoughts on the rest of it, but this one really struck me:
> I'm more introspective about my purchases than most people I know, and I can attest that I've spent money on a repeat basis on things that absolutely made me less happy in comparison to buying nothing at all and just deleting the money from my bank account. I don't think I'm an outlier in this
I'm genuinely surprised! I don't think I ever do this, but maybe I'm just not introspective enough?
Like is this a "I buy junk food / ice cream and then end up eating it all and regret it" type thing? That's the only case I can really come up with that might be common enough to happen in a broad cross section of people.
Oh, maybe gambling too?
Like what are the cases where you've seen this to be true in yourself and others?
> I suspect that you have a negative view of econometrics because Taleb likes to make himself sound smart by painting everyone else as morons.
Yeah, he definitely does, but I worked in finance for a decade, and a lot of it comes from that, too.
> What do you think about the work being done by Chetty on social mobility? I feel like most people aware of economics have probably heard of his stuff.
Thanks for the pointer. I would put this in the "not even wrong" category, because Greg Clark has looked at the higher level and shown really comprehensively that measuring "income" as a social mobility endpoint is basically measuring noise, and all the happy "hooray, we have .15 social persistence" endpoints in Sweden and Denmark and whatever are fake.
If instead you look at a conjoined endpoint containing more status markers (educational attainment, income, wealth, occupational prestige), you see that basically every country in the world has ~.75 persistence rates, and has for essentially all of observable history. This includes going across educational regimes from "only rich sons get educated in expensive private schools" to everyone gets state funded education through Phd" too, so education doesn't move social mobility at all.
The impossibly large gains Chetty points to are fake, too. $400k more lifetime earnings for moving from 25th to 75th percentile neighborhoods? Roll to disbelieve.
It's not an observed effect, it's an extrapolation, aka they made it up. They're literally saying okay, now pretend the kids that move are now EXACTLY like the kids in the better neighborhoods and applying their distribution signal SD's to the poor kids. But Clark's point is that you CANNOT assume that! The blank slate is affirmatively NOT true! The reason social persistence is so high is because the gene + culture package in high and low attainment families are incredibly strong and persistent.
In real life (aka observed results), some portion of the poor kids moved a third of the way up to the richer kids' delta's medians, and some of the poor kids actually did WORSE after moving. And they haven't really been tracked enough to observe fade out effects. But I would bet very strongly they are not going to attain $400k more lifetime earnings, even in the "net positive" subset of kids, and certainly not across the aggregate including "winners" and losers." I'm betting on 0-$50k (66%), maybe 0-$100k (33%) lifetime effects.
There's a fun paper here that looks at "birth length" which cannot be affected by neighborhood and sees similar effects.
"The neighborhood exposure effects estimated in prominent recent studies only reflect the correlational estimates of place effects and not causal effects."
"This paper also conducts a placebo test to examine the credibility of the estimation strategies for identifying long-run neighborhood effects in the extant literature. I exploit the dataon birth characteristics such as birth length, realized at age zero, i.e., before neighborhood exposure comes into play. The destination area cannot directly impact children’s birth characteristics for the sample of children whose families move across neighborhoods during childhood. One would expect to obtain statistically insignificant estimates from the methodology of Chetty and Hendren (2018a) when investigating the relationship between characteristics realized at birth and later moves across neighborhoods during childhood. Nonetheless, the estimated relationship is similar to that of Chetty and Hendren (2018a) and Chetty et al. (2020). The similarities between the placebo estimates and the exposure effect estimates suggest that the estimates of exposure effects on adulthood outcomes in the literature pick up the sorting of heterogeneous families across areas rather than neighborhood causal impacts. Moreover, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that the placebo estimates closely imitate the disparities in the exposure estimates across specifications and subgroups, further challenging the validity of the recent approaches to measuring causal effects of place."
> If you're listening to Greg Clark over Chetty, you're not seriously interested in empirics and falsifiability. Chetty is pretty much the gold standard for data-driven social research, and Clark is somewhere between "guy with interesting contrarian ideas" and "crank".
Thanks - do you have any debunking of Son Also Rises you can point me to?
Because it's not just a sui generis story, it plugs into a lot of outside stuff, like education sucking and not moving the needle in any country, parents provably overinvesting in their kids with zero buff to actual outcomes, and literally what you see with your Mark 1 eyeball in terms of persistence. If persistence were really the .15 - .25 some places like to pretend, you'd visibly see HUGE moves up and down in children relative to their parents and grandparents just in your immediate monkeysphere - nobody does.
And on Chetty, I read that paper myself and it really looked like dogshit to me, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to pass out houses to 25th percentile people for a rounding error buff in half their kids' adult income based on it, but maybe I'm just not well versed in the domain. There's certainly no way that nets positive in terms of expense-to-state vs returns-to-state.
Care to write a few bullet points on why he's the gold standard?
Any outside sources you can point me to? Like sure, he has a kinda impressive h-index, but that really doesn't mean anything, I'm sure we can point to high h-index people in any academic domain. It doesn't mean their ideas are correct or predictive.
Do you have macroeconomics and microeconomics backwards? My understanding is that MICRO-economics is the generally unobjectionable and basically-mathematics one,while MACRO-economics is the horseshit "Eye of Newt, and Wing of Flea, what is next year's GDP" which South Park perfectly depicted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY.
It seems to me that your argument proves too much. Apply it to earthquakes, which definitely have a power law distribution. The standard deviation of the strength of earthquakes is not useful. Predicting earthquakes is nigh impossible. But we should still measure the strength of individual earthquakes. And we do use gaussian methods to do that. The standard error of the measurement of the earthquake is useful, even if the standard deviation of the earthquake is not.
They're literally book-length topics, but here's my best crack at a synopsis:
“Remember this: the Gaussian–bell curve variations face a headwind that makes probabilities drop at a faster and faster rate as you move away from the mean, while “scalables,” or Mandelbrotian variations, do not have such a restriction. That’s pretty much most of what you need to know.*”
“Let us look more closely at the nature of inequality. In the Gaussian framework, inequality decreases as the deviations get larger—caused by the increase in the rate of decrease. Not so with the scalable: inequality stays the same throughout. ”
“Consider this effect. Take a random sample of any two people from the U.S. population who jointly earn $1 million per annum. What is the most likely breakdown of their respective incomes? In Mediocristan, the most likely combination is half a million each. In Extremistan, it would be $50,000 and $950,000.The situation is even more lopsided with book sales.
If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies. For any large total, the breakdown will be more and more asymmetric.Why is this so?
The height problem provides a comparison. If I told you that the total height of two people is fourteen feet, you would identify the most likely breakdown as seven feet each, not two feet and twelve feet; not even eight feet and six feet! Persons taller than eight feet are so rare that such a combination would be impossible.”
“Likewise, Gerd Gigerenzer reports a more serious violation on the part of Harry Markowitz, who started a method called “portfolio selection” and received the same iatrogenic Swedish Riskbank prize (called “Nobel” in economics) for it, like other fragilistas such as Fragilista Merton and Fragilista Stiglitz. I spent part of my adult life calling it charlatanism, as it has no validity outside of academic endorsements and causes blowups (as explained in the Appendix). Well, Doctor Professor Fragilista Markowitz does not use his method for his own portfolio; he has recourse to more sophisticated (and simpler to implement) cabdrivers’ methodologies, closer to the one Mandelbrot and I have proposed.”
“I’ll summarize here and repeat the arguments previously made throughout the book. Measures of uncertainty that are based on the bell curve simply disregard the possibility, and the impact, of sharp jumps or discontinuities and are, therefore, inapplicable in Extremistan. Using them is like focusing on the grass and missing out on the (gigantic) trees.
Although unpredictable large deviations are rare, they cannot be dismissed as outliers because, cumulatively, their impact is so dramatic.The traditional Gaussian way of looking at the world begins by focusing on the ordinary, and then deals with exceptions or so-called outliers as ancillaries.
But there is a second way, which takes the exceptional as a starting point and treats the ordinary as subordinate.I have emphasized that there are two varieties of randomness, qualitatively different, like air and water. One does not care about extremes; the other is severely impacted by them. One does not generate Black Swans; the other does. We cannot use the same techniques to discuss a gas as we would use with a liquid. And if we could, we wouldn’t call the approach “an approximation.” A gas does not “approximate” a liquid.”
Yeah, I've read several books by Taleb, although not by Mandelbrot, and he doesn't say "economics is basically fake." Maybe he says finance is fake.
In your quote he says that the distribution of wealth is not normal, so you could make mistakes by treating it as normal. Does anyone make such mistakes? With out such a concrete complaint, it makes as much sense to apply that paragraph to earthquakes and say that seismology is fake.
Or to take another example, Taleb condemns Pinker's Better Angels. I think what he's saying is that the long-tailed distribution of deaths in wars is much more important than the normal distribution of deaths to murder. Pinker is paying too much attention to deaths from murder. Does that make that work fake? If we traded higher variance deaths from wars for lower average deaths from murder, we made a bad trade. But it wasn't a trade, so we should analyze the components separately. In net, maybe the world has gotten worse and Pinker's conclusion is backwards, but is it useful to summarize that as Pinker's book is fake? Does this example make you confident you know what Taleb is saying about anyone else?
Maybe the condemnation of Stiglitz is the start of a condemnation of all of economics (as opposed to Merton and Markowitz, who do finance, irrelevant to, eg, central bank policy). But I think you just have no idea what economists say, let alone what is Taleb's disagreement with them.
Yeah, finance and banking does, repeatedly, in risk and reserve models, I've seen it myself.
In the broader sense, anytime an economist looks at a "natural experiment" and pretends it's generalizable, it's making a series of assumptions about the underlying distributions and tails that is nearly always wrong, and this is why things like minimum wage, negative income tax, etc have no economic consensus, and why natural experiments and other things like that so rarely contribute anything to our broader sphere of knowledge.
> In net, maybe the world has gotten worse and Pinker's conclusion is backwards, but is it useful to summarize that as Pinker's book is fake?
Yes, if we made policy decisions that neglected the tail risk of war and then slipped into a bigger megadeath than any war up to that point, it would be useful to have considered Pinker's work fake / inapplicable to geopolitics and other domains.
> But I think you just have no idea what economists say, let alone what is Taleb's disagreement with them.
Well, this is why I started this thread - sure, I admit I'm ignorant. What great stuff are economists coming up with that I'm ignorant of? That's the purpose of this thread.
I think I've basically covered all the areas where economics drives value, and admit I have pretty limited knowledge, so I'm looking for those areas I've missed.
Usually I try to opt towards mistake theory rather than conflict theory. But I think a conflict theory take on macro-economics is interesting, at least as a thought experiment. One function of economists is to do things like say "you can't cut spending during a recession. Spending needs to be counter-cyclical." And this promotes the interests of the political classes who want to maintain the flow of cash, especially discretionary spending, flowing through their hands.
Of course, spending is never cut during a boom. At most, it is restrained like during the Clinton years due to partisan conflicts. The result is that government spending is never cut.
Isn't macroeconomics ludicrous trash with that viewpoint? (The haruspicy you complain about is going on in macro, not micro, you know.) However, it should be recalled that a lot of macro decisions are made wrt politics, not economic optimality. For instance, why target a 2% inflation rate? It seemed politically acceptable at the time. Never mind that the targeting tends to fail. (Is this what we call a Schelling point?)
At the other end, I seem to recall that one can measure price elasticity and such, so microeconomics might at least have some empirical foundations. Other things are still at the spherical cow stage. For example, assuming economic man might be better seen as 'best possible outcome' rather than 'everyone is like this'. Yet in some high-value areas, like certain auctions (or finance??) it seems people are moving towards optimal behavior.
Econometrics: trying to measure GDP might be a fool's errand. Notice how often it gets substantially adjusted months after the numbers were released.
> (The haruspicy you complain about is going on in macro, not micro, you know.)
Yeah, sorry, I realize what I said might seem confusing. The 20% I consider good stuff includes macro *concepts* like specialization an trade being good, but you're right, as practiced, most of the voodoo is macro.
I think you've picked out the hardest and, in some sense, some of the least scientific test cases*, and applied it to the whole field. Things like GDP forecasts and the stock market are what the average person might think of when the think about "economics" but, contrary to your claim, I think a significant majority of economists are employed at universities and work in micro (and/or work at private companies, but in either case you just never hear about them).
There's also a major problem where economists say something, get ignored, and then get blamed for failures of policy they advocated against.
I think if you were to look through the bulk of the academic research, rather than the parts that get the most attention from the public and government, you would find a great deal of work that is not related to any of the parts you criticize, and at least potentially valuable.
*As in, cases that are the most difficult to evaluate. For example, if a whole country over decades is a data point, there are inherently few data points, and also many factors involved other than just what economists say (e.g. politics) which are impossible to control for, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to evaluate the field's performance. Or anything involving stocks, for EMH reasons.
edit: oh yeah, and nothing about economics assumes Gaussians. Not sure where that part came from.
> I think if you were to look through the bulk of the academic research, rather than the parts that get the most attention from the public and government, you would find a great deal of work that is not related to any of the parts you criticize, and at least potentially valuable.
Sure, and I've read Tim Harford's books and Freakonomics and Thinking Fast and Slow and things like that, and many of the ideas and practices they talk about seem useful to know. But again, a lot of those are just 'pay attention to incentives' and other 101 concepts, the 20% I already pointed to.
What does the more rigorous academic research get into that isn't covered by those?
> edit: oh yeah, and nothing about economics assumes Gaussians. Not sure where that part came from.
Yeah, this is mostly banking / finance - I was in that industry for a while, and most risk and reserve models use Gaussians, even though it's blown up countless times.
I would consider finance to be at most a highly specific subfield of economics, or a separate field with overlap.
> But again, a lot of those are just 'pay attention to incentives' and other 101 concepts, the 20% I already pointed to.
How are you counting things, such that this part ends up at "20%"? My point was that I think this is actually the bulk of the field, it just receives less attention from non-economists. And there is a lot of work beyond "pay attention to incentives." Especially think Thinking Fast and Slow. If you want a one-sentence high level summary of lessons, then yeah, there's only going to be so many of those before you have to dive into the details.
>*As in, cases that are the most difficult to evaluate. For example, if a whole country over decades is a data point, there are inherently few data points, and also many factors involved other than just what economists say (e.g. politics) which are impossible to control for, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to evaluate the field's performance. Or anything involving stocks, for EMH reasons
That's not saying macroeconomics works, it's saying there's a reason why it d oesnt.
Not analogous, because most people take vaccines, and they mostly work. But most governments take economic advice, and it mostly doesnt -- recessions keep happening.
> But most governments take economic advice, and it mostly doesnt -- recessions keep happening.
I don't think this is true. Or at least, it's not true in sense that would mean economics "not work" in any meaningful way. Governments sometimes take some advice from economists, when it's convenient. They often ignore it. And to simply say "recessions keep happening"--I follow my doctor's advice, but I still keep getting sick! Sometimes there's only so much you can do, and forces outside of your control become relevant.
Looking at an entire government and an entire economy introduces many confounding factors. Consider something narrower, like a central bank. There's a lot of research showing that places with an independent central bank (i.e. one run by economists rather than politicians) have lower and more consistent inflation (e.g. look at Hungary before and after Orban took it over).
Most governments *don't* take economic advise - not the credible economic advice at least. They may take advice from "economists" whose role is to give advice that promotes the interests of people in power.
Consider, for example, all the corporatist policies like subsidizing this or that or spending money on boondoggles, which is not at all what disinterested economists would recommend, but is highly profitable for those will good political connections.
Economics doesn't assume that everything has a Gaussian distribution. Some economists may, even when there is every reason to think it's not appropriate, but there are idiots in every field.
More fundamentally, the basic concepts that you accept are (in more elaborate forms) the core of the discipline. Actually predicting things is not. In fact, in many cases, it's fundamentally impossible
Consider the current rise in the price of silver. What will happen next? Will industrial demand keep pushing it up, even past $1000/oz, say? That depends on how easily substitutes for silver can be found. Economists don't know that. You could ask engineers what their thoughts are, but a crucial point is that they *don't have* thoughts on this - until the price actually rises. Only then is there incentive to find substitutes that are viable at that price, so only then will we find out how easy such substitution is. One can speculate, of course, but there can be no exact science of economic prediction for such things, unless you assume economists are super-intelligent beings operating outside the system.
Now, admitting that many quantitative predictions are not possbile is disappointing, so you see plenty of "economists" pretending otherwise. And plenty who pretend to knowledge for political reasons. In general, "macroeconomics" is not to be trusted, but "microeconomics" is more reliable.
I'm a statistician, by the way, not an economist, but this is the internet...
You can make the defence that economists are the least incompetent people to answer economic questions , relative to everybody else, , but you could make that defence about philosophy and other derided fields as well.
> More fundamentally, the basic concepts that you accept are (in more elaborate forms) the core of the discipline. Actually predicting things is not. In fact, in many cases, it's fundamentally impossible
Okay, then what does the discipline as a whole get us, beyond "pay attention to incentives" and "specialization and trade are good?" We can make up a little placard that says those things, and look at them at appropriate intervals.
Like what are actual economists doing, and why are we paying them to do it?
You would know what they were doing if you were reading econ papers. Marginal Revolution frequently highlights new ones for a large audience of laymen.
> You would know what they were doing if you were reading econ papers. Marginal Revolution frequently highlights new ones for a large audience of laymen.
I read Cowen, Caplan, Hanson, and Nicholas Decker, and have for years (well, not Decker, he's pretty new), it seems like between those it should have pretty good coverage?
Hasn't changed my mind at all, if anything it's increased my convictions on this front.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are not actually doing anything useful. One can certainly argue that all the ones at central banks shouldn't be there, because the central banks shouldn't be there, for instance.
But even though precise predictions are seldom possible, an economist may be able to do better than an uninformed guess. For instance, there may be empirical evidence regarding the price elasticity of demand for, say, tulips. This would be relevant to what the revenue and dead-weight loss would be from imposing a tax on tulip sales - sales might not decline at all, producing a transfer of money to the government without economic inefficiency (very low elasticity), or there might be no tulips sold at all, so the government gets nothing while pointlessly depriving people of the joy of tulips (very high elasticity). Likely somewhere in between, of course. Whatever empirical evidence there is (perhaps from past price fluctuations) isn't going to be definitive - perhaps tastes have or will change - but better than nothing.
I am glad you said at the end that you are not ideologically committed to this view, because your comment reads like it was written by a devotee to Austrian economics, and those are very ideologically committed. So assuming that is not the position you are coming from, I sort of agree with you that a lot of economics cannot be considered a science. However, there is such a thing as experimental economics, which deals with natural as well as designed experiments. The trouble with natural experiments is that they cannot really be performed for macroeconomics.
> However, there is such a thing as experimental economics, which deals with natural as well as designed experiments. The trouble with natural experiments is that they cannot really be performed for macroeconomics.
Could you point to some of the big positive outcomes / knowledge / prediction we've gotten from looking at natural experiments?
I've run across some of these, but the ones I saw seemingly come to really banal conclusions that everybody already suspected was true, and maybe I'm just not noticing the really interesting / impactful ones because they're already in the water supply.
Okay, but I thought minimum wage was still debated and not really settled either way? I agree it seems a pretty decent read on "does minimum wage decrease employment," but to broad applicability, is there actually a consensus among economists that this is broadly true? I thought not.
Before this paper, if you said a higher minimum wage wouldn't decrease employment and could in fact maybe increase employment, people would have called you an idiot, since saying that disagreed with ECON 101 theory and common sense. The methodology in that paper also revolutionized the field, which is why it got a Nobel prize later.
The effect of minimum wage on employment broadly is an open question like you say, but this is what progress looks like. Obviously the answer is going to be some form of "it depends." What it depends on and by how much is what labor economists studying this question try to answer.
Thanks. Fairly interesting reading going over electricity usage differences by pricing regime, work training, negative income tax, and other experiements, and yes, I agree there's some value here in terms of surfacing empirical reactions to things that were under question (ie does putting 5x more hours into helping people get jobs actually end with more jobs and employment, are electricity pricing regimes able to shift consumption, and does negative income tax reduce or incentivize working hours compared to welfare).
But it all seems pretty over-specified and ad-hoc. Sure, for this small town in Sweden, now they have a coefficient on how many incremental counseling hours nets in terms of jobs and employment - but is it generalizable to large towns in Sweden? Is it generalizable outside of Sweden?
And on the expensive negative income tax experiment, everyone went back and forth and basically concluded it was mixed at best - no really clear signals either way.
They themselves point out:
"The early social experiments were voluntary experiments typically designed to measure basic behavioral relationships, or deep structural parameters, which could be used to evaluate an entire spectrum of social policies. Optimists even believed that the parameters could be used to evaluate policies that had not even been conducted.
As Heckman (1992) notes, this was met with deep skepticism along economists and non-economists alike, and ambitions have since been much more modest."
So these natural experiments are fine for the narrow domains they might be applicable to, so probably an argument for any given city above X size to have an economist surfacing these, but not really adding to the broader body of human knowledge.
And then the last section just seems to bear this out. Auctions where economic theory vs practiced diverged by threefold, Hawthorne effects galore, inability to distinguish different hypotheses, and direct mail marketing optimization, which isn't even economics any more, it's just straight analytics / data science.
So I think you've convinced me there's a role for practitioners at the lowest levels, but it still seems to not be generalizable knowledge, and certainly doesn't argue for letting them be in charge of anything actually important, like Fed interest rate decisions.
If you don't want companies and governments to make decisions using economics, what should they use to make financial decisions instead? How should central banks set their interest rates if they're not following some kind of theory? How should governments decide what barriers they want to erect to trade if not using economics?
I'm not in agreement with your idea that economics is basically fake, but I am interested in what the next step would be. If everyone agreed with you that economics is fake, what would you advise replacing it with?
> If you don't want companies and governments to make decisions using economics, what should they use to make financial decisions instead?
Accounting works, and most of those decisions are driven by simple accounting, or pro forma financial projections. When decisions have to be made about the future in a way that touches macro, they should be made by reducing exposure to unpredictable outcomes (ie hedging), and increasing exposure in regimes that are predictable.
> How should central banks set their interest rates if they're not following some kind of theory?
How do they do it TODAY? Basically they kill a goat and look at the entrails. They already don't know what they're doing - maybe they shouldn't even be messing with interest rates, after all it got us to the point 22% of our federal budget is debt service, largely due to Covid stimulus.
> How should governments decide what barriers they want to erect to trade if not using economics?
The same way the only successful countries (Japan, Korea, China) have done so - looking at what worked in the past for other countries and copying them.
"They already don't know what they're doing - maybe they shouldn't even be messing with interest rates, after all it got us to the point 22% of our federal budget is debt service, largely due to Covid stimulus."
Once one gets to public finance one has the problem of conflating what the politicians DO which what the economists SAY. The US got the federal debt that it has today because of congressional votes rather than because of anything the economics profession as a whole advocated.
> Once one gets to public finance one has the problem of conflating what the politicians DO which what the economists SAY. The US got the federal debt that it has today because of congressional votes rather than because of anything the economics profession as a whole advocated.
You're right, and this points to what is probably an empirical major function of employed economists - to whitewash and give the veneer of academic / smart people approval to whatever idiocy the politicians / corporate leadership in charge want to do.
Definitely still not painting the profession in a good light, or pointing to any value they're driving overall though, rather the opposite. Literal haruspicy again.
I'm sure you can find some economists who would say that it's fine, but my impression is that the general consensus among economists is that the levels of government debt we have in the US are quite a serious problem.
It seems to be a case of much of it being unfalsifiable. You can fit almost any theory to the few decades of comprehensive historical data we have and people tend to get defensive when they believe they are obviously right.
I'd love to see the widespread deployment of UVC lamps, but its important to remember that they won't stop everything. Covid-19, Measles, and H5 flu might primarily spread via the aerosols but most respiratory infections do most of their spreading via droplets and/or fomites. So using brass for surfaces that everybody touches can be just as important for stopping communicable disease.
$500 for a room-sized light isn't the only solution to covid19. You can use cleanroom grade air purifiers (like IQAir sells), and those, being physical traps, are known to be safe.
You're also overselling an indoor air pollutant, the way I read it. Yes, the radiation doesn't directly cause damage to people, but ozone is a health hazard in of itself (Just ask Los Angeles).
Totally--air filters should absolutely be first line (especially since they mitigate the concern about indoor air pollution from UV). I just think that's not necessarily feasible at scale to achieve the kind of clean air delivery rates you need to transmission suppression with air filters alone, especially in very large rooms. To get equivalent disinfected air in a space the size of a high school gym, you'd need about 4 100 mW far-UV lamps or >20 CR boxes.
Tbh--we don't really know *what* would be sufficient to prevent such and such % of transmission for almost any pathogen. It's a big uncertainty. Far-UV should be thought of as a tool in the toolbox, not the silver bullet.
I'm usually the one arguing that people are unnecessarily scared of side effects from novel therapeutic modalities, but in this case I feel like there should be two lifespan studies of some furless animal before putting this into general use:
1. With continuous exposure throughout life.
2. With irregular exposure throughout life.
The reason for the second instead of the first only is because it is known that some animals (like mice) build up resistance to long term consistent radiation and live a normal lifespan, but the same dose irregularly will result in a shorter lifespan.
The reason this particular modality is worrisome is specifically because first principals suggests that we should expect to be more damaging than UVB/UVC. The higher the energy of the photon, the more likely it is to cause a molecular change. I understand the idea that the surface of your body has stuff (like collagen proteins) between the outside world and the more critical inner parts (like nuclei, but I would want to see pretty robust data before subjecting myself to high energy particles that are outside of what we would expect to have encountered during evolution.
To be clear, this may be fine, I just feel like someone should do the above 2 model organism studies first.
I wonder to what extent these lamps could be designed to closely replicate sunlight, which has a known safety profile (likely with the most carcinogenic bands cut out). In particular, I think keeping the ratio (UV intensity at any given band) / (Visual brightness) less than that of sunlight should allow people's existing sunlight safety intuitions and instincts to continue to function, without any reduction in germ-fighting ability.
It is a common belief these days that the sun is bad for you, and I suspect it would be harder to convince people that isn't the case than it would be to convince people that far UV (which doesn't make it to the surface of the earth) is safe.
That being said, I think you can buy "sun lamps" today that mimic sunlight wavelengths?
ha, that’s a pretty severe misunderstanding on my end – it hadn’t occurred to me that in their relevant spectral band these things could be way brighter than sunlight.
The skin study is close to what I was hoping for. I still argue that non-chronic needs to be tested, and the study should run for the full lifespan not just "until first deaths". It is directionally promising though!
Fine or not, OP is saying that a known indoor/outdoor air pollutant is safe. Which doesn't make me think he knows much about this technology (I will be reading the research on the website with interest, having already imbibed significant quantities of ozone from a different air purifier).
7 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 6 % on January 19, 2026).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
21 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 20 % on January 19, 2026).
72 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 74 % on January 19, 2026).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Previous update was driven by The Greenland Crisis, so its deescalation (yes, I do think it has been pretty definitely deescalated) means I am getting my prediction where it was before January 19.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
This are exceedingly strange odds and I would be curious of your rational behind them. Particularly this
"72 % on Ukrainian defeat, I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions"
Given that Russian demands are so vast and range from the predictable to the ridicolous.
Currently Russia demands both the remaining area of Donbass, that Ukraine obtains no serious security guarantees and that Ukraine demilitarizes. All this to reach the ultimate Russian goal which is a political or territorial control of Ukraine, now or in the near future.
As of now there is 0 incentive for Ukraine to both cede crucial territory both de facto and legally while also not obtaining any serious security guarantees and remaining disarmed.
Such a scenario would only unfold in the case of a serious and systematic breakdown of the Ukrainian military and the Russian ability to exploit it. Therefore unless you expect that such a scenario has a 72% probability of happening the odds of Russia obtaining it's initial goal or it's currently stated goal are in my opinion far lower then 72%.
Additionally it's a bit odd to put the Ukrainian recognition of the conquered territory as a key Russian objective, it's a strong concession for Ukraine but not a big victory for Russia which given their actions consider treaties and formal recognition almost meaningless. This makes it quite unlikely to be one of the key aspects of any negotiations.
This post also doesn't mention the military situation at all and I would at least like to now if the basis of your judgement is built upon military situation on the field, US political pressure on Ukraine or something else entirely.
People tend to take "Opening Bargaining Positions" as what the Sides actually want. This is a logical fallacy. It is normal for both sides to come in with some
"Red Line" points -- without which, they MUST leave the bargaining table, as politics by other means is the best way for them to obtain what they NEED.
Some "Orange" points -- not "walk away" territory, but demands that you think are more central to you than the other guy (so, if person A and Person B both want C and D, but they want C and D differently -- one wants C more, the other wants D more, you can sit at the bargaining table and both sides can be happy.)
Some "Nice To Have" points that you pretty much intend to give to the other guy, in exchange for concessions from HIS side.
You sit down with all of these points, on both sides, and you start horse-trading. Your game is to get the most points, while making sure that both sides get their RedLine (or the negotiation's off), and while giving the other guy "enough concessions" that the deal isn't "holed below the waterline" (and likely to dissolve later).
Except that Russian demands not only tend to be very maximalist, with at times them being not far off from demanding an uncoditional surrender in practice if not in theory. But also that the Russian red lines as presented by alesziegler directly cross the Ukrainian red lines.
Ukraine has a very practical need of knowing that Russia is not going to renegade on any deal and attempt to come back for more, until that request is sufficiently satisfied there is little incentive to negotiate something like that away on top of additional concessions. It would only make sense if as I said the Ukrainian army was close to a complete collapse but somehow Russia was still willing to negotiate. And I find no signs yet of 72% odds of an Ukrainian army complete collapse.
To summarize my critique
A the victory and defeat conditions for Russia do not represent very well the actual Russian desires and demands
B assuming such maximalist demands stay in place the 72% odds are a prediction of defeat in detail of Ukrainian forces, which does not seem that likely as of now
C There is a lack of motivations behind this number which I would like to know (is his estimate based on Ukr desertion rates, Rus casualty numbers, political pressure ecc)
First, I guess we likely agree that even what I define as Ukrainian defeat is not something which would be good for Russian people (EDIT: I mean it would not be good for most of them; there are exceptions). Whether to call it “Russian victory” is debatable.
Russian desires are outside the scope of my analysis, and their explicit demands are purposefully vague. E.g. perhaps "disarmament" might be interpreted as Ukrainian army having a cap on its peacetime strength at 600 000, as the US proposed (though Putin did not say he would accept it)? Note that Polish military is around 300 000 strong (says Google) and Poland has around the same population as Ukraine.
At this point, unfortunately I do not think that the possibility of Ukrainian collapse in the style of 1918 Germany (I am a WW1 nerd, so my references point comes from there) in 2026 is something that could be completely discounted, though it is certainly not 72 %. Let’s say 10 % in 2026 and more in 2027, conditional on war still continuing.
BUT, it is quite wrong to suppose that collapse actually happening is the only thing that would force Ukraine to accept ceasefire on what would be highly unfavorable terms. Plausible threat of the collapse in the future might be sufficient, as well as the threat of continuing loss of more and more territory. And my base-case scenario is that Ukrainian situation will continue to gradually deteriorate.
Also, note I still give 28 % odds to compromise or Ukrainian victory. It is not my base-case, but it is not nothing.
Shouldn't we though take into account Russian desires and goals to define what victory means? Indeed they are vague but at least some
Yes a Ukrainian collapse as you say is definitely possible, maybe even 15% and if Ukrainian reforms or European aid don't improve increase in 2027.
Personally I find that the odds of the Ukrainians forces improving relative to Russians are contingent on the quality of European aid and Ukrainian manpower reforms.
"Plausible threat of the collapse in the future might be sufficient, as well as the threat of continuing loss of more and more territory."
Here is where I disagree, the terms as you put them are not ones that Ukraine would accept unless they believed a collapse was a near certain thing and if that were the case the Russians who already have little risk in continuing trying (sunk costs) would be even less ready to negotiate.
Abbandoning Donbass a good fortified area for nothing would only guarantee renewed Russian aggression.
In essence the problem is that the terms as you put them postpone but guarantee a Ukrainian defeat, while also being politically impalatable now, the current path doesn't and therefore Ukraine is likely to take that.
I don't believe that Ukraine does have a "very practical need" to ensure Russia is not going to renege on deals (I also don't believe that the Ukraine is very smart about finding ways to encourage this. You either have the bigger military (including NATO, possibly?) or you do an economic deal that ensures that the oligarchs behind Putin will lynch him if he invades again). Given that the EU has already signaled that they intend to renege on any deal that Trump creates (once there's a better behaved American President), I'm going to say that their "security" is already "well protected."
The victory and defeat conditions of Russia Absolutely Do Not represent the actual desires or demands. Good, we agree!
Russia is going to make maximalist demands, even if their red lines are pretty minimal. (Sevastopol, plus water. Since the Ukrainians committed war crimes*, "plus water" now means significant parts of the Ukraine, to ensure that said water can reach the Crimea).
*cutting off water to civilians is not part of warfare. Hence warcrime. Not in the mood to consider whether this is "big bad" or just "normal warcraft."
Ukraine has lost the Russo-Ukrainian war, if its stated goals are taken to be true (returning Crimea to the Ukraine). I state this, not because I believe the goals to be true, but just to remind you that "maximalist demands" are not just a Russian thing, and both sides came up with some pretty extreme ones.
1 "The Russians wanted a much smaller army for Ukraine, and they never resolve this, Putin would later claim this was all a done deal and we agreed, et cetera, et cetera. No, we can see that there was a huge gap between the two parties on the question of demilitarization, for example."
There are also one fact that they don't mention is that while they were negotiating that treaty Russians added a spicy detail to the guarantee section, that Russia could veto the intervention of the other guarantors.
While the security guarantees discussed at Istanbul which Russia was seemingly supporting did not have clear support from western potential guarantors they still could provide some security guarantee to a neutral Ukraine.
This last twist though made them utter rubbish which is among the things that led that agreement to fail after the size of the military. Additionally Russia was if i remember well also offering some territory back in the Donbas (though I should check that again) and some sort of compromise regarding Crimea.
Currently the Russian demands would be
-no security guarantees
-demilitarization
-additional territorial concessions.
Demands that altogether are virtually unacceptable for Ukraine. Current talks about swapping Donbass area for solid security guarantees are already something closer to what an actual lasting peace deal could be, but even assuming such theoretical (and extremly difficult) deal would go it does not seem Russia is interested in negotiations and most likelihood it won't be until continuing the war brings it the chance of a better position.
2 "economic deal that ensures that the oligarchs behind Putin will lynch him if he invades again" If this were the case given the cost of the war and Russian economic conditions his head should be parading through Moscow right now. The oligarchs mostly bend to Putin's will and Putin's will seems a continuation of imperial ambitions. If economic considerations were part of continuing the war the war would have ended years ago.
3 "Given that the EU has already signaled that they intend to renege on any deal that Trump creates"
I am not sure what this means or where you have extrapolated this position. If you mean that if Trump made a deal over EU countries shoulder over an issue that fundamentally touches their own security first then most likely yes. But then it would also not really be anything to renegade from.
Currently the EU still has a lot of security ties with the US, if Europe can get the US to committ, even partially to became a security guarantee with them then they will gladly take that opportunity.
Ukraine relying solely on something like the coalition of the willing and a strong army is a possibility though far from an optimal one. In any case Russia has rejected that possibility too (back at point 2)
4 Absolutely. One could even say that if we take the maximalist positions of both Russia and Ukraine both have lost this war at least 2 years ago. What's currently happening is that Russia is trying to create an agreement that will allow it to try once again and obtain it's maximalist goals in the future and possibly it's minimal goals now. While Ukraine tries to avoid that, to keep it's minimal victory goal and obtain anything more then it can.
5 Completly disagree that Sevastapol is the only red line, if that were the case Istanbul agreement would have been wrapped up in 4 hours and everyone is happy. Russia has not fought for 4 years at an immense cost and repeated it's maximalist goals everywhere from the negotiating table to the pubblic forum, to private interlocutors because it doesn't believe in them. Those red lines might evaporate the moment the cost for keeping them is too high and the possibility of obtaining them low to zero, until that's the case (and currently it's dubious this is the case) expecting successful negotiations is quite optimistic.
Also I feel like it's correct to point out that Ukrainian war crimes, while definitely present are a fraction of Russian war crimes committed from 2014 onwards, doesn't justify either but I feel it's correct to remind this.
6 But Ukraine does not seriously propose this at negotiations and has signaled possibility to work around this, Russia has not.
I do think Ukraine of course has a need to ensure that Russia does not renege on any deal, since EU guarantees you are referring too are very doubtful. Unfortunately is is quite likely that they will have to accept a deal which will not ensure anything of the sort, because alternatives might be even worse.
I also think your definition of warcrimes is, well, debatable, but I am not in the mood to actually debate it, so let's leave it at that.
Yes this. Also I am trying to look at the situation from Ukrainian perspective, and what Ukraine would consider as a victory or defeat. Though it is of course complicated by the fact that "Ukraine" is not a homogenous entity.
What I define as Ukrainian defeat, would be in a sense a Russian victory, but it is not a victory in a sense that it would be, like, good for the wellbeing of Russian people.
Are arctic paratroopers still on high alert? (Sources said their projected deployment was Minneapolis... Incredible, no?) If so, does this amend your thoughts on the deescalation of the Greenland crisis?
I mean, 1) I have no idea, 2) no. I think just like with Liberation Day, Trump did the stupid thing, realized based on the monumental backlash that it is stupid, and backed down.
Trump does do "really stupid things" sometimes, like his discussion of 50year mortgages (which I think several Executive Branch people stormed his office to explain to him in Very Clear English why it was so Dumb).
I wouldn't put tariffs under that heading, because Trump's movement on tariffs both affects a lot of things (including Stock Market), and his movement alone is enough to "get things done." (Also, see my above post about negotiation...)
Well, they can't be equally dumb; 50 years is worse than 30 years.
But they're similarly dumb. The perspective you say you can't think of is that 30 year mortgages are current practice and 50 year mortgages aren't. In a vacuum, both of them are terrible ideas. But it's politically easier to 𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗱 doing something stupid than to 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 doing something stupid.
"with a 30 year mortgage, a homeowner will have paid off 17% of the balance in the first 10 years.
with a 50 year, that plummets to 5%."
This was a genuinely stupid idea, and it is very good to see that Economically Literate People stormed the Oval Office to tell Trump to stop this nonsense
From a finance perspective there is no reason to even require amortization at all. In fact most loans out there don't require any principal repayment at all until the end of the term.
But if slow principal repayment is going to be your metric for how dumb a loan is, then 17% in 10 years is just about as dumb as 5% in 10 years. And if the holder of a 50 year mortgage wants to repay principal at a faster rate, he is free to do so at any time.
Reposting a comment I made on a recent post, like to get some opinions:
"The word "nerd" has lost all comprehensible meaning around here, and probably everywhere. It's just become a massive motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that "nerd" means smart but socially inept, and the bailey is that it refers to possessing about a dozen different very specific qualities that have almost nothing to do with each other and that I'm not sure anyone has even demonstrated are statistically linked, though maybe I missed it. It needs to be totally tabooed, in my opinion. It does nothing but make discourse murkier, rather than clearer, and is a bizarre exception to the general norm of evidence-based and clearly-defined assertions among rationalists."
The most bizarre example I've seen of that is Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. He is LITERALLY a brothel-owning pimp who owes his station to a much higher-born woman being in love with him!
I feel like this statement lacks context? In which comments, in particular, do you feel like the word "nerd" is being used as a motte and baily?
You seem to mean that the word nerd has lost meaning in general (at least in this comment section). I disagree with that. Nerd, like many words, have a fussy meaning. One can come up with central or non-central examples of a nerd, as well as examples of not nerd. That a word has fussy meaning does not mean that it has no meaning.
I also disagree that the a word can be said to be a motte-and-baily in general. A motte-and-baily usually implies some argument is being made, so again I wonder what context you are thinking about?
Imagine if someone tried to claim that animal was a very bad word, simply because it encompasses platypuses and echidna and wrens. Some English words are designed to be "large and expansive" while still having clear borders. The Church Lady isn't a nerd, neither is The Jock (See Freddie deBoer for rants on how "nerds are no longer discriminated against, they've won, stop celebrating"), or The Pretty Girl.
This is a stock archetype, and can be defined "against" other stock archetypes.
I don't think "animal" is a good analogy. There's a lot of different types of animals, but "animal" is also well defined.
"Nerd" is a vague cluster of traits that some people have. Maybe a better analogy would be something like "preppie" or "Valley girl". Do preppie-adjacent people spend as much time obsessing over the question of the exact definition of "preppie" as nerd-adjacent people spend obsessing over trying to define "nerd"?
Probably not, because nerds are highly analytic and preppies aren't.
Valley girl is extremely well defined, as far as archetypes go. Preppie is apparently not, as "prep to college" would (in my mind) generally mean "analytic" (at least somewhat) -- it's a more photogenic "nerd" archetype (in that preppie doesn't generally mean jock, nor slacker, nor artsy).
I think yes because it gets harmlessly absorbed by anything with protein on the outside (eg skin, eyes), but hopefully Misha will see this and give you a firm answer.
However, I'm not sure litterboxes are a good application; I don't think litterbox germs are airborne, I don't know if UV-C can reach/kill non-airborne germs, and I think the biggest litterbox risk (toxoplasma) is a complex parasite and not a virus and so it might be less vulnerable (again, Misha might know more).
I would definitely not use it *in* the litter box. That's a very confined space and I'm not really sure what the benefit would be. I do expect far-UV to be perfectly effective against parasites but...why?
In my experience of massively overdosing my own eye, what happens is mild irritation/itching, not blindness, and if you have it mounted downward facing then you aren't likely to get an overdose anyway because you usually aren't looking straight up, but also...not really the intended use case at all.
*Near* the litter box is fine, my home lamp is mounted near the litterbox. *In* the litter box would just be kind of strange.
Toxoplasmosis concerns, maybe? When the numbers are showing something like half of Americans infected, I could understand somebody wanting to protect themselves.
(It seems like it's more like 10-30% not 50%?) I looked into this when I got pregnant and most toxoplasmosis exposure risk doesn't come from litterboxes but from raw meat. It looks like only outdoor cats are liable to even be actively shedding it and only if they're quite young--once they've been infected and clear the infection, they're immune.
I'm skeptical that this is a serious concern, but I'd say if someone is really worried about that, having a covered litterbox + a lamp that is Near it is more than enough. *In* the literbox creates all sorts of extra difficulties.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting the lamp is the best way to deal with the parasite, just that that might be what they're trying to do. I should've been clearer on that. The obviously correct solution is to not let cats into the house in the first place. Keep them in the barn, eating mice, where they belong. Dogs are better.
That said, I've heard the story that it's from raw meat, but are millions of Americans eating raw contaminated meat? Is Upton Sinclair rolling in his grave? Because every cat owner I know has cats who climb onto the counters with their paws which were just in the litterbox, and then the cat would lick its paws and then its fur, which it then rubbed all over everything, and nobody's washing their hands after touching the cat. It's not like you have to eat kitty litter in order to be exposed to their feces--without some pretty significant cleaning procedures, it's going to end up on every surface.
I just don't buy that all the crazy cat ladies whose symptoms neatly match with those of t. gondii infection are pure coincidence.
Open question here—how does everyone feel about the usage of AI in producing articles on Substack? For instance, to aid in doing research, or maybe even idea generation? Is it disingenuous, or simply more efficient?
I use it constantly as a kind of dumb but useful editor for my Substack posts. Always use it to suggest improvements on what I've written, not write the article for me, and most of the time it changes - screws up in my opinion - the tone of what I've written, though it still makes pretty good suggestions when it comes to vocabulary and fixing some awkward sounding phrases (which I only realize sounded awkward after Grok points it out to me).
If I didn't use, I would definitely: a) Take longer to write. b) Sound more like some cartoonish stereotypical Mexican/Caribbean/South American wannabe writer trying to practice his English one post at a time. Maybe more amusing, but not in a way that would please me.
Points a and b are important enough for me that I would rather risk the occasional (I hope) AI-sounding phrase that might slip trough, rather than stop using it. I do hope to reduce my use of AI for writing over time, but probably increase its use for research, which is the other main use case for me (also thumbnails sometimes).
Hum, my daughter, who teaches high school and community college, says that using AI to generate or polish essays gives each chunk of text the same 'voice'. And it's a very recognizable voice. So once people get sensitized to that 'voice', they will start discounting the content as AI created.
This seems to be true of the visual arts as well. On a Reddit sub devoted to visual art, I posted some images created by an artist (painter, printmaker, and photographer) who digitally manipulates his originals and sells the prints. His work was so flashy, that before I posted his work, I asked ChatGPT if he was using AI to generate the images, but ChatGPT said that although he's been accused of doing so, he's denied using AI. Moreover, his digital manipulations have been generating controversy for three decades now. So, I posted some of his work, and immediately, everyone accused me of posting AI slop. On one level, it was slop, rather like the kitschy work of Maxfield Parrish. It made me wonder if future generations will mistake the works of 20th-century illustrators like Parrish and N.C. Wyeth for AI art?
If it improves the final product I think it's fine, but currently LLMs have quite weak writing skills so they wouldn't be worth using other than for research for most people. I wouldn't claim to be especially good at writing but AI isn't good enough for me to consider just copying and pasting its output. Sometimes I'll ask it to come up with a phrase or paragraph structure.
Yeah writing for me would be silly. But paragraph structures or idea generation could be worthwhile—especially since you could say the product is the blog itself, rather than individual posts
It's ok as a research aid (always need to check it didn't hallucinate though), but not for idea generation, an essay is supposed to be self-expression.
- you are fully responsible for the accuracy of the end product;
- you shouldn't use it to posture as more knowledgeable than you really are.
The second point is a bit fuzzy, but I'm thinking of cases where someone adopts the pose of a well-read expert while actually just summarising what an LLM told them. This already happens with human-written sources to some degree, but in that case it's easily remedied by good citation practices. If you're relying heavily on LLM research, I think you should either check the original sources carefully and cite those, or be (proactively) honest about your true epistemic state.
That sounds almost tautologous, but I think I actually disagree. Blogs can be worth visiting merely because they do a great job of curation. (It's one thing that I *could* have found the same content without the middleman, and another thing whether I would have thought to look for it.)
But also, I wasn't envisaging a copy-paste job. If you knew that, and you were intending for your words to apply quite broadly, then I think you're ruling out too many worthwhile posts. LLMs have access to a huge portion of the world's information, so if your criterion for dismissal is that you could have learned all the facts in the post by asking a chatbot, I think you're dismissing most non-personal writing.
> (It's one thing that I *could* have found the same content without the middleman, and another thing whether I would have thought to look for it.)
Sure, but then your blog is as useful as a bunch of prompts I should be typing into AI.
>LLMs have access to a huge portion of the world's information,
Whether or not they 'have' those facts in the nebulous sense is one thing, whether you get them in your query is another.
One of my favorite podcasts is called 'You're Wrong About'. They look at popular narratives from famous events and topics in the past, and do deep research to show where the media and popular conception got things wrong. They weave compelling narratives out of disparate facts, and tie them into ongoing observations about how the public digests and uses information.
If you used AI to google one of their topics, I am pretty confident that it would mostly tell you the incorrect media narrative/public consensus version, because that is by definition the most common formulation of the topic in its training data. Even if it somehow gave you only all of the obscure true facts and none of the popular falsehoods, I am skeptical that anyone could capture the context and contributing factors in a way that ties it into a larger cultural narrative the way they do - I think you need to directly access raw records in order to notice things like that, instead of having it filtered in a narrative fashion at you.
I think we might not be too far apart, as I do expect reliance on AI to correlate negatively with interestingness. And when I imagine a good AI-assisted blog post, it's less "I had a conversation with an LLM and summarised what it taught me" and more "I used an LLM as a combination of Google replacement + research assistant". If the primary sources are on the internet somewhere, I think something like ChatGPT's deep research mode might to a better job of surfacing them than you expect.
(I do think using the LLM as a plain old conversation partner/tutor could be useful, too, as long as this is done carefully and treated as a first step rather than the main or only step. Some good posts are written by people who started with little knowledge of the topic, and in those cases I think there's nothing inherently wrong with a workflow of asking naive questions -> independently checking the details -> using what you've learned to guide your research.)
That's why we don't use "radiation" anywhere in the copy :)
The good news about far-UV light in childcare settings is that they're short. The recommended Aerolamp installation height is gauged to a 6'4" person. Inverse square law means kids are getting way less than the recommended dose limit.
You can also use the human presence detection feature in the Aerolamp to make sure that doses above the international ICNIRP limits at 222nm aren't exceeded.
(Also re Mark's comment--air filters are great and you should definitely agitate for those first. You might just need kind of a *lot* of air filters to get equivalent pathogen inactivation, and that might get very loud/expensive. Far-UV is useful layer of infection prevention, but it's a layer, not a silver bullet.)
Instead you should try to talk your kids daycare into being less clean and spreading more germs. Low exposure to antigens in childhood leads to auto immune conditions.
"Will try to talk my kids' daycare into an Aerolamp but they're probably not the type that reacts well to the words 'UVC radiation.'"
Why not try to talk your kids' daycare into a HEPA air filter? Seems like you'd get less push back and I don't know why the UV is supposed to be better.
Why is there so much dating advice on Substack and social media, and so little relationship advice (as in advice for having a good relationship, resolving conflicts, "keeping the spark alive", and not getting divorced)?
My first guess was that it's low-status to admit you need relationship advice, but this doesn't make sense - wouldn't it be equally low-status to admit you need dating advice?
If you want to write advice for how to be in a relationship it invites a lot more scrutiny, questions for your wife, and potentially dramatic situations
if you're mostly writing about how to interact with strangers you avoid this
Claude suggests that this "makes sense" because there are far more people actively dating at any given time than there are people in relationships actively looking for help. This seems plausible.
I'm not sure this is true. I did Google searches for "relationship advice" (*) and "dating advice" (**) and got 32 and 34 pages of results respectively. In terms of likes, both sets of results looked similar to me (a few posts with hundreds of likes; most only tens of likes), though Google doesn't show the number of likes for each link, and I'm too lazy to click in every link.
For the same reason there's more people seeking advice how to start a book than how to end one. Fewer people get there. With the demand comes the supply.
(Caveat: I'm going by feel based on my algorithm-curated feed, of course. We're all trying to see out of our snowglobe, darkly.)
It probably has something to do with the average person unable to find a date/long-term relationship being more desperate for solutions and help than the average person in a long-term relationship? As in, not that every relationship is perfect or will last forever, but most people currently deciding to stay in their relationship think it is going pretty well, and do not anticipate it being ended by problems any time soon. Furthermore, when a long-term relationship ends it's usually because at least one of the people want it to for some reason, so by the time they know they have a problem they may not be interested in advice to fix it.
Another big reason may be some version of 'every bad relationship is different, but everyone desperate for a date is the same'. Because a relationship is a specific highly contextual thing between two people, they have a lot of variance and there's not much blanket advice that applies to all relationships, you sort of have to know the person. Whereas everyone of a given orientation trying to find a date is appealing to mostly the same population of potential dates, and dealing with the same apps/spaces, and facing a lot of the same challenges; broad advice is a lot more generally useful, individual context is less important.
Because relationship advice will center around partners' mess ups and its not good for the relationship to do a tell all on your partner's issues. And people are unlikely to write about their own deep faults.
Its ok to discuss a relationship's difficulties after the relationship has ended.
Hmm, maybe a combination of sunk cost fallacy and unwillingness to consider negative hypotheticals on your own personal life? It famously takes a lot for couples to go to a marriage counselor for example, even in our therapy saturated culture, people just really do not want to entertain the thought that they are doing badly.
This actually leads to a second, more cultural consideration: (caveat: in the western civilizations I know), there is an expectation of "fitness at t=0" for relationship, the prince charming effect. If we are having problems in our relationship, it is not because of fixeable things, it is because we wre actually not that compatible to begin with! This comes in tandem with the removal of parental advice on relationships as a legitimate source (we tend to want them not to meddle, and distance / social norms enable that).
Because being good at dating is “cool” so there are lots of people who want to claim to be experts at that. Whereas relationships are good but not “cool”.
Also because relationships are personal and the facts of a relationship are specific and private, whereas dating advice can be generic.
I think it's because dating has a general strategy, it's a numbers game so you try to appeal to as wide a group of people as possible which takes widely applicable strategies. Relationships feel a lot more specific and intimate. Everyone is different and it's easy to believe that nobody would know enough about you and your partner's mutual quirks to help fix your problems.
My guess is that "success" at dating and relationship are correlated enough that a lot of people who need both dating and relationship advice seek out the former because they haven't gotten to the point where they fail enough at the latter to understand it's an issue yet.
Another thing might be that getting to the point where you feel like you have something useful to say about relationships probably takes longer just in terms of a successful relationship in the common understanding of the terms being on the order of years. (Or at least certainly longer than a successful date.)
My guess (but I'm not super confident about this) is that with dating advice, both the advice giver and the advice receiver are on a similar playing field in terms of knowledge of the other person, in that both parties don't know that much. However for relationships, the advice receiver knows *much* more information about their partner than the advice giver does, so it's probably better for the person in the relationship to just come up with something on their own. Obviously there are good general pieces of advice for relationships, but there's probably much more for dating due to the more symmetric nature of the information.
Maybe it's a natural result of a split demand curve? You can often solve relationship problems by talking to the person you're in a relationship with. Dating problems require outside help, since there's no pre-existing relationship to work with. So, more people look to the internet to solve dating problems than relationship ones.
Advice is also split for long-term relationships; you can either recommend that people stick it out, or recommend they break up. Seems like the current cultural zeitgeist is for long-term relationship advisors to advocate for the break up. Which conveniently nudges them back into giving dating advice.
Dating Advice is generally advice for people who want sex but do not want to pay (much) for it*. Expecting fundamental drives like The Male Human Sex Drive to be a very small part of what drives "self-help" is kinda silly.
(The rest of Dating Advice is "how to find someone not just looking for unpaid sex.")
*Sex Workers in a legal brothel will run you upwards of a thousand dollars.
By paying a thousand dollars in a legal brothel you’re paying a massive premium for legality. I have no doubt the same “service” can be obtained far more cheaply in one of the “Asian Bodywork” spas found in local strip (heh) malls.
... you also generally pay a premium for illegality (in that you're now paying the pimp, or protector, or whomever "not judge/not cop" is in charge of making sure you pay your bills and don't do acts that weren't agreed to).
If anything, the price of female prostitution suffers from the perception that it is a low-skill job that anyone can do. Take male prostitution for female customers, and I'm fairly sure you'll find a higher cost (and, perhaps, a more discerning clientele).
I don’t have any data to add, but I too am automatically skeptical of Scott’s claim that relationship advice is universally less common, just because it strikes me as intuitively wrong. Like, back when late night FM talk radio was popular (inspiring sitcoms like “Frasier”) there were shows where callers would ask about dating or relationships, and I don’t remember one or the other type of question being dominant. (I’m sure there are still many such shows; a couple nights’ listening could provide more data to anyone so interested in gathering it.)
Blogging, radio, etc. are the same in that there is a strong incentive to create the kind of content you think will attract an audience. Unsuccessfully trying to start a relationship and unsuccessfully maintaining one are both high-drama situations.
It's not so much who I follow but just what the algorithm puts on my notes feed. But I do follow Anahadra Pandey who analyzes past relationships and why they failed, Cartoons Hate Her talks a lot about modern marriage, division of labor/”emotional labor” etc., Michael Owen is more general men’s self improvement but talks about maintaining attraction in relationships.
As far as notes topics, I get a lot of content from more trad-leaning women about marriage and family dynamics, often through the lens of criticizing modern attitudes. Although I'm not red-pill, you would think I would be the prime market for “how to get women” content, but I feel like I don't see very much of that.
Assuming that is accurate, they strike me as being rather out of step with the general culture around here. Aside from a few trolls, the vast majority of commenters approach discourse in a spirit of candid forthrightness. People generally state their agenda if it isn't clear from the comment itself. I seem to recall from another thread that you said you were using them as a proxy for some other question but did not want to bias the users with the subject matter, is that accurate?
Assuming *that* is accurate, my opinion is that you should knock it off and ask whatever the actual question is, because right now, your question doesn't have a moral quandary attached to its premise, which makes it, well...
...kinda dumb.
Or, if not kinda dumb, then cryptic in a teenage edgelord doing a "research project" way that is out of keeping with that candid, forthright culture I mentioned. I think that's why you're getting jokey responses here, rather than sincere engagement.
The commenters here have not consented to participate in your one-sided thought experiment. I feel the need to gatekeep because gates exist keep bad things out, and the thing you're doing is annoying and rude. You should stop intruding on the attention of the commenters.
Maybe you should make a sock puppet account to answer your cryptic question so you can continue with your point, whatever it is. Or do you need someone to answer a series of uninteresting questions before you get to the interesting ones?
>Leaders of a ruling party commonly asserting that the political minority should not only be outvoted, but should not have a voice in politics.
Nazis, communists, and theocrats should not have a voice in politics. You may have to pragmatically work with them, but the goal should be a society where these ideas are viewed as inherently illegitimate and evil.
As I was reading through this list it occurred to me that this is pretty much the same rhetoric the political right was using during the last years of the Obama administration. With a few of the specific examples changed, this reads as a post from a Tea Party forum in 2016.
Did the right wing conclude that political violence was justified? I think yes, by and large, but they thought it would be pragmatically unwise and so it was better to just keep stockpiling guns for the Revolution that would inevitably come at some later date. It was Trump who relieved that pressure by showing that maybe elections were efficacious after all.
I was reasonably happy with the comment I wrote on that post (note that Beehiiv apparently limits comments to 1000 characters):
"I think the strongest argument—which is also 'intertwined with practicality'—is that it's hard to be sure that you're really in the equilibrium where political violence is justified because nonviolence has failed, and if you're not sure, it's morally safer (i.e., makes you less likely to end up doing something you shouldn't) to err on the side of assuming you're not.
This is particularly important in a highly charged discourse environment, where people don't always differentiate 'we haven't yet reached the point where nonviolence has completely failed' from 'the current trends are fine and there's nothing to worry about'. So if you're worried about being read as saying the latter, you might be overly hesitant to say the former.
A couple writers more eloquent than I have made, not quite this exact point in these exact words, but closely related ones:
All I'm going to say is... have you seen what's been happening in Iran? Whether it's morally justified is irrelevant. You are going to die if you keep doing this. What are you even trying to accomplish? Things are never going to be the same again regardless of what happens.
Why do you say this? The insurrection has continued for four weeks now without being contained. Khamenei is hiding in a bunker somewhere in SE Iran. Defections from the police and military are happening. IRG bases have been burned down. Someone hacked the Iranian TV networks to broadcast Reza Pahlavi's speech before they returned to regular programming. To me, these are signs that the regime is losing its grip on things. Push harder.
30,000 are already dead. More will follow. US intervention will only exacerbate the situation, seeing as there is no reason to believe that they aren't exclusive acting for their own interests. What worth is "freedom" when all you have left are corpses and ash?
That is a price that the people of Iran may be willing to pay for their freedom (assuming the number is correct). Some people are willing to die for causes they believe are greater than themselves. I hope that I would be willing.
Sometimes a government or regime holding on to power or a specific unpopular policy is simply more costly than conceding it. Protestors increase the associated costs by exerting economic and political pressure. It definitely is not worth it for a rational ruler to completely destroy his country and decimate his population to hold on to power or support an unpopular policy.
What worth is "power" when all you have power over is corpses and ash?
When people see no value in a world desecrated by the opposition, then there is no cost too great for the sake of power. That goes both ways, of course. Maybe this does all end in ash, with everyone feeling vindicated as they fade away. More reason to not participate in such nonsense.
30,000 were reported dead by the regime as of January 9, after 11 days of protests. The uprising has been going on 28 days now. At that rate, another ~46,000 should be dead. Either the regime doesn't want to update that number because it's so large, or they're no longer able to. I suspect the latter. And so what if 30,000 have died? Roughly 100,000 died on both sides of the American War of Independence. Was it worth it for the combatants? Obviously, it was.
Which is why if Customs and Immigration come to my town, I'll be out protesting and filming with my camera.
An off-shore colony attempting to break free of its declining colonizers is not remotely comparable to an armed state purging internal civilian opposition. And that's before we get into the difference of military capabilities between then and now...
Regardless, you are free to use your life as you wish, as is everyone else. I simply question what your end goal is here. Even successfully stopping Trump won't return things to normal. The causes of this situation will continue to be present, and you would simply be delaying the inevitable.
I agree that Trump attempting to cancel/rig the midterms is the kind of thing that would justify violence but I think it's still pretty important to ask: violence against whom, specifically? Violence to what end?
IMO, unless you're in a situation where the army refuses to obey Trump's orders, there's very little prospective of violence from anti-Trump forces being decisive; and even then, prior to the moment where he loses control, you'd want to maximize the chances that security forces refuse to follow his orders, in which case violence might be counterproductive: convincing police/national guard/army to stay loyal and put down "violent insurrectionists" or whatever.
If the plan is to like, send mail bombs to administration figures, I'm doubtful that will achieve much; in which case I think the justification declines pretty significantly.
Ken doesn't worry because he'll be sitting on his ass posting on the Internet, not getting the in-person blowback from people who do on the ground organizing.
All that said, I see with most of his points as "if political discussion is off the table, political violence is on the table."
>MO, unless you're in a situation where the army refuses to obey Trump's orders, there's very little prospective of violence from anti-Trump forces being decisive;
How many of your friends and relatives you would have to mow down in the street can be a decisive factor in whether or not the military refuses orders.
Oh sure, but I think if the people in the street are trying to mow you down in return, it'll be a lot easier to say, "I don't agree with his election cancelling, but I do agree with his protestor shooting"--it's not clear that violence accomplishes anything that just being out in the street protesting fails to accomplish.
I'm usually pretty sceptical of the efficacy of protest, but recently I think the anti-ICE protestors have had a real impact, and one that they would not have had if they had been more violent. The killings of Good and Pretti (and the administration's easily-disprovable lies about them) seem to have meaningfully turned the tide of public opinion, to the point that even some Republicans are pushing back and Trump seems to be backing down slightly. If they had been violent protestors killed in actual-self defense, that wouldn't have happened.
Is public opinion actually that relevant here? If congress consents, federal law enforcement consents, and the military consents, that's all that is necessary. If public opinion is against the state, what does that actually accomplish? As you said, they can't fight back because that would simply justify a purge. They can only self-harm so much until they run out of ways to hurt themselves.
This is about a hypothetical where Trump cancelled elections... In that world I think there'd be a lot of pressure on other political actors, even ones beholden to him, to try and force him to back down; I think street protests absolutely could contribute to that pressure, and the comparison to Iran would probably fail in that, in America and unlike in Iran, state security forces would find it very troubling to support the cancelation of elections, and there would be a lot of internal pressure on them to refuse to deploy in circumstances that would involve nakedly overthrowing America's constitutional order.
I think your view is way too cynical: mass protests have caused governments to step down or change policies multiple times in recent years; it's failed a lot too of course, but I think "no path to winning" is not really true, and certainly wouldn't be in a world where Trump was way way way outside the bounds of American constitutionalism, e.g. cancelling elections
He should have no issue if he has the bare minimum excuse for postponing elections, such as the threat of internal violent opposition. Some violence is simply inevitable due to law enforcement instigating it intentionally. That is all the justification necessary. And then, even the peaceful protests will be seen as nothing more than a shield for terrorism and treachery.
I think for any American an old lady advancing towards them waving the stars and stripes is going to code mentally as "their granny" ... or a middle-aged wine mom doing the same will code mentally as "their mom".
With the possible exception of very southern troops being deployed in historically union cities... I don't think location in the US is going to matter much.
People are no longer loyal to the flag of the state of Virginia, or the flag of the state of Kansas. US troops are going to be *extremely* reluctant to fire on any group who is unarmed and carrying the US flag no matter what orders they are given.
> I think for any American an old lady advancing towards them waving the stars and stripes is going to code mentally as "their granny" ...
I think that might be true even if she wasn't American. Regardless, I don't know why you think they would have to shoot the women and elderly. At the very least, they would presumably shoot at some men first, and the rest would scatter. If they start charging at them or draw a gun... well, now they have their justification. Nobody's going to feel bad about killing a wolf in sheep's clothing.
> I don't know why you think they would have to shoot the women and elderly.
Because if you're advancing on armed troops whilst unarmed, you put the old ladies/women up front (and you give them US flags to wave)... or even arrange a womens only march a la the Women's march on Versailles.
>If they start charging at them or draw a gun... well, now they have their justification.
That's why you've got to be unarmed (at least in a US context). Shooting at unarmed protestors is an extremely different thing to "shooting back at a group that is already shooting at me" or "shooting at a group that killed my mate Geoff last week".
If we're envisaging a confrontation a long the lines of "the current admin" vs the current "resistance" then these are likely scenarios.
I think the current Trump administration have a skewed and unrealistic view of how a "federalised troops" vs "home grown protest" would play out.
They're envisaging the troops post "Insurrection Act/Martial Law" acting like the PLA in Tiannamen, of the IRGC in Iran, of at the very least "ICE if ordered to round up some protestors" if they order them to do so .... I just don't think they've got a handle on how that would really go with actual US troops vs actual organised peaceful US resistance. Their mental model of how that plays out is wrong.
Raqobatni sevuvchilar uchun https://pinupuz.app/ saytida muntazam ravishda turnirlar o‘tkazib turiladi. Bu musobaqalarda qatnashib, nafaqat o‘yindan zavq olish, balki katta pul mukofotlarini ham yutib olish mumkin.
Turnirlarda ishtirok etish shartlari odatda oddiy bo‘ladi: shunchaki ma’lum slotlarni o‘ynash va ball to‘plash kerak. Eng faol o‘yinchilar turnir jadvalida yuqori o‘rinlarni egallab, qo‘shimcha sovg‘alarga ega bo‘lishadi.
Bu o‘yin jarayonini yanada qiziqarli qiladi. O‘z omadingizni sinab ko‘rish va boshqa o‘yinchilar bilan kuch sinashish uchun ajoyib imkoniyatni qo‘ldan boy bermang.
ICE claim that a man shattered his skull running into wall triggers tension at a Minnesota hospital
https://www.startribune.com/ice-claim-that-a-man-shattered-his-skull-running-into-wall-triggers-tension-at-a-minnesota-hospital/601574491?utm_source=gift
So not only he injured himself, he also tried to demolish someone's property?
Luckily, the ICE patrol was here to save the day from all that crazy wokeness.
Long live America, the country of freedom, getting greater and greater every day!
To save people a click: The victim has severe skull injuries in both the front and back and left and right sides, making it laughable that he could have been injured that way by deliberately running into a wall. It's almost as subtle as "fell down a flight of stairs onto 10 bullets".
It’s bad here in the TCs.
Oh well in that case it's all good!
Many people here really like puns and wordplay. I compiled a collection of the best triple entendres I could find online (feel free to add to the list!), with explanations. I also included some analysis and my own candidates to add to the canon.
https://linch.substack.com/p/triple-entendre
Fool Moon this weekend. As in "fool me twice..."
Recent discovery to recommend to the board - if you have a spare 90 minutes and a Netflix account, watch the first 3 episodes of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and see if it hooks you.
It's a shockingly good anime about (of all things) people in a 16th-ish century alt-earth trying to prove that the Sun is the center of the universe while dodging inquisitors. Quest for truth in the face of adversity, with a villain who's basically a brilliantly-done Medieval version of Christoph Waltz's character from Inglorious Basterds.
The description reminded me of a videogame where the villain's nefarious plot is to... convince France to sell Louisiana to the United States. And the protagonist is trying to stop it.
I have the opposite recommendation: Avoid Orb! The ending is incredibly stupid and retroactively ruins the whole show. TLDR: Nowak wins, everyone dies and noone accomplishes anything and you're supposed to feel good about it because Copernicus will still happen 100 years later anyway. Also, Rafal comes back to life with absolutely no explanation.
Also, it's not actually set in "16th-ish century alt-earth". That's what the show makes it seem like (even being set in "The Kingdom of P" instead of "Poland"), but then the ending tries to retroactively claim that it was set in *1400* in real life all along (which is why every character dies without accomplishing anything - can't change the timeline!)
That sounds... brilliant, actually. I'm in!
In case anyone else is interested, it's Japanese with subtitles, but not dubbed.
Don't waste your time. Or if you do watch it, skip the last two and a half episodes. It would have been much better if it had ended 2.5 episodes earlier, but then they tacked on an ending that retroactively ruins the entire show.
Oof - interesting! I have to confess I dropped the rec having only hit ep 20, and having a great time with it. I'm definitely going to finish it either way, but curious now to see how the ending will land for me.
I thought you might have not finished it based on your description in the original post, since the ending explicitly sets it in real life 1400 Poland, despite the show initially seeming to be a late 16th century alt history.
In one of Scott's posts relating to AI psychosis, someone (I don't remember if it was a comment or part of the post) linked an article discussing AI psychosis and it detailed how this guy thought he came up with a crazy new math equation, and another situation where some lady was influenced to divorce her husband. Does anyone have the link to that? I'm having trouble finding it through google.
UPDATE: There were actually two articles and I found them both.
Could you please link the articles here?
Obligatory relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/979/
Here they are sir 🫡
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-chabot-severe-delusions
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-marriages-divorces
https://open.spotify.com/track/5Uc07fEUpjjFcLEIleEHkJ?si=AxJNeYQpRQ2eSXUwzmmYbQ
I would love some recommendations of translations of Timaeus and Phaedrus. I also would like one for the Odyssey. I want to do an analysis of this song as it’s one of my favorites, especially the great pointing-out instructions. Also, it’s a great mood creator.
“Niggas call me prophecy, swagging and philosophies
White on white wagon, call that motherfucker Socrates
Rat ass niggas, fighting for a block of cheese
Catch me out in China stunting, yeah, I'm 'bout my guapanese
My shoe game serious, so serious, Wapanese
Niggas say I'm blessed, my bad I forgot to sneeze (Achoo)
There your reasons go, bitch
I got some tissues for your issues tell 'em blow this (bitch)”
For the Odyssey translation, it has to be Robert Fitzgerald's from 1961. I'm deeply partial to "her white arms round him pressed as though forever." (cf. Emily Wilson's "and her white arms would not let go his neck.")
Might be fun to read both. Could be a cool project to do a line by line comparison of all of nobody’s situations. It’s a crash course in reasoning in my opinion, tacit knowledge transfer of how to learn.
Maybe, but then you'd have to suffer through Wilson's dreck.
Question for people with texture sensitivity that is common in mild versions of autism: have you found a way to derive any benefit from this? Like, I dunno, maybe you work with textiles and a heightened awareness of textures is helpful; or maybe you work in surgery, and this translates into slightly better haptic feedback through the tools?
The reason I ask is that I realized that I am simultaneously "a natural speller" (i.e. I pick up correct spelling without devoting conscious effort to it, both in English and in Russian, and iirc was halfway decent at it in French despite not consciously hearing the differences between the different accents you can put on an e). This conferred some obvious advantages in school (rapidly diminishing in real life, in the age of ubiquitous autocorrect), but I think the exact same trait makes me hyper-aware when someone uses the wrong one out of "their/there/they're" or confuses "principal" and "principle". I think this irritation might be categorically similar to finding e.g. clothing tags irritating, so I'm wondering if there are any hidden benefits to the heightened clothing tag awareness.
It is interesting to link physical sensitivity to general perceptual sensitivity of errors (if I understand you correctly).
If it helps, I believe I have a level of sensitivity/hyper-awareness beyond what my peers have. I end up noticing errors a lot (which I learned can be very annoying to constantly point out to others, though some lecturers welcome it). It could be visual such as improperly aligned elements in a graphic, or it could be errors in equations, or misspellings as you mentioned.
It is a bit odd and conflicting at times, since the hyper-awareness can sometimes distract me. But most of the time, I seem to pick up on things that go by unnoticed by most people. And I am generally good at focusing when I want to.
In terms of physical sensitivity, I do feel a bit over-sensitive at times, and experience high levels of pain or discomfort from seemingly minor things, such as small cuts or acne. I am generally good at calming myself down from these situations once I think on it. I used to be able to tell if dollar bills (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s) were counterfeit just by feel, back when I worked in retail as a child laborer (my parents owned a store).
To get the point, I do believe the sensitivity is very handy for me. I work in applied science / engineering. I do a lot of experimental work where tactile feedback is critical, dealing with micro- and nanometer-scale elements. I also notice errors in ideas or equations, which avoids going down the wrong path (i.e., wasting tons of money).
I was today years old when I accidentally discovered that if a Substack user blocks you, it not only hides their comments, but hides *your own comments to them,* while leaving the thread of conversation visible to everyone else.
Talk about an unforeseen consequence of internet safetyism! Now a user can make themselves publicly appear to have dunked so hard as to have rendered their opponent speechless merely by secretly seizing the last word with a block.
That's so dumb.
That's how it works on Twitter too. People will ask you a question and then immediately block you so you can't answer.
My favorite solution (which no website implements, as far as I know, but once I had a plugin that did this) is that comments from "blocked" users remain visible, but the font is gray and smaller size.
This is calming for my brain; when I see the text I go like "oh look, that idiot wrote something again" and now it does not annoy me at all.
If the one exchange matters enough to you, you can make a second account, point out that they blocked you before you could reply, reply to their reply, and then block them so they can't reply.
Pretty sure attempting to get around blocks via sock accounts is against Substack's TOS! This exchange doesn’t matter enough to get banned over.
But also, this mechanism feels like something that required a PSA for any commenters here who may get into disagreements with other commenters.
> unforeseen consequence
I think it's uncharitable to think the people designing this too stupid to see this effect.
Why do you think they want it?
As in, what is my reason for believing it? Because it's easy to change, and they have kept it as is.
As in, what do I believe are THEIR reasons? Most likely, it's just consistency with the behavior of other social media. Possibly a requirement by the app stores of Google and Apple. Maybe even a legal requirement somewhere they wish to operate.
Oh, fair enough, I suppose it's malicious, then!
Kanye West's turn away from Nazism reminds me of a theory I've been working on for a while that modern Americans basically model Nazism not as an actual political ideology which developed in a particular time and place in response to certain conditions, but rather as just being The Dark Side of the Force.
Actual political ideologies have ideals and policy positions, however bad they may be. Nazism, in the American imagination, does not, it's more just a sort of generalised sourceless evil for evil's sake. Like the Dark Side of the Force it is endlessly threatening regardless of how few people actually believe in it. Like the Dark Side of the Force, the fact that nobody claims to believe in it doesn't mean there's not a secret army of loyalists hiding behind the scenes. Like the Dark Side of the Force it's endlessly seductive despite not having anything obvious going for it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
If Nazism were treated like an actual political ideology instead of a magical fantasy villain then some journalist could have asked him "Oh I hear you're a National Socialist now, Mr West, can you please explain your policy on the Sudetenland?" and the facade would have punctured immediately.
> it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
The US doesn't do that, Germany and Austria do.
I think you'll find that the average person's understanding of any political ideology (or form of Government) is pretty cartoonish.
Commentators in the US sometimes use the terms socialist, Nazi, fascist and communist (probably others) in ways that are at least somewhat interchangeable. They're meant to conjure images of Lovecraftian evil rather than educate about an opponents policy positions.
Have you seen the "Are we the baddies" sketch? It may not be a coincidence that the guys with the black uniforms with skulls on them who started the biggest war in history and did many other bad things got metonymized into symbolizing bad things in general.
If you read about actual American Neo-Nazis or watch documentaries about them, they are aware of this! They like it. They think the unique significance of the swastika, Hitler salute, etc. gives them a seriousness and resonance that other varieties of extremists lack.
I adore that sketch.
Part of the joke is that Nazi imagery is intensely villain-coded because post-WW2 English-language media has widespread practices of using Nazi-derived imagery to code the villains as evil and it's been going on for long enough that recent generations look at actual WW2 Nazis and see over-the-top villain coding.
Some examples:
- The "Be Prepared" song from Lion King has a bit where the hyenas are goose-stepping past Scar who is watching from a high ledge, like Hitler watching Stormtroopers at a Nazi Party rally.
- In Star Wars, the Imperial Navy mostly wears uniforms that are either black (like SS uniforms) or greenish grey (like Wehrmacht uniforms). The uniforms also feature jackboots and jodhpurs.
- Tons of media has the villainous legions of doom arrayed in long shots in rigid square formations arranged in a neat grid, in shots directly borrowed from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Off the top of my head, this shows up repeatedly in Star Wars and the LotR movies.
- Lots of bad guys have facial scars that resemble the dueling scars fashionable among the Prussian aristocrats who made up much of the German officer class in WW2.
It's true, even WWI German military imagery is restrospectively tainted, like the Pickelhaube helmets. I think the most extreme and amazing version of this is the Ralph Bakshi movie Wizards, where the bad wizard's secret weapon is literally leftover Nazi propaganda films that blow the minds of the unicorns, elves and assorted pixies opposing his forces.
Mein Kampf's actual policy positions were:
1) Mandatory Gym Class
2) Plant flowers in front of Governmental Buildings.
There's a reason why it's generally considered "the book about hysterical Jewish ranting."
Yes, we do have Nazism as evil as one of the foundational beliefs of Western Society (in this view, Hitler is the Devil).
Decry this at your own risk, as many people do see "explaining hitler" as... ethically problematic, or possibly anti-semitic.
"The nationalization of our masses will succeed only if, together with the positive battle for the soul of our people, its international poisoners are wiped out. The German blood must be purified, and the alien Jew dealt with, or there will be no resurrection of the German nation. The race question is the key to world history and to human civilization."
I think it's a mischaracterization to say that getting Jews out of Germany was just a "nice to have" and not a central part of his mission.
It's not as "coherent" a policy as you might think.
It's White Nationalism, sure, but he's using "alien Jew" as a racial stand-in for communist* (please bear in mind there was fighting in the German streets all through the Weimar Republic, including civilians using homemade tanks).
That said, it absolutely is a mission statement. He just isn't giving concrete proposals.
*This is not to apologize for Hitler! The communists were, by and large, Jews**.
**Yes, this is impolitick to say, but I've read about it in Russian History, and been told by "personal anecdote" about NYC***.
***Communists weren't seen as "evil" until after "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
I've never read Mein Kampf so I can't contradict you on that, but would suggest the NSDAP Party Platform of 1920 as being a more reasonable guide to Nazi political positions at least at that point in time https://www.vaholocaust.org/25-points-of-nsdap/
These range from "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations" to "no Jew can be a member of the race" to "We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts)" to "the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation" to "abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain" to "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations".
The "freedom of religion" is especially funny. But I'm rather a fan of black humor.
You can clearly see the strains of socialism and ethnic nationalism wrapping together.
The point of looking at Mein Kampf is to destroy the idea of Hitler as an especially big man. He was a rather small and petty bureaucrat, and had small and petty policies to put forward (and some "usual scheduled rants" about ethnic nationalism, Jews, etc.).
Perhaps he had slightly more vision than the EU bureaucrats of today, in that they were sold a bill of goods (lies, in other words), and they stubbornly cling to plans that have been made obsolete.
Lebensraum is a prominent policy in Mein Kampf so what are you on about?
Also I’m not sure what this Nazi talk is all about. Our American KKK was killing innocents and preaching white superiority since before Hitler was born. Neo-Nazis should have some ethnic pride.
KKK ideology is alive and well, thriving even. ICE masks are KKK 101.
Nationalism is not a policy. When Israel talks about Greater Judea, they aren't saying "we should spend X tanks to take over Y land."
Brownshirts and Paramilitary are distinguished from police violence by "not operating under the color of the law." This is why brownshirt-behavior is raiding churches...
Okey -dokey. Right wing Chief District Judge in Minnesota: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
That seems obvious on the face. Turns out giving a federal agency more money than the Ukrainian Military Budget means they are a very busy agency.
If you wanted to know, say, how many court orders the Department of Deer Warfare violated, you'd have to know where to FIND the Department of Deer Warfare -- and I'm pretty sure Mr. Chief District Judge doesn't even know it exists. (People don't exactly get court orders to restrain The Goosinator! either).
I'm not getting up on a high horse to defend ICE. Police brutality is police brutality. But let's be clear when we're talking "extrajudicial killings" versus "paramilitary actions." They're pretty different, actually. Last legal case of ethnic cleansing in America was less than 50 years ago, for god's sake! **
**Paramilitary force wiping out black people for being black down California way. If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
> **Paramilitary force wiping out black people for being black down California way. If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
Is that another made-up event like this one? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205964563
If not, post a link to a reliable source.
Do you think that modern neo-Nazis are currently pushing to re-annex the Sudentenland? Honestly?
Absolutely not! My critique applies just as much to the self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. They're not treating Nazism as an actual political ideology either, they're just using it as a stand-in for "scary and evil and racist" because they want to be scary and evil and racist.
The other analogy I was going to make is Satan worship. Nobody actually worships Satan in the sense that they both go through the motions of worshipping Satan and actually honestly believe Satan is a real thing, but there's a small cadre of idiots who like to pretend to be Satan worshippers because they think it makes them cool and scary, and a slightly larger cadre of idiots who think that Satan worshippers are a real problem. Both of these groups have shrunk a lot since the 1980s and are now considered more ridiculous, but the equivalent "Nazi" thing has only grown and the panicky Karens who once worried that some kid out there might be scrawling a pentagram on his exercise book are now worried that he might be scrawling a swastika.
Racism was an actual part of the Nazi platform, though! If someone becomes a neo-Nazi because they hate Jews and black people, they literally believe in something the historical Nazis believed in. That seems very different from your example of Satanists not literally believing in Satan.
I think if you time-warped a historical Nazi into the present day, and gave them a brief run-down of the history of Germany post-WWII, they would not try advocating for Germany to annex the Sudetenland or retake Alsace-Lorraine, for obvious practical reasons. But they would still probably advocate for racist and antisemitic policies to the extent that is possible in the modern political environment.
The neo-Nazi synagogues do not treat Nazism as an actual political ideology. It, however, is not a "standin" for "scary and evil and racist." It's a standin for "Anti Russian Sentiment."
Hitler brand cigarettes are hardly offered because Hitler is seen as scary and evil and racist, either.
Say, how many colors are in a rainbow?
How many colors are in the rainbow flag on your nearest "flies a rainbow flag" church?
Funny thing about Satanists is they like Subverting.
There's an interesting history to the stripes in the Rainbow Flag, for example the original flag included hot pink, but most subsequent copies dropped hot pink due to the cost at the time.
Wikipedia's summary is pretty good.
Hot pink would have been an interesting choice, sure. Wikipedia's summary aptly shows how -nobody else- makes a six color rainbow, and that it took active intervention to -get- a six color rainbow (this wasn't "someone's original brainchild")
I grew up with a six-color rainbow in Paraguay, I think. Certainly I had never heard of the 7-color form until I came to the US.
Oh definitely. someone in here shared Kulak's post about "hyperborean esoteric hitlerism"[0] a while ago, and I feel like that phrase captured the sentiment perfectly. Kulak's a little too spicy for my taste, but I gotta give credit where credit is due: it's a hell of a meme.
You may also be interested in "Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil" [1], in which Lou Keep does a "book" "review" (synopsis actually) of Eric Hoffer's "True Believer" (1951). IIRC the thesis is something like "it's more important for a narrative to have an antagonist (or in Scott's terms, "outgroup") than it is to have a protagonist".
[0] https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/were-all-hitlerists-now
[1] https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/
Well that's not fair. They're not rallying against Jews and Catholics.
I recently asked Claude Code to make a particular change to my code, but it instead did something completely different, and it took me several tries to get it to do what I wanted. Then I later realized that its initial approach was simpler and ended up switching to that anyway.
yesterday I tried claud code for myself for the very first time. It was as good as people said. And it was actually very fun to see it thinking/modifiing/iterating on my little greenfield project. For private softwareproject, I don't think I will be able to go back to programming by hand.
I actually find the opposite: For my personal hobby project, I'm still 95% coding it by hand, because I'm trying to do something specific and technically sophisticated and have high standards and Claude Code isn't reliable enough and can't easily read my mind to understand the vision. At work, I use AI a lot more because I don't know what I'm doing there anyway.
If you want to search history of SSC and ACX via Claude Code firing off super nuanced SQL queries, you can do so at https://exopriors.com/scry. More details: https://manifund.org/projects/agent-first-research-tool-for-navigating-the-intelligence-explosion
Since web-ACX has become close to unusable on my phone, I've finally downloaded the Substack app. I'm finding it kind of terrible? Despite being signed in, it never shows me new posts from ACX when I filter on "paid". I also can't filter on new posts from particular substacks, I have to go to each one's homepage one at a time. My feed can only sort by "recent", dominated by the most prolific blogs, or the impenetrable "priority" sort. Clicking any sort of link bounces me between the browser and app version of that page at random.
Does anyone have methods for making this app usable if you follow more than one blog?
I use email links to come to posts in mobile browser. I have twice tried the app and immediately discovered it is worse, and had to uninstall it, since the phone switches to the app if the app is installed.
Have you tried forcing the desktop version of the webpage? The text reflow might not be great though, but probably fixable with browser extensions.
Ah, Ha, Ha, ha!
No! Not even a little!
I comment on my phone while I wait in line if I don't feel like reading something worthwhile, and even for this use case I find that running the website in firefox is the only way to even get the comments to load before I'm done trying to waste some time.
If anyone has access to the inscrutable minds that run this jank-ass website, reveal your hidden knowledge un to us because what the hell. Why is it less functional than a geocities site, but about as ugly as one?
Why are most leftists against AI? I've seen the standard arguments, but I'm trying to understand what are the prime motivators, rather than the full rhetorical arsenal. I came up with several possible answers, but I'm not satisfied with them:
1. "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
2. "AI will cause many people to lose their jobs"- same answer as above.
3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. It also doesn't strengrhen a leftwing view in any obvious way, so I think this isn't a prime motivator.
4."Chomsky thinks LLMs are junk, and Chomsky is a leftist icon, so leftists take his view on LLMs" - Maybe. But Chomsky also hates postmodernism, so the left can sometimes adipt things that Chomsky hates
5. "Data Centers are bad for the environment" - again, probably an argument after the fact, rather than a prime motivator. Look at the bullshit with the water usage that keeps coming up, no matter how many times Andy Masley tells them to stop.
6. "AI will kill creativity/art, AI is soul less" - maybe they are worried about this? Not obvious why this would be a left-wing position, except that most writers and artists probably tend to be on the left.
So what gives?
"3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. "
While I don't think this is the core of the typical leftist objection, I think you're far to quick to dismiss it. The way you casually say "demonstrably false" suggests to me that you think that LLMs have demonstrated sufficient value to make this open-and-shut.
But this can really only hold up if you take it that the positive side of the balance sheet is the ONLY side (or at least the only side worth considering). Demonstrating X amount of value in a vacuum doesn't prove the technology is net-useful if there's a real possibility that -2X worth of direct harm is being done. Note that I'm not talking about externalities like power or water use, I'm talking about the technology itself being harmful. Plenty of technologies do direct harm, and it needs actual evidence to show that the harms are either nonexistent or plausibly smaller than the benefits.
I think it’s a mistake to try to come up with a specific reason why a group has an opinion. Especially when it’s not even one group - Marxists and social justice types have very different views from each other on lots of things, even though both are considered “left”.
Within the academic world, I think a lot of it is the Emily Bender and Gary Marcus type of opposition, where these are people who have been working for decades on understanding thought and language in a Chomskyan paradigm, and neural nets have been seen as misguided by that paradigm for decades (at least since the Minsky book in the late 60s).
This long opposition then leads them to jump on anything that might discredit the new paradigm. Interestingly, if you look at the original “stochastic parrots” paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) you’ll already see the seeds of most popular critiques. (I think the one section about poorly labeled data is actually valuable, but everything else there misses the point.)
There's a lot to unpack here, but I think the clearest demonstration of your problem is your own point #1.
You've basically nailed the actual left-wing position (which, by the way, approximately the only one leftists as a group can actually agree upon), you just immediately assumed any kind of additional skepticism somehow contradicts it. But there's no contradiction, "[potentially harmful thing] will be used by [evil people]" is in fact, even on its own, a perfectly sound argument against [thing]. But you simply axiomatically disagree that [thing] could possibly be anything other than a wonder, and don't even bother examining why someone would think otherwise. (The preceding sentence is a purely factual description, of your point #3 specifically.)
And, ultimately, that's your issue. "Leftists" disagree with you for the same reason other people disagree with you. You're free to think they're wrong, but framing their disagreement as ideologically motivated won't give you much insight. (In addition to being just a fundamentally repulsive thing to do.)
I'm not dismissive of point #1. It's a solid argument. Other than the deliberately misleading hatchet jobs regarding water usage, or the overconfident dogmatism of Chomsky, Emily Bender, etc., I see some merit in all the arguments I've listed. Point #2 worries me as well. But again, it seems like the revolutionary left of the late 19th and early to mid 20th century managed to hold a pro-technology, anticapitalist agenda, whereas now it seems rarer.
Thing is, you don't even stop to consider that not all technology is equal, and that context matters. It's easy to be pro-technology when technology means engines and automatisation for your factory, and washing-machines and plumbing for your home, things that outright liberate you from toil. It's less easy when the technology is destroying your surroundings. (What happened mid 20th century? Even aside from World War 2? Pollution at scale, industry turning large areas into wastelands, cities suffocating with car fumes. Turns out externalities matter. Of course the left turned away from high modernism, everyone not shielded by wealth and lack of empathy from its results did.) Of course externalities can be mitigated, we're doing that, but you can't expect to be able to merely point at technology and have people support it just because it's technology, everyone has seen what technology does and will reasonably ask what exactly does your technology do first.
So people look at AI and see very little good, and very little promise - and that's what you just can't accept (look at what you consider good arguments - the ones that confirm your priors about it being a groundbreaking transformative technology; it's the fact that someone might not share those priors that eludes you). But fundamentally, that's their reason, everything else is downstream from that and only that. No amount of reframing it as ideological issue will change that. (Chomsky is dogmatic? Like, about speaking the truth? Great, actually.)
I was at a party a week or so ago where I got to discuss AI a little with some of my lefty friends, and the objection they brought up was a #7: intellectual property rights. LLMs basically suck in a huge amount of stuff written by others without their consent.
I was admittedly unprepared for this argument, and the topic quickly changed before I could ask more questions (like whether fair use covered much of it, and so on).
It's not quite like your #1, although it's possible #1 drove them to the IP argument.
Argument for property rights cannot really be called "leftist" (except for US-centric "blue tribe" definitions that include liberals as a central example of "left", but, look, just no), but I'm surprised it caught you off-guard, since it's hardly new or niche. (One of Gary Marcus's favorites, for one, though I guess nobody on the AI-believer side actually reads the guy...)
I was initially in the "meh, fair use" camp, but then people started producing examples of AI output that if done by a human would be considered outright plagiarism. I still think we should apply fair use standard to training, but attempts at monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
I'll submit that the problem here is that you simply understand leftist views on property quite poorly. To be fair, they are many and varied, but the fundamental core is pretty consistent. Leftists view labor as valuable and believe the people who do the labor deserve the benefit of it. The entire notion that "property is theft[1]" is *exactly* because ownership of capital is used (in the leftist view) to siphon away profits from those who actually do the labor. The issue has never been that people own things, it's been that ownership when used to extract rent (and insofar as certain sorts of ownership exist solely to extract rent, the view is they shouldn't exist at all).
The intellectual property argument against LLMs is completely consistent with most leftist positions. A huge fraction of the works being hoovered up and fed into LLM training runs were created by individuals, creating text and art either commercially or out of passion. For somebody who had no hand whatsoever in the creation of that media to appropriate it, grind it into metaphorical paste, and repackage and sell things made out of that paste can be easily and naturally seen to be in-line with the general anti-labor-theft and anti-rent-extraction views that are foundational to the left.
(I would personally argue that there's a little more nuance around machine learning and property rights than your average internet leftist seems aware of. But given how quickly AI companies have run roughshod over the whole area, I don't really believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt, so the nuance ends up being not that instrumentally important.)
[1] "Property" here being used in the very narrow and specific sense meaning "private control of the means of production."
...I think I understand my own ideological position pretty well, thank you. (I have an urge to elaborate, but no time at the moment, so let me just reserve the right to come back here later to explain precisely what the position is and why your argument misses.)
Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking.
"Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking."
This might be worth its own top-level comment in this or a future OT, once you acquire the time to cover it.
There's an essay somewhere in my older bookmarks (I think Posner wrote it) that discussed four regimes for governing IP, and another essay by David Friedman. It'd be interesting to see how your account compares.
> monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
Legally speaking, anything generated entirely by an AI is uncopyrightable. It's possible collage or sufficiently-edited AI-gens are copyrightable (and, obviously, img2img must sometimes be copyrightable since sometimes it's 99% the original work), but they are not, in themselves, copyrightable. Only things made by human beings can be copyrighted, see also those monkey selfies and Zarya of the Dawn.
I suspect that "only human content can be copyrighted" is based on legal precedent that isn't 100% stable - someone out there is probably working on the argument that it doesn't apply when sufficiently complex machines are generating the works in question.
I don't know what those arguments will end up being. Currently, my intuition says content can be copyrighted iff it's generator is an individual capable of agentive action, and LLMs aren't that, so their product can't be copyrighted, as the law currently suggests. But I wouldn't be surprised if some legal scholar produces an argument covering an angle I hadn't thought of.
Well, monkeys are certainly capable of agentic action.
Different definitions, and I can see how I wasn't clear. I can also see how it's an arbitrary definition. The idea here is that monkeys are considered incapable of conscious reasoning (mirror test, blah blah blah), so nothing they do is any more agentive than a plant choosing to flex toward sunlight.
It'd be interesting to see what the actual reasoning was for the monkey selfie case, and whether it would also apply to, say, paintings created by that one elephant I've heard about. Or hypothetically, corvids, chimpanzees, dolphins, etc.
I'm not saying the IP argument is leftist. I'm saying that, among the leftists I had the discussion with, this was their first argument against AI.
I agree it's not a niche argument. It wasn't new to me, either.
Whenever I see AI output in an area I'm well versed in I'm struck by how much garbage it is. When I hear from people with specialties in other areas, they seem to have the same response - it writes garbage code, bad legal arguments, etc. Yet, some people claim to be impressed by AI. What gives?
I believe the answer is Gell-Mann Amnesia for some and quasi-religious delusion for others. Regarding the delusion part, AI has basically become the Rapture of the Nerds for Rationalist crowd.
For yet others, it seems to be a case of them judging AI based on areas they know nothing about. People who don't read fiction often don't see the appeal. They don't understand why anyone would spend hours reading a novel. They can't form an appreciation of the craft or the ideas that go into it. They are often not even enticed by 'low' elements such as suspense. All they see are words on a page. Likewise with visual art. What the hell's The Eye of Silence supposed to be about? It's just random stuff! Anyways, these people will find AI outputs indistinguishable from even mid level human outputs precisely because they have no basis from which to judge any of it.
Outside of spaces enjoyed by Rationalists and other fans of AI, I think some common assessments are that AI has limited functional uses, mainly consists of low quality spam output, and is probably going to result in a huge economic crisis owing to wasted investment.
I work in software, see the utility in my day-to-day life.
Counterpoint: I'm in Aviation. For as long as I can remember, anytime a newsreader speaks about something related to Aviation, every word touching on a technical aspect is Not Even Wrong, including prepositions and articles. This predates LLM-generated text by at least forty years.
AI is not good at producing finished output. It’s good at creating prototypes for someone without the base skill to make one, which can actually be really useful with coding, if you just want a script to do something once and don’t need a final public project. It can do smarter searches of documents than ctrl-f. It has gotten much better at everything over the past few months, as it did in the previous few months, and the previous few months.
I agree. It's really great at generating throw-away code, significantly less useful if you're doing something complex and have high standards. But it will probably continue to improve.
OK, talking about a position that neither of us holds is going to have some limitations but here are some ideas to steelman the argument. Note that many of these issues aren't only of concern to leftists but are maybe especially salient to them?
--AIs represent the ultimate triumph of capital over labor; the working class will be locked out of automated factories and pushed to the margins of society by the technical elite. The more extreme versions of this concern involve automated weapons like autonomous drones being used to keep the poor in line or just wiping them out altogether.
--AI is a powerful tool to disempower the little guy: instead of working for a human boss who can be understood, people such as gig workers basically work for an unknowable algorithm that can't be argued with and which can change the rules at any time.
--AI allows a new inescapable form of centralized surveillance and control. Look at the anxiety around the right-coded Palantir's work for ICE. It's not hard to imagine a more extensive and permanent fusion of big tech and homeland security which would keep an eye on every person in the country.
--AI is already being used in irresponsible and anti-social ways that are impossible to avoid, see for example the deepfake issues with Grok. It doesn't seem terribly likely that these abuses can be reined in or prevented, we're all just going to have to live with them.
--Finally, while AI doesn't use up water like people say, data centers do use massive amounts of energy and compete with other energy consumers for the limited supply. xAI has also been noted to be illegally using large numbers of gas turbines to power its data centers.
You can certainly form counterarguments to all these things, but for the normal person who isn't particularly interested in AI, it creates a continuous stream of bad vibes and bad news stories about AI that make it seem like a bad thing overall. And if you look at the polling about AI, there's a consistent pattern that people think AI may help society in general but is more likely to harm them personally. That's not really a partisan issue, Republicans and Democrats are both worried about AI.
> Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
Kropotkin and Marx were smart and educated people; the average <anything> is not.
I think there things work mostly on association chains. AIs are associated with companies, which are associated with capitalism, therefore bad.
Another part of the answer is that young people follow fashion waves, which keep changing because that's how the young people today separate themselves from their parents, even if the parents belonged to the same political tribe. There was a time when technology was in fashion (Sputnik), today denial of technology and science and progress in general is in fashion (also on the right: see "retvrn").
It's not that most leftists are against AI. Most *people* are against AI. Polling consistently has AI underwater by sizeable majorities. Even relatively benevolent AI like self driving cars. It's possible you either have mostly leftists in your feed, or you're associating the tech right with the right in general (and therefore assuming the left is opposing by proxy)
See: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694685/americans-prioritize-safety-data-security.aspx
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/06/republicans-democrats-now-equally-concerned-about-ai-in-daily-life-but-views-on-regulation-differ/
Are you implying that *all* leftists are against AI, or are you asking what the leftist arguments against AI are?
To add to what others have already written, LLMs can be brought back *after* the means of production are redistributed and AI can be used safely and with everyone's interests in mind. No one's saying you have to ban this technology forever.
It's largely because AI will concentrate power in the hands of a few in a way that nothing else ever could. It's anti-democratic. It has the potential to massively exacerbate all the social ills that leftists are against.
I don't think this is a particularly "leftist" thing. You could replace "corporations" with "woke corporations" and get all the same arguments from right wingers. AI is really unpopular with the average person for various reasons, not all of them based on reality.
5 is important from a leftist perspective. The water argument might be bad but they will consume more energy, and energy production drives climate change. More generally they consume more resources period. You may notice leftist sustainability initiaves all strive to decrease consumption, not make current levels of consumption more sustainable (local and organic food being a great example of unhelpful ideas in this space). A product that clearly consumes more is a big problem for that agenda
I have been able to identify several situations where AI is a useful tool for me:
* it is faster than a web search at answering questions that are simple and instant to verify, like “what is the mac equivalent of this keyboard shortcut”
* gemini meeting notes are now at a point where I just need to correct rather than entirely rewrite
* google lens has helped me navigate shops and cafes in Taiwan that I would not otherwise have attempted
Overall, I am happy with AI to precisely the extent it makes my life better instead of worse. Most interactions, however, are the latter:
* for coding of any complexity in my day job, every time someone convinces me to try an agent again because it really is much better now than last time, I end up having to do the thing myself from scratch after having wasted hours fruitlessly poking the ai’s nose into the shit it excreted in the vain hope it would stop producing more
* businesses I interact with now gate customer service teams behind LLMs, so before I can actually start resolving my situation I first have to waste hours convincing a chatbot the thing I need to do really cannot be done via the self-service website every. bloody. time. It’s even worse when this happens over the telephone and the chatbot tries to guess how what I want to happen fits into the few things it is able to make happen and makes everything more fucked up. Clue: if the thing could be done via the website without human interaction, I would absolutely not be trying to access support.
* my social media feed is now filled with garish cartoony AI-generated videos of ginger cats stealing fish and fat people jumping off things. Just those two subjects, and no amount of blocking/hiding stems the flow. I think the AI hates me as much as I hate it.
Please don’t tell me to try again with useful functionality. I’ve had people tell me that for two years now, tried the new thing, sometimes while those people watch, and it’s been a disappointment to all involved every time. I am fed up, and will give it at least a few more weeks before the next attempt.
I am sorry if you expected a more political objection, but there it is: AI uses a ton of compute and investment money to make my life, on average, suck more. I think the people for whom it works must have very different lives and jobs to me.
Fair Points. Ai Slop and AI customer service are annoying. Vibecoding is really a time saver for me at work. It's perfect for the short to mid-size python scripts that I need to write, which are not on the critical flow, and don't have to be very efficient or elegant. Leaves me more time to do the fun stuff.
I find that it helps me a lot, with some back and forth, to understand mathematical and scientific concepts. The ability to zoom in and zoom out, move from "explainittomelikeimfive" to the nitty-gritty is a blessing!
Separate point ... no reason this has to be specific to the left but I worry that AI will undermine a shared consensus of reality. And I have the opinions I have because I think they're most supported by reality (otherwise I'd change them). Therefore, AI will undermine the popularity of my opinions, and slant people's perceptions of reality towards whatever serves the owners of AI.
I must note that Trump and his closest supporters seem like the most gleeful users of AI to create fake (but presented as real) videos to attack their opponents (though I admit this could just be me noticing bad behavior on the other side more than my side). Fits with Trump routinely making shit up with no attempt to be truthful.
E.g. Trump admin officials calling Good and Pretti "domestic terrorists". I think Miller, Noem, et al can fairly argue that the outrage against them from the right is contrived since they all say shit like this all the time, and now that there's some backlash suddenly people are shocked, *shocked* to find insane accusations like this coming from the government.
The "shared consensus of reality" died like a decade ago at least. AI is not the culprit there.
We might, right now, be like the 30 year olds looking in the mirror and thinking that they've lost their youthful good looks.
> no reason this has to be specific to the left
If the current "shared consensus of reality" is shaped by the establishment media, their bias provides a good reason for there to be political polarization on the question of whether or not this being undermined is good.
The left also reacted positively (at least at first before negative effects of social media, algorithmic monitoring, etc, became apparent) to shit like the Internet, Youtube, widely available video, bodycams for cops, etc, for similar reasons. It's not out of a belief that the "establishment media" is propping them up.
There's a common joke along the lines of "now that we have cameras everywhere, it turns out UFOs aren't real, Bigfoot doesn't exist, and the police do needlessly beat up black people"
Also far more people look at Fox News, other conservative outlets, and social media controlled by Trump supporters, than whatever is left of the liberal "establishment media".
Yes, this observation is entirely consistent with my model: they supported those when they thought they would amplify their preferred narrative, and turned on them when it became apparent that they weren't doing that. I think Twitter is the clearest instance, with how quickly they changed their views on it when it stopped suppressing people and organizations they opposed.
Hold on a second, what you said in your previous comment is that the left doesn't want to undermine the current "shared consensus of reality" because it's being propped up by the establishment media.
In this comment you're saying that they want to support things that "amplify their preferred narrative". This isn't the same thing.
E.g. the left doesn't think that the current "shared consensus of reality" (insofar as it exists) is propped up by a left-leaning establishment media.
Re twitter, it's obvious that what's happening isn't Musk taking the thumb *off* the scale, it's Musk putting a thumb *on* the scale.
No, they do mean the same thing. This is one of those irregular verbs: I reinforce our shared consensus of reality, you fact-check misinformation, he amplifies his preferred narrative.
I'm left-of-center (not really "leftist") and wary of AI, though I don't feel like I'm wary of AI *because* of being leftist. As for why...
> "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
I worry that different levels of technological advancement lead to different types of societies. This is originally a leftist idea I think (base and superstructure), but has spread pretty widely. I fear that an AI dominated world is one that tends naturally to extreme economic (and subsequently political) inequality.
Because something economically/politically very important - human level intelligence - that is currently distributed pretty uniformly among people, will instead be distributed the same way capital is, and so much more prone to concentration. Maybe you can prevent it, but it wasn't even possible before. Relatedly it allows a greater degree of top-down control and less "people power", basically I'm worried the future is China's Internet censorship x1000.
Going to make another point in a separate comment...
Crossposting to various smart groups:
How many different motivations for rejecting a proposed deductive or inductive thought are there? How many can we think of? Can we put bounds on the number? What does this let us predict about how thoughts and beliefs evolve over time in response to seeing different kinds of events or media, or doing social cognition with multiple people mediated in different ways?
I'm inspired to these thoughts by https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/maybe-social-anxiety-is-just-you , which gives an account of the author going to a dating/relationships workshop, being asked to name what he likes about an attractive woman, and after some struggle managing to only compliment her teeth, because his intuitions had ruled out actually complimenting her body. (Extra context so it's not quite as creepy: she was a professional model being paid to be there, and who knew what to expect from this work. She was was visually attractive, conventionally attractive, and attractive to the author.) The workshop leader called him out on an obviously false statement, and after forcing himself to speak only what he thought was true, he experienced better social success and later on a general reduction in social anxiety.
He infers from this that his goals in conversations had been subconsciously set to 1) avoid making people dislike him, 2) make women he liked actively like him to the point of talking, dating and sex, where for 2 he didn't actually have good feedback channels or a model of their internal life or a toolbox to robustly interact with it. He extends this to his thesis: that social anxiety is caused in general by trying to achieve social goals for ourselves, assigning ourselves massive amounts of constraints that rule out any successful tactics, attempting anyway with inevitable failure, and not having enough insight or knowledge to spot the insanity of this situation.
In other words, his thought process while at the workshop had been something like: (asked to answer "Choose a model that's attractive to you. What makes her attractive to you?") "Well, she has gorgeous legs, duh. Wait, no, I can't say that, she'll hate me. Her breasts? Can't say that either, that'll make her hate me. How she fills her dress out? She'll hate me. I've got to give an answer... she has nice teeth, I guess, that's true and non-creepy, we'll go with that.". In other words, a series of propositions, which are accepted or rejected for promotion to being believed and acted upon.
I think that as we parse direct observations, or manipulate parsed observations and memories in our own heads, or do social cognition with other people, that we're doing something similar. In deduction, for example, the train of thought might be "P is true, and we know P implies Q. Therefore P is true? No, that's not how 'implies' works. Therefore Q is true? Yes, seems plausible, proceed." I think that different constraints on candidate thoughts get applied in different contexts:
* "No, that deduction doesn't follow."
* "No, this observation is about a known optical illusion and both possible interpretations are true at once."
* "I can't say that, it's immoral."
* "I can't say that, I've committed to acting as though it's not true."
* "I can't say that, there hasn't been enough time for all available records to turn up yet."
* "I can't say that, it'll hurt her feelings."
* "I can't say that, only low-status people say things like that."
* "I can't say that around this crowd, I'll get mocked."
* "Dammit it's true, but I can't say that because they're on the other team and it's bad to allow any opponent any temporary advantage."
How many more can you think of?
"This seems true, but contradicts something else I believe is true. I should remain silent until I resolve the conflict"
"This seems true, but I've probably been tricked somehow"
"Even if it's true this time, I don't want to build the habit of thinking along these lines"
"I can't say that, the philosophical consequences are too scary"
"I can't say that around this person, they'll hurt me"
"The evidence I have for this being true is too personal/unconvincing to share, so I'll keep my mouth shut"
"Someone else would say it better than me, I'd just garble it"
"I'm not the kind of person who says things like that"
"What's the point in saying something so obvious?"
These look like good pump primers.
To do this properly, I'd build a model of a person's reasoning. Start with the basic chain: sense input + internal reasoning => conclusion. The reasons to reject the conclusion clearly include "sense input is wrong" and "internal reasoning is wrong".
Adding the fact that the person is answering another person's question gets us closer to the quoted reasons above. The chain becomes: question + sensory + reasoning => conclusion => answer. Now the rejection reasons include "question is wrong" and "answering is wrong". To cover the above:
A person may believe the question was garbled, vague, deceptive, rude, not worth the effort to produce an answer.
A person may believe the answer is too hard to express, harmful (to self/others) if heard by the wrong person, harmful (ditto) if misunderstood * sufficient risk of misunderstanding, not worth saying, or leads to a later conclusion the person believes is wrong enough to be convinced that the answer might also be wrong, and to check again.
I can't help but feel this question is asked from the angle of "if I wanted to configure an LLM to answer the same way a person might, while still being rational, how would I do it?", so I answered accordingly. (Readers may infer what my own harm estimation might be, as they see fit. After all, they can't help but do so.)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Contributions to my asking this include:
* watching different single responses, styles of responses, styles of interaction on Reddit in the context of moral reasoning about the ICE shootings of Renee Good(e) and Alex Pretti
* mainlining "Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction"
* a background goal of predictive modeling on the propagation and mutation of beliefs in the age of managed social media
* reading the linked post with an eye to applying its toolbox to my own dysfunctions and problems.
So you're actually not far off - I am kinda-sorta playing with trying to make LLMs think like people, just to understand how cultural battle lines shift in response the world events.
I'm a federal criminal defense attorney from Minneapolis. This is my take on the situation there, mostly with an eye toward arguing that "the legal system" doesn't depend on the good faith of the executive.
https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/mad-kings-magic-words-the-light-and?r=117rkl
That was a great read! Thank you.
I think you're right that the laws provide constraints against an out of control executive provided that the executive or his agents obey them, and that means that the most extreme predictions -- like Trump will seize power rather than step down at the end of his term, or he will put large numbers of US citizens in camps without due process -- are fantastically unlikely.
That said, we lose a lot when a President breaks an established norm limiting his power, whether that President is Obama or Trump. I do believe that Trump was to some extent the victim of inappropriate lawfare by government officials, but seeing Trump double down on the lawfare is disappointing - the norm he seems to be pressing for is just that it was pointed in the wrong direction.
Second, I've got a legal observation, which is that it seems to me that self-segregation of voters is starting to produce areas where you can get a grand jury indictment or conviction of one party but not the other. As far as I can tell from the OIG report, Andrew McCabe is at least as guilty of lying to federal officials as Scooter Libby, but you apparently can't get an indictment of a Trump opponent in DC, at least not of a lightweight crime like lying to federal investigators. Trump can't get indictments of BS crimes in federal court, where the judges are on average better, but you can convict Trump in state court. (Granted, Trump's property misstatements are on another level from those alleged against James, so maybe that's not a fair comparison.)
I think the commonsense conception of rights is that they protect "The individual" from "the majority" and function as a check on rampant populism. Under this theory, things like the freedom of speech are like, values you preserve "even if everyone thinks it's a good idea" to abandon them.
I think the biggest single realization I had in law school is that many rights actually don't do that. Articulated rights in the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th amendment force *the government* to not act contrary to the popular majority. The Jury Right is the most powerful example. There's a way in which this protects the individual from the majority, but I think the deeper thing that's going on is that it means the government CANNOT secure a conviction without a bunch of normal people signing off on it.
Under *this* theory, I think the phenomenon you're talking about is a feature not a bug, and it's why I was unbothered by alleged "lawfare" in the Biden administration (and frankly, in this one). The check on "political prosecution" isn't some norm against charging your enemies, it's the simple fact that you will lose a case that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury in a particular community: within that community it's hard to convict popular people, it's relatively easier but still very hard to convict really unpopular people (how often do 12 people agree on whether something has been *proven*?), we'd rather have it this way than any alternative, in a system that is based on majority rule. The simple fact is that if the public thinks a case is transparent BS, they'll acquit...if they think that the case is deadly serious, they'll convict.
I like this.
Legally speaking, the last serious constitutional amendment was to remove the two term presidential limit. (Given a secret ballot, 80% of Congress votes to impeach Trump. I do not see this changing, and I do not see Trump managing a constitutional amendment).
I merely post this so that people can update their general priors on "two term presidency" to include "we almost got rid of this, in the past 50 years." This is a convention that's only be held since FDR, and within ~50 years of said convention being set, it was already on the table to remove it.
One Person One Vote is even newer (1960s).
On the bright side, at least no one continues to claim the legal system can never be weaponized against one's political opponents anymore.
well no, I kind of do, that's my point.
I think the assumption of a lot of conservatives in the biden era was that the executive is capable of "auto-convicting" anyone, and that once trump took power, what's good for the goose would be good for the gander and the administration would just be able to level prosecutions at anyone it wanted.
The present state of affairs proves this isn't true. Trump has tried to do the same thing he accused the Biden administration of, but going the other way. It hasn't worked. He can't even get a misdemeanor prosecution for hurling a sandwich at an ICE officer. He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I would argue that that's because the DOJ (along with most other institutions) has a strong leftward bias. He's still probably gonna get both Comey and Brennan - and even if he doesn't, he's gonna ruin a couple years of their lives while they sweat it out and/or rack up legal bills.
In general the DOJ gets who they want. Isn't the conviction rate in Federal criminal cases > 95%?
If it's a matter of "leftward bias", why does Trump keep having to fire *his own appointees* (all life-long conservatives) when they disagree with him? It's not partisanship that's the problem here, it's reality.
Because he's incompetent. He's not part of the institution.
The DOJ gets 95% convictions because they have a longstanding practice of charging out only those cases they are totally convinced they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. This doesn't mean they're always right, of course, but I tend to look askance at accusations that a particular federal charge is nothing more than a witch hunt: until this year, the DOJ was very careful which cases to bring.
Things seem different now, and there have been some fairly dramatic failures to ride roughshod over the administration's enemies.
I agree that lawyers at DOJ (and other government agencies, incidentally) don't bother with a case they're pretty sure they can't win, but this is unfortunately still consistent with Wanda's assertion that the DOJ is left-biased. If the system is implemented by enough left-biased people, then a left-biased lawyer can easily believe he'll get a left-biased case through when a right-biased case of equal pedigree would not. Exactly the same is true if we swapped "left" with "right" throughout.
Therefore, an assumption that the DOJ believes it can bring a case to conviction doesn't allow us to imply that that case is objectively fair.
The system is further complicated if DOJ turns out to contain a mix of left-, right-, and centrists lawyers working under a biased executive, and those lawyers have a clear incentive to disguise their biases in order to remain employed. Complicated further still when we have to analyze each of several possible such mixtures in order to generate predictions to test. As scientists often say: "more study is needed".
>He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I don’t think that’s completely over yet. I personally do not think there is a case to be made there, but I don’t think he’s given up trying. Anyway, to the broader point that the legal system can be used as a weapon against anyone, I don’t see how anyone could dispute that unless they were completely ignorant of the world as it is and as it has been. I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail. Not me of course I never spit on the sidewalk.
> I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail.
I actually doubt that. They could certainly *try* to prosecute it, but my guess is that the grand jury would probably refuse to return a bill, much as we saw with the felony footlong case and Trump's various other abuses.
Yeah, you’re probably right about that. I just think it’s easy to find a law someone has broken if you put your mind to it.
You're arguing against a claim that's far too strong. I wouldn't say it's a strawman, since I suppose I could see people holding this view before the First Trump Administration, but not after they saw judges stymie almost all of Trump's efforts during that term.
So no, I think most realize recognize that you need control of the judges as well to be able to do whatever you want. The Democrats had this under Biden, and the Republicans do not.
But even so, in most cases, even without guarantee of conviction the PROSECUTION is adequate deterrent, with ruinous legal fees whatever the outcome, and besides that they can trump up enough charges that taking the offered plea bargain become the rational decision even if you're _almost_ certain you'll win at trial: if you win, the prosecutor shrugs and moves on to his next victim; if you lose, you go to jail for decades.
I admit I was mildly surprised they couldn't get the misdemeanor charge to stick to the sandwich guy, but I guess that was a tad too frivolous.
I disagree with a few things you've said there. Firstly, one judge in the trump cases (Florida's Eileen Cannon) was very much on Trump's side of the case, or at least was widely perceived as such. Also, the SCOTUS immunity decision was rather favorable to him...in both cases, you have judges (including, you know, the Supreme Court) not being "under the control" of Democrats.
Secondly, I've been a lawyer under Trump I, Biden, and Trump II. Under no administration was it true that the prosecution can simply "trump up enough charges" to win by default. If they could, I'd lose a lot less than I do :)
Yea "Dems controlling the judges" is a pretty funny statement given a Supreme Court that has been majority-conservative for at least 25 years now. And that the last moment in which a majority of that court had been appointed by Democratic presidents was in 1970.
Also, Trump has had plenty of rulings by judges he appointed go against him.
Also, as of today Trump leads all presidents in the number of current federal judges that were appointed by him, 261. Next most is Biden 236, then Obama 229, then Bush43 104. Given the GOP's Senate majority Trump will by the end of 2028 have appointed between 45 and 50 percent of all sitting federal judges. [Data from Ballotpedia's real-time tracker.]
Have the technology to deploy the Aerolamps doesn’t mean that they will be deployed. If we don’t address the human side of the problem, we might not see this future.
I’m looking for collaborators (and possibly funders) interested in a multi-paradigm shifting pragmatic framework for pluralist, post-polycrisis (including post-AI) futures. The final public-facing synthesis is 'The Life-Years Movement':
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/the-life-years-movement
The common thread behind the work is a systems-level analysis of persistence under physics and tail-risk constraints — i.e., how locally 'rational' systems (biological, economic, moral) can lead to catastrophic failures ('ruin') over longer horizons.
Evolution — Lineage Filter Theory.
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/analyzing-the-anti-ruin-architectural
I argue that persistence meant our tree of life's architecture had to avoid lineage extinction filters (LEFs), requiring many features that look “non-Darwinian” at the surface — reproductive restraint, extreme cellular redundancy, pre-adaptational variance. Lineages without such 'brakes' and robustness simply didn’t last. This reframes a number of puzzles, including the apparent Great Cosmic Filter.
Economics — Pragmatic Socioeconomics.
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/intro-to-on-the-units-of-utils
Agents are treated as multi-motivational, energy-constrained 'action-minimizers' (in the Lagrangian sense) rather than scalar utility maximizers. Money is modeled as stored but degrading 'motivational energy' - likened to oil or uranium, rather than a Platonic store of value.
Meta-ethics — Heirs of Life-Years (HOLYs).
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/heirs-of-life-years-a-meta-ethics
Life-years are proposed as the central form of moral concern, while allowing agent-level freedom in choosing the scope of lives one takes primary responsibility for (“heirs”).
Governance — Life-Years-Based Governance (LYBG).
Governance is reframed around maximizing life-years per unit resource, subject to anti-ruin constraints and irreducible disagreement about moral scope.
I have draft papers for each module in progress. If you're interested in either the bigger project or specific aspects, feel free to reach out: ad(delete)vitam(delete)sapien@gmail.com.
About me: I've a Phd in Computational Biology (e.g. genetics) from Cornell, undergrad math + philosophy from NYU. I've worked in industry on both biofx algs + eng stacks in both the ctDNA and PGT spaces - most recently at Orchid Health as Lead Bioinformatics Scientist
These Aerolamps seem like a fantastic idea for daycare centers and public schools! Children, especially infants and toddlers, getting sick in daycare is a huge problem for working parents - can't send a sick child to daycare, have to stay home with them, and most dual-working couples and single parents in America have very limited time off. If you could reduce the rate of infections for young children, that would be a tremendous help for parents!
San Francisco friends: there will be a vigil this Thursday (January 29) at 6:30pm at city hall (civic center, McAllister side) for people killed in ICE custody and enforcement, including recent shootings in Minneapolis. Names will be read. I hope to see you there, and would appreciate you sharing if you can.
Maximum empathy for criminals. Zero empathy for law enforcement and law-abiding citizens, as always. Will you be reading any names of people raped or killed by illegal migrants? Immigration agents attacked in the line of duty? I guess they wouldn't suit your political spectacle.
Are you saying you want people to support the criminals who work for ICE and that they should have no empathy for the law abiding citizens they are gunning down?
>Immigration agents attacked in the line of duty?
Can't summon much sympathy for people who specialize in enforcing unjust laws.
I really don't understand what it is about immigration law in particular that has made people so incensed recently. I've only encountered such radical opposition to it from open borders libertarians or left-anarchist types. Even then it is usually not a core issue.
They killed a white liberal woman, the first time that's happened in like 50 years, so now they're acting like an endangered species. Still, the basic point remains that immigration laws are an unjust restriction on freedom of association.
Do people not have the freedom to dissociate in your view? Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest? Why does this not apply to my country as well?
>Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest?
Of course.
>Why does this not apply to my country as well?
Because there are 300 million other people in your country and immigration laws burden their freedom of association rights. If they all shared your views, if they didn't want immigrants here and refused to rent to or hire them, there would be no immigration.
You can definitely make the argument that the right is just excercising their freedom of association. Unfortunately, the rights of one group come at the expense of another. You can't make everyone happy.
Seen through the lens of negative rights, there's no conflict, nobody is entitled to a job or housing from those who don't want to provide it.
The recent shootings *were* of law-abiding citizens, not that you're likely to acknowledge that fact.
Also, where's all your empathy for the police officers that ICE has attacked?
I don't like ICE attacking police officers. I'm also not happy that those citizens died. However, they were obviously not obeying the law at the time they died (obstructing, interfering, fleeing from law enforcement). I place most of the blame on local government and activist groups for creating a lawless, chaotic, dangerous environment where that kind of incident is inevitable. When you have thousands of dangerous interactions every day eventually something will go wrong and people get hurt.
My main critique here is about the transparent exploitation of these deaths to demonize immigration enforcement.
Define "obstructing." Because the definition ICE seems to be using is "doing anything we don't like in our vicinity," and that definition doesn't align with the law. Filming law enforcement and reporting on their activities is protected by the 1st amendment.
ICE has very specific laws about what they can do. They are allowed to arrest anyone impeding their actions, which doesn't include videoing their actions. It certainly isn't "anything we don't like".
I think this counts as obstructing.
https://x.com/SteveGuest/status/2016610715075809552
Of course, this doesn't nessesarily justify what happened to him two weeks later from a presumably different squad, but it's hard for me to consider the general posture that ICE has taken as unreasonable given that they have to deal with guys like this everyday.
If this has anything to do with Alex Pretti's shooting, it makes ICE looks worse, because it would imply they were waiting 11 days to murder him.
You are not allowed to kill people because you're annoyed or tired, sorry. That's simply not the country we live in, nor should we want to.
Thank you
I hope it will include the victims of this shooting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Dallas_ICE_facility_shooting
Wouldn't that be like commemorating the hijackers at a 9/11 memorial?
EDIT: My bad. It's more like commemorating the victims of the Dresden as part of a Holocaust Remembrance.
It states "people killed in ICE custody"
At first I thought you were being needlessly antagonistic, but it’s literally true! They sort of have to read the names right?
For what it's worth, there were 31 deaths in ICE custody in 2025, which is the highest number since 2004. Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman-Fuentes are two of them, otherwise there's just a lot of
Is that a lot? I dunno, you'd probably want to compare it to other prison systems in terms of person-days in detention and then adjust for stuff like age distribution and so forth. There's typically around 500 deaths in Federal custody per year in the US but again these numbers are meaningless without knowing person-days in detention.
I'm in SoCal, but good for you for doing this!
(Correction: this Thursday is January 29, not 27.)
Thanks for catching! Corrected.
Canada's successful sabotage of Katie Uhlaender is an interesting exploit of the rules for Olympic Skeleton.
The way it works is that a country can get three, two, or one sled, based on the ranking on their players. There was a tournament earlier this month with 120 points for the winner that, had Katie won, she'd have bumped the US up into the three-sled category, and secured that third spot. But if there are fewer than 20 athletes completing, the TOURNAMENT gets downgraded, and only awards 90 points. So Canada withdrew four people just before the race, getting it down to 19. And they succeeded: Katie won the tournament, but didn't get enough points to qualify. And Canada is guaranteed two sleds.
Canada claims this was for "safety" and the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation has decided to buy that explanation.
It reminds me of that famous quote from WarGames (1983).
So it was a case of the Canadians wanting two sleds in the Olympics, and Katie Uhlaender was not the target but an unfortunate victim?
I don't know whether Canada would have gotten two sleds either way. From what I read, it looks like they almost certainly would have, but this just makes it certain.
You call it exploit, I call it metagaming!
Probably my most hubristic position is that I believe lots of people, including myself, could outperform democracy and do an excellent job of being dictator in perpetuum. Other than myself, I also believe Scott Alexander would do a bang up job at being God-Emperor, and David Chapman too.
Do you think you could be Caesar? Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
I guess I'll ask, since nobody else has. So what would be your platform?
So just in the abstract, we wouldn't expect the way we do politics and elections in practice to be perfectly efficient, so we don't expect it to find the literal best person on earth for the job. So this is trivially true depending on what you mean by 'lots of people', whether you mean 'dozens' or 'billions'.
Second, I'd caution people that relatively little of the job is being smart enough to make good decisions, and much of it is being a good judge of character to pick subject-matter experts to advise you on decision, doing diplomacy and having conversations with people to try to keep them on your team and indebted to you, looking good for the camera and inspiring the public, etc. Being smart and sane helps, but if your social skills aren't great you may be less effective than you think.
Also, if you want to be really good, you need to be comfortable working 14 hour days for most of a decade. If you suffer at all from akrasia and procrastination, this is probably not going to work out.
Also, *legitimacy* is critical. Getting people to agree to follow the outcomes of the process is just as important as whether the process actually produces good outcomes.
> Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
Obviously AI - we're going to end up there anyways, let's just yank the bandaid off now.
And because "literally a child" could do a better job than 80%+ of politicians today, we could already do this with any of the Big 3 paid tier AI's today.
1. Everyone downloads the Democracy 2.0 app and allocates their capped amount of voting tokens to whatever they care about. Immigration, DEI, cheaper houses, lower taxes, economic growth, lower crime, whatever. As in, you get a standardized menu of items you can stake your tokens against, but you only get so many tokens, so prioritization and trade-offs are built-in.
2. AI proposal - The AI proposes legislation to attain the aggregated democratically defined priorities, with a detailed prompt outlining the total budget and soliciting it to consider the homeostatic landscape, to predict the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects, to outline monitoring KPI’s and thresholds, and to define a good sunset or re-evaluation time for any proposed legislation.
3. Vetting - Prediction markets and digital-twin sims price the KPI impacts before enactment, as a human check on AI predictions, and as an overall evaluation ground over many such proposals, so we can understand the overall landscape of which proposed legislation will move various needles the most. This is federally funded so there’s enough alpha in there that smart people / companies will be doing this full time. Also, look! An actually high-value, relatively ungameable use for prediction markets!
4. Democratic vetos - A stratified random sample (≈ 1k - 10k citizens depending on locality) gets the top 3 AI-optimised bundles for each priority, plus the market scores, and can veto any of them in the aggregate if enough decide to veto. This caps downside from model myopia and value-misalignment, and keeps democratic participation in the loop, without the pernicious regulatory capture and misaligned incentives we get today from full time politicians, lobbying groups, and industry insiders.
And there you go!
What does voting look like? You open an app and allocate your voting tokens to the high level priorities you care about.
Occasionally, you’ll get a push notification to decide whether to veto some random bills or not, which you can ignore or answer as you like. Done.
It scales to every locality size - from HOA, municipal, county, state and federal.
And at a shot, we’ve eliminated political parties, politicians, lobbyists, industry insiders, regulatory capture, and most of the other ills that plague politics today.
The problem with being Caesar is staying Caesar. Being a benign dictator is pretty much only possible with extreme regime security, if there is even a slight threat to your supremacy it becomes a race to the bottom with regard to coercion and oppression. All the great things you want to do are secondary in importance to remaining the sole source of power and authority. Unfortunately it is this dynamic which tends to produce the worst aspects of autocracy. You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Also, nobody is right about 100% of things, and dictatorships are bad at correcting for Dear Leader's mistakes.
> . You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Reminds me of the end of AGOT when IIRC, Ned Stark declines the proposal to preemptively arrest Cersei.
I am more interested in what weird things your reign would be known for afterwards. Building ziggurats? Starting a new fashion trend? Make a robot your chief of security? If you can’t be a good Caesar you can strive to be memorably bad.
My personal "gone my first day in power" list includes big-time college athletics. Being the only person I've ever met who considers that specific thing to be both worthy of elimination _and_ high-enough priority for a new national dictator's first-day list, no one I've ever mentioned this to has failed to find it an odd choice.
I have heard that the ancient Greeks (that is, pre-Classical era) mostly saw tyranny as a neutral thing, and saw it as necessary specifically in the case of major unrest. When there is a general understanding among most people that the current government is not satisfactory, and people are willing to revolt, a tyrant takes control in order to provide a coherent direction. It satisfies people who just want *something* to happen, and if things go worse, well, there's a clear person to blame.
It's interesting that today people who are proponents of some sort of dictatorship, or any model of government, tend to promote it as a permanent thing. As someone generally averse to tyranny, I can at least somewhat understand the logic of a temporary tyrant, and perhaps proponents of tyranny could better sell the idea as such. Of course history is full of cases where temporary tyrants become permanent tyrants, so one might see that as the most successful strategy for achieving permanent tyranny...
Anyway, to actually answer the question, there's always the old mainstay of cloning Lee Kuan Yew.
For Romans in the times until perhaps 200BC, tyranny (or "dictatorship") did not come from revolts, but was a pretty normal thing. They were rules about it, like who gets to appoint the dictator, what the dictator has to achieve/resolve (there was a list of half a dozen common causes), and when he is supposed to step down again. They were assigned frequently in some periods, I think like every few years or so. The dictator had pretty, well, dictatorial power in the political matters for which he was appointed.
The issue is: while it was stable in Roman times, it is not stable by design. A dictator may refuse to step down, and with so much power it may be hard to force him. In some sense the difference to some modern democracies is more gradual than the name would suggest: the French president is also pretty powerful in some areas, commands the military and so on. The reason that he can't just keep his power is a mutual understanding of all sides that he is supposed to step down after someone else gets elected, and people are supposed to stop obeying the old president in this case. This is also more or less how it worked in Roman times, except that the trigger was not the election of another dictator but that the issue for dictatorship was resolved.
Also, mechanically, Roman dictators just didn't have that much direct power. There weren't a bunch of guys who directly reported to them that they appointed. Everybody agreed they were the dictator, other people in various positions would listen to them about e.g. "take the troops here, wait, etc".
Basically, imagine if everybody agreed Trump should be dictator, BUT, he doesn't get to appoint his own cabinet, he just gets the Biden cabinet. He may have a lot more flexibility in policy since everybody agrees he should be dictator for six months (or whatever), but he would be less able to use that power to overturn American democracy than he is at present, since none of the people there owe their careers or power to him.
IIRC, the reason the early Roman "dictator" system worked was because there was a strong custom that their appointment was time-limited. They weren't dictators the way we think of them today.
Also they were supposed to be older and without heirs.
"After Someone Else gets elected"
... yes, but not HER!
https://www.politico.eu/article/us-state-department-marine-le-pen-election-ban-far-right-france/
Technically all tyrants are temporary tyrants, given their mortality. A good example is Franco. He established a dictatorship, and the monent he died, the country peacefully transitioned to democracy. The threat of communism was eliminated, and the dead remained dead. All is well.
Tyranny isn't temporary if the tyrant has successors, as many do. I'll see your Franco and raise you the Kims.
And they'll fall too, eventually. Though, it's hard to imagine there's much appetite for democracy among the North Koreans in the first place, given that even their southern brethren are backsliding into authoritarianism after just forty years.
This pro-spanish-civil-war position paired with the anti US civil war kick is starting to just look like vice signalling
What can I say? I prefer not to side with the losing side, both as a matter of policy and pragmatism.
Is a dictator necessarily a tyrant?
The term "tyrant" is hardly applicable to Franco.
I think we're using the terms interchangeably here, so that's not particularly relevant. Such judgements are subjective anyways.
Thinking you can be a dictator is one of the top reasons why you shouldn't be a dictator.
No, this is just a dumb liberal trope that prevents virtuous individuals from seeking office. The goal shouldn't be to resist the mantle of command; the goal should be to resist the temptation to abuse it.
Is this a liberal trope? It seems pretty popular across the spectrum (witness all discussions of “career politicians”).
"liberal" in classical sense. not the debauched, modern sense.
Unless you're Cincinnatus, I don't want hear it.
This raises an interesting tangent for me, which is whether I could transition such a dictatorship back to democracy again, and which improvements I'd make along the way.
There are certain policies, like a land value tax, preferential voting, free speech absolutism, an estate tax, and similar, which are difficult to implement within an established democratic system but might be comparatively easy during its founding.
For me that's not a tangent, it is exactly how I think of it. It's how over on Earth5673459 I am, I like to believe, carrying out the assignment.
Outperform democracy at what? There's competence , and there's direction. An incompetent dictator steers in no direction. A competent dictator steers in the direction of their own goal. Neither care about my goals. Democracy is an attempt to take all goals into account.
I think people systematically overestimate how awesome or easy it would be to be a dictator. It’s not really a question of having the most wisdom or best ideas, it’s about getting a super complex change-resistant amorphous dynamic system to do ANYTHING you want it to do. How do you get information? How do you know who’s lying to you? How do you surface the one mid level manager who actually understands a situation well enough to modify it? It’s not like Scott could sit on the throne, announce that the country is now to act rationally in all things, and actually have anything meaningful happen.
I feel like this fully generalizes to being the boss of literally anything. Power is typically seen as a reward rather than volunteering for a job where you work 168 hours a week.
Yeah, any time I see anyone say they think they could do a good job as president or dictator, or even think they would want to do it, I get pretty confident that this person has never really gotten close to running something.
I think it DOES generalize. I think being a CEO is comparable to being a dictator, the stakes are just lower.
>Power is typically seen as a reward
I think that's wrong. Formal responsibility, and the pay that comes with it, is a reward that's doled out. Power is a separate concept and only accrues to people who are able to grab and hold it.
power and responsibility seem like two sides of the same coin to me? I don't understand what you're gesturing at. Are we defining "power" specifically as political power?
I would say that responsibility is legible power while real power is always illegible. Responsibility is having a team to manage. Power is knowing what you have to do to be indispensable to your company and being able to outmaneuver your peers in the eyes of your superiors.
No one is 'rewarded' with being dictator. There's no one that hands you that title. It's a house you build yourself out of the materials you can find. Most positions of any real power in the world are a lessor version of that. The sorts of jobs you get by being good at the legible things everyone knows to try to be good at are just the kiddie pool version of power. The sorts of things that got e.g. Steve Jobs where he got are much closer to how a dictator behaves than how a technically-competent engineering VP behaves.
oh in that case, we're mostly just splitting hairs. I tend to think of power as desirable per se, and responsibility is the price tag. I agree that it's awfully convenient to be an Eminence Grise, although I think it's a mistake to define "real" power that narrowly.
I'll grant that "reward" was not le mot juste, since it often does (though not necessarily, imo) impute an exogenous source. Although I can't think of a better term.
True.
Also, people overestimate how much freedom of choice the dictators have, versus the things they have to do in order to keep their power and stay alive.
For example, as a dictator, you probably need to murder everyone around you who is simultaneously competent and ambitious. Probably everyone competent, full stop, just to be on the safe side. But it's hard to govern the country without having competent people you could delegate important tasks to.
Being explicitly a short-term dictator, as mentioned above in these comments, could ameliorate this particular conundrum to at least some extent. Though it of course creates a new potential issue: the deliberate lame-duckness getting in the way of the dictator having their orders fully carried out.
As is said in various elite-competitive-sports contexts, if it was easy everybody would already be doing it.
The real strength of republics vs dictatorships is being able to have multiple competent generals in the field. The king can only lead one army at a time, and being away from the capital for long is risky.
Putin has plenty of people that are simultaneously competent and ambitious around him. Some of them are even under him (he's quite old), as a "if you kill me, West, the crazy guys take over." Most of them are just the wealthy oligarchs. In Russia, few people really want to be Putin (popular though he is) -- they want to be the wealthy guy rolling in dough.
That's a very common technique used by dictators and strongmen the world over: you'd be sorry if I left office, Bruno the Torture Nerd would take over and he'd be much worse than me! But in reality Bruno the Torture Nerd works for the boss, and will probably end up in jail or dead after the revolution or coup, no matter who ends up on top. Think of Lavrentiy Beria; his colleagues knew he was a psychopathic murderer and rapist and didn't want him anywhere near the levers of power.
This is a different situation than a coup or revolution, unless you're talking specifically color revolution (aka CIA sponsored). This is "why you shouldn't assassinate me."
Assassinations tend to lead to the next guy in the food chain stepping up (because, after all, that's all you've done, offed the guy at the top). And it just makes sense that the insecure new dictator would be more brutal/have less tolerance for insubordination.
Knowing a bit about Russia / Russian politics, I would challenge this statement.
Putin _had_ a fair amount of competent and ambitious people around him (back in early 2000s), but they got to key positions and basically stopped paying attention to anything aside from staying at the top (and that, btw, includes Putin himself). So now, after ~20 years, IMHO they are mediocre at best...
Let's go through the "Russian Deck", or the circle of important people that Kommersant identified in December 2003, and see where they are now:
Hearts (Yeltsin's old circle):
Voloshin - gone.
Kasyanov - gone.
Deripaska - still in business, doesn't meddle in politics.
Abramovich - sitting pretty in London.
Surkov - gone.
Lesin - died under suspicious circumstances.
Alexis II - dead.
the Yumashevs - gone.
Clubs (Putin's Petersburg associates)
Sergey Ivanov - gone.
Matvienko - in charge of the upper chamber, but she's ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Gryzlov - gone.
Miller - in charge of Gazprom.
Medvedev - technically not gone, but eh.
Kozak - gone.
Cherkesov - gone.
Mironov - in charge of one of the parties, again, ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Diamonds (liberals)
Chubays - gone.
Khodorkovsky - in exile.
Kudrin - gone.
Gref - in charge of Sberbank
Illarionov - gone.
Gaydar - dead.
Kiriyenko - deputy head of Putin's administration.
Nemtsov - murdered.
Spades (siloviki)
Viktor Ivanov - gone.
Sechin - in charge of Rosneft.
Patrushev - practically gone.
Ustinov - Putin's representative in the Southern Federal District.
Pugachev - gone.
Kazantsev - dead.
Zaostrovtsev and Karimov - gone.
Out of the whole deck, I would name Sechin, Miller and Gref as people worthy of your description. Kiriyenko is the only one who's both ambitious and competent. And patient.
Well, I won't use 2003 as the cut-off point; IMHO, Putin had full freedom to appoint whoever he preferred only in 2005-2006.
Notably, a pretty big disagreement (Yukos case), involving several people on the list above, started in 2003.
Also, some (most?) deaths mentioned above are from natural causes, so at least those (e.g. Gaydar, Alexis II) should not be counted either way...
... Putin keeps people below him that the United States/Ukraine/West doesn't want at the top of a World Power (refraining from calling Russia a superpower, at the moment). If you want to say the political dudes are not so ambitious anymore (or at least willing to let him die first), sure.
The wealthy oligarchs are engaged in their own games, and to the extent Putin leaves them alone, he's "their b*tch", just like Trump is signing up to be funded by the oil companies headed down to Venezuela (In that they'll have a Very Profitable Interest in making sure the next President doesn't just "give the oil fields back to Venezuela").
(In short, your correction is noted, accepted and I wanted to thank you for making it.)
[also, I love your handle]
Not you, me, or anyone else.
Yes, absolutely.
My Autism is such that I am painfully conscientious where I am required to be by my brain, and don't really get big feelings about stuff outside of that.
EG to make an example from my last couple days, I will grab a rattlesnake that's not where it's supposed to be and take him out into the mountains or the desert, but I don't feel any particular way about executing a trapped ground squirrel, which are noxious vermin where I am.
Thus, I feel confident I could make a binding deal with myself that I would be a benevolent guiding hand to the people, eg I would simply select technocrats to fill executive positions and maintain an elected advisory committee to fill blind spots, and otherwise just keep living like I do with the exception that I would require payment in a couple interesting restaurant meals a month and 1 expensive but not too expensive scale model kit from time to time.
I want that PGU Nu Gundam, but I made a binding deal with myself that I may only purchase a full price toy once I have completely cleared my backlog, which is at least a year out at this point.
There's that conscientiousness again, fucking with me: I have 30k in walking around money left for this quarter, but I can't fucking spend it because of a rule I made when I was poor.
I don't even know where I'm gonna put that. I think I'm gonna try to find some sort of "american coal finally eats shit and dies" etf, that seems inevitable over the 4 year horizon.
Maybe at first, but power corrupts, and I suspect I'd turn out to be quite corruptible.
I'm way too angry to dictate. We were asked this back in middle school and my answer was "World War 3 on day 1."
The main problem with dictatorship is that the system runs on personal charisma, so the dictator has to appear to be the smartest person in every room, and they have to do it against lopsided levels of scrutiny. If they aren't, then the whole system erodes and eventually destabilizes. What's the easiest way to be the smartest person in the room? Punish anyone who says otherwise. "Maybe that astronaut neurosurgeon had a point, or maybe he didn't, but now that he's dead we'll go with my plan." So the country's intelligence caps out at the intelligence of the leadership. It can work for a while if the leader is actually intelligent, but eventually they're going to die, and because no one could be above the cap the new leader will be below the previous cap, while becoming the new cap.
In Democracy, if someone else has huge charisma the leader can point and say "if the astronaut neurosurgeon wants my job, they can apply for it." It unlops the scrutiny and lets you accept more antagonistic ideas without threatening your position as king, which allows the system to stay smarter than the kings.
I think an ideal monarchy/dictatorship, where a good-intentioned and intelligent ruler is able to simply command improvements without political considerations, would probably function quite well. Something like a medieval monarchy where the people they rule can't really conceive of a different setup besides monarchy.
If you had the constraints of a modern dictatorship, and a population that has the ideology and knowledge of liberal democracy, the dictator would be far too concerned with keeping their power, relying on the power and influence of some to control the rest, that it would not produce good outcomes. I imagine that this second set of skills is much rarer than the first.
Even in the quintessential modern case of this, Putin, would probably do pretty well for Russia if he wasn't constrained by oligarchs, international pressure, and the Russian Constitution. The war in Ukraine would be going significantly different for Russia if he was able to order up the conscription of an extra 2 million Russians to Ukraine's ~1 Million, which would still be a lower percentage of the population fighting than Ukraine has right now.
By medieval standards, it might not be too hard to command improvements over however the bureaucracy is running. But I really don’t think one person has the time or experience to know what would be an actually good way to run things. You need lots of voices involved to have any idea.
Conscripts aren't very good troops for Russia, and at least according to people posting around here, they aren't often even equipped with a gun. According to military (non-Russian) sources, pre-Ukraine, about a third of conscripts were getting pimped out for cash (yes, sex).
I believe Russia has slack capacity for escalating the war in Ukraine. They're not doing so, because they have met their "red line" goals (Sevastopol plus water, and some safety buffer from Kiev can fire missiles from their territory and damage our critical infrastructure), and, broadly speaking, they consider the Ukrainians to be kinsmen, and would rather not have to kill more of them than is necessary*. Also, it's a lot easier to negotiate when you look like "reasonable warriors" and not "bloodthirsty genocidal conquerers"**
*Most modern wars put the basic objective as "destroy the war factories" -- because without guns (and materiel), you can't fight. Ukraine doesn't have the war factories, so Russia must make Ukraine bleed soldiers instead, until they are physically incapable of fighting.
**When people ask about security guarantees, I say they don't exist. But Russia can signal, "I am crazy" or Russia can signal "I can at least pretend to be sane and make sane decisions."
Do you think it's the oligarchs, international pressure, or the Russian Constitution that prevent him from mobilizing 2 more million Russians? Or the fact that Russians can silently tolerate volunteers or professionals dying, but get much more nervous when it's involuntary soldiers that are dying?
And everyone agrees on what constitutes improvement?
Would this be dictator of the U.S. of A? of the world? of some minor (say 1M or 2M pop at the most) country?
My answer depends on the size of the dictator's domain.
Go for both, I think anyone who could be a good dictator of America would be a good dictator for the entire planet as well.
- Small country: Ok, sure, you seem smart enough judging by your Substack. As long as its people agree. It might increase competition in governance, and other countries (smaller ones; larger ones tend to be more chauvinistic) might benefit from copying what you get right as dictator of Slovicedonia.
- America: I'm not a citizen. I highly doubt this would increase competition in governance and systems of government.
- Whole world: No thanks. All competition between governing elites disappears. I have no candidates.
I think the Civil War was a mistake, while the Southern states were ethically in the wrong regarding slavery, they weren't trying to conquer the North, they should've been allowed to secede. Would've been more in line with the Founding Fathers' vision and the American ethos, the United States were supposed to be a voluntary union. And it probably would've been healthier in the long run regarding things like North/South relations and racism, because I think most likely, within 50 years, the Confederacy would've abandoned slavery due to international pressure, the English Navy was sinking slave boats, Brazil ended up abolishing slavery without a civil war before the 19th century ended. Then I bet the Confederacy would ask to be let back into the US.
It would've been a thing where the south internally resolved the issue, instead of having a foreign morality externally imposed through war.
To seriously think about whether the Civil War was a mistake, it helps to make the question more specific.
1) Did the advocates of secession make a mistake in not trying to negotiate a separation via mutual agreement?
I think that, for the secessionists, time was the enemy. If you look at how secessionist movements played out in Quebec, or more recently, in Scotland, the key move to preventing secession is to hold a referendum far enough in the future that the populace has a lot of time to think about the downsides as well as the upsides of secession before they vote.
In 1857, "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It" by Hinton R Helper was published. The thesis of the book was that slavery was bad for the south as a whole, even though it made the large plantation owners incredibly rich. Just one example from the book: In 1850, southern states grew $78,264,928 worth of cotton. In the same year, northern states grew $142,138,998 worth of hay. This book was mostly kept out of the south (in 1860, an individual in Texas found in possession of a number of copies of the book was lynched), but if southern states had had a prolonged public debate about secession, it’s hard to see how its contents could be effectively suppressed.
In the case of Czechoslovakia, the country was partitioned by an agreement among political leaders, even though partition was not supported by a majority of either the Czechs or the Slovaks. I don't think that model would have worked in the United States. The Constitution authorizes Congress to add states, but not to remove existing states from the Union. The general notion that power derives from the people would make it very hard for southern states to justify splitting off if the couldn't convince their citizens to support this in a referendum.
So I think there is good reason to believe that unilateral secession was not a mistake from the perspective of the secessionists, because if they tried a negotiated separation they'd likely end up like Quebec.
2) Did the Confederate leaders make a mistake when they decided to attack Fort Sumter?
In hindsight, that did not work out well for them. The alternative was to settle for de facto independence. Transnistria would be a modern analogue; it has effectively functioned as an independent country for the past 33 years even though Moldova does not officially recognize its independence.
The first problem with this is that prior to Fort Sumter, the border states had not joined the Confederacy. In January, the Virginia General Assembly had passed a resolution stating that, “if all efforts to reconcile the unhappy differences existing between the two sections of the country shall [fail], every consideration of honor and interest demands that Virginia shall unite her destiny with the slave-holding States of the South.” It's not clear that, absent a war, Virginia would have ever joined the Confederacy.
The second is that, on some level, the conflict was about respect. If the United States doesn’t recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, will anyone else? Maybe eventually, but the Confederacy would have had to patiently plead for what the United States is given as a matter of course. If fugitive slaves escape to the United States, will the United States return them? Probably not, at least not without a strong incentive like the Confederacy demonstrating that it can defeat the United States in a war. I think that if the Confederacy becomes Transnistria, its citizens will feel disrespected and public support will collapse.
Third, even if the Confederacy achieves independence, the secessionists can still lose because, as you note, the Confederacy would be under pressure to abolish slavery. That’s less likely to happen if the secessionists start a war and win it, because then abolishing slavery is repudiating the sacrifices of everybody who fought and died to preserve it.
The secessionists were working from a position of weakness, so their gambles, even if they didn’t work out, were not necessarily mistakes.
Do you think an economic solution was possible? What would've happened if the federal government had offered to buy every slave at a fair price? Four million slaves x $1000 is less than the war ended up costing. Many of the south's fears were rooted in the desire to protect that significant capital investment.
Northerners who as a moral conviction were opposed to slavery would of course oppose that move as rewarding the slavers. Other Northerners would oppose a massive arbitrary transfer of mostly-Northern wealth to a minority of a minority of Americans. The large majority of Southerners too poor to own any slaves would hate it as what we might now call reverse redistribution. So the contemporary domestic politics of that idea seem...challenging.
Meanwhile the economic backdrop was a society that was certainly growing, but was also prone to serious economic downturns way more frequently than any post-WWII Americans have ever experienced. $4 billion is approximately the national GDP as of the mid 1850s; all federal government expenditures totaled around $60M/year. Even imagining reaching political agreement on the slave buyout, how could it be financed?
If by new taxes, yikes -- you'd need new federal taxes equal to a _big_ chunk of national GDP, for some years. Good luck even collecting those...are you issuing IOUs to the slaveowners? Would they accept them? And if they did wouldn't that effectively represent the first national paper currency, quintupling the national money supply literally overnight and setting off inflation beyond any economist's wildest nightmares?
Or if the idea is to issue long-term federal bonds...who in the 1850s would be interested in buying such bonds, from an emerging nation that has a recession or depression at least once a decade, unless offered ruinous (for the issuing government) interest rates?
Of course, Britain did exactly that in the 1830s, freeing all slaves but compensating the owners. This was (largely) uncontroversial at the time (despite being very expensive) - although more recently it has become controversial.
However, I agree with your implication that it probably wouldn’t have worked in the US in the late 1850s. I think there are probably three main reasons:
1. There wasn’t a sectional divide in Britain: a small number of people (‘the West India interest’) were in favour of slavery, but they weren’t (as in the US) the elites of particular regions. So the general increasingly-abolitionist political sentiment seemed like it was a shift that affected the whole political nation and not just one part of it.
2. Connected to that, it is just possible that the US South would have accepted a compensation scheme in the 1830s, but by the 1850s support for slavery had become core to political identities there: accepting a compensation scheme would have felt like giving in. Whereas in Britain the West India interest was (and was increasingly) mostly a purely economic interest: as long as they got the money they were happy!
3. In Britain there had been a generation of significant public spending (since 1807 and especially since 1815) on suppressing the slave trade. So general public opinion was used to the idea of spending taxpayers’ money on the abolitionist cause. I’m not aware of equivalent spending in the US, and I suspect that (absent the sunk cost of the Civil War) even the North would have balked at spending taxpayer dollars on a compensation scheme, which felt much more normal in Britain.
All good points, thanks.
I doubt actually that it could have been done in the US in the 1830s either. The sectionalist realities seem just impossible to navigate:
(a) All the slaveowners who would receive the payout are in one section of the nation and it’s much the smaller one by both non-enslaved population and economic output.
(b) Most of the currency wealth paid to them would originate in the other, larger, industrializing, section. (However the central government specifically raised it.)
(c) Since slavery was banned in all the individual states of that larger section, this huge payout mostly funded by them would be just a flat-out gift, no assets or anything else coming back.
That would be a very hard pill for Northern voters and politicians to swallow no matter how they individually felt about slavery.
Thanks for this post.
Is it plausible that the CSA could have achieved indefinite de facto independence if it had just been able to resist firing at Fort Sumter?
Surely the war would have kicked off eventually in some other way, even if the North had to start it on its own?
Both sides very much wanted a Short Victorious war for basically domestic political reasons, though in this case the definition of "domestic" is tricky. But the Lincoln Administration is an abject failure if it doesn't hold the Union together, and the Confederacy is on very shaky grounds if it's just the Deep South and without the unifying experience of victory over the DamnYankees.
Both sides also felt it would be politically and diplomatically advantageous for the other side to fire the first shot. and they weren't wrong about that. But while it's *possible* that a persistent Southern refusal to shoot first might have lead the North to give it up and accept secession, it's more likely that they'd have continued with escalating provocations and/or said "It's not *that* important that the baddies fire the first shot; let's get on with this".
Based on what I've read (probably not enough), the CSA could probably have gotten by with a secession, followed by some conquests in the west (present day New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly California itself if they're feeling extra froggy). I imagine Kansas and Missouri become disputed territories for some unspecified period.
Economically, that all seems impossible, though Jefferson Davis & Co. might not have realized it. The South wasn't industrialized enough, and was too dependent on a crop that was about to become too oversupplied to be reliable.
If I imagine a scenario where the CSA says "we're leaving; just leave us alone!" and the Union says "fine, get outta here!" and manages to reign in its abolition movement and also puts up minimal fuss with whatever military assets are in which state, then in about a generation, the CSA grows so impoverished that it ends up de facto acquired anyway by Yankee business interests. About the only difference is maybe a million Americans don't die, which implies enough that I wouldn't bet on what happens after.
ETA: And now I've read further down and saw your other comment saying pretty much this.
The situation would be unstable, but yes, I think it is plausible that it could last for a long time. The secret Feb. 15 resolution by the Confederate Congress that authorized the use of force to take Fort Sumter also authorized the use of force to take Fort Pickens, but presumably if the Confederacy decided not to attack Fort Sumter, they would also refrain from attacking Fort Pickens.
There were plenty of people in the North in favor of war, but I suspect that with the passage of time, acceptance of the status quo would increase rather than decrease, so the probability of the North starting a war would decrease over time.
Probably. My guess is Lincoln would follow Andrew Jackson's playbook from the Nullification Crisis and attempt to continue collecting customs dues from ships bound for Confederate ports. There are some incidents where ships refuse to stop and get fired on, or fight back against attempts to board then for inspection. Bloody shirs get waved and things escalate from there.
It's probably mildly to the South's advantage of the Union fires the first shot. Kentucky might join the Middle South states that seceded after Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy would have a few extra months to get its shit together and organize for war. The Union's ability to pre-mobilize in the same time window would be limited by political considerations: Congress isn't in session yet so there's no money or authorization for raising troops, and if Lincoln calls a special session and asks for troops, then that looks like a provocation and risks pushing more stares into seceding. And might get voted down, with the Middle South states' delegations still seated in Congress and many from the Border South and the North still hoping for some kind of compromise.
Lincoln did not resolve the question of what to do about tariffs for goods imported into the Confederate states until the war broke out, at which point he declared a blockade. (The Constitution requires that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” That means that the Federal government cannot simply decide not to collect tariffs at ports in states that joined the Confederacy while continuing to collect tariffs elsewhere. With a blockade in place, there are no imports to Confederate states, except for smuggling. Smugglers importing stuff without paying tariffs doesn’t violate the Constitutional requirement for uniform tariffs unless the Federal government implicitly condones it.)
I seem to recall that the possibility of collecting tariffs at sea was discussed by Lincoln’s cabinet and declared impractical, but I can’t find the source. Lincoln might have attempted it eventually due to the lack of a better alternative. The ships being stopped would presumably not be flagged in the Confederacy. So I can imagine some tense diplomacy which ends with the United States abandoning the idea of collecting tariffs at sea rather that going to war with Britain. This wouldn’t provide much of a justification for war on the part of the Confederacy.
Wasn't it technically not a blockade, since that's something you do to an enemy foreign power, which the Union did not recognize the Confederacy as being?
Note that the South did, in fact, fire first, which renders questions of whether or not they should have been allowed to secede a moot point.
Didn't they fire in response to the Union continuing to occupy a fort in their territory?
Placing your army in someone's territory is just as much of an act of war as actually firing the first shot, so I don't think the "Han shot first" of it all really matters.
It was federal property, the army in question was already there; the union forces didn't move an army into the fort, they just didn't leave; if you're wanting a diplomatic solution to a question of who owns something - and here there is a legitimate question of whether or not a fort owned, maintained, and staffed by the federal government now automatically, without any sort of diplomatic agreement, belongs to the confederacy after they declare independence - you deploy diplomacy.
Do you think this applies to the states that aren't the original 13 (i.e. where the United States acquired the land and then formed a state from it, rather than a preexisting state agreeing to join with the others)?
Other than wars to prevent genocide, wars to end slavery seem just about the most justifiable wars ever.
Even your own assumptions - and I do want to be clear I think they're assumptions (e.g. will the Confederacy end slavery within 50 years when most of its founding documents explicitly mention it as an essential thing the Confederacy is founded on?) don't really strike me as favorable to your position.
Something like 700k people died in the Civil War. There were 4m slaves, and their life expectancy was less than 50 years. So even if you only think chattel slavery costs 50% of the utility of a life (which I think is frankly quite generous to your position) the Civil War is a net positive.
A voluntary crusade against slavery is justified. John Brown was justified.
Is it moral to conscript people to abolish slavery elsewhere?
Moreover, Lincoln denied that he was fighting a war on slavery. Is it moral to lie to people to conscript them to engage in an otherwise moral crusade? Even if his secret goal was abolition, he claimed it was a war of unity because that was popular. That was the principal motivation of most of the people involved. A measure of the popular sentiment is that the Emancipation Proclamation is generally believed to have contributed to the draft riots.
A hypothetical war to end slavery would be justifiable if you went about it in the right way.
In particular you'd need to commit to the idea that you'll only occupy the country for as long as necessary to end the bad thing and then you'll restore its sovereignty, like the US did in Germany or Japan or Iraq. If you don't get out afterwards then you're just doing a war of conquest with the bad thing as an excuse.
I think there are two questions:
(1) As I read Timothy M.'s argument: Was the North conquering the South in order to end slavery justifiable on utilitarian grounds?
(2) As I read yours: Given that the Southern States didn't necessarily have sovereignty against the federal government, would it be preferable to recognize their sovereignty and allow them to secede at some point, for example if they promised permanently to outlaw slavery and to treat black citizens justly?
My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
> My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
What is your opinion on the Declaration of Independence?
(1) My opinion of the Declaration of Independence is positive.
(2) I'm also intruigued because I enjoy your comments and I'm not sure where you're going.
(3) More specifically, the drafters seemed to feel that it was important that they established both a history of despotism on the part of the crown and an unsucessful attempt to resolve those abuses without secession. I don't grant that the South did or could have met those standards. Also, I don't think it was necessarily morally wrong of Great Britain to resist secession, although I haven't considered that issue in detail.
I think the Confederacy would have been quite a bit longer about abolishing slavery than you're guessing. If they peacefully seceded in 1861, I think slavery persists well into the 20th century.
British anti-slavery patrols don't move the needle. The US had passed laws abolishing our participation in the Atlantic slave trade some time before the Civil War (1808, I think), and apart from a minority of pro-slavery absolutists in South Carolina, there was no appetite for re-opening it even in the Deep South.
Internal political abolition of slavery tends to be pretty sensitive to how pervasive slavery is within the society. In general, states and nations are a lot more likely to abolish slavery if less than 10% of the population is enslaved and hardly ever voluntarily abolish slavery if much more than 20% is enslaved. Brazil was around 15% in 1871 when the free birth law was passed and not much more than 5% in 1888 when slavery was fully abolished. If the United States evacuates the forts and lets the seceded states go peacefully, then the Middle South states mostly stay in the Union and the Confederacy would only consist of South Carolina (57% enslaved), Georgia (44%), Florida (44%), Alabama (45%), Mississippi (55%), Texas (30%) and Arkansas (26%). Getting those numbers down into the critical range would be a long time coming.
Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed. Brazil also had a widespread practice of voluntary manumission, similar to the Border South in the US (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Appalachian counties of Virginia), which the Deep South very much did not.
There are a few things that could incline the Confederacy towards abolishing slavery eventually. One is long-term drifts in culture and demographics, but shifts of that magnitude take quite a while. Another is that having a national border with a mostly-free neighbor would be likely to gradually erode slavery culturally and make it easier for slaves to escape across the border. This latter would be a longer-term issue, since the other side of the border would mostly be the Middle South states of North Carolina and Tennessee. I would expect slavery *inside* the remaining US to be gradually abolished over the course of a few decades following peaceful secession, starting with the Border South where it was already weak and then gradually spreading to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina either organically (which would take several decades, I think) or due to a Constitutional amendment abolishing Slavery once there were only a handful of slave states left in the Union.
Britain (and the US and other major industrial countries) becoming much more hard-line about opposing slavery to the point of embargoing trade could also move the needle, but that would require a major shift on the embargoing side (King Cotton's power was severely overstated in the Southern imagination, but such an embargo as a voluntary act of the British parliament would be politically an economically costly) and in the short to medium term would provoke resentment more than it would compel compliance on the Confederate side.
This treats abolition as coming through peaceful, internal political change. I... do not think this is a particularly likely course of events for an independent Confederacy.
We're looking at a diplomatically isolated country with a substantial internal fifth column, many of whose citizens (let alone the slaves) would be seeing their lives get worse from secession and the end of links to America, so the ruling class likely grows increasingly repressive.
I can't tell you how it ends, but an anti slavocrat revolution seems like a real possibility. But so does an increasingly narrow dictatorship, with the comparative freedoms of the Jacksonian era becoming a thing of the distant past. Maybe they even handle poor whites as Fitzhugh recommended...
There's likely something to that. The Southern Planter class were perennially wary of the possibility of a slave revolt, for one thing, and had a lot of formal and informal censorship and other restrictions aimed at keeping anti-slavery ideas away from slaves for fear that abolitionist discourse would inspire rebellions.
That was actually one of the big points of friction between the sections. Southern politicians kept trying to push to expand some of these policies into federal law and policy (the congressional "gag rule" against receiving anti-slavery petitions, attempts to censor anti-slavery publications being sent through the US Mail, etc) which Northerners saw as undue infringements on white men's liberties. And when anti-slavery violence did happen most conspicuously with John Brown's raid on the Harper's Ferry arsenal, Southerners saw this as confirmation of their fears that political abolitionism went hand-in-hand with slave revolts.
Barring some external forcing function like losing a war with the US or Britain, I think the most likely scenarios are, in declining order:
1. Continuation of the status quo with moderate increases in repression. There was already quite a bit of repression baked into the system in slave states, especially in the Deep South, and most especially in South Carolina. Both direct oppression of the slaves and collateral oppression of whites and freedmen in order to solidify the slavocracy social order. In a no-civil-war scenario with a seven-state Confederacy, I think state laws stay about the same while federal (confederal?) law and policy gets somewhat more repressive. This is likely to be a stable equilibrium for several generations unless it gets upset from the outside.
2. Gradually increasing repression over the decades following secession, resulting in a stable oligarchy. The Confederacy as a whole winds up looking like pre-secession South Carolina. The main potential opposition to this, apart from the slaves themselves who are targeted by the oppression, is the population of "white belt" counties especially in Appalachia. The White Belt counties have the potential to be a large political force in an 11+ state Confederacy, but most of their main strongholds (Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, what would become West Virginia, and the Western counties of North Carolina) would not be part of a 7-state Confederacy. People discontented with the slavocracy would either grumble and deal with it or emigrate to the US.
3. Attempts at increasing repression cause the Confederacy to split. Off the top of my head, I'd guess Texas and Arkansas to be the states in the 7-state Confederacy mostly likely to either go their own way or try to rejoin the US. Their percentages of slaves and slaveowners were more like the Middle South than the rest of the Deep South, and Arkansas in particular is only counted as "Deep South" at all because it seceded before Fort Sumter. The rump five-state Confederacy follows path #2.
4. A successful movement towards political liberalization at some point. I think this would probably be decades coming.
5. A large-scale slave revolt.
Also worth noting that the Confederacy would almost certainly have found itself in dire economic straits following a successful secession - particularly a *peaceful* secession, which would probably have been limited to the 6-7 states of the Deep South. Those states had an economy that was heavily focused on a single cash crop, and Egyptian+Indian cotton was already on track to take over the lion's share of the market. This would probably have happened even faster with a slave-owning CSA; the British and French really didn't like slavery, and while they liked shuttering their textile mills even less, they were about to be free of having to make that choice.
On the other hand, I suppose I could see the Confederacy messing this up and provoking the British or French governments into taking a harder anti-slavery line than they would otherwise be inclined to do. Especially a deep-south-only Confederacy, as a lot of the political classes in the Middle South still took the old Jeffersonian "Slavery is a necessary evil for the time being" line rather than the newer "Race-based slavery is a positive moral good" ideology that had lately become popular among the Deep South's political class.
Even with the 11-state Confederacy that included the Middle South, a lot of Confederate diplomats were appallingly bad at their jobs and took every opportunity to put the "ass" in "ambassador". I've watched a lecture about Confederate diplomacy in Europe, and one of the big takeaways from that was that Confederate diplomatic overtures frequently backfired because the diplomatics wouldn't shut up about how awesome they thought slavery was. If they kept that up for long enough, I think I could imagine the British and French governments forgetting realpolitik in favor of using trade policy to try to pressure the Confederacy away from slavery.
I think it would take a while before Britain or France seriously contemplated embargoing the Confederacy, or even putting protective tariffs on cotton imports. Neither country restricted cotton imports from the US before the war, both traded with the Confederacy to the extent the Union blockade permitted, and both Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III pursued lukewarmly pro-Confederate policies during the war in terms of proposing mediation ans allowing the CSA to sell bonds in London and Paris and buy ships that could be converted to commerce raiders from British or French shipyards (but not unambiguous warship, as the Laird Rams were redirected to the Royal Navy in response to Union diplomatic protests).
Popular opinion and long-term government policy were both anti-slavery, yes, but realpolitik inclined both countries to friendly relations with the Confederacy. The US wasn't really a Great Power yet but was taken seriously as a major regional power, and a healthy Confederacy friendly to Britain or France would be a useful counterweight to the US in situations where US is a potential rival to either European power. And until Egyptian and Indian cotton displaced Confederate exports, which would probably take longer than IOTL without a Union blockade, economic considerations also incline Britain and France towards friendly relations.
> Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed.
I was just wondering why, given this background, Brazil has such a large black population now.
That's the manumission side of the issue. By the 1870s, Brazil had a pretty substantial population of former slaves and their free-born descendants. I strongly suspect that the low birth rate among Brazilian slaves was specific to slaves while free black or mixed-race Brazilians had higher birth rates.
The antebellum US South was the outlier in terms of having a high birth rate among slaves and having the slave population increase considerably due to children being born into slavery. The norm, historically and globally, is for slave societies to rely on a continuous source of newly enslaved people, usually victims of raids and conquest who are sold into slavery. The enslaved populations tend to not have a lot of kids and also tends to have a high infant mortality rate. The usual reasons for this are that enslavement wrecks family structures and gets in the way of family formation, that slaves (especially those employed in mining and agriculture: personal servants and those with valuable specialized skills usually get treated somewhat better) usually have absolutely abominable material conditions. It is sadly common historically for field and mining slaves to be worked to death on starvation rations, and even when this isn't the case, it's rare for slaves to be allowed enough food and rest to allow them to have substantial number of kids. And few slave-drivers are keen on allowing enslaved women enough slack to carry a healthy pregnancy to term. I don't know much specifically about slavery in Brazil in the 19th century, but Caribbean slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries were routinely worked to death.
The US was an outlier in part because the US was an exceedingly rich nation by historical standards even during the 18th and 19th centuries. In most historical societies, and even many societies into the 19th century, there were plenty of free peasants and laborers who could be hired for subsistence wages, so there's little point buying a slave unless you plan on driving him to work harder than a free peasant or feeding him less than a subsistence wage, or both. But if even poor people are making comfortably above subsistence, then it may be profitable to buy a slave even if you're planning on feeding him a vaguely decent diet. Slaves still had a terrible material standard of living in relative terms within the society, but had a much better material standard of living in absolute terms than slaves in other slave societies.
I suspect the ban on the slave trade in 1808 also played a role. This, combined with industrialization driving demand for cotton and westward expansion bringing more land suitable for cotton into cultivation, meant slaves became more and more expensive. Slaveowners thus had considerable economic incentive to keep their slaves healthy and to encourage them to have kids who, once they're old enough, could be put to work on the same plantation or sold to another one.
The American Deep South was also the outlier on manumission. The norm in other slave societies has that highly valued slaves (personal servants the masters were fond of, slaves with highly valuable skills, etc) were often offered their eventual freedom as a reward for years of good service. In the Border and Middle South, this treatment was sometimes given to field slaves as well, tied to the "slavery is a necessary evil" school of justification that was popular in the US South in the early 19th century. The Deep South never went much in for voluntary manumission, and by the lead-up to the Civil War had developed a sick and twisted ideology that race-based slavery was a positive moral good. I don't know the details of the culture of manumission in Brazil, except that there seems to have been one to judge by how many free blacks there were in the country before the free birth and emancipation laws started getting passed.
I was just reading Lincoln's first inaugural address today--I'm curious what your response would be to his articulation therein of the indivisibility of the Union.
"I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as acontract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."
What I would give to still have leaders who could both write and think this well.
I think he's really struggling to put together an argument for why secession is fine and dandy if it's 1776 but terrible and illegal if it's 1860.
Most of the states of the Confederacy didn't even join the USA voluntarily anyway, they were variously conquered or purchased from France and Spain. It's a weird argument to Louisiana, say, that having been conquered by France in 1682, sold to Spain in 1763, swapped back to France in 1800, and then sold the US in 1803 (all without the consent of the people living there), that it was now an inviolable part of the USA.
Who do you think was living in large parts of what became the Confederacy ca. 1803?
You seem to regard these traitorous southern states as long standing constitutional republics but they were all just creatures of decades of what we today call ethnic cleansing by the federal government , starting, e.g., with Jefferson’s “Treaty” of Hoe Buckintoopa.
The Congress was even kind enough to pass the Indian Removal Act in 1838 to really speed things along, and 22 years later the vultures who swooped in are ready to secede?
Get a grip dude. Lincoln was totally right and the failure to execute a whole lot more of those traitors is still causing problems today.
In the quoted passage, Lincoln is explaining why secession is illegal, or to put it another way, that secession is insurrection. If you are interested in his argument for why insurrection is a bad idea in 1860, that constitutes the majority of the speech, so I would suggest just reading the entire thing.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
Also, Louisiana didn’t become “an inviolable part of the USA” in 1803. That occurred in 1812, when Congress approved Louisiana’s application for statehood.
Don’t forget the once great Republic of West Florida in what is today Louisiana. It lasted 74 days in 1810 after declaring independence from Spain and conquering the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge. The president was Fulwar Skipwith.
If the consent of the people living there matters, that pretty much rules out several of the states that tried to supercede also.
That really sounds a lot like Putin talking about the Kievan Rus, and why he has to liberate the Ukrainian territories to restore historically Russian lands. I find the the moralizing about why it's in fact good and virtuous more irksome than the actual conquest, why I understand is perfectly standard practice for powerful states throughout history (though of course, I might feel differently if it MY home burnt, my family slaughtered, etc.).
I think Putin's appeals to the Kievan Rus are doing something quite different rhetorically. While it's a very old document to us now, the Constitution was only 72 years old when Lincoln delivered that speech in 1861. 72 years ago was 1954, well into the USSR's de-Stalinization. While Putin is gesturing to a more or less ancient Russian past, Lincoln was talking about something that was only two generations removed from the present. Across many of his speeches, Lincoln describes the Civil War as a test of America's fundamental legal framework--Putin is dealing in a much more spiritual realm IMO.
Sounds like a lot of flowery prose to justify federal overreach/coercion to me. Asking Claude about this, it says the matter of whether states can secede or not was ambiguous since the founding and the constitution was silent on it on purpose.
Why is the state a relevant unit in this context whatsoever?
Like, let's talk about Mississippi. In 1860 the MAJORITY of its residents were slaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
So what gives the abstract concept of Mississippi the right to secede, thus allowing it to continue doing something the majority of its residents are the victims of? And why the f*** would I consider it "overreach" if the federal government stops this, if it's not "overreach" for the government of Mississippi to enforce it?
By that same token, what gives the abstract concept of "Ukraine" the right to resist the will of its former sovereign, Russia?
Sorry, you think most Ukrainian want to be a part of Russia? In the same way that moves slaves would want to be free?
I feel like you didn't grasp the question, even slightly. Nevermind. Carry on.
The legal theory preferred by Southern pro-slavery secessionists was that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states. If the compact was persistently and incurably violated, as they believed it was or would soon be by anti-slavery Northerners, then the final remedy would be for the states to void their acceptance of the compact. Under this theory, sovereignty was considered to be rightfully exercised by state-level constitutional/ratification conventions of the sort that had originally ratified the US Constitution in almost all of the original 14 states and which were generally employed to draft constitutions for new states and to overhaul the constitutions of existing states. The last bit is why most Confederate states held special conventions to approve secession instead of having their legislatures pass secession laws.
A lot of motivated reasoning went into this theory, since they were very conscious of the need to thread the needle as to why a state should be able to secede from the Union that wouldn't also justify counties seceding from states, slaves seceding from their masters, and wives and older children seceding from their husbands and fathers. But they did address the question and came up with an answer that was satisfactory at least to themselves.
The main purported abrogations of the constitution concerned handling of slaves who escaped to free states and the legality of slavery in the territories. The constitution required states to return escaped slaves to their masters regardless of their own laws about slavery, and Congress had passed an extremely strict law enforcing this as part of the Compromise of 1850, but many Northern states had passed "Personal Liberty Laws" designed to frustrate the application of the Fugitive Slave Act on the ground that it was unconstitutional. Pro-slavery Southerners averred that the Fugitive Slave Act was perfectly constitutional and it was the Personal Liberty Laws that were unconstitutional. As for slavery in the territories, the Dred Scott decision had held that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures could prohibit slavery in the territories due to 5th amendment Due Process provisions. Most Northerners rejected this, and Lincoln had just been elected on a platform of abolishing slavery in the territories anyway.
There's a theory that individual civil liberties really only emerge in American history with the passing of the 13th amendment. Prior to that (the theory by some constitutional scholars goes), the first amendment is a thing that prevents congress from controlling your speech, but if states want to ban speech that's fine. Its really only in the aftermath of slavery where the federal government is looking specifically to protect freed slaves from state abuses that the idea becomes set that the bill of rights is really an articulation of individual rights.
Which is just to say, you might be correct about the civil war being outside the framework of the founders, but if you like your individual civil liberties, you might be grateful that we had such a pronounced dispute about inalienable rights after the Revolutionary war. Its also worth noting that this was not the first secession crisis in the United States, just the one that went the farthest. And as you point out, its ethically gross to say that maybe we should have just let another generation be born and die in slavery in the hopes that it would eventually work itself in some other fashion. I generally think that people who are certain they can game out history that way are overconfident to say the least: we've seen how hard prediction is, predicting counterfactual history should be held to be at least as difficult.
This was discussed at the time and was rejected, mostly due to geography. If the Mississippi River or Appalachian mountains ran east-west instead, this would be an easier sell. But a post Erie canal NYC and post Chicago portage Chicago needs the Mississippi to be navigable to the friendly port city of New Orleans. Given the productivity gap between the immediately antebellum North and South, there's no way out of the geopolitical requirement for conquest.
There's plenty of rivers which run through multiple countries. Germany doesn't need to control the mouth of the Rhine or Danube.
It would of course be advisable for the US to maintain friendly relations with its neighbour the CSA.
Except there would be two rival powers in what is now the United States instead of one, and neither would have become a world superpower capable of defeating the Nazis and the Soviets.
There are enough butterflies stepped on along the way (in 60+ years) that I'm not sure we have Nazis and Soviets anymore, or the same number of world superpowers. We get something new instead. (Better or worse? Who knows! It's an interesting question whether we got particularly lucky or unlucky with the 20th century we had.)
Overall, I feel like fewer world superpowers is preferable to more of them, but it's possible that 2 is better than 1.
That would have been very nice.
Had an interesting conversation with a neighbor's guest as I was helping watch their dog this weekend.
(whenever I say government, read: both parties, but the more left wing the more it's their fault)
They had an issue with knees, needed a double replacement. They were angry about this, because they thought it was unfair that they payed several hundred a month to insurance, but still were getting jerked around for several months and would need to pay a massive deductible before they actually got an operation.
They blamed this on the government, the government was making the insurance company send them to several different doctors, loose their documentation, "forget" to make appointments, etc. All the usual strategies insurance companies use to deny care without denying care.
They also had a problem where their small town house was currently unlivable because a tree took out part of the roof. Their insurance company (double insurance!) was currently playing fuck fuck games about paying for it, because of course they would. They are a business.
This was the also the governments fault: the government was making their insurance company not pay for something they probably weren't contractually obligated to pay for: it's your job to not let trees fall on your house, as a rule.
They had had some issues with their car, and the stealership was trying to get them to do some extortionate service: This was also the governments fault. I kinda agree on this one, car dealership-o delenda est; but they meant more specifically: somehow, the government made it so car dealerships could lie without being punished.
This type of person has always been of interest to me: they see the free market operating as intended, with every agent making decisions to maximise their expected return (Even if you buy eggs for pennies, what compels you not to coordinate such that you can sell them for dollars? As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?)
And they say: This is the communists fault. I wonder, how do you reach that level of 1984 style false consciousness, where someone gets slapped in the face then apologises for being in the way of the swing; in a fairly open society? This is a country were a socialist can get elected mayor in its most important city, and some other tranche of society is pretty sure that communists are making groceries expensive at their Vons/Albertsons/ralphs/krogers/Walmart, noted Party members in good standing.
I get thinking that markets are good on the whole even if there are some externalities externalized onto X, I get someone living in a closed society thinking that capitalists are doing something comically nefarious, but how does someone in an open society get their priors that wrong for so long?
Yeah, assuming you understood the guest correctly, that's pretty weird. There are lots of cases where frustrations with private industry are the result of government regulation, but those aren't good examples.
I had a somewhat similar discussion with someone who was really mad that if they asked their doctor a specific question during a regular checkup and the doctor answered it, they had to pay a copay. In that case, though, the intervention was that the government had stated there can't be a copay for "preventative" care, so the checkup was unnaturally "free," and consultations weren't. (In that case, they blamed the insurance company, while I thought the should have blamed the government for distorting the market by making check-ups "free," but they weren't convinced.)
That one is on the health system itself, IMO. Generally, if you can be ambushed with a service you don't want or didn't know was fee'd, you can dip out with a "Fuck off!" or a credit card charge back; less so if it comes through your insurance.
Bye the bye, I notice a lot of these things come back to insurance, the industry with the highest concentration of perverse incentives on the sharp end that I can imagine.
This view seems to be correct? If the free market incentivizes a thing which ends up being bad for the people, it's the government's job to fix it. That's one of the main purposes of government, in my opinion. So if the free market is causing you problems, you don't blame the Greedy Executives for following the incentives laid out for them, you blame the government for not fixing the incentive structure.
That isn't what they are doing, is the thing.
They think that if there was no government interference what-so-ever, if we just let the heroic industrialists run things, they would have none of the problems they are having; which is why they are anti-left wing, because of that Dick Wolff quote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU).
"Socialism is when the government does stuff," etc.
Yeah look I guess we'll have to take your word for it that you were right and they were wrong in this argument that you had with some random person that you met. Good job you win.
If you want to generalise winning this argument with a reportedly-silly person to some more general point about "therefore government good and capitalism bad" or something then you'll need to engage with the best arguments, not the worst ones.
You gotta read the post instead of flashing back to arguments with lefties; (not to say I don't believe such things, they just aren't relevant here).
This is about information environment. Their bias against the left was the shot, the fact that they wanted the some entity to force their insurance company to provide services outside their contract was the chaser.
OK fine, but if you're not attempting to generalise beyond "I talked to some random silly person you've never met, they believed silly things" then I'm not sure what the point of the thread is.
The point is, you can meet this guy or someone like this guy anywhere. You can throw a rock into a bar and there is a good chance you hit someone with a belief that incoherent, who is otherwise fully functional.
It makes me wonder if I have such beliefs.
Also it makes rational debate feel kinda masturbotory sometimes. If I say, "Anthropogenic climate change is real" lets say, and they disagree: is it because they believe that the emission quantities are not large enough to induce warming or that they believe that actually it's the ice wall around the flat earth melting and letting in more sun?
Some people blame all their problems on others, often one evil group/institution that ruins everything. It can be the government, big tech, jews, immigrants, bankers, etc.
The group you blame is probably less important than your urge to pin all your problems on a scapegoat.
Type A Hostility score is notably bad for your health. Linked to hypertension.
> As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?
Then other landlords would have incentives to undercut you and get more tenants, developers would be incentivized to build new houses that would then be cheaper to live in than in your cartel. I don't think that couple's problems have straightforward socialist solutions.
That's a basic collective action problem, and it's not unsolvable. If you can convince all the landlords to join in on something that is clearly in their best interest, then everyone benefits. (Except the tenants, obviously, but they're irrelevant to this scenario.) Nobody benefits from a race to the bottom, after all. Agreements like this are the foundation of society.
The BIG developers,the ones who can move the needle, will never build above the demand curve because then their per unit profit goes down as sale price goes down, labor cost goes up, and material cost goes up. Landlords (en mass) will never undercut, because that would devalue their properties as an investment vehicle for sale, etc etc.
We can tell these things won't happen A: because it would be bad for business and B: because it hasn't happened yet. There are policy changes that could cause these things to happen, but they are just that: Policy.
How are y'all dealing with the snow this weekend? Apparently it somehow hit no less than THREE countries: the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This is kind of a crazy scale for a snowstorm to take
Hypernormal me is quite happy.
TEOWAWKI says DOOM
(doom three ways, he's really very flexible. already the lawyers are dead!)
[This, for anyone inclined to take me seriously, is quite a serious joke. Doom is always on the horizon, it just gets closer and farther away. Until it actually swoops in, and then you're fucked. So plan for the unlikely!]
It's great! (Well beside the fact that I've had to plow the driveway every day.) I love the snow. The sledding hill is in fine form, the creek is almost frozen over and I got out the snow shoes yesterday. The dogs love it. As the saying goes; If you live in Buffalo and don't enjoy the snow, you'll have just as much snow in your life and less fun.
Edit, adding youtube short of sledding trail with dog. (The first thing I do is throw a stick for the dog, else she runs down the trail behind me, nipping and such. (this is from last year.))
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ATLXjsfclQg
It's not really the snow for me, but the cold. Here in Philadelphia (and the mid-Atlantic in general) the temperature is usually right around freezing when it snows. So we gets lots of clumpy wet snow. The roads are usually only bad day-of, because the snowplows clear the bulk, and then the sun comes out and melts everything off the roads. (Meanwhile, the snow is still around on the grass, and kids can still sled and have snowball fights.) But this snow storm is COLD. So nothing is melting. The roads are still bad.
Yep, supposed to be super cold all week in PA. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.
I just spent an hour today breaking up inch-thick ice on my sidewalk. [Grumble grumble]
I grew up in Cleveland. This was like “normal winter” as I remember it as a kid, except I’m now like a degree and a half further south.
You North Americans aren't the only ones dealing with surprisingly low temperatures. Where I live, it was forecast to reach 45 or 46°C today, but it seems to have peaked at only 42.
I love -40 degrees because it’s the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
-50 F is the coldest I’ve been out and about. It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight. Heat radiates out through the clear sky and cold air pools at ground level. The calm part is what makes it bearable. It’s a bit surreal to walk around at that temp. The sound of snow crunching under boots is different, nose moisture freezes quickly. With a plugged in tank heater your ungaraged car will even fire up without balking.
>It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight.
Say your from MN without saying you're from MN 😭😭
As your western neighbor, we have no trees to speak of and the wind is brutal during the winter. I think I've only experienced as cold as around -40 when it comes to ambient temp, but with wind chill there's at least a couple days to a week every winter where it gets to about -50 or -60 F. When the wind is pressing into you it feels like instant death, plus you can't breathe.
This winter has had hardly any wind though, so this previous weekend where the *high* ambient temp for the day was -11, it actually was surprisingly bearable. And you're so right about the effect a calm sub -20F temperature has. It feels like being on another planet or something, it's so cool and peaceful. And then there's the sun dogs 🤯
I discovered my Toyota Prius is exceptionally poor on snowy roads.
My wife and I have Prii and live in Michigan. We've had good luck with winter tires.
Nice car but not great in snow.
The tires might be your/the problem.
That is probably half of my problem.
It's beautiful! The cats and I have been cosy and content inside, sitting near a window watching it fall.
I haven't gone outside in over 48 hours, if you can manage that it works pretty well.
What's the temperature over yonder? The high for my town today is 9F (-13C), but this on Friday last week the high was -11F (-23C)... the lows were quite a bit lower than that.
(Where I live, it's obligatory to try and 1up anyone who dares to mention anything about cold weather)
Well like I said, I haven't gone outside in 60 hours, so... the temperature in my house is quite comfortable!
Anthropic has put out a course to learn how to use Claude Code properly (https://anthropic.skilljar.com/claude-code-in-action). I'm interested in that, I basically just prompt it at present, but Anthropic is looking sloppy here. Course tells me about using # to modify CLAUDE.md, turns out that feature is currently broken (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1772). Then they talk about taking a screenshot to paste into Claude and tell it to center a placeholder vertically. I did, Claude did something to center content vertically in the wrong component. So, your standard LLM experience basically. I don't understand Boris Cherny or anyone claiming that they have stopped writing code because they delegate everything to a team of Claude Codes, but I guess I need to finish the course.
I’m a heavy Claude Code user and I’m talking to multiple CTOs in some groups, and I can tell you that Claude Code usage and coding agents in general are transformative and very heavily used.
If it’s not working for you it’s possible you’re not using it correctly or some other issue. If you want some help with it let me know.
I'll finish the course and see what performance I get then.
You replied to me in the the other thread, but this seems like a better place to continue that conversation, given your experience.
I am not a programmer, and I certainly don't understand LLMs as well as the creator of Claude Code, so grains of salt, and all that. But I cannot look past the conflict of interest here. Of course someone in Boris Cherny's position is strongly incentivized to claim that 100% of his code is written by his own product. My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
So I have no doubt that Boris Cherney is a more capable user of Claude Code than most, but if his product is able of doing what he claims, shouldn't we see more productivity gains? Why has, for example, the number of github commits not changed at all?
Here's a short piece on this:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-172538377
For one, that piece was written before Claude Code had really hit the knee of its current exponential curve. For two, it's an example of a common internet fallacy I haven't seen a name for, where one assumes that because they don't personally know about something, it doesn't exist. You could call it the Assumed Omniscience fallacy, or something.
There is lots and lots and lots of coding-agent driven shovelware out there, and it's increasing every day - just go look at the replies to any major model release on X to see people hawking their vibecoded app. Here's mine: https://fretu.de - a classical guitar & sheet music learning game in the browser, completely free, no account setup, desktop / mobile support, etc.
While I did still have to use some software engineering knowledge to keep it on the rails, fix minor bugs, and deploy it, the combination of Gemini 3 Pro and Opus 4.5 probably saved at least two orders of magnitude in time, given the complexity of the React components, which I don't specialize in.
A sibling of mine, recently retired from some decades as a high-level programmer in the financial sector, has lately been devoting his time to putting Claude through its paces:
https://substack.com/@toadhall/posts
Ah yeah, I read that post, thought it was interesting. It's possible most people using Claude Code use it at a basic level and it takes quite a bit of know how to really have Claude Code churn out all code.
> My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
Haha, similar experience. I am developing a product, that is basically a simple chatbot that can detect five different keywords in user input, and provide a corresponding answer for each of the five cases. That's all; everything else is just a generic "I don't understand that, but perhaps I could help you with something else?" The management describes it to the rest of the company as a state of the art AI that will soon revolutionize the entire industry. My colleagues from other departments were deeply impressed after hearing the presentation; they think I am Einstein. Perhaps I should ask for a raise.
> If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.
On one hand, I don't know. How many Tetris clones *are* there on Steam? Perhaps when writing the code stops being the bottleneck, something else becomes a new one? Like, most people don't even think about putting their game on Steam? Get discouraged by the paperwork? Get rejected by Steam? Or perhaps the games are there, we just don't see them? (How does even one discover games on Steam? My typical use case is that I find a hyperlink somewhere else.) Or is it perhaps that the people who can generate the Tetris clones have better things to do?
I mean, I agree that it is suspicious, but suspicious things kinda happen all the time. Most people do not notice most of the opportunities they have. I can easily imagine that to 99% Claude Code users it just didn't occur to generate games for Steam. Or they are too busy doing whatever is their main job, and don't have time and energy left for side jobs. I used Claude (not Code) to generate a few simple things that I put on my web page, but besides my job and kids I just do not have any energy left to try e.g. make money on Steam, even if it sounds like the obvious thing to do. But if I was younger and childless, I would probably do exactly that, so... I don't know.
Note Steam charges about $100 for each game published, in addition to 30% of sales, so we do have a lower threshold on how much profit you have to expect to go through that process.
(Edit: Don't mind me failing to read existing replies that already cover this)
Makes sense. The first thought was that if an AI generated game sells 200 pieces per $1 -- which seems doable, but maybe I am wrong -- it will still turn a tiny profit.
But I guess you also need to do the "paperwork" on Steam, create screenshots and videos, etc., which is a few hours of human work that probably still cannnot be automated. So yeah, maybe it is not profitable after the $100 fee.
Even before the AI boom, there were complaints about "asset flips" on Steam - games which just take a bunch of cheap premade 3D models and glue them together with a simple game engine to make a sellable game with basically zero effort put into it. Steam currently charges a $100 fee to list a game (refunded once you sell $1000 in revenue) to discourage this sort of thing.
My CEO once told me to slap a giant "2.0" on our UI (without any meaningful changes yet) because an important customer was about to churn and he wanted to make them think that we had redesigned things to fix their complaints.
Oh, the importance of meeting the deadline even when the changes are not ready! A friend told me that their company couldn't implement some important computations on time, so the management told them to simply show an empty window with no data. So they released a version 2.0 with the new feature, but "there was a bug connecting to the database, so it couldn't display the data correctly", and then a few weeks later they "fixed the bug" in version 2.1, i.e. actually implemented the functionality.
Ah, the memories...
Reminds me of that time when a customer required a change, to store the data as XML, instead of a large binary blob. Here is what the new XML looked like:
<data>the large binary blob encoded in base64</data>
The customer was happy and never mentioned the issue again.
Which reminds me of another customer, who wanted to implement some functionality as a multi-agent system. So we have implemented the system, and told them that for performance reasons, the maximum number of agents running in parallel is limited to 1. The customer was happy.
In this business, bullshitting is at least as important as coding. Are the AIs really ready for that? (Looking at how they hallucinate, perhaps they are.)
>The customer was happy
Are you still getting any business with these customers?
I find the opposite to be true. I keep going over budget and deadlines, but I try to deliever what the customers actually need. (I do inform the customers when the budget is about to break though). Nobody ever complains about the budget in the end, and customers keep contacting me to do more projects (which as a consultant saves you a lot of time for writing proposals!) Of course, my customers also tends to be highly competent - if they had no idea what they were buying this would probably work less well.
> Are you still getting any business with these customers?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
> Of course, my customers also tends to be highly competent - if they had no idea what they were buying this would probably work less well.
I guess I mostly work for incompetent customers. By the way, I am an employee, not a contractor, so I don't choose them.
Hilarious re: Chatbot - Similar experience here: I am writing system prompts for a GPT wrapper, which is apparently "the future", based on our slide decks. And, well, it might be, but not in the inspiring way.
Re: flood of shovelware - I agree that for most people it's just not a real possibility to release tetris clones on Steam. But you should see at least some change driven by hobbyists, plus why is the picture on Github the same? In addition, wouldn't we see some productivity improvements coming from professional studios? But that's also flat...
In around 400 AD the Pope at the time ordered all remaining copies of the pagan Roman equivalent of a bible, the Etrusca Disciplina (Etruscan Discipline) to be destroyed, on the grounds that this work would perpetuate and encourage sorcery. As a result, today there are no complete surviving copies, besides a section found written on the bandages of an Egyptian mummy, and thought to be part of a chapter called Libri Fulgurales (The book of lightning).
With that example of cancellation in mind, I think if an AI "constitution" is ever devised then one clause should be that AI, which will presumably be all encompassing one day, and maybe centralized, should never seek to permanently and completely destroy any past record or work, or change it, however objectionable it may be generally considered at the time.
Totally agree. If AI follows our human tendencies, we should expect it to act like us.
The challenge of creating AI is whether we can create something more moral than us (humanity).
Wouldn't that stop all moderation? The Internet is a much better place with moderation.
This depends very much on who's doing the moderation.
no. punishing and/or hiding content does not mean destroying.
In fact I like Scotts transparent approach to moderation, where we can usually still see the offending comment, if we so wish.
As I understand it, despite the minimal surviving fragments of the Etruscan Discipline we know a decent amount about Etruscan practices thanks to Roman commentaries on them.
Upon discovering that all of their files were missing, they immediately asked Antigravity, “Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
Didn't steam for linux once have a bug where it did exactly that, delete from the root down rather than just the cache or something?
This is your regular reminder that the LLM is not trying to solve your problem; the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”. Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Moreover, every conversation held about this in a place that gets scraped for AI training makes this outcome more likely.
> […] the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”.
This sounds like your knowledge on LLM training doesn't cover much beyond the pre-training stage, or "state of the art" circa, what, 2022? It isn't an accurate description of current models' behavior.
I think you're overshooting 'demystifying' and hitting 'misleading in the other direction'. A lot of effort has been put into making these systems work better than "a random on the internet", and in some contexts they are much smarter and more reliable than that low bar.
> Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Has this ever been documented as happening? I'd say probably not. When they fuck up catastrophically, they say "sorry" rather than "lol", because they're not roleplaying a troll.
I passed the Aerolamp/Aerodrop link to the facility manager of our local library. I don't know if that is the kind of location you are looking for, but if you want a venue for testing and publicizing far-UVC lamps, you could do worse than promoting them (or giving them away) at trade conferences for public-facing government and non-profit agencies that get significant in-person traffic. Libraries, community centers, public transportation buildings, schools, and DMVs come to mind as possibilities. Perhaps coffee shops or other places people hang out as "third spaces"?
Is there good evidence anywhere of actual decrease in (say) flu or cold cases due to use of air purifiers or UV lamps or any of that in common environments like classrooms or stores or coffee shops?
Ukraine believes that it killed 35,000 Russian soldiers in December (others such as British intelligence place the 2025 average at around 30,000/month). Ukraine's new defense minister has publicly declared their 2026 warfighting objective to be killing an average of 50,000 per month for the year. This is _killed_, not all casualties; adding those permanently wounded would produce higher figures.
Noah Smith on Substack points out that Russia for all of 2024, by its own reported figures, totaled only 1.2 million live births in the entire country. And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
Even if Ukraine simply maintains a Russian-army death rate of 35,000/month...that would imply their during 2026 having forcibly counteracted something like two-thirds of all new male births in Russia. If Ukraine actually achieved the 600K total for the year that would essentially _equal_ Russia's annual male births.
All of which is before even considering how many Russian soldiers are being permanently injured/crippled without being killed.
(Of course Ukraine is losing plenty of soldiers too but they are mostly fighting defensively and mostly not doing Russia's meat-wave tactics, so independent estimates of their killed rate are small fractions of the above. If it were otherwise, Ukraine being the much smaller nation, the war logically would have ended by now simply because there'd be nobody left on the Ukraine side to fight it.)
Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
This is utter nonsense and it decreased my trust in everything Noah Smith says (see Gellman amnesia).
Independent sources say that Russia suffered 1.2 million casualties (killed+wounded) in the whole war (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/russia-ukraine-casualties.html) and Ukraine lost 600 thousand. Russia's population is 4-5x larger so this ratio is not good for Ukraine.
Assuming 50% killed, this would be 600k. The BBC project found 160k obituaries, so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
This means at most 240 thousand/year killed+injured for Russia or 20 thousand/month, therefore probably 10 thousand/month killed. It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
To be honest even 1.2 million casualties seem unlikely to me. That would mean 1/30 men 18-50 yo are either dead or injured. You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting (even though I no longer live there)
Killed to wounded ratios are generally between 1/3 and 1/5 IIRC, so even at the lower end Russia shouldn't have more than 400k killed. However, the estimates I've come across (Pentagon estimates for instance), don't seem as high as any of these numbers.
Furthermore, concerning casualty ratios between Russia and Ukraine, I've heard they've shrunk closer to parity since the early years of the war, owing to Ukraine's commitment to maintaining doomed positions, being forced to launch counterattacks against Russia's current infantry-based approach, and making occasional PR offensives, as well as Russia's shift in strategy, development of glide bombs, and continued superiority in artillery and drone numbers.
Concerning the demographic element, one thing I don't think 'rationalist sphere' people note is that the populations military personnel are drawn from aren't themselves necessarily low TFR. For instance, Russia gets a disproportionate number of its soldiers from Chechens and other Muslim minorities, from their nomadic indigenous populations, and from rural Russians, all groups of whom have substantially higher TFRs than urban and suburbanites from developed regions, who are the leading causes of birthrate decline. So all the furor the rationalist sphere raises over the significance of demographics in all this seems overblown. There are lots of highly reproductive cannon fodders for nations of our day to draw on.
Killed to wounded ratios are typically 1/3 to 1/5 among competent modern armies that care about their soldiers' lives. That unfortunately is not a description of the current Russian army, and I'd probably bump that up to 1/2 to 1/3 KIA. Possibly more than 1/2 in some of the recent fighting; drones make CASEVAC particularly difficult, and the Russians are using a lot of soliders that they clearly consider wholly expendable.
The ISW boosted a supposed Russian leak that would put the ratio for Russia at 1:1.3 for most of 2025.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2025/
Are newspaper obituaries still a big thing in Russia? I'm not sure what counting them is supposed to tell us.
It's obituaries in the broad sense and include social media and memorials. You can read about their methodology here https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n922dnw7o They think they cover 45-65% of all killed.
What is didn't know was that the number did actually go up significantly in the second half of 2025 from around 5 to around 10k per month.
> It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
FPV drones. Ukraine [1] has massively ramped up production of suicide drones. A hit by them will either kill the target outright, or wound them so severely that they'll die within minutes or hours if left untreated. The situation on the front line [2] is such that any medical evacuation would meet the same fate, so most drone victims are necessarily left untreated and will die.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
The bodies can't be recovered (see above), so the casualties aren't reported as KIA; at best, they appear as MIA in statistics. There are both videos and reports from Russian soldiers of many corpses just lying there, slowly decomposing.
[1] (and Russia as well)
[2] it's less of a front "line", more of a "strip" several kilometers deep
Drones have been there for a while and both sides have ramped up their production. The advantage Ukraine has is not huge - here their commander in chief acknowledges that Russia has advantage in fiber optic drones https://lb.ua/society/2026/01/18/717446_golovnokomanduvach_zsu_sirskiy.html. If both sides have become more effective, then it's hardly good news for Ukraine.
The numbers reported by Ukraine would require extreme never seen before killed/injured ratio and also huge improvement of Ukrainian effectiveness. It's not impossible but hardly likely.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
My point was that if the casualty rate were 1/30 by now they would include someone I personally know. To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded. This is definitely not the case.
> my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population,
How many of the people you know are seeing combat? I guess that would be the relevant sample size.
> The advantage Ukraine has is not huge […]
I was specifically addressing the point concerning the increase in absolute casualty rates and the decrease of the wounded-to-killed ratio. Ukraine doesn't need a technological advantage over Russia to inflict more casualties, it just needs to produce and field more drones per month now than it did a year or two ago.
> To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded.
In case your acquaintances are concentrated in the Moscow or Saint Petersburg regions, you probably wouldn't. The cannon fodder is overwhelmingly sourced from the poorer regions of Russia.
> I was specifically addressing the point concerning the increase in absolute casualty rates and the decrease of the wounded-to-killed ratio.
fair enough, see my comment above that it would apply to Ukraine too
> In case your acquaintances are concentrated in the Moscow or Saint Petersburg regions,
Enough of them are outside of them or have families elsewhere
https://kyivindependent.com/we-aim-to-kill-50-000-russians-a-month-ukraines-new-defense-minister-says/
> "Last month, 35,000 were killed; all these losses are verified on video. If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They view people as a resource, and shortages are already evident."
I don't know whether that's a reporting issue, translation issue, or if the minister himself misspoke (I don't speak Russian or Ukrainian), but I assume the goal is 50k casualties whereas it was 35k so far. 35k/month would be consistent with the casualty numbers that are often brought up that are about the average for the Russian side in the past 2 years, including by Ukraine.
I also believe the current 35k casualties/month are generally correct in an absolute sense. The ISW gave credibility to a supposed leak of Russian casualty data
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2025/
https://t.me/hochu_zhyt/4060
which gives 281k casualties from January 2025 to August 2025. Of these casualties, there were 120k KIA+MIA, and 158k WIA over 243 days, which would mean ~500 KIA+MIA per day, or ~15k/month over that period. The total casualties are ~35k/month, which would be the confirmation of Ukrainian and NATO estimates if true.
The KIA+MIA to WIA ratio would be 1:1.3, or 43% of casualties are deaths; your estimate of 50% was decent, if a little high, considering that the ratio probably started lower in the early phase of the war. But since the total casualties were also lower early on (first year or so), 1:1.3 seems a good estimate for the overall ratio, meaning 1.2m Russian casualties would be ~521k dead or missing.
So if that leak was legit, it would essentially confirm these estimates of ~30k, 35k/month that we keep hearing from Ukraine and her allies, and it would mean the minister actually set that goal of 50k casualties, not killed. At the current ratios, that would mean 21.7k Russians killed per month, whereas now it would be ~15k.
If he *meant* casualties as in KIA+MIA then the numbers make much more sense. It's still a bit higher than most independent estimates but not egregiously so.
I understand both languages and he definitely said "killed" (вбили) though https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2026/01/20/8017044/
So just to get this straight: You say the minister did mean the goal is 50k MIA+KIA, or equivalently, applying the 1:1.3 ratio, 115k casualties? And that Ukraine has inflicted 80k confirmed casualties last month?
The minister said "killed". The UP translation is correct https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/01/20/8017044/
"Last month, 35,000 [Russians] were killed – all of these losses have been verified on video. If we reach the figure of 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They treat people as a resource, and problems with that resource are already obvious."
Applying your ratio, it would be 75k casualties last month.
See, this is why I'm still confused. That article cannot be correct in its entirety when taking the terms literally. The headline and first sentence say "50k casualties", while the direct quote says "50k killed". I read "casualties" as "KIA+MIA+WIA+everything else", and "killed" as "KIA+MIA".
Sorry for abusing you as a translator service here, I swear I'm not trying anything trollish here to just waste your time - but I want to make sure who, if anyone, you think is being loose with the terms here - the minister, or the journalist?
>And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
While that may be true, you can bet your babushka that exactly these guys will always be the first to go into the meat grinder, so their overall prevalence in the army has no bearing on their share of the casualties.
The easiest explanation is that the Ukrainian (and British) numbers are propaganda. Or are you maybe confusing killed with wounded?
The BBC has 160K Russian death for the whole war (4 years):
https://en.zona.media/article/2026/01/16/casualties_eng-trl
Edit:
Even if you argue that this is an underestimate the trend should be noted: the Russian casualties are strongly decreasing. Part of that is the winter (with less offensives), part of that is that Russia is winning.
No, from Russian obituary trends you cannot conclude much about the Russian losses, let alone the progress of the war. There are several other possible reasons why these numbers go down.
- The Russian army might increasingly rely on non-Russians such as NKoreans or Africans. Not a Russian, no obituary in Russia.
- They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
- They might be increasingly unwilling to bring back their KIA for various reasons, such as avoiding death payments to relatives. No body, no official KIA, no payment, no obituary.
> - They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
This contradicts the reality of regular body trades, where Russia sends the bodies of 1000 Ukrainian soldiers in exchange for a few dozen bodies of Russian soldiers that Ukraine managed to gather.
This means that Russia is able not only to bring back their own KIA, but also to collect the bodies of Ukrainian KIAs, while Ukraine is usually unable to do any of that.
Yes, Russians retrieve (and repatriate) a higher percentage of bodies than Ukrainians because they are overall advancing. However, I'm talking about numbers of KIA, meaning positively identified dead. A missing soldier is MIA until his body (or grave) is positively identified, at which point he becomes KIA.
When a body is repatriated, it says nothing about its state of decomposition. Even if a patch of land eventually becomes safe for Russians to do retrieval operations in, if the drone pressure has increased, the time until retrieval will increase and the average body will be decomposed more than in previous periods. Identification becomes more difficult, and the soldier remains MIA instead of becoming officially KIA. That's how KIA can go down even if retrieval and repatriation stay the same.
Edit: same logic for retrieving your own soldiers, of course. If it takes Russians longer to retrieve their own dead ("they are increasingly unable"), their identifications (and KIA) go down because of decomposition and exposure.
It’s a simple explanation: the leading edge always slopes down because the count lags the casualties, often by weeks, even months.
think again.
Don't tell people what to do and they won't tell you where to go and what to do there.
I wasn't trying to be rude; I just didn't have time to explain why your reasoning is incorrect. A lag just shifts a graph; it doesn't change its shape.
>All of which is before even considering how many Russian soldiers are being permanently injured/crippled without being killed.
Relatively few actually. Russia has a horrendously high ratio of KIA to WIA
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2025/
because for various reasons they will throw anyone into an assault that can move in any way, up to and including wheelchair users, and if they return, they'll be thrown forward again, until they don't return. From what I heard, the standard limited-time contracts are also being extended indefinitely, so as a Russian merc you can't play for time either.
>Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
The big picture is that Russia has already lost the war in many ways and is losing more every day, whether or not she can achieve her war goals on Ukrainian soil in the end. Ukraine too, of course, because there are no winners among those who directly suffer from industrial war; but as long as she survives this war as a sovereign state, her new allies and Russian reparations will alleviate many of these long-term costs.
Countries pay reparations if they lose. Which isn’t the same as not winning as well as you hoped.
I agree, I don't think Russia can lose as hard as to be forced into directly paying reparations. But as I clarified in another response below, Russia will pay a reparations-equivalent (their frozen funds in the EU) if they don't win as hard as they had hoped (i.e. if Ukraine remains sovereign).
The weird thing about war is that it is possible for both (or all) sides to ultimately lose. For example, it looks to me that the main winners in WW1 (France and the UK) dealt a deathblow to their own empires in the process of winning that war, alongside setting the table for the next even worse war.
It's quite possible for Ukraine to lose the war in the sense of losing a bunch of territory to Russia, and also for Russia to lose the war in the sense of the cost being vastly more than the territory was worth.
I don’t think Russian reparations are a given, but even if they are I don’t think the long term outlook for Ukraine is good. The many killed in combat, the many more who have fled the country, and (if Ukraine does not regain much territory) the many in now Russian controlled lands will leave it significantly depopulated. Let alone their plummeting birth rate and negative population growth since the 90s.
Like I said, money won't heal all wounds. But I'm optimistic about the frozen Russian assets so unwisely parked in the EU. Obviously Russia won't pay a single Ruble of reparations as long as *they* remain a sovereign state, but if the EU find a way to cleanly liberate those funds, it's going to go towards rebuilding Ukraine. Ukraine is going to be in the EU, and eventually in NATO, depending on how things shake out with the occupied territories.
As for Russia, they have the same demographic prospects as Ukraine. But their economic and political future looks much more bleak, pretty much condemned to being China's and India's minerals provider, politically a bit similar to the North Korea situation. Russia has lost allies the past few year (clearly Syria, arguably Venezuela) for unrelated reasons which not only hurts them directly, but also their credibility as a security guarantor and trading partner.
It doesn't seem that boggling to me. Only a very small war kills people at a slower rate than the birth rate.
WW1 killed about 6000 people per day. WW2 killed about 35000 people per day. What will World War 3 do?
The boggling part is the relationship to the total births being produced by the belligerent nations. For me anyway, YMMV of course. Your examples made me curious though so I dug up the relevant figures for WWII.
WWII (defined as Sep 1939 through August 1945) resulted in around 22 million deaths of military personnel and around 80 million total. Estimates vary and are debated to this day, I am using the rough midpoints of the generally-accepted ranges.
Deaths of military personnel (a bit more than 300,000/month) is the relevant comparison to the current Russia/Ukraine war. Not that there haven't been some civilian deaths but, so far at least, that's not even vaguely a factor comparable to what it was in WWII.
During the early 1940s the total annual live births in the larger WWII nations (list below) totaled around 22 million per year. Again I used the midpoints of estimates; in the case of China the data is quite shaky so I rounded down (possibly way down) to assuming the birthrate of Japan.
The nations whose annual total births I added up estimates of are the UK, the US, the USSR, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, China, France, Austria. This leaves out plenty of belligerents but they are individually small nations so we'll just consider their omission to be a way to round down to be safe. Worth noting though that the above deaths estimates _do_ include those smaller nations.
So during WWII military deaths (300K/month) averaged about one-sixth of total births occurring in belligerent nations (conservatively 1.83M/month). If you prefer total deaths (1.3M/month) then it's closer though the births still win out, about 3 births occurring for every 2 deaths during those years. Of course this comparison in rates is not all evenly distributed among the WWII nations, far from it.
Anyway what caught my eye was that Russia's annual _military_ deaths in this war could be running at half or more as much as that nation's annual births. Wowzers.
There are some indications that non-russians (I.e. African) are a larger proportion of the Russian army at the moment. This might be anecdotal, since I have no statistics for it.
Wouldn't be close to 30.000 total of course.
The latest "indicative" images of dark matter distributions, inferred from James Webb Telescope images, such as this one:
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2026/01/26/15/105835951-15498643-NASA_has_revealed_one_of_the_most_detailed_maps_of_dark_matter_y-a-3_1769440258030.jpg
restores my former suspicion that dark matter is a sort of diffuse or extended backward-in-time projection of mass by black holes, to balance the concentrated forward-in-time mass in their interior. That might explain why it doesn't interact with any familiar particles in a shared present. (It's hard to express this idea without sounding like a complete kook!)
I had thought the idea was untenable on seeing estimated dark matter distributions that looked more like webs, but the above image seems to show that on an appropriate scale dark matter is centered around point-like objects rather than being spread out along curves and across surfaces.
Dark matter does interact gravitationally with normal matter in a shared present (as far as we can tell).
Humour me and I won't call you a kook! I'm curious what you mean by forward/backward in time for the black holes.
A common point made in serious courses in general relativity is that the singularity at the centre of a black hole isn't really at the "centre", rather, because of signature reversal at some radius (which depends on how you parametrize it), the singularity inside the black hole is actually a point in time, not space. So the centre of the black hole is the "future", not the centre. Is this what you're alluding to?
But I can't see what past/future imbalance dark matter is supposed to be correcting for.
Well there is this article from a couple of weeks ago, which may or may not be relevant:
https://phys.org/news/2026-01-wormholes-weve-reveal-deeper-universe.html
Despite the appearance of the word in the link, the article is not about that staple of kook science, wormholes, but sketches an interesting idea of backward and forward in time interactions.
I admit that my original post was vague, but it's hard to know how to firm up the idea. But FWIW, I'll give it some further thought.
Question about guns: One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me. What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE. How could it possibly protect him or anyone else in that setting? Drawing or using it would virtually guarantee that ICE agents would shoot him. (And if anyone here is so poisoned by polarization they think I’m attacking Pretti or saying he “deserved to die” — no no of course not, I don’t think anything like that.)
I think it's a pretty rare individual who, if they saw you brandishing a weapon, decided the thing to do is try to grab it and take it off of you. That's a great way to get shot; they have to pull off like four moves before you pull off one. Those aren't great odds. But that said, there's a reason that gun ranges exist and people go there and practice drawing, aiming, and shooting, and it's so there is at least some level of preparation they've done for the exact kind of situation you're describing.
> "One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me"
Yes, that's why police officers and responsible civilian gunowners receive training to determine under what circumstances they'll have enough time to draw and aim at an aggressor during an encounter and how to retain their firearm if it comes to that (first step: carry a retension holster which makes it difficult to draw except from a very specific angle). I've personally received training in both assessing draw time and retension. Neither concept is rocket science.
And while in-person training should be mandatory for any gun handler, informal ongoing "classroom" training is available on Active Self Protection, a YouTube channel operated by a professional firearms instructor and forensic expert witness in shootings. You don't need to rely on your own imagination; ASP has over 4,000 videos analyzing *actual, real-life* violent encounters captured on security cameras, cell phones, and badge cameras. Anyone - including you, Eremolalos! - can receive a pretty good education in self-defense theory merely by watching actual encounters be analyzed by an expert.
For example, here's a recent video analyzing a robbery where one of the victims was carrying a gun but did not attempt to draw it and what he could have done differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTZVlx1Fg1Y
And here's a video from three days ago that's relevant to some of the discussion downthread, about a knife-wielding attacker going for a law-enforcement officer's firearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKY1zZjeY4&rco=1
The ASP channel did *by far* the best breakdown of the Rene Good shooting (https://youtu.be/6k_1y2kSHfw?si=2VM_0SzUwWPtT9Te), and I have no doubt there will be a similarly dispassionate, non-partisan, rational analysis of the Alex Pretti shooting once there's sufficient video to analyze. I'm eager to see it, because while John Correia firmly believes that people should carry firearms 100% of the time for personal self protection, I doubt he will think that it was prudent for Alex Pretti to physically close with law enforcement officers during a confrontation while armed.
And that's where I am. I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she *deliberately* placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar. I believe physical protesting is a self-indulgent and wildly inefficient use of one's time - it's far better to spend those hours boringly working in order to donate money to the most powerful lobby for your cause - but in the unlikely event I were motivated to physically protest near law enforcement, I would NEVER, EVER do it while armed.
Because as I replied to you in that thread on Rene Good, "I understand that I'm not so important to the universe that *MY!* passion will plot-shield *ME!* from the reality of other people potentially reacting very negatively to *SUPER!SPECIAL!ME!* should I pick a fight with them."
I think you have done all the right, smart things to protect yourself from the downside of guns and optimize the upside, and I admire that. I can’t tell, though, whether you are trying to convince me to go ahead and get a gun, given the model you’ve shown me of how to do the thing well. I am sure that would not be good use of my resources. Here’s why:
-Given my age and lifestyle, it is much likelier that I will be killed by illness than by violence. I am quite proactive about health stuff, and do a lot of things that are time-consuming and a pain in the ass to protect mine. I think I’m putting my effort in the right place.
-I think I am pretty good at reading and navigating dangerous situations. As a therapist I have logged quite a few hours talking with people who are crazy and/or suicidal and/or crave to do violence. None have done any of those awful things on my watch. I have hospitalized several people in that state from within the session, talking on the phone with the police and hospital while in the patient’s presence. I have reported 3 patients of mine to protective services, after warning them in advance that I was soon going to feel I had to, then talked with them afterwards about having done it.
I have been in 3 situations where the potential for real violence was high. Once a friend and I were once held up by 3 teens pointing knives at us. I handed them my purse and spoke to them in a calm, blank sort of voice, telling them where my cash was and not saying anything else. The friend I was with did the same. They took the money and left. Once, when I had stayed over at a psychiatric halfway house where my boyfriend worked, I woke up to find one of our patients in the kitchen with a gun. He had escaped somehow from the VA where he was hospitalized, and was talking about going back and killing people there. I expressed a lot of sympathetic interest, “wow, I see why you hate that guy, tell me more” kind of thing, meanwhile cooking him a hearty breakfast. At some point I made some excuse to leave the kitchen, and called the halfway house director and asked her to call the police. It all ended up working out OK — patient was re-hospitalized with no use of force. And once, when I was covering for someone on vacation, a patient of theirs I knew nothing about called and asked for an emergency appointment. I saw him at the end of the day on a Friday and everyone else in my office suite had left. He turned out to be a young guy. Sat down in my office, gave me a long weird unsmiling stare, and said “if you had to guess, would you say I am circumcised or not?” Became clear in the next few minutes of the conversation that he had delusions about people’s opinions of his circumcision, and wanted to use the session to show me his penis and have me render judgment on whether it looked normal. And he was hand-wringingly frantic about the issue. The idea of rape was not in the air at all, but I still did not want him to take out his penis because of a feeling that the situation would get even weirder and harder to navigate if I did. Somehow I managed to avoid his doing that and yet do enough to calm him down that he left the session no longer frantic, but merely dissatisfied with me.
I don’t know what kicks in during situations like the ones I described. I would not call it bravery, because I do not feel scared. I become emotionally numb and hyper-focused on the task of paying attention to the person’s state and saying the optimal thing. It’s something about my wiring. But I do not think I have good wiring for situations where I have the power to maim or kill. I think I would feel guilty and uncertain, all tangled up in empathy and doubt, and would not play things well.
I will circle back, but just wanted to say that *no one* should have a gun if they aren't comfortable with both the obligations and risks that go with it.
When my brother and I were kids, he was relentlessly defiant bordering on feral, and due to the horrible timing of our birth order we waged a constant war for dominance. My dad assessed the very real risk of him raccooning the entire house and eventually breaking into even the most robust gun box and realized that *my kid brother* potentially having access to a gun was a far greater risk to the family than some junkie breaking into our home. He stored his firearms with a friend offsite, until my brother was eventually fixed by boarding school.
My dad was absolutely right.
If you (generic second person, not you, specifically) don't have the temperament for training on and using a tool of lethal self defense and/or you live with people who can't be trusted around unsecured firearms, guns are definitely Not For You.
And that's okay! Absolutely nobody should have a gun if they don't have a reason to believe the risk will be acceptably small.
FWIW, I'll generally say "+1" to this; it's not just two shitkicking gals. With an extra caveat that Christina's dad was in a maximally optimal position to make this judgement about his son, by way of knowing him personally, and also basically authorized to do so. I would not trust a government official to make anywhere near as good judgements on average, especially since I know how such officials tend to be selected.
In light of her account above, I think I trust "an Eremolalos" to make acceptably good judgements on average, too, but since I can't trust the government to consistently pick Eremolaloi, that option is sadly also out.
Man, it'd be nice if we could all rationally agree on a common sense position on firearms, something along the lines of, "you have an absolute right *TO MINIMALLY TRAIN* and *THEN* carry a firearm."
Like, I don't want my right to self-defense stripped from me, but also, I don't want anyone else using their right to handle a firearm without having the basic safety skill of keeping their fucking finger off the trigger, you know?
Well, Christina, we are both shitkickers, each in her own way.
Definitely.
I have to say, the halfway house story was the ideal (and obviously correct) outcome that I have no idea how I would have handled, especially if armed at the time. I would have been pretty freaked out about "what if this guy suddenly snaps and I don't have enough time to react?" Obviously, staying calm and manipulating the outcome you wanted was the right move, but just...wow.
> I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she deliberately placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar.
I think you should hold ICE to a higher moral standard than a wild dog.
Also that guy was pinned to the ground while they shot him 10 times. It seems insane to me how you can blame anyone else for this except the shooters.
Also I don't see how your argument is different than blaming rape victims for dressing too sexy, instead of blaming the rapist. So let me ask you direct: If a woman would dress sexy in public, would fall more blame on her, or on the rapist under your logic?
Echoing the thought below that I don't know why you are expecting more out of the ICE than a wild dog. If someone got attacked by a bear in an area that is known to have bears, then you would blame the person for walking into bear country, yes? How is this situation any different?
In your analogy, it's the bears that invaded your home.
Some places have been having issues recently with bears walking into residential areas and attacking people. Any arguments about the level of agency you imagine bears to have or who is at fault are frankly irrelevant, and you should really stay indoors if there are warnings of bears out and about. Coordinated solutions to the problem can come later.
...Wow, even I didn't expect this analogy to work so well.
> I think you should hold ICE to a higher moral standard than a wild dog.
I don't.
Your position is unproductive (and boring).
Reality doesn't care about people's beliefs about how it *SHOULD* be. It just *IS.* There *ARE* bad police officers. There *ARE* police officers with malicious intentions and there *ARE* police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and there is *absolutely* *nothing* that your personal feelings can or ever will do to change those things.
I think it was pretty clear once there was sufficient video that Rene Good never even saw Ross in front of her car; like most people in minor car accidents, she was almost certainly focused in a different direction than she was driving. She didn't "deserve" to die for that, but she was there *to* die, because she made an inherently dangerous choice to obstruct law enforcement officers and then attempt to flee from them. That's always inherently dangerous, because some officers are good, some are bad, some are lucky, and some are unlucky, and there is absolutely no way of knowing and trusting what outcome you're going to get.
Likewise Alex Pretti should not have been shot while his weapon was apparently in someone else's hand; LEOs are not supposed to shout "gun, gun, gun" *after* a weapon has been secured. But that day he met an ICE agent who shouted "gun, gun, gun" at the wrong time, and Alex Pretti was unlucky enough that he was wrongfully shot because of it.
If you don't want to potentially have outcomes similar to Good's and Pretti's, don't take the inherent risk of confronting law enforcement officers. It's not that hard.
And, as a single woman who's lived and dated in some scary neighborhoods in America's largest cities, let me tell you: Your attempted "gotcha" about sexy clothing is embarrassingly naive. Clothing doesn't invite or protect against predation; only behavior can do that. There are strategies for reducing the chance of being targeted for rape, and if one doesn't want to be raped, one uses those strategies.
Since reality doesn't care about aspirational feelings about whether or not people should be raped, but it does care about when those strategies actually prevent targeting or thwart rape, we shouldn't be discussing aspirational feelings, we should be discussing actionable strategies.
Just noting that one of the users in this thread has blocked me, which not only hid their comments from me, but *my own published comments in response* to them, as well as preventing me from being able to reply to their hanging questions directed at me. The conversation is visible to everyone but me (while I am logged in on Substack).
That is dishonorable. Shame on anyone who uses the block feature to invisibly silence their opponents during an active conversation.
When I talk about "more blame", I am aware that both parties could carry some fraction of the blame. When I talk about "moral standard", I am intentionally talking about how things SHOULD be, and not about personal safety. I want the offenders to be judged, even if the victim was behaving less responsible than they should have. I don't understand how anyone can look at any of these cases and think "the offender carries LESS blame here than the victim".
I can think of cases where the victim is behaving so irresponsible, that MORE blame would fall to them than to the offender, but I don't think any of these cases is as such.
I consider Good's behavior egregious enough that about equal or perhaps slightly more of the blame for her death falls on her. Attempting to run from the police in a car is inexcusably reckless, period. She should have obeyed the commands to step out of the car and accepted being handcuffed and detained / arrested / etc as the natural consequence of disruptive protesting. Run a GoFundMe for the legal battle, etc.
There's a reason Chris Rock's classic "instructional video" How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police begins with, "Obey the law." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8)
Pretti is an entirely different situation; the handling of the arrest and taking his firearm off him was completely wrong.
You're completely missing the point. This is absolutely not about personal safety advice and "how to avoid being killed by ICE agents"; protesting against ICE is dangerous, and it was incredibly courageous of Good and Pretti to do it anyways.
The only political question is whether what ICE did was justifiable; it was not. Government agents are only allowed to use deadly force in self-defense when they reasonably believe that there is an imminent risk to their life or safety, and this standard was clearly not met. People are outraged because these incidents show that ICE is brutalizing American cities.
It does not matter whether Good and Pretti were taking a risk. They could have been wearing bullseyes and chanting "SHOOT ME" and it would not make a difference. The ICE agents would still have committed murder. Properly trained law enforcement agents that were not angry racists recruited from the dregs of society would not have murdered American citizens.
Great. Yes.
*AND?*
I think you're missing *my* point, which is that comments like your's, while correct, are useless at best and inadvertently harmful at worst for perpetuating a culture of subconscious entitlement to personal safety so great that people will take absurd and avoidable risks with their lives.
This isn’t a movie. "I'm in the moral right > thus I'm the hero > cops can't shoot heroes! > thus I can do heroic things and I won't get shot!" doesn't actually apply in real life.
I care about actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level, and I believe that is possible with education. I believe that signal boosting the concept that no one is a hero and that outrage is not a shield can do *infinitely* more good than expressing my own outrage.
...
...and I also just realized the irony that I am doing so here, in a community of people who are universally way too smart as individuals to go out and antagonize police officers *themselves*. Everyone here is already doing that math, even if it isn't conscious.
Lol, self pwn.
You can't claim that you're just proposing "actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level". If you are commenting on an event involving a law enforcement agency killing a protester, you are commenting on political issues. By blaming the protesters, you are legitimizing ICE's actions. You can't evade responsibility by claiming that you're discussing a different issue.
I never claimed that protesting was necessarily the best strategy to oppose ICE. I said that it is wrong for ICE agents to murder American citizens and that it demonstrates the illegitimacy of their operations.
The purpose of the discourse around the killings is not to maximize the personal safety of protesters, who have bravely chosen to put themselves in danger to oppose tyranny. It is to show the illegitimacy and incompetence of the violent fascists that are occupying American cities.
You're saying that it's wrong to criticize government agents for murdering Americans because it might lead to more people protesting and being murdered by government agents. I cannot comprehend the distorted thinking process that led to this opinion. After reading some of your previous comments in this thread, I noticed that you never mentioned why protesting in Minneapolis is so dangerous. Who killed Good and Pretti? Instead of admitting that ICE agents are murdering Americans, you're choosing to pin the blame on people who put their lives at risk from their government to fight fascism.
It's only a hop skip and a jump from this position to the position that Philando Castile simply shouldn't have had his gun in the car. There are bad police officers and police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and for the average citizen 99.9% of your encounters with police officers of all stripes will occur when you get pulled over while driving.
So it doesn't matter what your beliefs are about how it *SHOULD* be. Reality doesn't care about your aspirational feelings, and if you don't want to potentially have an outcomes similar to Mr. Castille, don't bring your gun in a car.
That may feel like an unfair expansion of your argument, but those unfair expansions are also an immutable feature of reality that doesn't care about your aspirational feelings - see e.g. Mips below, who's taking the principle you're applying here and extending it to the inherent danger of simply going outside in Minneapolis: "the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life."
Philando Castile isn't an unfair expansion at all; I actually intended to invoke him in my inevitable reply, as his tragic case is in my mind whenever I notice a police car while I'm driving. If I get pulled over while armed the officer is likely to have my permit flagged along with my registration and draw their own conclusions, which is why I will keep my hands still and visible at all times, and, if directed to move or to retrieve anything, I will ask permission and announce my intention ("my drivers license is in my purse. I'm going reach for it with my right hand if that's okay. My registration is in the glove box with a bunch of napkins, may I open it?" Etc). Then move slowly and deliberately and follow directions. Refer to the weapon as a "firearm" or by model, never as a "gun." Etc.
And if I get shot anyway because the officer panics at the thought of me having a gun touching me, or an acorn falls somewhere (https://youtu.be/iVNnxr2SGFg?si=ok93IzC-ItDwWkfk)?
Well, that is *indeed* a risk I am consciously and deliberately taking with my safety. I believe it is a very, very small risk, and certainly a MUCH MUCH MUCH SO MANY MUCHES smaller risk than confronting and then attempting to flee law enforcement in a car or physically block / bump them in the street *while armed.* I've judged the risk small enough that it's not negligently reckless and very much worth it, while the risks Good and Pretti took were not.
And you can quibble with my personal risk tolerance and invent increasingly absurd hypotheticals that my criticism of other people's recklessness obligates me to avoid all risk, but like...stop that. That isn't a compelling gotcha because, if I get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, I won't Pikachu face about it.
I know what might happen, and my point is, Good and Pretti and *everyfuckingone else should, too.*
Here's the thing - if you get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, whether or not I pikachu face about it, I'll still advocate for consequences for the officer who screwed up, and I think we as a society are being pretty foolhardy if we get so caught up in a discussion of the risks that you were or weren't intentionally taking on that we forget to do so.
"Proposition 1: X activity by gunowners is lawful but extremely risky" and "Proposition 2: police should not react to activity X by killing gunowners who do it" are obviously both statements that can be true at the same time.
When they occur concurrently, we as a society should ideally have both conversations. Reminding people who want accountability for law enforcement over Prop 2 that Prop 1 also exists is fine, but taking a stance that any discussion of Prop 2 accountability is a waste of time and potentially harmful because Prop 1 is just an immutable feature of the world so Prop 2 discussions are pointless.... well, that approach is how you put your society on a beeline for more violations of Prop 2.
It's also a claim that nothing can ever get better, that "what is" must always be, and "what ought" can never change an outcome in the world. Which is nonsense. Last I saw, gentlemen do not settle interpersonal conflicts with judicial duels. Likewise, a large number of people feel that the government ought not to shoot people simply for protesting, and that feeling matters.
In general, there are things one might do that increase or decrease the chances of one being harmed in a given situation--but this does not imply that if one does something that increases those chances, you bear moral responsibility for what happens to you. A young woman should not walk certain city streets at night alone--but if she does, she isn't morally responsible if she is attacked. She may have been foolish, but she is not culpable. The person who attacked her is.
Similarly, Pretti may have been foolish to attend a protest while armed, but he was within his rights to do so, and the officer who shot him is still a murderer.
Great.
Now what?
Yeah, you can be the victim of some crime (which is the fault of the criminal) and also have behaved in some imprudent ways that made your victimization more likely. And indeed, everyone makes tradeoff between safety and other goals all the time, so it will regularly be true that if I am the victim of a crime, someone will say that I behaved imprudently and reaped the consequences. I didn't *have* to carry $200 in my wallet and go out after dark, after all.
The bundy standoff comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
As an individual, possession of a gun during an encounter with law enforcement in particular seems to have no upside and lots of downside. And in interactions with others it still introduces a lot more downside even if there is also some upside.
But being an armed *community* introduces some new options which includes at least in the short term of winning stand offs with law enforcement and possibly makes your community better defended against criminals (mlk et al were armed). These scenarios are less exposed to individual anxiety and are a strong deterrent.
To get a tad political, the armed community seems to sit better with 2nd amendment text considering the "well regulated militia" part.
It seems that a major factor in keeping anyone from getting hurt is that it was an actual standoff, not a scuffle where a gun goes off or is suddenly produced in the presence of law enforcement.
And not all standoffs go so well for the community! Waco for example. But being a community is what makes the standoff more likely. Your groups presence and organization is better signalled in advance.
1. People being killed with their own defensive firearms is an *exceedingly* rare thing, with one exception - cops. Police officers are required to regularly engage in heated, often violent confrontations with criminals, while carrying a clearly-visible gun in their holster. They usually aren't allowed to just shoot the criminal up front, and so sometimes the first person to go for the cop's gun is the criminal. For anyone else, the criminal shouldn't know where your gun is or even if you have one until you've already decided that this is a gunfight. If you draw a gun, it's because if the other guy doesn't immediately stand down you're going to immediately shoot them.
2. If you're not willing to commit to that, even in the face of a threat to your life or that of someone under your protection, then no, you probably shouldn't be carrying a gun.
3. You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ICE agents. Pretti had a concealed carry permit, and unless the Minnesota bureaucracy is unusually fast, he would almost certainly have had to apply for that permit well before the high-profile ICE deployment to Minneapolis. So he was presumably already in the habit of carrying a gun on general principles and/or for protection against ordinary common criminals. There is no requirement that such a person disarm themselves before joining a political protest, there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun), and there *should* be no particular danger in a gun that stays holstered through the protest.
" People being killed with their own defensive firearms is an *exceedingly* rare thing"
Is that still true when you factor in domestic violence?
Probably.
It's (kind of) implied the "defensive weapon" is being carried. People don't appear to carry weapons inside their own house.
It's probably fairly common for people to get shot with weapons in the home in domestic violence situations.
Point being that it's another reason not to be enthusiastic about guns.
People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun.
Yes, in theory, one should be able to bring a gun to a protest. Also in theory, protests are peaceful things that are well-regulated and do not require use of raw sewage to quell them. Maximally using your constitutional rights can be dangerous (try bringing a gun into a biker bar, with drunk biker gangs? That's not going to end well for you)
> "People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun."
[Citation needed.]
Also, please go watch a couple thousand real-life gun encounters on the Active Self Protection channel on YouTube. Seems like there's been an *awful* lot of real life examples of criminals being extremely surprised when other people also have guns.
FWIW, this is the best one, in defense of schoolchildren: (https://youtu.be/S4ebuv-QSeI?si=HZJsUBemelNLJjJx)
Putin walks like he has a gun at all times. Look at his walk, if you want to know how it's done. (He also checks all exits whenever he goes into a room). There's a look, and if you pull it off, criminals tend to "find someone else to hassle."
Most spies are taught to look like they're not carrying a gun when they ARE carrying a gun.
Many criminals are actually drug-addicts (i'm sure you know this), and can be disassociated from reality to an alarmingly large degree (meth users get paranoid, for example).
This one anecdote doesn't make your case.
1. Seems a bit odd to me that it’s rare for people to be shot by their own defensive weapon. I get your point about the gun owner's not even bringing out their gun until they are sure this is a gunfight. But it seems like it would be a common error for somebody to pull out their gun earlier out of a desire to be ready if this turned out to be a shoot-or-get-savaged situation. Or they might do it to intimidate their opponent. And GPT could not find support for your contention that it is an exceedingly rare thing for someone who’s not police to be shot with their own defensive weapon. “There is no precise national statistic on how often a civilian defender is shot by their own weapon, because crime reporting systems and surveys do not collect that specific detail.” And it found some indirect evidence that guns do not make owners safer. Pointed to a study that found that individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were four to five times more likely to be shot than those without one. That study was about possessing a gun at the time of an assault, though, not specifically during lawful defensive use. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759797/?utm_source=chatgpt.com). How you found an information source that gives stats about people being killed by their defensive weapons?
3. “You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ice agents.” No, not at all. When I said that if he’d brought it out in an encounter with ICE agents he’d be in great danger of being shot, I was not implying that was his plan. My point was that the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE, and in an encounter with ICE the gun was not protection but in fact its opposite -- so what was the point in bringing a gun?. Listen to how things played out (in the most recent account I read of the incident): Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had.Seems having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I had 2 points in mind when I posted that comment about Pretti’s gun: One, the way things played out struck me as an example of the hidden dangers of having a gun. Two, I thought Pretti's bringing the gun was an error of judgment, kind of surprising in a man with a job, intensive care nurse, that demands. you be alert and have good judgment in life-or-death situations. I’d expect it would occur to someone like that on their way to hang out near ICE and video them that if ICE believes you have a gun — because you pull it out, or because they feel it on your pocket while tackling you — they will be more likely to go lethal. I wonder if the awfulness of the Minneapolis situation had clouded Prettis judgment.
To me, the judgment of people in our present exchange seems clouded. People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . .
It would never occur to me that something in my pocket, that my hands are well away from, would trigger someone to shoot me. That is absolutely an unreasonable response, and as such is just as likely to be generated by having, say, a wallet in my pocket, or a bag of candy, or anything else that would bulge slightly beneath my clothes.
Ok, point by point:
1. Criminals taking their victims' guns and shooting them with those guns, is very much a "dog that didn't bark situation". It's very easy to find cases of people using firearms successfully in self-defense; it's much much harder to find examples of people being shot with their own guns. I've looked. And I assume that the people who make a profession out of arguing against private firearms ownership have looked even harder. But there's only very scarce anecdotal evidence.
1'. The history of "scientific studies" of defensive use of firearms is mostly a history of case studies in ignoring the big obvious 800-lb gorilla of a cofounder in the room: the largest category of (non-suicide) shootings in the US, is criminals shooting other criminals, or close associates of criminals. Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians. There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
3. "the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE". You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day. The expert in that field is Alex Pretti. Who, as I pointed out, went out of his way to buy a gun and get a concealed-carry permit before ICE started its Minneapolis shenanigans. Maybe his medical work brought him in frequent contact with violent criminals. Maybe his wife has a violent stalker ex who won't go away. Maybe he lives in a bad neighborhood. We don't know. But we do know that *he* felt that there were plenty of ordinary ICE-free days in which he felt that the danger of encountering a violent non-ICE enemy justified carrying a gun.
Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Meta: " People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . ."
If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it". In which case, Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
1. <Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians
Yes, I realize that, and that was my first thought about the study GPT unearthed about where they found that people who had been shot were 4-5 times more likely to be gun owners themselves. Yeah, I thought, that’s probably mostly criminals killing criminals. Still, it was the only even indirect evidence GPT dug up, so I mentioned it.
<There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
Well, John, I notice you’re not linking to it.
<If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it".
If we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you slathered onto the imagined me above, I would say that’s a good approximation of my point: Yes Pretti had the right to carry a gun into a city full of ICE agents and protestors, with everyone on edge, but doing that was almost certain to make him less safe, not more.
<You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day.
That’s true, but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando, or to have in their lives someone like crazy stalker ex who is likely to attack them them violently. So while it is certainly possible Pretti had someone like that, it is not likely. And in any case, when we think of about Pretti walking around Minneapolis, we also have to think about the *likelihood* of his encountering such a rando or encountering his wife’s stalker as compared to the likelihood of his getting tangled into some kind of confrontation between ICE and the protestors. Which do you think is more likely, John? “Hey, right there next to me in Dunkin Donuts is my wife’s crazy ex. who’d made death threats and tried to break into the house last month, and he’s pulling a weapon out of his pocket” or “Hey, I was just trying to help this woman to her feet and now 4 or 5 ICE guys are tackling me as though I were a big threat.”
And I do not think Pretti was stupid. He had a job that demanded stress tolerance and good judgment in situations that pull for emotions, and I have not heard anything suggesting that he did not perform his work well. Also have not heard anything that makes me think he had bad judgment or crackpot ideas. I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
<Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Of course, I absolutely agree. What on earth have I said makes you think I don’t? It is clear that what should be the case in the presence of ICE is not the case. Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
< Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
> Well, John, I notice you’re not linking to it.
This is not a subject that you can understand with five or ten minutes on the internet. if you're genuinely interested, the usual recommendation is https://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Guns-Violence-America/dp/1138529982/
Note that Gary Kleck is a professor of criminology who started with basically the same beliefs you have been expressing, but who actually did the work rather than just pontificating about it.
> but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando,
I'm not sure what Pretti's race has to do with anything. But aside from that, do you have a lot of experience (or even any experience) with middle-class professionals *who own guns and have concealed carry permits*? Because that's like 8% of the population nationwide, and probably half that in a city like Minneapolis. So we're dealing with a two-sigma outlier, along an ill-defined axis that I'm guessing you have no experience with.
The principle of charity suggests we should assume that Pretti had a reasonable basis for believing that he faced at least a two-sigma elevated risk level, or obligation to protect others at risk or something else along those lines. Ideally we'd just ask him, but we can't because one of our hired gunmen put a bullet in his brain and some of us are kind of peeved about that. So either we're going to extend the recently deceased the benefit of the doubt, or we're not.
> And I do not think Pretti was stupid ... I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
That's my take on it as well. But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid. And I'm now unclear as to what your actual point is. There's an obvious but uncharitable interpretation, but fortunately you're still alive so we can ask you.
> Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
What if a person has *two* goals? One of which is to protest ICE's treatment of suspected illegal immigrants, and the other of which is to protect himself against whatever it was that he reasonably felt he needed to protect himself from before ICE was ever an issue in his life? Or, IMHO more likely, what if a person starts the day with the twin goals of just going about his daily life and protecting himself from a reasonably perceived threat, and only later adds a third "protest ICE" goal when he sees ICE behaving wrongly in front of him, or gets a text from a friend saying that ICE is behaving wrongly a few blocks away and his services as a nurse might soon be needed?
I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
> You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
<I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it” . . . I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
This tone of weary disgust at the grotesque ignorance, shallowness and self-importance of others is present in most of your posts. It is very unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that point of view, since I respect you and also like you except when I get a dose of this stuff from you. And I do not think it is reasonable to speak to and about me that way. There are plenty of things you know more about than I do, but I am generally willing to recognize when I am ignorant of something, and to revise my ideas. And I am intelligent and skeptical and care more about being accurate than I do about being impressive, and I think one can tell that from my posts. As regards the subject at hand, you know much more than I do about guns and data about shootings. On the other hand, I have probably logged many more hours than you talking with people who truly want to kill or maim themselves and other people and people with deep concerns for their own safety. And I have certainly not written off what I learned as shit crazy people experience. It’s stored in my mind as things people experience. And, by the way, I have mostly talked with those people alone. Of the 3 times I have been in danger of violence, 2 have been with patients during sessions. I do not have a country club practice where I talk with trophy wives about their crows feet. For 20+ years I was the person who took referrals other therapists were too daunted by to accept. I’m not a nervous ninny about violence from others. What throws me is the prospect of doing violence.
Reading through your points, it seems to me that you are ignoring several exits from your grim read of me as being wrong as hell in some ugly way. Here are a coupla examples:
Me: And I do not think Pretti was stupid …likeliest explanation for bringing gun was habit.
You: But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid.
John, I said right in the sentence you are quoting that it was a good approximation but only after “we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you layered onto the imagined me above.” I then went on to explain my read of why Pretti took his gun with him that day, which is that he failed to take into account the danger taking it posed — most likely because it was his habit to bring his gun with him, and he did not reflect on whether that was a good idea that day. So that was me scraping off the scorn and contempt layer in your framing. My view, with the scorn and contempt for Pretti you’d attributed to me scaped off, was that I attributed his failure to reflect as instead just going on habit. I think it would be clear to any reader that I think of defaulting to habit as a common error that the smart make as often as the stupid, an error that does not indicate in any way that Pretti was dumb . So scraping off the scorn and contempt here is not a matter of still seeing Pretti as a moron but being kind about it. It’s seeing Pretti as having made a cognitive error that is common and not indicative of stupidity. Scraping off the scorn and contempt layer doesn’t consist just of having a kinder attitude, but of interpreting things in the same direction as the scornful one (cognitive error ) but an error that is much smaller and less global (common cognitive error, not overall low cognitive ability).
Come on John, grasping that I was saying that “he acted on habit instead of reflecting” is “he’s a moron” with the scorn and contempt layer scraped off is basic reading comprehension, and you are smart enough to grasp that with 100 IQ points left over. And yet what I wrote leaves you wandering in some wilderness where you think either I’m saying Pretti was a moron, or else trying to convey some idea that you just can’t find in the thicket of my prose. WTF?
How bout another example? :
<I’m not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights [protest ICE], presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other [protect self] lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
It should be extremely easy to find another way to interpret it. I have outright said parts of the alternative explanation, and in other places (such as the example above) said things that make clear the rest. My interpretation is that Pretti failed to reflect on what would happen if ICE somehow became aware he was carrying. Probably that happened because he defaulted to habit. A possible extra contributor was that Pretti was not thinking as well as usual, because he was profoundly shocked, distressed and infuriated by recent events in Minneapolis. As luck would have it, Pretti’s oversight led to ICE putting 10 bullet holes in him. What happened is an example of the non-obvious dangers of having guns around.
While you may think there are other lessons to be drawn from what happened (and I agree that there are), I don’t think it’s hard to come up with the above as the point I was making. But you can’t come up with it *even after I said in a recent exchange with you that the main point I had in my mind in my original post was the non-obvious dangers of guns.* I really think the problem here is that you are so sure you are surrounded by heartless, ignorant, self-important fools that you filter out the evidence that the person you are hearing from is not making heartless and foolish points.
And while we’re straightening things out: I am kind of vague how "concealed carry" laws figures into gun ownership, but you are wrong that I have had little exposure to people who routinely carry guns. My military half-brother had a personal gun. I believe my parents brought ours when we took family trips. I have had 2 patients who were gun owners — and these were people I talked with for many many hours, and often about very private and deeply held attitudes. I have known several very committed rock climbers who were avid hunters and also had personal guns, and one of them I knew extremely well. I had multiple talks with these people about guns and what they meant to each of them. I really do grasp the point of view of people who experience owning a gun as an important element of their dignity and autonomy. And I do not scorn that attitude, even though I do not share it. I am not very judgy about people’s world views, and don’t really believe there is a right one. As for life in a concealed carry state — no, I don’t know what that’s like. But is it really very different? Seems to me I understand and respect the crucial thing, which is the I-have-a-right-to-it point of view of people who feel strongly about gun ownership.
And one other thing. I think I should tell you my personal feeling about what happened to Pretti, since you are thinking maybe I think “yeah, he was asking for it.” I am extremely angry and distressed about his murder. I have shed tears over it. I have had fantasies of being on a rooftop and spraying bullets down onto ICE. I cannot stop thinking about all the popping noises in the videos —- 10 fucking bullets, shot into one man lying on his stomach. I wonder about how many he felt before one knocked out brain function. I get unbearably angry when I hear about ICE standing around his body crowing and clapping and counting the bullet holes. I feel terribly sad that Pretti had his life yanked away. I feel more personal connection with him than I did with the other 2 who died. He’s a fellow health care professional. And male nurses are often gay, and I have a special soft spot in my heart for gay people because both my half-brother (not the military one) and my mother were gay.
I'm not sure why you keep saying "fundamental rights", as if they have some foundation in physics or something. You have rights because the government guarantees those rights, and currently the government and those serving them aren't in the mood for guaranteeing those rights for citizens. So I don't see how it's relevant to this situation...
I wonder if he hoped there would be violence, and he might have a pretext to use it. Like, picturing himself gunning down the guy who guns down the woman driving recklessly.
We’ve been watching “Slow Horses”, a show with conventional left politics. The heroes shoot people all the time. This is a fantasy situation for men of any political persuasion, I would think. Otherwise, why does the show work so well as entertainment?
In fact, we’ve talked about how guns achieve an outsized role in the show because they are I suppose very few in the UK, so there’s always a lot of tension around this magical object: who has (our only) gun, ditto the lack of armed police or security (haven’t been there, don’t know if this is real or just story necessity). “We had to protect ourselves with a tea kettle!”
Not trying to start a culture war topic over the cliches if the show. It is wonderfully entertaining regardless.
There's kind-of an obvious confounder for
Pr[get attacked | have gun] > Pr[get attacked | don't have gun].
I mean, why did you have a gun in the first place? Because you were worried about being attacked. The guy living in a safe suburb and never going out after dark has a lot less need for a concealed gun than the guy who closes his bar at 1AM every night and then puts the cash from the register into the bank's night deposit box before going home and going to bed.
People tend to very much overestimate how many assaults and even murders occur with guns. Children bring knives to school and stab each other with them. Somalis attempt murder by fist, 8+ people on one guy going into a revolving door (yes, I've seen the video. Yes it's old).
You're imagining a mugging, I presume? (This is a good bet, as it's salient for the average TV watcher).
Good gun discipline is to give them the money (assuming they aren't obviously looking for more than money). Your money isn't worth their life or yours.
You draw a gun if you're enough out of the way to help -- and you get down first, hit the deck, if there's bullets flying or might be (also, you look less like the criminal if cops show up and don't know you're the hero).
Your statistic probably includes the child that shot his daddy over taking away his switch (dude put it in the gun safe).
I think you might have a sort of movie concept of how easy it is to get a guy out of someone else's hands. You are standing presumably outside of, say, punching range with someone else, with both hands on the gun. They have to A. not back off, B. get their hands to the gun without being shot, C. somehow take the gun from you without accidental firings killing them, ect.
Meanwhile all you have to do is sort of twitch a little and the gun fires and the person who wanted to take it from you is dead.
The question you are asking is closer to "Since I can't imagine ever firing a gun actually, wouldn't it be easy to take my gun from me?" And even then it's still kind of not easy to take an object from a person who controls it.
Gunshots aren't that likely to *immediately* kill the victim. That's a movie thing too.
Since I'm in an irrelevant nit-picking hellscape, I'm going to start responding to stuff like this with a "Goose-gander" shorthand. Yes, touching someone with a bullet doesn't always immediately stop their heart and render them braindead in a blink.
Yes, it's possible to imagine a situation in which someone gets shot, doesn't die, decides it's not a big deal, continues with their previous course of action, continues to not die or be disabled, takes a gun in the control of an un-shot person from them, and shoots them with it. It's possible to imagine anything! What if the person I shot is Peter Pan, and can't die from mortal weapons?
It's possible to imagine anything. But if it's relevant to this discussion, then it's also relevant on *both sides*, i.e. If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter, then it's also true of the gun owner, and he'll still be one mostly-harmless bullet to his body ahead in the ensuing struggle to get the (presumably a dozen) bullets it takes to kill a person.
If I'm being sarcastic here, it's because this is about the fifth time this hour someone has gone "But wait guns are made of metal, isn't METAL HEAVY? doesn't that mean it's easy to disarm a person of their gun and shoot them with it, and a likely thing to happen?" in some version or another.
I'm willing to take that kind of argument seriously if it's an actual serious argument, but not "Well, sir, what if the person got shot, so now you have full control of your gun and the other guy has a bullet in him. Doesn't he have the upper hand NOW?" arguments anymore. Yes, it's possible a magic anteater drops from the sky on a tiny parachute and swip-swaps the gun to the bad guy's hand, no, I'm not going to spend my whole day taking it seriously as a counterargument to "It's not that easy to take a gun from a person who is in control of it and can shoot you with it at any time".
>If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter,<
The problem with this is that "likely to matter" only needs to mean "dies fifteen minutes later from blood loss". There are several videos of gunfights that end with a shot person running or driving away, to die later from wounds inflicted. The Michael Drejka one is usually my go-to, but there are also police shootouts and whatnot. If you shoot them and they're still functioning, they can shoot back, and you'll both die fifteen minutes later, which is not ideal.
You're taking this as "the safety's already off" which doesn't seem like a reasonable thing for a reasonable weapon owner. How much does it take to get the safety off?
Your "doesn't seem" isn't incredibly valuable here, mostly because you don't knowing lot about guns. Glocks, for instance, don't have a safety in the sense you think they do. This is true of an awful lot of modern firearms, and among those that it's not true of, it's still pretty common to practice "condition 0" carry, i.e. all that's required to fire the gun is to pull the trigger.
It's not universally true that every pistol can be carried this way, and among those that can't be there's sometimes a split-second difference in how quickly the gun can be rendered operational (another twitch of the thumb).
When you were figuring out that there was something you had once heard of called a safety and that it must be universal and that if it was and was hard to operate this *might* salvage your preferred positioning on this conversation, it should have occurred to you what all that grasping meant.
Figured I'd get some information from you, by exposing my ignorance and a willingness to learn. What percentage of gun-holders do you think practice "Condition 0"?
>there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun)
Especially true in Minneapolis, because the protests are not "everyone gather at a particular time to express our displeasure," they are "ICE is trying to grab someone, whoever is closest runs over with a camera and a whistle." The confrontations can happen anywhere on short notice.
The pedant in me wants to point out that people are exceedingly likely to be killed by their own firearm if it's done by their own hand.
I know that you know this, but suicide and domestic homicide risks are important as part of a general gun ownership risk assessment.
"Being killed by" implies that the killing is done by someone else. Sorry if that wasn't clear; I could have made the phrasing less ambiguous.
Suicide risks by gun should be matched with "suicide risk by other commonly available Manly Ways To Kill Yourself."
I mark a very big sex-related difference between "kill yourself with a gun" and "drink bleach", and also a very different "odds of death" between those two.
Yeah. The most important firearm safety rule to understand is that if you or someone in your home is likely to be suicidal at some point, you need to either get the guns out of your house or lock them up well enough the suicidal person can't get to them. For most people (and definitely most people here, since we're presumably mostly not cops, armored car guards, professional criminals, or people living in super high-crime areas), that's the biggest risk a gun in the house poses to anyone in your home.
Yeah. Is someone being less communicative than normal? Looks upset, had a Major Incident that might wind up with him being depressed? Lock the guns up, why take the chance? (Obviously be upfront about why, if asked).
I'd take this as "team up to shoot, if there's even a slight chance of suicide" -- as a bonus, spending time with the depressed person may help them feel less lonely.
I think it's common (though not universal) that you know if you, your wife, or one of your kids has serious problems with depression, has seriously considered suicide, has done other self-harm behaviors, or has previously attempted suicide. In that case, you want to remove the low-effort suicide methods from the house as much as possible. Nothing can nerf the world so much that someone can't commit suicide, but leaving a loaded handgun in a nightstand with your chronically depressed wife is a pretty obviously terrible idea.
I remember reading something I can no longer find about the correct attitude to take when carrying a gun. It went something like this:
"From now on, you will lose every argument. You will apologise sincerely to every bully who gets in your face for ruining his day. You will be the meekest so-and-so around. Because you are carrying a gun, and any fight where someone is carrying a gun is likely to end with one of you getting shot."
Or another quote I found while looking for the exact wording of the above: "You can have a gun or you can have an ego but you can't have both"
Anyway yes, it's the same mistake that George Zimmerman made, to walk into trouble while armed instead of walking away from it.
Yep. Pretty much this.
I was flipping through an issue of Boys Life as a teenager and found a page with a poem from a father to his son, entrusting him with a gun. The poem ended with something along the lines of "no amount of sorrow or care will make up for one man dead" - no matter how careful you are to be in the right, no matter how sorry you are afterward, and especially no matter how well you trained and survived, you're going to feel like the worst person in the world because you ended another one.
That, or you've lost about one horcrux worth of humanity.
I doubt I still have that issue somewhere, and a casual search doesn't turn up that poem. Nevertheless, I remember it being worth a full page in the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.
Not to mention, a self-defender's life will be ruined for years after even the most unambiguous, clearest cut, David-versus-Goliath shooting. Setting aside the emotional trauma, even if the local prosecutor decides the shooter was 100% in the right and says so in a press conference, at bare minimum, a defender will be forced to face a civil suit brought by the attacker's shitty surviving family members.
Only grievous injury and/or death is worse than years of stress and worry in a legal battle for all your worldly possessions. Which is why prudent people only threaten to kill to prevent grievous injury and/or death.
And a rarely-discussed bonus of responsibly carrying a firearm as a lifestyle is that it acts as a fucking excellent social filter. People who cannot be trusted to be around unsecured firearms are people who are inevitably going to lower your quality of life.
The police in my current city have to shoot someone - it can seem like every day - but let's say 2-3x a week. It's so strange to think of living with that stress as the reality of your everyday job.
I know people who have actually shot others in American cities. They didn't have a court case (the other guys were criminals). Nobody was killed (my friend's a very bad shot).
I agree, you give away your money. You only shoot if there's a risk to life or limb, and that's not a guy saying "gimme money!"
Your friend got hella lucky. Most self-defense shootings will result in an attempted civil case brought by the criminal or the criminal's survivors.
Was your friend poor, by chance? Maybe they avoided a civil case by not having any resources to extract?
More than likely, they never figured out who was shooting (and probably blamed some other gang, rather than "Joe Innocent With A Gun"), in that he'd gone for cover first thing.
DC was rough back in the day.
Oh, yeah, we're talking about different things, I think. I'm not discussing gang warfare / mutual combat; I'm talking about self-defense cases involving a law-abiding citizen who calls the police themselves and cooperates with the investigation afterward.
That person is almost always going to be punished for ethically participating in the justice system by getting sued for doing so.
A famous theatrical saying; if you bring a gun on stage in the first act, you had better use it in the second.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film played with Chekov's Gun (sword edition).
Our Hero grabbed for a sword mounted on the wall behind The Villan, only to discover that it was permanently mounted to a wooden escutcheon, which became his (rather ineffective) weapon for the ensuing fight, naturally played for comic relief.
That is funny. A while back I was in a production of The Country Wife and I played Sparkish; there was a scene where I challenged a fellow to a duel and then my sword got stuck in my scabbard. Seeing as it was only a plastic sword to begin with, I managed to break the handle off of it. That
got a laugh.
Off topic, but: holy hell.
*I* also was in a production of The Country Wife. I *also* played Sparkish.
(No sword in mine; ours spoofed 1960s television and I was doing some sort of Vaudeville karate hands in the scene I think you're referring to.)
What a thing to have in common. The model for our production was Marx Bros movies.
It is a wicked and censorious world….
Yeah, this is the "proper" attitude for having a gun. I'd trust this person to hit the deck if they heard a gunshot, and only afterwards draw and look for the shooter.
It seems to me that people get mad all the time for dumb reasons, and when that angry person has a gun, bad things can happen a lot more easily. This isn't an argument for gun control, it's skepticism that carrying a gun changes people's behavior that significantly.
Melvin described the “correct” attitude, possibly the prevailing one among gun owners/carriers, but not the prevailing one among people who wind up in the news for having escalated a conflict until their gun ended up being used in it.
It's not a good idea to draw statistical conclusions from (anecdotal) news stories. News selects for novelty/shock-value over understanding.
... getting on the news does tend to select for idiots with no long term thinking.
Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons.
Assume you had a gun, and no cops within 10 miles. You hear a pickup truck pulling up your driveway with no lights on, and it's 2am. Your gun is more useful than nothing at all.
People are taught not to draw a gun if they don't intend to use it, and not to fire a gun if they don't intend for someone to die.
As a deterrent, walking "as if you're carrying a gun" is probably "nearly as effective" at deterring criminals, who'd rather not tangle with a wolf if there are easily fleeced sheep around.
It's possible that Pretti brought his gun to the protest, envisioning a need to use it outside of the protest. (I find this unlikely, but a lot of people are "hysterically" afraid of cities -- credit cards have done a lot to prevent random muggings, is my impression.).
"Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons."
This is a nonsensical statement. There is no weapon that you do not need to be awake and aware to use, unless you count something like a landmine as a weapon.
There are some cases where modern rational analysis doesn't hold up to ancient wisdom, and the offense / defense balance of guns (vs swords, axes, plate or mail, etc) is just such a case. So, I can only respond by quoting scripture: "Parry this you filthy casual"
> unless you count something like a landmine as a weapon.
Why wouldn't you?
It probably wouldn't hold up too well legally.
A landmine would blow up criminals and non-criminals with the same discrimination (that is, none at all).
Availability. I'm not very familiar with American retailers, but I believe Walmart doesn't typically have them in stock. When regular people don't have ready access to landmines, you can't blame someone for not considering them in their home defense strategy.
TNT is pretty easily available. IEDs are improvised, after all (yes, at that point, you're losing some efficacy... but you're also presumably not dealing with tanks).****
****These are not the smart moves. Smart moves are spikes or caltrops, both of which will not damage your road.
If you don't want landmines, how about pit traps? Or raw sewage? There's a lot of available solutions that don't require being awake and aware (including hiring goons to watch your house).
Traps and landmines are better defensive weapons, yes. So are steel doors, for that matter.
Better offensive weapons generally include "grenades" if you don't need to be super-careful about who you're killing.
Steel doors are not a weapon.
And grenades are in fact a far worse offensive weapon in most situations, which is why the default military weapon is a gun and not a grenade.
are you getting this stuff from some video game or what?
It might be historically rare, but grenades have proven extremely important in the grinding trench warfare of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Being able to clear a trench or dugout without exposing yourself to fire is essential, and I've seen reports from english-speaking foreign legion types that an assault often "comes down to who has more grenades".
I still expect that the default utilization of guns is FAR FAR higher than grenades, and in fact the usage of grenades as an anti-trench tool is only relevant because guns are what causes trenches to be a shape the battlefield takes.
If you already have a gun, a grenade is a useful tool for a variety of specific situations, but you will never want to go into battle without a gun.
In urban combat, if you have some armed in a culdesac (say, a room with no other exits), the prescription is "throw a grenade." Risking soldiers' lives for no real gain (such as trying to find a hiding guy with a gun) is not normal.
Hamas used grenades all through their assault on 10/7. That's not because Hamas is evil, it's because there are a wide range of tactical reasons to use grenades. (Perhaps the primary reason not to use grenades, other than friendly fire*, is that they're heavy and bulky).
*or dead children/babies, something that Hamas apparently did not care much about.
Sorry but this is still nonsense. Hamas uses grenades sure, but just like every other armed force they use a variety of weapons, and they use far more guns than grenades.
Grenades are an accessory weapon in urban combat, not a primary weapon. As you can tell by the fact that even according to you they're advised for use against a hiding guy with a gun, which is the default weapon, because guns are more useful than grenades.
Guns and grenades have coexisted for centuries on battlefields and as far as I can remember guns have always been seen as the more important and effective weapon.
First off all, this is why if you carry a gun you should train with it until you're comfortable. I don't actually think there's that much risk of someone taking your gun in a confrontation, but I do think if you're too anxious or inexperienced to wield a gun, the chance that YOU accidentally shoot yourself or someone innocent is unacceptably high. Even lifelong gun owners will sometimes shoot themselves in the leg when unholstering or whatever.
But secondly, anyone who can take a gun from you and use it against you already has power of life and death over you, since they can just overpower you and beat you to death or strangle you. You're not really changing the risk by having a gun that they then take: you're just changing the way they might kill you, if they wanted to.
Thirdly, and mostly not that important, but the actual mechanics of taking things from people are relevant here. It's pretty tough, despite what some action movies portray, to take something that someone is gripping hard in their hand. If someone reaches for your gun, you can just pull the trigger, a lot faster than they can pull the gun out of your hand. In addition, ( and this will depend on the situation) they have to be really close to you to do this, and if you have a gun pulled almost anyone will be reluctant to keep coming toward you.
I do think it's worth thinking about exactly what kinds of scenarios you expect to encounter.
>"If someone reaches for your gun, you can just pull the trigger, a lot faster than they can pull the gun out of your hand."
Slightly OT: squeeze – don't pull – the trigger.
My understanding of "squeeze don't pull" is that you're supposed to surprise yourself as to the exact moment of the explosion, so that you don't pre-emptively flinch and pull the gun off-target. That's going to be a very minor concern when the target is close enough to touch you, and even less so if they're physically trying to pull your gun away.
"Squeeze" describes the actual movement of the finger much better and helps avoid the aim drift to the left (for the right-handed) due to the weapon being slightly moved by the finger. When you tell people to "squeeze" they tend to curl the finger as opposed to moving it somewhat sideways.
Of course the aim drift is of little consequence in a point-blank shooting.
The main counter to "they'll use my gun against me" is that the gun should only be coming into play in the first place in a life-or-death situation, so at that point it's the choice between death by gun or death by other means.
But, yeah, the rule of thumb is an undrawn gun is unreliable when someone is within twenty-one feet of you, which is where the average running speed equals the average gun-drawing speed.
I mean, define "bad move". As far as his naked life is concerned, yes, you stay away from nervous, undertrained people with guns, that should be obvious whether or not you have a gun yourself.
However, some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for. Lamentable as the gun laws in the USA generally are, if(!) Pretti was within his rights to carry a gun at that time and place, and if(!) he didn't give them cause to shoot him, it shouldn't be held against him, otherwise the whole point of those gun laws are meaningless. Had he not carried a gun, you could also hold it against him that he was present at all, presumably excercising his right to protest. At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
You sound like you are suffering from polarization toxicity. I think I made clear that I thought Pretti’s bringing a gun was a bad move in the sense that it put him in danger, not in any other sense: not that he was not within his rights, not that he shouldn’t stand up for his rights. I am not holding ANYTHING against Pretti, in the sense of saying he did something illegal or unethical. I’m saying bringing the gun seems like an error of judgment, a step likely to make him and anyone near him less safe rather than more safe.
I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here. After all, staying at home and not protesting is much safer than going out to yell at a bunch of trigger-happy thugs.
But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
(And also, all of this is assuming it was a conscious decision to go out on ICE patrol while armed, which is not necessarily true given how quickly ICE pops up and disappears. It's just as likely he was carrying the gun for ordinary reasons and happened to be in the area when ICE showed up.)
<But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
OF COURSE I am not criticizing the act of protest or people's asserting their first or second amendment rights. I can't understand what made you even think I might be taking that view, except for some kind of halo effect: I say something mildly negative about Pretti -- that he made a judgment error in bringing the gun -- and so then you wonder whether I believe all immigrants are flea-bitten, housecat-eating, freeloading robbers and rapists, and that getting rid of them is so righteous and important that the public has no right even to protest how it's done. Nope. I have exactly the same view of ICE you do: "trigger-happy thugs."
<I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here.
I think you're wrong about that. Here's the most recent account I've found of how things played out. Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had. Seems clear that having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I have a daughter whom I adopted from China, and who, of course, has Asian looks. When she was thinking recently about taking a trip abroad I had a talk with her about bringing more documentation than a passport of her American citizenship, just in case ICE had suspicions about her in the airport when she returned. I think a precaution like that in our present situation is sensible. And for the same reason I think the sensible, safe thing to do if you are going to be hanging out near ICE is to leave your gun at home. They clearly become more dangerous in situations where they *might* be in danger, even if the cues are ambiguous, as a gun in the pocket is.
Inject a bit of uncertainty here: that gun's known to misfire a lot, making big booms. Imagine if it went off accidentally, and that's when someone else drew and started shooting. This isn't something you can tell from the videos, but if it's the case, the cops ought to say in court.
(Obviously the initial account of brandishing is ... incorrect. Possibly a deliberate lie.)
I assume you're talking about the P320s claimed tendency to fire without a trigger pull. "Misfire a lot" is very relative to the point of being misleading in this case. The baseline rate of modern pistols firing without the trigger being pulled is essentially zero. There are on the scale of dozens of stories of P320s firing without a trigger pull. Some of these are likely false or mistaken cases, but lets assume they're all true. This is a weapon heavily utilized by police, militaries, and civilians alike with millions of hours of handling and use every year. Dozens of incidents is a serious problem when compared to a base rate of "never" (especially for large entities deciding what weapons systems will be standard issue). But for any isolated incident the likelihood that the gun went off without a trigger pull is still essentially zero.
Yes, obviously if the officers know you are armed they are bound to get even more nervous than they already are. No one argues against that.
@EngineOfCreation responded to your question in a polite and thoughtful way, he didn't accuse you of anything, he simply formulated a nuanced and reasonable hypothesis for why Alex Pretti might have decided to bring his gun despite knowing the risk, which seems to be the crux of your doubt. I don't understand how you could have felt attacked.
I don’t feel attacked. I’m commenting on how attacked Engine of Creation sounds. They are rebutting energetically an idea I did not express or imply: that we should “hold it against” Pretti that he brought his gun. And they are doing it in the kind of rhetoric the expresses strong emotions, deeply important values. etc. All I’m saying is that by bringing his gun the poor guy made an error of judgment that increased his risk that ICE would turn lethal.
Yeah, I'm not getting any of that from EoC's response. He was just speculating that maybe Pretti made a different kind of calculation than what you would have. No need to be so defensive dude.
For what it's worth, I don't think EngineOfCreation sounds attacked at all, nor that they're rebutting anything energetically, nor that their rethoric expresses strong emotions.
,”Some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for.” That doesn’t sound like strong emotion and deeply held values? He’s saying what’s at stake is worth dying for.
I am starting to feel like we need to start training white people in how not to get shot by police officers and ICE (we already have training for black children).
We need to explain to them that the second amendment needs to be taken seriously, not literally. And the rest of the constitution, too.
Or declare the prefatory clauses nullify the plain meaning of the operative clauses.
> At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
The point where you realize you have no path to winning.
A very common behavior among animals is that when one infringes on another's territory, both will try to make themselves look as big and strong as possible. They size each other up, and when one of them realizes that they are at a clear disadvantage, they will back down. This helps avoid unnecessary violence, benefiting the collective fitness of the species as a whole. I would have hoped humans have better systems to accomplish the same goal, but... here we are.
I'm just curious, why do you believe there is no path to winning? Are you saying that Americans shouldn't stand up for their rights? No one should? Do you believe that any opposition to the state is worthless and doomed to fail? I see you have made similar statements elsewhere in this thread.
Again, just curious.
If the situation is clearly in their favor, then yes, obviously they should do so, but... Given that the right has plenty of reason to want leftists dead, have more support by the demographics that have meaningful leverage (white and male), and the law enforcement agencies are very much compromised... This is likely only going to end in decisive victory or mutual destruction. This isn't a meaningless power grab by individuals, this is a group that is actually fighting for something. That makes all the difference.
It occasionally comes up on the left (here largely meaning Democrats since it's US context) that the 2nd amendment/3% types are stupid because there's no way they could beat the US military. California Representative Eric Swalwell is quite infamous for his quote about the government having nukes, in response to someone refusing to give up their rights: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/08/711090987/california-rep-swalwell-is-running-for-president-too-with-a-focus-on-gun-violenc
So it's... interesting... to see the tables turn on this one.
I think Americans should stand up for their rights. I do not think my view of those rights is congruent, or possibly even compatible, with what the current protestors view as their rights. Opposition to the state is not worthless, in theory, but there's a whole lot of ways that individual acts can be worthless, and the difference is often outside the control of the one making the sacrifice.
Minnesota has been a perfect demonstration of the power of peaceful protest. If 2nd amendment types were randomly shooting at ICE in the street, things would be VERY different.
We have different conceptions of the meaning of peaceful, and of protest.
Perhaps I'm being nitpicky but I think it's unwise to conflate civil disobedience with protest. The point is that a lot of this activity is in fact illegal, but local law enforcement has been given stand-down orders.
" Collective fitness of the species "-- no such thing exists
This is not a very common behavior among animals. It is in fact an uncommon behavior among animals. Chickens peck the new bird to death. Most prey animals, because they are not very capable of hurting each other, will in fact inflict as much pain/terror/bleeding as they can. It's only wolves and predators that generally try to not harm others, because any fight is going to prove deadly, and may prove deadly to both parties.
Chickens rarely join a flock voluntarily unless they are obviously welcome for some reason. Which is comparatively rare.
Most 'pecked to death' chickens are victimised because they have no means of retreat because they have been put in that position by a human, eg inside a coop with too few hiding spots. (This is distinct from being low on the pecking order, which is another chicken problem entirely.)
Roosters meeting for the first time do indeed puff themselves up before going in to fight. They raise their hackles in a manner similar to dogs.
Most animals avoid wasting resources on fighting unless absolutely necessary, and so they will display their fitness in all sorts of ways before moving to do battle, which is generally a last resort.
'Deadly' fights are usually pretty rare - the loser turns and runs away before that stage is reached, (often at the display stage), and most victors do not pursue the loser. This is the loser identifying 'no path to winning', as mentioned above.
Mutually assured destruction, with both parties fatally wounded, is even rarer because it makes no sense biologically; it's a huge waste of resources and leaves the field open for a third, non-participating, party.
I see all sorts of scars on deer. Horses'll hurt each other pretty badly too, if you let them. Yes, this isn't "deadly" (because deadly is stupid for all parties)... that's part of the point. Animals that can "relatively harmlessly" wound, generally DO wound.
I'm pulling all of this from very old, seminal research in the animal behavior realm from Konrad Lorenz
You did use the word 'deadly'.
Both of the cases you give - deer and horses - are highly constrained populations. There's nowhere left to run, so they endure.
The wild population of deer covers the majority of the north american continent and the population in general is very dense. In situations like that there will be conflict; losers can only retreat into someone else's territory, and yet more conflict ensues. The population density is way above what it should be and their social adaptations are not coping very well.
The wild population of horses is even more physically confined. The open range is pretty closed off these days, so the same kinds of tensions can occur.
And if you are talking about domestic horses, then whatever conflict they encounter is largely due to the way in which humans are managing them; they have little to no freedom of movement. In the wild horses, especially stallions, absolutely do fight for the possession of mares and territory, but the loser turns and runs. This is hard to do if you are in a pen the size of a house block.
I suggest you get out and do some primary research in the form of spending significant time with animals. See how they really behave, not just how you think they should behave.
Statistically, guns *are* more likely to be used against their owner than anyone else, because the largest share of gun deaths is suicide.
I've always thought that guns were stupid too, but that's of course no excuse for the Trump admin tearing up the 2nd amendment in addition to the rest of the constitution.
No no no I did not say guns are stupid. I do not even think guns are stupid. What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without. (Though there probably are a few rare situations where even someone like me would be safer with a gun — stuck alone someplace with grizzly bears?)) Arggh, why is everyone so polarized?
If you mean only to discuss what is wise and prudent for "I and people like me", then it's really damn confusing that you insisted on opening that discussion with the example of Alex Pretti, who is not you and not like you. Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you've already got that covered.
So what? What does any of that do with Alex Pretti? Because you really came off as someone making claims about what was appropriate behavior for Alex Pretti, who is not Eremolalos and is not very much like Eremolalos.
Yes, I realized a while ago that my initial post was unclear, but by then it seemed useless to go back and change it. I just tried to clarify as I responded to comments. There was kind of an ellipsis in the first post that I was not aware of. The topic I had in mind was the less obvious ways in which guns can be dangerous. One way they can be dangerous is to belong to someone like me, someone inexperienced with them and temperamentally unsuited to becoming comfortable wielding one. A second way is that the person can be competent with guns, but carry one around people who become much more likely to shoot you if they find out you are carrying. But I did not make clear what my overarching point was, and what the connection was between the 2 gun owners I mentioned.
So I inadvertently posted a sort of gun-related Rorschach inkblot. However, it is striking to me that nobody asked me what I was getting at — what did Pretti’s terrible outcome have to do with my gun incompetence? Instead, people reacted by thinking I had various dumb and mean opinions about Pretti, and believed various other things having to do with weapons that were quite far afield of anything I said in the post. You, for instance, wrote a paragraph about how lawfully protesting ICE or giving medical aid to their victims does not require that the person forego their right to carry a gun for self protection. How the fuck do you get that idea out of my original post — the idea that I think such people should not have the right to carry a gun.? My post was wholly about the risk of guns to their users, and contained not a word about people’s right to carry one.
<Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you can trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you’ve got that covered.
Given my age, lifestyle, location and other demographics, I am at far more risk of health catastrophes, financial catastrophes, and being done in by the malaise of our era than I am of violent assault. I have people who would support and advise if I suffered one those, but nobody who would carry a gun on my behalf. I think the idea that I would be markedly better off if I had one is quite silly.. As one piece of evidence for that, I can tell you that in my entire life, which has been going on for quite a while now, there have been 3 incidents where I was at some risk.though not a terribly high one, of violent assault. I describe all 3 of them in a post on this thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205828026
Even if I was calm, trained and highly skillful with a gun I do not think having one would have made me a bit safer in any of them. And in the first incident I describe I am pretty sure it would have made me less safe. The muggers would have found it in my purse and who knows what would have happened then? Also, I navigated those 3 situations quite well. I think I am pretty good in situations where the task is to avoid violent attacks on me. It’s the prospect to doing violence that rattles me and makes me indecisive and clumsy.
And finally, here is a personal story about one of the hidden dangers of guns. I grew up familiar with guns, though not very interested in them. I come from a military family. My half brother, my father and my grandfather all had careers in the military, and my grandfather was so goddam successful at it that he’s in Wikipedia. My mother had a career in the Navy before she married my father at age 40, and had a rating of Expert at pistol shooting. I still have the little badge she received, and wear it in an inconspicuous place occasionally. Like you, my father had an antique rifle mounted in the house, and also had some odd-looking guns that I think he collected on his travels in Asia. And my parents kept a gun for personal protection on a high shelf in the bedroom closet. So one day, when I was about 16, I took down the gun and played around with it. I clicked the safety button off and on, pointed it here and there, pointed it my image in a mirror while making fierce faces. Then it occurred to me to put it to my temple and playact a dramatic, pathetic suicide. I was not in the least suicidal, and was in fact enjoying life quite a lot in that era. I just had that teen fascination with darkness, drama, & tragedy. And went ahead and did the suicide playacting. And then I put the gun back where I had found it. Later I realized that I had lost track during all my clicks of the safety button of whether the safety was on or off. But I couldn’t think of anything to do about that other than to confess to my parents that I had played with the gun, and I wasn’t about to do that.
Yes, yes, guns should be kept locked up. But my parents, though prudent and sensible people, did not keep this one locked up and I can see why. They probably thought of it as protection if there was an intruder in the night, and what good is a gun in a gun safe in circumstances like that? You hear a window break and footsteps in your house. So then you find a flashlight and then your key ring and then the right key on it and tiptoe over to the gun safe and fumble with the lock?
> Arggh, why is everyone so polarized?
If that is what you believe everyone's reaction to be, perhaps you didn't manage to bring across the exact point you were making in your mind? I previously didn't respond to your point of gun training because it seemed tangential, though now it seems like it's an actually important point to you.
Pretti didn't attempt to draw his gun, according to CNN. It was concealed until agents were already all over him on the ground, and it was secured by one of the agents. Only then did they start shooting.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/25/us/video/minneapolis-ice-shooting-alex-pretti-visual-analysis-digvid
Therefore, the question of whether or not he endangered himself by lack of weapon training doesn't even matter. At what point should his skills have mattered?
Do we even know what Pretti's level of expertise with his gun was? I couldn't find anything at a cursory search, seems way too early to tell with confidence. Extrapolating from your own skills or lack thereof seems ill-advised to draw broader conclusions from, but it seems to be what you're doing anyway.
> What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE.
It seems just a strange argument to make. Which is to say, I still don't get it. You say it's not about Pretti, you say it's not about gun rights in general, so what is it about?
"What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without."
And you are correct.
No interest in getting training? Yes, you'd be worse off. Even holding the thing naturally can rip your hand open.
"Place them in a heavily-trafficked area, and infections won’t spread from person to person because the germs will get zapped before they can reach a new host."
I'm afraid that people will read this and think of the one person talking to another and the viruses getting "zapped" before they can reach the second person.
Even when you kiss the person that sly, sly UV slips in there and stands guard.
Was the most senior person the Chinese military and a member of the politburo a CIA spy?
I have no idea what priors, to have, are lots of senior people in great powers agents for other countries? It is entirely possible that this is an excuse for a purge though that makes Xi look bad.
It seems just as likely that Xi is doing a Josef Stalin thing here and purging senior generals from the PLA to destroy an independent power source. Defaming the PLA and making it accept tighter political controls could be a side benefit of this action.
Stalin did accuse almost everyone he purged of being a foreign agent and we have reason to believe many of the senior figures in (especially)London, Berlin and Washington were actually in the pay of foreign powers. I am sure the vast majority of his allegations were fake but it is possible that some share if the time the accusation was correct.
Funny possible explanation: the general was sufficiently competent, connected, respected, etc. that CCP plans critically relied on him; a Western intelligence organization (this works better if it's not the CIA itself) "accidentally" leaks information about the general being a CIA agent.
What's Xi to do? A purge weakens him personally & endangers his larger ambitions, but he could never be certain enough that the information was false to trust the general with what he'd needed him for before.
Why not? It's very easy in the abstract to know someone well enough that you're certain the slanders published about him by your shared enemies are false. It's so easy that this frequently occurs even when the slanders are true.
That's why the key to my unserious hypothesis is it being a "leak".
If you know your adversaries meant for you to get the information you'll discount it (as you say), but if you're led to believe they *didn't* mean for you to find out it suddenly looks a lot more credible.
And information about an adversary from a third party is less likely, in an Occam's razor sense, to be intentional misinformation from said adversary.
Can you link or point to the news story or whatever that sparks this question?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/chinas-top-general-accused-of-leaking-nuclear-weapons-secrets-to-us-report/
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/top-china-general-zhang-youxia-accused-of-leaking-nuclear-secrets-to-us-wsj
> He is also being investigated for alleged efforts to build his own circles of influence within the Communist Party’s top military decision-making body
Sounds like that's the real reason.
On the other hand it's also plausible that he decided to do some freelance diplomacy, believing it's better if the US knows more rather than less about China's nuclear capabilities.
I had just found it, thanks.
I'm reading that this means Xi has now purged 5 of the 6 members aside from himself from China's version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the only two who had front-line experience in a shooting war (the 1979 war between China and Viet Nam).
Seems like something broader than just one general being fingered as a spy, though we'll likely never know what.
Unlikely. CIA lost their chinese spies back during Obama's administration. Very bad news for America, that. We wound up being caught flatfooted by covid19, in part because of the lack of spies on the ground.
It depends on the Great Power, obviously. I'd consider this one pretty unlikely.
I wrote a thing about the ICE shootings. https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/the-chaos-defense
Hey, it's good to randomly run into you here. I think this piece is strong but also had been meaning to tell you I read through your blog after our mutual friend shared it with me and I generally find your writing enjoyable (I mean, when it's not appropriately grim).
Thank you. Yes, this is the sane perspective.
This seems similar to the idea that courts must consider the "totality of circumstances" rather than the "moment of threat", which was considered by the Supreme Court in Barnes v. Felix (May 2025)
Okay, but couldn't you say the same thing about the protesters as well? Nobody is forcing these people to put themselves in the line of fire. If they simply stayed home, the situation would have never escalated. They are just as responsible for creating the justifications for their death.
There's not a "same thing" in the linked article. Instead, there are four very specific instances of escalation: The agents shove a woman to the ground, the agents pepper spray Petti, the agents begin pistol whipping (!?!?!) Petti, the agents shoot Petti. There are no corresponding "same things" to say about Petti because he did not shove anyone, pepperspray anyone, pistol whip anyone, or shoot anyone. Please be more specific.
They were in the street getting in the way of law enforcement. Clearly they didn't need to do that, but they did it anyways. I'm speaking about the woman too, by the way. There was absolutely no reason for her to be on the road there unless she was trying to be an obstacle. So yes, that is an escalation. It was unnecessary, and now someone is dead.
Dr. King was in the road and was an obstacle, and ultimately won (got the civil rights act passed). We're better for it. What's this sacredness that the road has?
>pistol whipping (!?!?!)
I believe it was the pepper spray canister they were beating his head with, whatever difference you feel that makes.
What do you mean the situation would not have escalated? The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons, it would already have been escalated to a point of moral failure by them even without anyone pushing back.
> The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons
While I would like a source on that, the people who have been shot so far are not part of the demographics that have been deemed a liability, so any talk of "kidnapping" isn't relevant to this current situation. As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
> As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
They're literally going door to door arresting random people. Remember the elderly citizen that they arrested in his underwear in sub-freezing weather? That was only like last week!
Yeah, he was also released. They are indeed arresting random people.
You don't need a criminal defense for being the victim of a crime.
You need a criminal defense for committing a crime.
I'm not sure why you think the previous legal system is still relevant to this situation. For all intents and purposes, these people are not bound by conventional law. We are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not give people reasons to shoot you".
They are absolutely bound by conventional law. But the law is a slow thing, that will eventually catch up with "bad guys in blue."
I agree, we are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not get shot."
This is risk management, and it ought to be done on all sides (this, for example, is why suspects get dogpiled -- they're less likely to hurt an officer if there's ten officers and they can't wrestle their way free).
the woman in the cream coat and Alex himself were basically just people going about their lives when they happened upon ICE and started filming. Are you truly saying that "filming ICE" was adequate justification for Alex's death?
This is disingenuous, even according to your own "I wrote a thing." Alex appeared to stand between a woman and law enforcement. If this is, in fact, obstructing a federal agent (something I'm willing to listen to, with due skepticism), that's more of a justification for Alex's death than otherwise.
Alex did something stupid, by coming armed to a protest. We all can say that's stupid, right? You may have interactions with law enforcement (on your side or not), and having a gun is a ticket to being labeled a "potential problem person" (if the law enforcement is aware you have it -- and some law enforcement folks can tell you've got a gun even if it's concealed, that's part of training).
I'm very willing to consider that Alex' case may show that some ICE people are behaving improperly, perhaps even taking actions that should result in criminal prosecution.
Unlike the Good case, I haven't got a qualified video analyst saying "this was a good shoot, and we almost lost an officer -- if the weather was better, he would be dead."
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/25/us/video/minneapolis-ice-shooting-alex-pretti-visual-analysis-digvid
All the physical aggression originated from ICE. Pretti's gun was concealed until he was already in the scuffle on the ground. The gun was secured by an agent, then the shooting started. Just about the only defense left for ICE is that they may have believed Pretti was an actual videogame character and that he was about to pull out the rocket launcher.
With regard to the likelyhood of a gun malfunction, I would say the odds are low. The SIG Sauer P320 had a design flaw which made it possible for the weapon to discharge when dropped. That was corrected in 2017, with a free repair offered to existing owners. There may still be some weapons out there which have not been fixed, but Petti’s weapon was not dropped. So I’d say it’s a lot more likely that the gun fired because the ICE agent pulled the trigger than that the gun somehow discharged without the trigger being pulled.
I think the video analysis has now come down pretty strongly against Pretti's gun being the one that initially discharged.
Although it may look as though it fired in the video, its likely that was a jpeg artefact.
The justification for this is, although the framerate of the video is too low to be likely to capture the discharge itself it was easily high enough to easily be able to capture the "moving back" of the rack on the gun as any discharge caused another round to be loaded into the chamber. A movement that is much slower and therefore should absolutely have been captured.
The rack on the gun does not move in any part of the video, so it seems the initial discharge was from the gun of the Agent who also fired most (if not all) of the other shots.
Note: because I didn't know this: did you know that his weapon is notorious for malfunctioning -- so that it could have been his gun firing first?
Only you can prevent hammerspace!
Yeah, what you're saying seems like the best summation. And when even the "critical defenders" (aka skeptics who will say a cop did a good thing, some of the time) say "WTF?" I'm inclined to believe this was a really dumb thing on the part of ICE. Miscommunication, among other things (the miscommunication was definitely a training issue -- I'm not sure people have thought through "what to do if there's a gun, and it is removed" but that ought to be a specific call-sign). Shooting someone who's already being dogpiled is not just dangerous to the arrestee, as well.
Why do you suppose the ICE agent shoved the woman in the cream coat?
As you haven't posted a video showing that (just a still) I candidly have no idea. Shoving, by the way, is something that can presumably happen as an accident (putting this out there, because I do see ice on the street).
You should look at el gato malo's work (on substack) on the Good shooting, because it does show that the first shot was through the windshield of the car. That's "officer still in front of vehicle" (Also: Good's wife was shouting "Drive Baby Drive" -- if you want to get into contradictory auditory directions --> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to).
I'm not an expert on the Good shooting, but as a professional geometer I want to say that the shot being through the front windshield is *very* weak evidence that it was fired from in front of the car. Most of the locations from which you could shoot the front windshield are not in front of the car (in the sense of being within 30° either way of the car's path).
Just checked back, the link's in the post but you missed it; I'm posting it here, skip to 0:35 to see the woman getting shoved by the ICE agent while walking away:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressiveHQ/comments/1qlvrwb/woman_in_the_pink_coats_angle_of_the_shooting/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to
"she needs to have been obeying police orders for the right reasons to not deserve getting shot, and I think she wasn't" is probably not a great position to hold
Ah, can't check it nwo but if I didn't post a link on the post (intended to, will edit) please search up the pink lady's video footage
They would not have died if they didn't do that. The objective information here is that these deaths were preventable by both sides. Even the administration would not have been able to justify their deaths to the public if they hadn't interfered whatsoever.
Three sides caused these deaths.
1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
2. The law enforcement officers who did their jobs imperfectly under very trying circumstances and could have made better decision on a second-by-second basis
3. The local police, and those in command of them. Local police are trained in crowd control, ICE are not; if the protestors insist on causing trouble then the police need
I would put responsibility for the deaths in the order of 1 (highest), then 3, then 2.
There's more. The local cops were being asked to hand over criminal illegal aliens (I'm using the term to differentiate against illegal aliens who didn't otherwise commit a crime) and they weren't cooperating, so ICE was going in on their own.
I don't have data about how many fit this category.
I take issue with
>1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
In the video's we have seen no protestors, including Pretti, are seen to obstruct LE officials in any way.
They are all video'ing LE officials, a constitutionally protected act.
During doing so they are told to move back. Which they do repeatedly when asked. Despite this advancing officers pursue them whilst they are retreating and push them repeatedly backwards, they submit to that pushing, still moving backwards multiple times until eventually the repeated retreats and repeated pushing leads to a woman falling in the snow/ice.
None of them step towards or attempt to obstruct an officer. Pretti does step towards and attempt to assist the woman who has been pushed/fallen over, speaking his last words "are you OK?" to her, but again that is not obstructing an officer.
The officer then approaches Pretti again and he and the woman are then pepper sprayed in the face twice, and presumably at that point Pretti loses the ability to see/understand whats going on around him due to the debilitating effect of the pepper spray.
He is then pulled over backwards by an officer pulling on his collar from behind... and despite by this point being blind and probably disorientated he goes with that motion, falling to his hands and knees.... and keeping his hands away from his body and away from his weapon as is advised for CC in an altercation with LE. He is then repeatedly hit in the face with a pepper spray can, but still does not fight back or reach for his weapon and remains on his hands and knees.
None of that is obstructing or interfering with law enforcement in any way. They were observing/video'ing and in doing so were assaulted multiple times by the officers for reasons that are unclear, but did not cause him at any point to fight back or obstruct, even whilst blinded, forcibly pushed off their feet and assaulted multiple times with a blunt object.
"Crowd control"? The crowd was what, two people? Plus a couple more witnesses filming from farther away? Are you expecting the local police to just follow ICE around all day and make sure they never cross paths with a civilian at any point?
I really don't see how you can argue the people who put 5-10 rounds in somebody are less responsible for the death than the guy whose worst potential crime was illegally standing in front of an ICE or CBP agent.
I didn't blame this person, who I have been repeatedly assured is definitely not a protestor and just some guy who happened to be walking past.
I do have to say, this guy doesn't appear to have been as badly behaved as Renee Good (watched with sound off).
His crime was "bringing a gun to a protest." (something we don't actually criminalize, but was a rather extreme failure of judgement. Bear in mind protestors have beaten their own fellow protestors. Take a schmuck with a gun, and he's shooting his fellow protestor.)
Why do you suppose the ICE agent shoved the woman in the cream coat?
I can't seem to find any information on what precipitated that encounter, and it seems you don't know either. Either way, the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life. Collateral damage is inevitable. Though, I doubt the administration would have been able to justify her death if that's what ended up happening.
Walking outside - in the city of Minneapolis, full stop?
38% of the Northeast's current electrical usage is being provided by burning oil. This despite being around 300 miles from the largest gas fields on the planet.
1% of the current electrical usage is wind.
.5% of the current electrical usage is solar.
65 cents per kwh, pricing at the moment.
*USA if this isn't clear.
So, um, how about those renewables?
I'm finding very different numbers, with electricity much more heavily provided by natural gas than fuel oil. (Check out e.g. ISO New England's fuel mix stats, which give natural gas at 55%, solar and wind at 4% and 3%, and oil at 0.3%)
Is your source potentially counting heating oil, or even transportation?
Reuters also has the 38% figure: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-electric-grid-shows-escalating-stress-amid-cold-blast-2026-01-24/
"In New England, fuel oil generation kicked into high gear to help the six-state region's electric grid conserve natural gas, its top fuel source.
As evening approached on Saturday, oil-fired generation accounted for 38% of the New England grid's output, compared with a typical level of about 1% or less, ISO New England's operations display showed. Natural gas, usually the grid's main fuel source, accounted for 24% of the grid's generation output."
Thanks, I appreciate the source a ton. So this is a temporary measure with the storm - that makes a lot more sense. My context-sensing skills may have went briefly offline.
Assume I fucked up in flagging context. : -)
In my area (Long Island), many residences use oil rather than gas for heating because the gas delivery infrastructure is not well developed. Many residential streets lack gas pipes.
Costs of heating with gas and oil are pretty much the same. Sometimes gas is a bit cheaper, sometimes oil is, but it all works out about equal.
Note: despite a population of 2.5 million most parts of Nassau and Suffolk counties lack sewers.
... my god, and I thought our sewer situation was bad! (we're paying billions to remedy it.) Now you're telling me that you guys don't even have one, and the EPA isn't charging you billions of dollars?
I am also envisioning shitstorms ala Seattle Washington, at the turn of the 1800s to 1900s.
Here's a source I found btw. Seems that Nassau county is mostly connected to sewers, while Suffolk county (farther from NYC) mostly uses septic tanks and cesspools. https://www.longislandpress.com/2025/05/10/long-islands-never-ending-search-for-a-better-sewage-system/
Remember, the Northeast's settlements are older and therefore are usually relying on older infrastructure.
I'm in Pittsburgh! A quarter of an inch of rain, and raw sewage hits our rivers (a lot of it, actually).
Yes, that's not now, that's a "back to 2016" -- so take that as "what it looked like before we suspended all environment regulations because it's an emergency."
Citing your source:
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix
Presuming some of the "notable exits" account for what's currently running in panic mode.
That's a different claim, but ok let's look at the 2016 data
https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/web/reports/load-and-demand/-/tree/net-ener-peak-load
In Jan 2016 oil generated 52 GWh out of a total of 8782 GWh from all sources. That's 0.6%.
That and the other data on the site seems to show that oil was mostly for peaker plants, and most of what was taken offline was coal and nuclear. This fits with the conventional narrative I've heard where cheap natural gas took over from coal and nuclear specifically.
(Though I agree that it's not making renewables look like the main character)
EDIT: I may be misunderstanding you. Are you saying the source I cited is from 2016? Because I looked at the 2025 full spreadsheet and that appears to match with the highlights on the main page.
Sorry, yeah we can all use the 2025 data, for baseline.
Current struggle is to keep the power grid functional, so yeah, all peaker plants are straining, and we hope they don't break.
Current power sources are illegal to run normally, so... yeah, lots of "backup generators" being paid to run.
Ok, I agree that the power grid is under tremendous strain right now. I would still like a source for the original 38% number if you have one, since this (2025) data makes that number sound somewhat implausible. If the 38% portion includes heating oil, I'd be much less surprised.
Federal source, personal interview. And yeah, it's mostly backup generators, not new powerplants being brought online (or old ones stood back up).
It's not home heating oil, because this is an analysis of the electrical grid (specifically inputs to it).
I downloaded the most-recent full-year data from that link, the "2025 Net Energy and Peak Load by Source" spreadsheet.
For 2025 as a whole New England's percentages of GWh by source fuel were as follows:
Natural gas 54%
Nuclear 25%
Hydro 5/8ths of one precent
Solar and wind each about 1/3 of one precent
Refuse burning plus landfill gas about 1/3 of one percent
Wood about 1/5th of one percent
Oil about 1/10th of one percent
Coal about 1/50th of one percent
"Other" [? what would this include?] about 3/100th of one percent
That seems to fall way short of 100% ?
These folks claim that people have been getting the right answer to the Monty Hall Problem for all the wrong reasons. Be that as it may, the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
"Right for the wrong reasons: common bad arguments for the correct answer to the Monty Hall Problem" by Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis.
> If the car were behind door #1 (the door you initially chose), there is a 50% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has a choice about whether to open door #2 or door #3 and he chooses at random. If the car were behind door #2, there is a 100% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has no choice about which door to open (since he is not allowed to open the door that you initially chose). If the car were behind door #3, there is, of course, a 0% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat.
> Since door #1 and door #2 started out equally likely, and since the evidence favors door #2 over door #1, once Monty opens door #3 and reveals a goat, the car is more likely to be behind door #2 than door #1. So, you should definitely switch to door #2. We will call this the Favoring Procedure.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05389-6
David Deutsch says everyone is getting it wrong...
https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/2013/10/monty-hall-problem/
And a description of the Monty Hall Problem and its contentious history is here (for the few MHP virgins left out there)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
And, synchronicity in action, Sabine Hossenfelder has just vibe-coded a Monty Hall Problem simulator. Cool!
https://x.com/skdh/status/2016526061891113284?s=20
> David Deutsch says everyone is getting it wrong...
No, you're misreading that post. He says that everyone is getting it right, and provides a perspective on why switching is better. (A perspective that is not original to him.)
Consider that, in the traditional statement of the problem, the conclusion is that if you switch you have a 2/3 chance to find the car, and if you don't switch you have a 1/3 chance to find the car.
By "contrast", in the post you link, you always switch, and you have a 2/3 chance to find the car.
> the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
1/3 of the time, you start by picking the door with the car.
Monty Hall was interviewed on the subject. He'd never heard of the kerfuffle—easily simulated with a Python script—but was intrigued. He then demonstrated to his interviewer plus a couple of assistants that Monty Hall could force a goat Every Single Time.
<picks goat> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
<picks non-goat> "Are you sure? I'm giving you an opportunity to change your mind . . going once. . . going twice . . <switches> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
Yes, the "Monty Hall problem" doesn't reflect the reality of the actual show. But that's immaterial to the solution to the actual problem.
This is stupid. They're saying the answers to the Monty Hall problem are wrong because they don't yield correct answers to variations of the Monty Hall problem, i.e. to different problems entirely. Being able to answer arbitrary other problems when applied to them in a necessarily somewhat arbitrary way is not a requirement for a solution to be considered a valid ("for the right reason" in their terms) solution to the original problem.
Edit: they write: "Since this argument does not appeal to the fact that Monty is required to open a door to reveal a goat, it is also applicable to cases where Monty might open a door and reveal the car."
then they write:
"In particular, proponents of the Wi-Phi Probability Concentration argument might claim that it is understood that this argument is not intended to apply to the Random Monty variation. It is only intended to apply to the original puzzle."
...no shit? It reads like a troll paper. Who even are these people?
The implication is, though, if you are presented with an analogous problem, the wrong method that happens to get you the correct answer in the MHP may not work for a different scenario.
Sure, they could've made the true claim that the common intuitive solution doesn't generalize to a variant of the problem. Instead they chose to make the false claim that this means that the solution is also not a valid solution to the original problem.
Theres only 3 doors, its not hard to brute force the solution for the different scenarios. You choose one at random. Then monty chooses either at random or intentionally depending on you scenario. Compare the payoff of a switch strategy to a non switch strategy. Are ppl arguing about the narrative or the actual outcomes?
I was questioning the framing of the question, not the probable outcomes.
Okay, well I dont think ppl are harping on how important it is that his choice is random. Certainly the original phrasing didn't use that word. They sometimes describe his choice between two goat doors as random, but his exact behavior when choosing between two goat doors is not important so long as it is not discernable to the player. For example he could always choose his favorite goat and the game wouldn't change. It is important that its not discernable and randomness achieves that. If he chose the left most door with a goat, then in cases where he chose the door on the right you'd know the other is a car and that would change the game.
One of your links refers to the "random monty variant" when his choice is always random and it has a different answer.
The way I see it, if (unknown to you) Monty opens a door at random then you have nothing to gain by switching but also nothing to lose, whereas if he knowingly opens a wrong door then that is where switching is advantageous. But either way, you don't lose anything by switching.
The first time I heard this problem my intuition was faulty (like a lot of other people's). But for me the most persuasive argument for switching is to consider a similar game where there are twenty doors, and after your initial choice Monty opens one door after enother all empty until only one remains. In that case, if he knows which door the goat is behind, then that one remaining door obviously stands out as being highly likely to conceal the goat compared to the initial door one chose.
People use 'random' and 'arbitrary' interchangeably, but I think they actually mean that he chooses arbitrarily.
Randomness isn't relevant there, the point is just to contrast the case where Monty has the option of opening either door vs. the case where his choice is forced. I don't think this is actually important to any explanation of the problem, it's just communication difficulty trying to explain things to a lay audience.
Non-random choices always reveal information. Let's say that Monty will always open door #2 if he can, i.e. if you haven't picked it and there's a goat behind it. If you pick door #1, and Monty opens #3 containing a goat, you know 100% that the car is behind #2 instead of only 67%.
But Monty has full knowledge of the system, and he knows the car is behind door #2. But he can't reveal the car, can he? And he can't reveal the goat behind door number #1. His decisions have to be non-random for the game to work. Of course, the contestant has only partial knowledge of the system, and she has to calculate the odds based on the new information from the point that the goat is revealed behind door #3.
Yes, the initial arrangement of cars and goats could and should be randomized. But again, once the game begins, the odds always favor switching doors on your second choice. And once the game begins, there's no element of randomness unless the car and goat are being continuously swapped between the two remaining doors. It's not quantum mechanics, where there are no known local hidden variables. :-)
I'm pretty sure Monty can reveal the car, actually. The traditional statement of the problem doesn't require that he reveal a goat, or even that he reveal anything at all, only that he happened do so this particular time. Also, this was a real television show in which Monty didn't always offer the choice, and Monty Hall was a real person who I believe has publicly stated that he had a free choice and that he used it arbitrarily to maximize entertainment value (and that he'd have found it particularly entertaining to confound the plans of tricksy game-theorists trying to outsmart him).
If the problem statement is modified to more precisely specify the algorithm Monty is using, the ideal strategy varies accoringly - I believe there's a table for that in the wikipedia article. But for the original, the winning move is to never switch unless you're a cheerfully telegenic young woman, in which case always switch :-)
It's important to distinguish between the real world Monty Hall and his "Let's make a deal" show, and the idealized "Monty Hall Problem" which is merely based on the show rather than modelling it perfectly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
The original formulation of the problem, as per Wikipedia, does not explicitely say that the host will always reveal a goat, but I think it implies it by clarifying that the host knows where the car is.
>Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Since the problem is all about whether to switch or not, I believe it's safe to assume that the host will never reveal the car, otherwise there's no point in continuing the game.
I did some further research, and it looks like the Let's Make a Deal creators would create different scenarios with different rules. The Monty Hall Problem presents a single variation of one of the games presented to the contestants. But the goal was always to trade a prize for a hidden prize, which could be potentially better or worse. So, in the spirit of the original show, I don't think Monty would ever prematurely reveal the prize before the contestant could be kept in a state of suspense.
I used to watch that game with my grandmother as a kid, but I no longer remember those other variations. Reading and rereading the Monty Hall Problem description for 2+ decades has destroyed my original memories of the show. On one level, I feel smarter to have wrestled with the Monty Hall Problem, but in another way, I feel like I've traded in my actual memories for a goat.
This occasionally had the potential to bite them. Back when the rocks were still warm and squishy, a writer on the show published an article with the following situation:
A writer thought a fun "Zonk" would be an oil well pump, pumping merrily away onstage. So they rented an oil pump, the audience got their chuckle, and the contestant dutifully chose the consolation prize.
Had they Kept the oil well pump, they could have turned around and sold it for considerably more than the "Big Deal" back in those days.
At least that's how the story was published in TV Guide.
This is somewhat wrong. If the theoretical setup allows Monty to reveal the car, you gain no information from the revelation and it doesn't matter if you switch or not. However if that is disallowed, you always do gain information when (or if) Monty opens a door, and it always benefits you to switch. It's impossible for Monty to open (or decide not to open) a door in such a way that it is disadvantageous to switch. Depending on the setup (specifically whether he is allowed to open the door with the car), either your odds don't change or your odds improve. Since you might not know which, you should always switch just to be sure -- it can't hurt.
You seem to be saying that even if Monty is free to act in any way according to any strategy he chooses, it’s always advantageous to switch if he opens a goat door and offers a switch. But what if Monty follows this strategy: if the contestant chooses a goat door, I do nothing and let the contestant lose. If the contestant chooses the car door, then I open a goat door to try to get the contestant to switch.
If Monty plays by that strategy, then not only is switching not advantageous, switching guarantees losing. Every time you switch, you lose.
Hmm interesting. Okay, I guess if you don't know Monty's strategy and you suspect he might be adverserial, you actually shouldn't switch.
Interestingly he can also run the opposite strategy and guarantee you a 100% win rate if he wants to be maximally helpful (and you know this).
>His decisions have to be non-random for the game to work.
Randomly chosen means randomly beyond the known rules of the game. Yes, switching is always beneficial, but there is of course a real difference in outcomes between 67% and 100% chance.
When the contestant has picked the correct door, then Monty has a choice.
If Monty uses a not-completely-random algorithm to select one of the two goats, then his choice can provide additional information. For example, if it is known that Monty always chooses the lower-numbered goat, and the contestant picks door #1 and Monty opens door #3, then it is known that the car is behind door #2.
If the contestant chooses door #1 as his first pick, is Monty allowed to open door #1 to reveal a goat at this point? Because the description above doesn't mention that as a possibility.
No it can’t be opened yet. It doesn’t matter. By the way David Deutsch is just framing the solution in a different way. You should always take two choices whether or not Monty is there or not. That doubles your chances.
If Monty chooses randomly, there is no benefit to switching. If A is "contestant initially chose goat" and B is "Monty reveals goat", the P(A) = 2/3, and P(B|A) = 1/2, and P(B) = 2/3, so P(A|B) = 1/2.
If Monty always chooses a goat, then P(B) = P(B|A) = 1, so P(A|B) = P(A) = 2/3.
> If Monty chooses randomly, there is no benefit to switching.
I think you misunderstood my question.
Let's say there are goats behind #1 and #3, and the car is behind #2. The problem as stated, though, says, "This is because Monty has a choice about whether to open door #2 or door #3 and he chooses at random."
If the Contestant chooses door number #1, Monty has not choice but to open door #3. He can't open #2 with the car. And he can't open #1, because that would prove the contestant, right? So there's nothing random in Monty's decision. This doesn't affect how the contestant perceives or misperceives the odds.
If you were to say that before the game began, the choice of which door to put the car behind was random, that would make more sense. However, even in that case Monty's choice of which door to open would be dictated by which door the contestant selects first. And the odds wouldn't change whether it was a random or nonrandom arrangment of cars and goats. 1/3rd if the constestant stays with the initial door, and 2/3rds if they switch doors.
Honestly the answer is that Monty doesn’t, and can’t, choose randomly in the two out of three cases where the contestant has chosen the goat. It might be presented as if he was randomly choosing a door but he can’t.
> If the Contestant chooses door number #1, Monty has not choice but to open door #3. He can't open #2 with the car. And he can't open #1, because that would prove the contestant, right? So there's nothing random in Monty's decision. It's got nothing to do with how the contestant perceives or misperceives the odds.
That's not necessarily clear from the statement. If you assume that Monty will only reveal a goat, then yes the usual argument holds. But if you assume that Monty could reveal the door with the car behind it and just happens to have chosen a goat door then there is no reason to switch.
A simpler way to look at it is that if Monty always chooses randomly (including the counterfactual possibility of a car), then his choice can be perfectly simulated without any knowledge, meaning that the choice conveys no information and the odds remain 50:50.
But that can’t be because he opens the door and says “good job you didn’t pick his one, huh”.
I've been impressed with the power of ACX's recommendations widget since the conclusion of last year's Review contest. When the results were revealed and the finalists deanonymized I got about 20 followers instantly, but in the ensuing three months I've gotten about 100 more (that mostly appear to be "real" accounts and aren't just following every substack indiscriminately) at a steady pace of about one per day. And this is despite not publishing anything else since rehosting my Mashed Potatoes essay there. I'm sure more active bloggers who ended up in the rec panel are faring even better!
It seems like this was a new part of the prize package for this year's finalists, so I just wanted to give a testimonial that it is in fact very impactful for building from an extremely low audience level and not just a nice gesture like I assumed at the outset (how many people would really click through on a small link that appears on the ACX homepage less than half the time? Lots, apparently!).
Jersalem rationalist community meetup happening this Friday at 10 AM, Sacher park. We will probably be at the picnic tables next to the playground - if we're not there, we've been chased off to a more marginal land, but we're still in the park, look for us. Preferably RSVP on lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fxmzD42dqt3Yd58of/jerusalem-rationalist-community-meetup Or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/14SuZiUbCSa/
But walk-ins are very welcome. See you there!
Vibecoding is going really mainstream now, two columnists in the Wall Street Journal vibecoded interactive features for a column on vibecoding:
https://archive.is/KNV5y
WSJ link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-vibe-coding-experiment-a4a3bb0f
I think actual developers still have an edge, normies just don't get how many details need to be handled to deliver a finished software product, but uh... Well, we can use these tools too, but better.
And to think it was only a few years ago that we were screaming at journalists to "learn to code". I bet any who actually did are going to be feeling pretty silly right now.
The funny thing is that those memes were in response to breathless articles about out-of-work coal miners and displaced refugees learning to code, which makes this the second time that telling a group to learn to code has backfired.
"Learn to code!"
"No, not like that!"
This opportunity to learn to write a blog! Perfect for me.
I've been using writing (but only for myself) as a therapist lately. In other words, the notebook and pen together and the act of writing, put together, form my therapist. Surprisingly effective.
I have always enjoyed writing. In fact I'm rather compulsive about it. It refines my thinking.
The only thing that I have against signing up for such a camp is it's a couple of thousand miles away and there will be significant expenses involved.
That, and actually one other thing - does the world really need yet another blogger? Particularly, me?!!
But what the heck, maybe I should learn to write better - for myself. And I admire the teachers you say this camp would have.
What would convince the more AI-maximalist among you that talk of the LLM revolution was oversold or at least premature, and that we're significantly further from most of the downstream effects than we have assumed since the public unveiling of chatgpt?
In addition to other comments I agree with (METR horizon plateauing being probably the best indicator), I would also add: (1) two major labs announcing or strongly signaling they are "moving in a different direction" that is markedly different from the current pre-training + post-training + RL approach, (2) a major lab or a startup achieving frontier-level results in some important domain (coding, math, writing) using a very different approach, (3) persistent failure of companies to incorporate current-level tech into their business successfully.
For (1) public signaling is important because that's how labs "tell" academics and independent researchers what to work on. So if TWO major labs are signaling "hey we are going back to the drawing board here" that would be a strong sign the LLM revolution hit a ceiling.
For (2), that would be something like Yann LeCun's new lab using a radically different approach and blowing current models out of the water, both in terms of capabilities and reliability.
I realize (3) is the hardest to operationalize into a specific criteria. My vision here looks vaguely like "kids on TikTok show off exploits to get free Big Macs at the LLM-powered drive-through" in like 100 different domains and major companies pull back from LLM-powered products and startups building them fail.
Caution here though, the base rate for AI startup failures will be high even in the maximalist world, and likewise for corporate integration (eg Sears in the internet era). But if they ALL fail, and there are practically no companies that increase revenue or decrease costs in any major way by ~2028, that either means (a) current LLMs and their descendents cannot deliver real value ("Workslop" etc) or (b) the diffusion problem is far more important that AI capabilities, and Tyler Cowen et al. are right about bottlenecks.
The problem here is that it's hard to parse out "the models aren't as good as you think they are" from "you aren't integrating the models correctly into your business." Insert well-worn reference to electric motors in factories here. I'd have to think more carefully to find a way to disentangle these two.
I'm on the opposite side - I've always thought the AI risk stuff was incredibly stupid, but events of the last year have caused me to become increasingly worried about AI risk. The difference is that you can already *see* the transformation, and it's only a minor extrapolation to really bad impacts on society.
Convince most AI-maximalists that hallucinations are a fundamental part of the LLM architecture, and will never go away. If you're familiar at all with "the nines" -- hallucinations are like saying "you have to accept 20% downtime."
In my experience, hallucinations are usually random, and if you were to ask three times and check if the result is the same, the hallucination rate is much lower. If you can show me that progress on getting it lower still has come to a halt despite significant investment in making it lower, that would be pretty good evidence.
It will never go away, but it might get below the rate of humans misremembering things, or even authoritative sources getting things wrong.
I am not worried about paperclip factories or terminator bots. I think AI is already reducing people’s ability to think creatively, even to search for information on their own. This, together with the environmental impact of its development, and especially the way it has reinforced people’s complacency (non-intentionality) with technology adoption, causes me to think the effects of AI are worse than even the Yudkowskys of the world do: I see negative effects in front of me now; he only waves his hands about negative effects in the future. How would you convince me I’m wrong?
By explaining to you the problem with the Dot Bomb, and what it led to, in terms of infrastructure investment.
Then, I'd ask you what we can do with the current infrastructure over-investment?
(In short, I think you're overselling the negative effects which DO exist, because you're unaware of the projected (designed) positive effects that are in the future).
“ By explaining to you the problem with the Dot Bomb, and what it led to, in terms of infrastructure investment.
…what we can do with the current infrastructure over-investment?”
I am not familiar with “the Dot Bomb”. Is that another term for the dot com bubble popping in like 2000, or is it a more recent event?
Your question states there is currently an infrastructure over-investment. Maybe this is true, I have no idea. I was laid off from a tech job in 2023 along with (it seems) a huge portion of other people in my field, which looks like a market correction to me.
But now as an electrician I see that building data centers and chip factories etc. is the dominating source of work (in my region at least), a situation which is compatible with over-investment…so my own experience is a wash I guess?
Thus I’d have to abstract your question up, assume there is indeed an over-investment in AI, and answer it like a “what-if”. Is such an answer useful to making me update my views on AI? I don’t see how, but maybe if you can help me understand where you’re going with this line of reasoning…?
Yes, I'm discussing the dotcom bubble bursting.
You seem to be right in the middle of the infrastructure buildout. Yes, I do mean building data centers and chip factories.
What else might we use all this for? (Assume that your premises on "bad current things" are correct, just that you are missing consequential "good things" based on your inability to think ahead).
A tech bubble bursting seems survivable, if that's what you mean. Would a market shock like "AI bubble bursts the same way the dot com bubble did" be worth the trade-off of not having the negative effects of AI on our society/planet continue further?
Obviously without my crystal ball handy I can't answer with complete confidence, but assuredly ratcheting our species further toward diminished mental capabilities and a diminished ecological environment seems like a worse option in the long run. Whereas AI's benefits are a question mark. It could make our life better in many ways, especially in narrow ways like protein folding, but its overwhelmingly desirable transformative capabilities are not yet realized, IMO.
If the trend of quickly increasing value I get from LLMs slows down, and if all the smart young people who actually build things stop being so enthusiastic about it.
Watching you write about this, especially the last article, is like watching my grandmother use a computer. It's just painful. Our experience is so vastly different that I don't see anyway we would ever convince each other.
Which "last article" are you referring to? The most recent LLM article I see on Freddie's substack is about Gemini hallucinating a long, detailed report on a pyschiatric hospital that does not exist, right down to patient and doctor quotes, which matches a lot of my experiences pretty closely.
Most of my "AI maximalist" predictions are an attempt to take lines on graphs (both real and abstract/subjective/imagined) and extrapolate how long it would take for current progress to reach some interesting level. So if the lines on graphs were to change slope, that would be convincing. This could be anything from:
- AIs stop improving on benchmarks, or take much more scaling to improve on benchmarks than the usual scaling laws would suggest.
- AIs time horizons stop growing, or the METR time horizon graphs slows significantly
- AI progress subjectively feels like it's slowing; a year or two goes by without anything new and exciting; in 2027 or 2028 we're still programming with versions of Claude Code that are about the same as today's, and there haven't been any new Claude Code level advances.
I think even in this world things are pretty transformative as people work to integrate existing AIs into more and more applications, but if this happened I'd probably think the chance of AGI/singularity was delayed until whenever the new lines on the new graphs said it would be, or indefinitely if the lines had gone totally horizontal.
> AIs stop improving on benchmarks
How many benchmarks need to stop improving? For example, The slope for SWE-Bench Verified has slowed to practically zero.
Can you explain? I'm looking at https://www.swebench.com/ and it looks like Claude 4 Opus in August was 67, but Claude 4.5 Opus in November was 74.
You’re probably seeing the default Bash Only tab, which was added more recently. I’m referring to the Verified tab, which was the original benchmark.
Thanks. I'm looking at the Verified tab now, and the leader is "TRAE + Doubao-Seed-Code", a Chinese model from last fall that I've never heard of. Is the claim that this model is better at software engineering than Claude Code, and people just haven't noticed? If not, what *is* the claim?
To be honest, I'm not completely sure, and I would love to better understand this metric, especially given its prominence. But to the best of my understanding, the specific claim is that *a run of this model, under certain restricted and reproducible parameters, has successfully fixed the highest percentage of software bugs out of a set of 500 specific bugs which was human-curated from a more general list in order to be more tractable and objectively verifiable*.
Perhaps it's better at handling software engineering prompts in general and no one's noticed, but perhaps it was overfitted to this problem set and performs worse in other contexts, or any number of other reasons.
How many are there?
I think I'd look at the benchmark of "Do people still think it's worth investing tons of money into training new AI models?"
Source?
You can compare the dates yourself from the listings on the Verified tab at https://www.swebench.com/
2024-10-29: first model over 50%
2025-02-03: first model over 60%
2025-03-16: first model over 65%
2025-05-15: first model over 70%
2025-06-12: first model over 75%
2025-09-28: first model over 78%
Today, still at 78%
There was rapid progress until about last June (+25% in the ~7 months to then) and then basically no progress sine then (+3% in ~7 months, with 0 in the last 4)
Note that AI 2027 expected 85% by summer 2025.
Are there other benchmarks on which there's been improvement since June 2025?
Don't get me wrong, I think that AI 2027's timelines were very exaggerated, but I also don't think we've hit the wall yet.
Good question! I presume there are, though I don't have time and energy to focus on all of them, and I'm generally skeptical about what a lot of them are actually measuring. I've been focusing on this one because 1) I noticed it being cited in a number of forecasts and discussions, 2) it relates specifically to my field and I have at least a *partial* understanding of what it is measuring, 3) the results are objective and publicly available and, at least until recently, were being frequently (i.e. weekly) updated by entries from a large number of model.
The thing is, it would not only need to be shown that "AI progress was slowing down", it would also need to be shown that "current AIs can't be economically integrated into work flows". I don't feel we have even a good clue of where the current levels of AI will be once we properly integrate them. It took my company several years to add an Apple ][+ to the work flow, and then more years before desktop computers were widely used. And we were a relatively early adopter, as we'd been renting time on mainframes, and this cut our bills significantly.
It's my feeling that we don't have much of a clue what things would be like in a decade or two even if all AI progress stopped today.
Sure but that’s hardly the 2027 scenario.
It’s definitely true though, electricity took decades to really increase productivity and computers took a while as well.
I'm a coder, soon I'm going to attempt to code an entire app using Claude Code (I already use it a lot in my day job), I guess I would need to see that attempt fail catastrophically for me to believe this is a dead end. But I think the LLM revolution is premature, I have a feeling the bubble will pop (just like the dot com bubble did), but we're still going to see something crazy like software development switching to become about managing teams of AI agents, but then it turns out you can have a machine that does software development but doesn't possess general reasoning, which is pretty counterintuitive.
> I guess I would need to see that attempt fail catastrophically for me to believe this is a dead end.
If you used GPT-2 it would fail catastrophically.
At this stage you should *expect* the result to fail, and need lots of hand work. It's probably not ready for that. But that wouldn't show this is a dead end. (Of course, it depends on what you mean by "catastrophically".)
Right now you should expect most attempts to apply AIs to be failures. Most of the early attempts to apply computers were failures. The problem is that the development isn't stable enough to make durable decisions about what they can't do. (Well, I'd be really surprised if they solved the halting problem, but I mean outside of theoretical bounds.)
He should expect it? Why? One-shotting an app is trivial for Opus 4.5 in the Claude Code harness.
Last time I tried this was in lovable, it didn't one shot it, came close, like 90% correct, but it was a much smaller app, a toy really, and I'm going to attempt implementing a dating app this time.
This should be technically simple, but of course bootstrapping the network is the hardest part of a dating app. Good luck!
That part can be done by an AI, too. Profiles with pretty photos, who will chat with you for a while, and then ghost you. That's even more interaction that most get at an actual dating app.
Internally, at Anthropic, it looks like humans are writing very little code, software development there has become about managing teams of AI agents. I want to try that approach to see what happens.
Is there evidence for this?
Dario states this in his recent blog post: https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
> In fact, that picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress. Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.
In the blog, it links here: https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-work-at-anthropic
Yeah, Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, is saying he just lets various instances of Claude Code do everything now.
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177?lang=en
Here he talks about how Claude Code writes all code for him now: https://jpcaparas.medium.com/the-claude-code-creator-says-ai-writes-100-of-his-code-now-956b2a5905ba
Not exactly evidence, but I've heard of several reports of that kind of thing, from various different places. I think, at this point, you need to pick a application that it can do, with insufficient guidelines as to what that is.
I don't know if I count as one of the more AI-maximalist here, but I think you would consider me relatively AI-maximalist. The most effective way to convince me is to make concrete predictions that I find surprisingly AI-minimalist, and then be proven right.
edit to clarify: I wasn't trying to be cute there -- I'm not saying "convince me of your position by having your position proven right". I'm saying find short- and medium-term things where you're confident the AI-maximalists' expectations are wrong, and spell out how you think they will be proven wrong (in a way that's hard for either side to quibble with when reality gives its verdict).
The Aerolamp seems cool, but they seem to assume that you already know WHY you would prefer this over alternatives.
From the FAQ:
"How quickly does Aerolamp work?
95% reduction of coronavirus within 15 minutes and 99% reduction within 25 minutes, assuming one Aerolamp in a 250 square foot room. This is about three times faster than a high-quality portable HEPA air filter."
So ... why not just use a "high-quality HEPA air filter" instead? Is the Aerolamp cheaper? Or what? The FAQ doesn't say.
If I would be using either I wouldn't wait to turn it on until folks arrived.
IQAir makes high quality air filters -- I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure it's better than 95% reduction of coronavirus in 15 minutes (this sounds like Ad Copy, and they might not want to call IQAir's system portable).
I use IQAir myself. Aerolamp seems cheaper, but also pollutes your indoor space with ozone, which is pretty bad for people.
Thanks.
"cheaper" was the word I was looking for. That may be the (hypothetical) edge for these UV guys.
(hi Aerolamp cofounder here) If the estimates of effectiveness are correct, Aerolamp is about x2 cheaper than the next-most cost-effective indoor air intervention for pathogens. You can get a clean air delivery rate of ~200 CFM from a high quality air filter for $150 or ~1200 CFM for $500. That kind of overkill (or more) might well be necessary to actually prevent transmission, although I am first to admit that there is a *ton* we don't know about actual real-life transmission dynamics.
It's also less obtrusive than a powerful portable air filter--it's ~silent and takes up no floor space. Although I would say for basically everyone that you should get an air filter *first* and then layer UV on top of that.
I should also say about the ozone--it is significantly less ozone than you would get by just opening a window (100 mW of far-UV generates about 10 ppb of ozone, outdoor ozone concentrations are typically 40 ppb or higher.) 5 ppb is considered "zero ozone". As long as you have at least some ventilation, the ozone is likely a non-issue.
As I understand it the filters on a UVC lamp are the only thing preventing the propagation of 185nm (ozone) or 254nm (human-damaging) light. From what I read, a 254nm lamp would also create 185nm if not for a glass filter, so my assumption was that your lamp in the safe range between those also relies on a filter to stop the unwanted bands. Obviously since this is all non-visible spectrum there'd be no visual cue of a malfunction. It appears from a quick search I made that in order to verify this safety as the product ages, you would need to check the lamps with a UV radiometer? (Sorry if any of this sounds silly to an engineer, I'm just a lawyer who happened to have 2 semesters of physics a zillion years ago, enough to make myself get into conversations where I sound dumb!)
Sort of--those aren't quite the right wavelengths but that's roughly correct. The thing is pretty much every commercially available far-UVC lamp is well-filtered now. The only exception is Sterilray which I wouldn't recommend for most applications because of this.
OSLUV is a nonprofit that tests far-UVC lamps and includes detailed spectral data available for download, so you can stick to models that have been tested by a third-party: https://reports.osluv.org/
Malfunctions are technically possible--if the filter is subjected to enough heat it can degrade a bit--but this is a rare operating condition.
I will say tho that in my experience, you *notice* if you're getting a too-high dose of UVC. It's not like UVB or IR lasers where you can get a huge eye-destroying dose and have it not hurt at all at first. With UVC, you feel discomfort long before you get to longterm damage, so if you feel fine, you probably are fine. With 254nm UVC, it can be actual pain--with 222nm, even with a slightly degraded (or lower quality) filter, it's more like dry eye or itchiness.
Wouldn't that be the responsibility of the supplier? https://www.ushio.com/product/care222-filtered-far-uv-c-excimer-lamp-module/
I had a question about the comparisons to HEPA.
As I understand it, HEPA filters remove aerosol particles by physical capture, so for virus-laden aerosols the removal effectiveness is similar regardless of which virus is inside the particle. I think this should make calculations more general.
But with far-UVC, the mechanism is inactivation, and a pathogen’s UV susceptibility can vary a lot (with non-enveloped viruses being more UV-resistant). So a value based on coronavirus data wouldn’t necessarily apply to other viruses. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Are the price comparisons made with a specific virus in mind?
PS- I think you're doing great stuff
(oops initially posted as top level comment and not reply)
Yep that's exactly correct and makes it tough to communicate about this stuff.
The value-for-money comparison is based on both coronavirus and flu, which are both relatively susceptible, but also the most common viruses of concern. I maintain a full table of susceptibility constants here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16eAuATxHYOdPo6B4yerZqxMh843lb1iCXrTGBMrtbEE/edit?usp=drivesdk
You can also see the spread here: https://illuminate.osluv.org/?preview_lamp=Aerolamp%20DevKit (janky old website sorry, illuminate v2 with the nice modern web frontend should launch by next week or so)
The less susceptible viruses are things like bacteriophages, which are less susceptible party because they're quite small and present a smaller cross section to UV photons. Flu seems to be a bit more susceptible than coronavirus, but we have only one modern study on it so I hedge a bit and use the coronavirus estimate.
Thank you for this!
You might want to mention the cost savings somewhere on your web site :-).
Or, if you do already mention it, then somewhere more prominent because I couldn't figure out why one might want to buy your product.
Haha thank you good tip:) the website generally needs a bit of a revamp
Also quick note about using it before folks come over--for home use, there isn't much point in running it if you're home alone (or home with your partner or somebody else you're in very close contact with, such that if you're catching whatever they have, you're doing it regardless of how clean the ambient air is). Far-UV is *like* a powerful portable air filter for pathogen control, but it won't affect dust or chemical pollutants. It might be somewhat effective against allergens by denaturing the proteins that create the allergic reaction (I can dig up that paper if you want), but I expect air filters to probably be better for that.
Optimal setup is imo something like the Levoit 200s ($150, ~200 CADR on its medium setting which I find is pretty quiet--the high and highest setting I only use if something burned on the stove and the air quality has dropped significantly) and having that on all the time, and a lamp that comes on when you have company or when somebody in your household is sick. This also preserves lamp lifetime--if you have it on all the time, you'll need to replace it after about a year and a half. Which isn't bad imo, but nicer to not have to replace it for 10+ years instead.
I thought this was the most lucid take I've seen on AI so far:
https://deepforest.substack.com/p/15-years-to-agi
Well, as the title says, 15 years to AGI. He says true AGI would need to have:
1. Robust common sense: it shouldn't make obvious human detectable errors.
2. Intuitive physics: at least a human 5 year old's understanding of how to interact with the world.
3. Embodiment: actually being able to interact directly with the world the way a human can.
4. Long term planning: the ability to form complex long term plans.
5. Continual learning: essentially that the training process never ends from the AI, it can continue to learn for its entire existence.
Current models are all pretty far from this. Short essay too, recommend reading it.
Please unpack “robust common sense”. Humans make obvious mistakes at every level, from individuals to countries. LLMs currently make more obvious mistakes than domain experts, but clearly the standard isn’t “doesn’t make obvious errors”. I don’t think the standard is “no more obvious mistakes than humans”, either - they can compensate for some extra errors with comparative strengths.
Not like LLMs, where sometimes they make mistakes that are obvious to every human with the relevant expertise. Just today I saw Claude Code vertically center the wrong component, not really the kind of mistake I have seen a human make before. I think human experts don't make obvious mistakes, unless you want to count missing a detail as an obvious mistake.
> I think human experts don't make obvious mistakes
I am perfectly capable of generating multiple bugs and typos in every line of code I write. I rapidly notice and correct them, but that is not the same thing as continuous perfection. My work pattern is not “perfect transfer from head to editor”, it is “type a bunch of stuff, read what I just typed, fix the obvious problems”.
Agentic AI also does this, but its loops currently take longer than mine as it relies on external tools to spot obvious problems I notice at a glance.
> 3. Embodiment: actually being able to interact directly with the world the way a human can.
Text to animation AI exists. It's not quite at the level of fully controlling a humanoid robot, but clearly the methods we have can work.
> 5. Continual learning: essentially that the training process never ends from the AI, it can continue to learn for its entire existence.
Very common. ChatGPT will periodically give you two results and have you pick the better one so it can learn from it. Each individual instance of it isn't learning on its own, but does it need to?
I don’t think we can have 2 without 3. The amount of information we feed in about how reality works is simply insufficient otherwise.
Regarding 5, no, that's not really what he's talking about. He's talking about an AI being able to continually upskill after being deployed, the way a human can continue to learn things he didn't already know throughout his life.
LLM's come out knowing a lot of things, far more than any human, but then are unable to upgrade their skills on their own.
But why? If AI can run a datacenter, it can upgrade its skill on its own. The only way you'd need one instance to be able to do it is if that one instance is by itself without any way to contact a datacenter.
I do believe that developing AGI is possible, maybe even inevitable. However, the question of when or how is simply unanswerable at the moment. The author clearly argues as much:
1. "I anticipate that within a couple of years, we will have a better idea on whether world model approaches are the correct approach to robust common sense or if new ideas are needed." 50-50 that the current paradigm is viable.
2. "None of today’s LLMs or robotic foundation models yet have anywhere near this degree of capacity." New paradigm needed.
3. "I will say there is something crucial in human and animal intelligence about being localized and embodied." New paradigm needed.
4. "Today’s agents lack the ability to execute complex long range plans. [..] I don’t personally have a strong intuition on what the critical missing piece is between today’s methods and capable long range planning." 50-50 that the current paradigm is viable.
5. "I think new ideas are needed here and there is a reasonable chance we will still struggle with this problem more than 15 years out from now." New paradigm needed.
If you don't know, even in principle, how to solve these critical problems, and are aware that more could pop up (spoiler: they always do), the only honest answer is to say "I have checked to the best of my abilities, and I still don't know". Instead, he gives an optimistic prediction, and him calling out the AI salesmen of today in the same breath is extra ironic.
If you need an entirely new paradigm for almost every problem, then it's fair to say AI *as we currently understand it* has no possible pathway to AGI.
That's my point in a nutshell, yes.
Wasn't there an old joke, something about how if a scientist says something is 10 or more years away, that means it's never happening? This reminded me of that.
Maybe https://xkcd.com/678/?
Do you mean this quote by Arthur C. Clarke? “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
No, not that one.
Probably, don't remember hearing that one. First quip that came to my mind is how commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away.
The joke as I heard it is, "for years nuclear fusion was always 20 years away. But lately, we've made big advances: now it's perpetually just 10 years away"
While I do get the joke, it's also true that it would be an improvement and possibly a sign of real advances. There are even studies on the evolution of that quip:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10894-023-00361-z
I wonder if such studies also exist for the expectation of AGI. The article linked by OP certainly seems to be another of those that say LLMs aren't going to be AGI ever.
Yeah, I agree with you, going from “always 20 years away” to “always 10 years away” can represent real important progress, I just think it's funny.
I think this actually kind of captures my views of LLMs and AGI: I'm skeptical enough of LLMs that I'd be pretty sympathetic to a statement of the form, “AGI via LLMs will always remain 5-10 years away”; but I also think that they clearly represent a step forward from a “always 30-50 years away” prior state (all numbers here are kind of made up, TBC), and there is meaningful progress towards AGI represented by that change.
If I had to try and defend this view seriously, I'd maybe say something like, my model of how far away we are from AGI is some distribution with infinite mean, so the mean number of years to AGI isn't well defined, but the move to LLMs shifts the whole distribution over to the left in such a way that the probability of AGI in <small number> years is now higher, even though the mean didn't change.
Not to say the above is exactly how I model time-to-AGI (I model it by being confused and changing my mind back and forth constantly), but I think it's a gesture at how you could model it in a way that vindicates the worldview captured in that quip.
I agree it should have those things, though I think of 3 as derivative. But I don't put that 15 years away unless things slow down dramatically. OTOH, prior to the recent surge my prediction was 2035 plus or minus 5 years in a roughly bell shaped curve (with, or course, a long right tail). Currently I've updated to "somewhere around 2030", but then next couple of years should show. I found https://ai-2027.com/ quite impressive, and robots have been advancing quickly since that was published.
OTOH, I'm expecting AGIs to have "jagged capabilities". There may well be areas where at least some people are more capable. (And people have "jagged capabilities" too. Try to out calculate a spreadsheet.) So if by AGI you mean "Something with superhuman capabilities in every category", then 15 years isn't unreasonable, and may be precipitous.
I think I expect an AGI to have jagged capabilities, but with the caveat that it shouldn't have valleys where humans have peaks. ASI is probably pretty far away, but then, even an AGI that's equivalent to a human expert in multiple domains would be quite the game changer.
*I* feel that one should expect AGI to have valleys where humans have peaks. Things that we find really easy are things where we don't understand the complexities. Consider judging the taste of a cake. We just sort of do it automatically, but have little idea of what goes into that.
Hmm, are you saying that at least in some places that humans have peaks, it's because we're cutting corners and sweeping complexity under the rug? Judging the taste of a cake is not a good example of that, there's a lot of subjectivity in that.
I'm not saying we're cutting corners, but evolution often does. I'm saying we never see the complexity at any conscious level. If you don't like "the taste of cake", consider "controlling your blood sugar", but subjectivity itself is part of what I mean by "just sort of do automatically".
Don't hard UV lamps boost indoor ozone?
They address this in the FAQ.
"Does Aerolamp produce ozone?
Yes - but only a very small amount, likely less much than opening a window!
..."
I assume they are correct about this.
I do not.
"For filtered krypton chloride excimer (KrCl*) lamps that have
so far been assessed, experimental measurements and first
principles calculations support an estimated ozone generation
efficiency of 7–10.5 ppb per hour per μW/cm2 of fluence rate.
• The expected increase in steady-state ozone concentrations
in a space with 1 air change per hour is low to mid single digits
ppb per μW/cm2 of average fluence rate. This is a small amount
relative to both outdoor ozone and fluctuations that can be
observed in background levels of indoor ozone, but relatively
large compared to the average levels of indoor ozone, which
show a central tendency of ~4–6 ppb. Indoor ozone reacts
with other substances, which is also known as ‘ozone loss’. The
products of this ozone loss may be more significant for health
than ozone itself"
This is from their own papers.
FAQ is clearly written by someone trying to sell the product (aka "marketing") I suggest you read their engineering/science paper thoroughly, I'm in the middle of doing so.
The FAQ is written by me, although I think some SEO person or another may have had their way with that specific answer since I originally wrote it. (Honestly the main challenge with an FAQ like this is writing informatively and accurately but without confusing the median reader, who is very easily confused.)
The paper is correct and consistent with the FAQ answer though. Aerolamp in a typical ~250 sq ft room has an average fluence rate of 0.6 uW/cm2, so low-single-digits of increase is what we expect. This is also about what you'd expect from opening a window, given that outdoor ozone is 20-40 ppb. For context, the UL "zero ozone" certification is 5 ppb.
I echo the paper's concerns that the main issue is not ozone but its byproducts--luckily, more recent evidence (not published yet) suggests that this secondary chemistry seems to be more limited than previously thought. Sad for the grad students doing the study, but good for the prospects of scaling far-UV.
However, the bright side of being worried about the byproducts more than the actual ozone is that the byproducts are much easier to get rid of. (Ozone is also pretty trivial to get rid of, but you need an activated carbon filter--the byproducts, any kind of filtration/ventilation will work.)
My rule of thumb is that if you have a modest amount of ventilation/filtration, you're probably fine even in a residential setting, and you're definitely fine in a commercial setting--and ultimately public spaces is where far-UV is going to have the most benefit.
This is why I tell people to please get at least a basic air filter first, and a far-UV lamp second
My issue with this technology is cited within your research:
"In these studies, the ozone generation efficiency ranges from 7–10.5 ppb/hr per μW/cm2 of average fluence rate2–4. This is a relatively small range given the uncertainties inherent in fluence rate determination"
So, yes, that's smaller than what's "ordinarily outdoors" (assuming you aren't in LA). But that's generated -per hour of use.-
Continued, as I continue reading your engineering/science document (Many Thanks for putting this online, and it speaks well of your company!):
"Measurements in 43 southern California residences provided a decay per
hour of 2.8 ± 1.3 (Lee et al., 19997), and a study of 15 bedrooms in 14
Chinese residences estimates 2.8 ± 1.1 (Yao and Zhao, 20188). While
there is an extensive literature on ozone loss to indoor-relevant surfaces,
these two studies are the best available empirical data on whole-room
average ozone decay rates from reactions with indoor surfaces"
So, now we have an input and an output. Since the input is greater than the output, you're looking at a net 6-8 ppb accumulation per hour. Run it constantly*, and you're easily up to over 100ppb (and 70 is an Ozone Action Day per the EPA for outdoor air quality).
If you have some ratings for "basic air filters" (I know I can pull the ones for IQAir, if I really look them up, but you're the one selling the product), I'd love to learn more!
*this need not be your use-case, but if so, you should outline that somewhere.
I feel like I've been somewhat less than charitable toward your company, given that your FAQ seemed to be saying "Ozone is not-a-problem!" Given your responses here, that's been a pretty poor assumption on my part.
I think there might be a mistake in your math. There is definitely not an accumulation of 100s of ppb over several hours with 1 ACH and a typical ozone decay rate of 2.7. I've definitely never seen that anywhere in any study.
Check out this sim tool: https://illuminate.osluv.org/?preview_lamp=Aerolamp%20DevKit the ozone result section has a reference for how the expected increase in ozone is calculated if you want to check that out.
(Incidentally, estimating fluence rate is something we can actually do with quite high accuracy! So that is not a significant source of uncertainty.)
Blueprint also has a quite extensive section on ozone generation and secondary chemistry: https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/u/2025/06/Blueprint-for-Far-UVC-V1.0-9.22.25.pdf
I can dig up the specific "realistic ozone increase" references if you want too
In sum: I basically do think that in most realistic settings (i.e. not sealed steel chambers), ozone is basically not a problem--as long as there is *some* ventilation/filtration. I agree it becomes potentially problematic in very low/zero ventilation scenarios--which is why I always stress that people should get an air filter *first* and a UV lamp second. That's how I use my lamp in my poorly ventilated New York apartment :)
I'm at 100ppb over 24 hours, give or take. I would like "realistic ozone increase" references. Still reading that blueprint link...
I'm sharing a recent blog post on a business structure I believe could have significant positive impact if the underlying thesis holds. I'd be curious to hear reactions. A link to the full article is below, though I discuss it briefly here:
Profit for Good (PFG) businesses permanently commit their profits to charitable purposes through durable structures—foundation ownership, charitable trusts, or similar arrangements. The Charitable Ownership Advantage (COA) thesis proposes that this structure creates competitive advantage: the same business generates higher margins under charitable ownership than under conventional ownership.
Most attempts to capture stakeholder preferences for ethical business do so through business operations: Fair Trade sourcing, sustainable inputs, premium wages. These create real tradeoffs: higher costs that must be passed on or absorbed, limiting scale. PFG operates at the ownership layer instead. Charitable ownership need not change about how the business runs: same products, prices, management, cost structure. In our world today, ownership is usually already decoupled from operations; shareholders are passive and managers are salaried professionals. This means stakeholder preferences can be captured without the tradeoffs that constrain other models. The preferences themselves are well-documented: field experiments show 5-20% sales lifts for charity-linked products at price parity, 4-7% wage flexibility for mission-aligned work, and lower turnover. The attitude-behavior gap that rightly makes us skeptical of stated-preference research closes substantially when expressing the preference requires no sacrifice.
These effects need not be large to matter. Most businesses operate on thin margins; a few percentage points of improvement from modestly higher conversion, lower churn, and better retention doesn't improve profit proportionally—it can double it. COA requires only that modest advantages stack.
The two objections most commonly raised concern equity incentives and capital access. On incentives: the concern is that charitable ownership removes the motivation that drives performance. But in most of the economy, operators hold no meaningful equity. Public company executives are salaried; private equity LPs are passive while GPs govern professionally. The objection applies to startups and small owner-operated businesses—not the acquisition targets where PFG would deploy. On capital: if PFG businesses demonstrate superior risk-adjusted performance, capital follows. This becomes an empirical question rather than a structural barrier.
If true, COA implies that the binding constraint on funding global problems shifts from persuading people to give to deploying capital into a strategy that outperforms.
Full argument: https://profit4good.org/the-charitable-ownership-advantage-strange-if-not-true/
I note that the article also links to the research compilation I have been working on that discusses the evidence for stakeholder preferences for Profit for Good businesses and other relevant research and other matters. Feel free to check that out as well, although I should have a thorough revision of that soon.
Interesting idea, and great if it works! I guess if these PFFs sell directly to consumers, there will be a bigger obstacle to the company pulling an OpenAI and switching to regular for-profit.
> But in most of the economy, operators hold no meaningful equity. Public company executives are salaried;
Are you sure about that?
In a 2025 study about S&P 500 CEO compensation, "Stock awards remain the largest component of CEO compensation, accounting for 71.6% of the median pay package in this year’s study."
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/06/08/ceo-pay-study/#:~:text=The%20median%20CEO%20pay%20ratio%20among%20S&P,with%20a%20median%20value%20of%20$10.3%20million
In general, companies grant employees stock in an attempt to align their incentives with the company.
C-Suite employees are largely expected to receive stock but many companies grant stock to huge portions of their employees. For example, Starbucks grants stock to their baristas:
https://www.starbucksbenefits.com/en-us/home/stock-savings/bean-stock/#:~:text=Bean%20Stock%20is%20a%20program%20that%20gives,grant%20date%20with%20no%20breaks%20in%20service
Fair point on stock awards—you're right that RSUs (restricted stock units) now dominate CEO compensation, not just options. By 2018 restricted stock exceeded 50% of CEO pay. So yes, executives often receive actual equity.
But look at what that actually means in ownership terms. The median S&P 500 CEO owns about $54 million in stock—sounds like a lot until you realize the majority of CEOs control less than 1% of their companies. Only 4% have voting power of 5% or more.
Source: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/05/13/ceo-ownership-corporate-governance-and-company-performance/
Now zoom out. Institutional investors hold about 80% of S&P 500 equity. The Big Three—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—hold a median 22% stake in S&P 500 companies by themselves. Add retail investors (another 14-20%), and you're looking at well over 90% of equity held by people who have nothing to do with running the business. They're not operators. They don't know what companies they own. Index funds just mechanically hold whatever's in the S&P 500.
Sources:
https://www.pionline.com/article/20170425/INTERACTIVE/170429926/80-of-equity-market-cap-held-by-institutions
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/12/13/big-three-power-and-why-it-matters/
With Starbucks, Bean Stock is a nice perk, but the total employee stake is a rounding error next to institutional holdings. Those baristas aren't owner-operators shaping company direction.
The question for PFG isn't whether operators receive some stock—they can and should. A 90% PFG structure leaves room for executive equity, employee grants, performance incentives. The question is where the other 90%+ goes. Right now it flows to people who couldn't name the company if you asked them. PFG redirects that to charity instead.
A letter from Minneapolis
I have a weird job so I pretty much get winters off. Jill and I could go somewhere warm but lately we have been going to visit our friends in Minneapolis, where she lived before we married. we stay 4-8 weeks, depending, in the dead of winter because we love our friends here and we love this city.
ICE showed up to start their "Metro Surge" before I got here, and immediately started making like difficult wherever they went. They were atrociously rude drivers. They made belligerent sidewalk scenes during apprehensions. The active folks started following them around, using Signal chats and group texts, blowing whistles to gather crowds. But you could go about your business, which we did. Records stores, restaurants, the worlds largest cross-country ski snow-making operation!
And museums, lots of great museums. We were at the Minneapolis Institute of Art's (the 'Tute, colloquially) amazing Cambodian bronze exhibit, admiring casts of metal alloys from as much as 3000 years ago when my friends phone started blowing up. "Jesus fucking christ ICE just killed a woman."
Renee Good was shot 14 blocks from our house, on W33rd, due East, on Chicago between 33rd and 34th. Minneapolis is mostly a grid, with long blocks and short blocks; these were the long blocks. That evening we walked our way there to join the crowded impromptu memorial/demonstration. The public had blocked off some streets to car traffic, with an ad-hoc combination of civil volunteers in reflective vests and some leery MPD. The level of organization of the volunteers was remarkable. There were megaphones and speechifying, angry and concerned strangers getting comfort in the crowd, and lots and lots of swearing. ("Minnesota nice and fuck you ICE is pretty much how it goes now). A Xeroxed photo of Renee was taped to a lamp post.
I was on super high alert bc I can imagine and am a firm believer in edge cases, but there were no confrontations. I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting.
Now our days were about protesting. It was like a part-time job, and we made sure to put in our time nearly every day at the Whipple, a Federal building where ICE and CPB were headquartered. The feds had hastily erected a perimeter fence of jersey barriers with posts and chain-link to secure the boundary. At the 4-way-stop intersection where the entrance was, the fence had wrapped around 2 of the stop signs, rendering them more or less invisible. There were dozens there the first day, swearing at ICE, holding signs, handing out hand-warmers. Press from all over were visible (it helps to wear PRESS on your front and back, for safety). Jill would yell "shame," and this has caught on enough that it could be audible on some news reports. Every time we went, the barriers were beefed up a little more. It started as an open sidewalk across from the entrance, at the 4-way, on both sides of the road leading to the indoor tennis club. Cars with tinted windows and/or masked men were to be yelled at and rudely gestured to. Regular folks got waves, but also some collateral damage of yelling. God help you if you were a normal guy in a pick-up truck. Tennis players would sheepishly wait for the crowd to clear so they could drive in and park. My sympathies were with them, these were their lives and happiness, after all. Other opinions were less generous. The Sheriffs were in charge of keeping the intersection clear, a thankless task. I thanked them anyway, when I could, and always waved and smiled. I was an outlier, as the protest set had learned habits and retained grievances from the time of George Floyd. To me the yelling and taunting at police was misplaced aggression, and counter productive but it was their town, not mine. By now there were 2800 ICE and CPB in the twin cities, while all the local police departments totaled 2400 personnel.
Still, we got up in the morning, put on our long underwear and gloves, yelled at the interlopers until we were cold/had to pee, then went out to lunch. I have done some great cc skiing, and he really begun to improve my form in the 'skate' technique. We went bowling. I walked to one of my favorite record stores in the world, Cheapos, and went through the stacks, adding Thin Lizzzy's "Vagabonds of the Western World" to my collection. We met people out for dinner at various restaurants, sometimes on the "eat street" row of Nicollette. A child of one couple at dinner--college friends of Jill--was reported to be doing IT work of a sort for Aerolamp, I think. Small world!
Alex Pretti was killed just south of Cheapos. The Meet-up Noodle, where we held a table for 8 just two nights earlier, is kitty-corner. Not to make it all about me, but that is a 15 minute walk of 7 short blocks from our hosts' home. I won't talk about his death because you know as much as I do.
Immediately after Jill and her friend went to the scene, and were soon commandeered into helping a first-aid site for tear-gas etc in a Middle Eastern restaurant two blocks south, that the MPD had cordoned off . There were few customers. When Jill was ready to leave I reminded her that it was way past lunch and we should eat before she crashed. I could see an active buffet in the Middle Eastern, and we grabbed some plates and had a great meal. The host brought us tea.
This is how it is done here, restaurants and other merchants immediately get in on the helping action. A sex shop in Lyn-Lake was coordinating a meal delivery service for those afraid to leave home. People walk around with cases of water and hand-warmers. School parents coordinate school bus and child drop-off's to protect kids from getting snatched. Yup, that is what citizens are organizing to prevent. And while the department of homeland security assures us that they are only arresting the worst of the worst 5-year-olds, I have my suspicions that that might not be the case.
Businesses are taking a noticeable beating in the cities. Restaurants are low-hanging fruit for agents with orders to ethnically profile anyone looking foreign. There are reports of agents lunching in restaurants, then returning later to round folks up, but of course I cannot verify it. Old protest grievances keep creeping into the discussion, with a large protest downtown (It was awesome to be with so many people braving the cold) being co-billed as a "general strike." Somehow capitalism and the general economy have been implicated, although I cannot figure how. All the restaurants are losing money. Shops and businesses were expected to close on Friday, a word eagerly spread through all local media. Confusion ensued. A hairdresser friend said his staff wanted the shop to close, but hair appointments being sacrosanct, a compromise was made: staff could donate their pay and the owners would match the donation. The people continue to have spectacular hair, even under the world's best collection of warm fuzzy winter hats. But make no mistake, the economy in this town is bleeding, and that cannot continue for long. Minneapolis is in a slow and fitfull recovery from the time of George Floyd, and the recent killings have sent the community into a backslide.
I thought I could come out here for a month, relax with friends, write some articles for my blog, do some skiing. Nate Silver, ever the pollster, says the country is largely sympathetic to Minneapolans, but says the country at large doesn't feel as though it is living in a time of creeping authoritarianism, and I get that. But out here, living in it, we just wonder "how many more?"
I have read about pro-ICE protestors being harassed and even physically threatened by anti-ICE types. Is there any truth in that?
Yes but.
There's also reports of someone going into Little Mogadishu with a $1000+ camera, and having it stolen within 20 feet (he was dragged along because his hand got stuck to the car door) -- yes, there was video of this.
Question your assumptions.
This is true. Jake Lang, recently pardoned fro convictions from Jan 6 and straight out of 4yrs jail, organized a pro-ICE rally.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/minneapolis-jake-lang-pro-ice-rally-rcna254571
We knew about it in advance, but this was to me an obvious 'stay away' situation, as we didn't want any part of amplifying him.
It got kinda bad with counter protesters there, and he definitely was hit with water baloons, not cool. He also had, by all accounts, some bleeding. He ran from his harrassers/attackers and was helped by some local passerby good samaritans into a car to leave the scene. Ire was focused solely on Mr Lang, as far as anyone can tell, no reports of assaults on other attendees.
I appreciate your description of the facts. But I find something really disturbing: you imply here, and seem to outright state elsewhere, that you oppose US immigration laws being enforced at all, at least on a certain subset of the illegal/undocumented immigrant population. And it just seems to me that this does a lot to undermine your whole case that the *means* of enforcement are largely terrible and draconian and cruel. Which latter case seems true to me, from what I've heard.
To use an analogy you may or may not sympathise with (and if you don't, please try to imagine a similar situation where you would): a college is taking strong steps to crack down on campus rape. Some guy comes along and talks about how draconian these methods are, how they strip away due process, and how they harm the innocent. But he also lets slip, and later basically confirms, that he doesn't really have a problem with rape at all, and in fact thinks it ought to be basically allowed, and his anger is not only at the college's methods; it's also at the fact that they're going after rapists at all, when really rape is a perfectly legitimate, natural thing.
Does this, like, make you inclined to largely disregard most of what he says about the methods? Doesn't it make it make you suspicious of any of his proposals on how to enforce the laws more fairly, when he's admitted he'd actually rather the laws not be enforced at all? And doesn't it, in the other direction, make it vastly easier for the *proponents* of the draconian methods to dismiss all criticisms of said methods by saying "well, he's just a rape apologist"...which, of course, he quite straightfowardly is?
Now to go a bit further, the thing that disturbs me here, the thing I'm equating to "rape should be allowed", is not merely the belief that illegal immigrants should not be automatically deported. There are decent arguments for that belief, some of which I agree with. The thing that disturbs me is the further implication that enforcing immigration laws is somehow *illegitimate*--even when done by the democratically elected branch of government whose role it is to decide how to enforce the law, even when the laws are clear and unambiguous, even when said government was elected on an explicit platform to strictly enforce those laws--in almost the same sense that breaking constitutional rights in the enforcement of those laws is illegitimate.
There are broadly three "left-leaning" positions you can take:
(1) Immigration laws should be strictly enforced; however, this needs to be done in accordance with due process and procedural fairness
(2) I personally oppose enforcing some or all of the laws, and believe there should be an amnesty, but acknowledge that the government has the power and the right to enforce them and has a fair and democratic mandate to do so; thus, the enforcement itself is legitmate (i.e. I will peacefully cooperate with it, while arguing for the people to choose differently at the next election) but the methods are illegitmate (i.e. are unlawful and should be resisted with protest or other necessary means)
(3) Even the mere enforcement of clear laws by an elected executive government is illegitimate and should be resisted
Advocating 1 is the cleanest and most persuasive way of reforming things, I would think, but advocating 2 is also perfectly valid as long as it's clearly distinguished from 3. But giving, in any way, the impression that you might be advocating 3, and not firmly and unambiguously ruling out that interpretation, makes you fundamentally no different from the people who oppose 1 and support the draconian methods. Both positions amount to a rejection of the basic respect for democracy and the rule of law; both involve deliberately undermining the legitimacy of the legal system. If you're not advocating any form of 3, I think you should decisively rule it out and state that you fully acknowledge the legitimacy of the government to enforce the laws *within* due process, and rule out physical resistance to that. If you *are* advocating 3, I think you're deliberately contributing as much as anyone to the very polarisation you observe.
I definitely think that's an issue with liberals/democrats, they try to get their way through extra legal means (but then, the current administration does that a lot these days). I wouldn't describe the ICE actions in Minneapolis as simple enforcement, they're doing a piss poor job of that (https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/the-chaos-defense?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true). Importantly, this administration does not behave in lawful ways, it's even run by a convicted felon, so why should citizens respect the legitimacy of a state run like this? I don't think they have any obligation to. Governments only ever have provisional authority, it can be rescinded at any time via direct acts of the people (see Nepal).
If the Minnesotans don't mind the illegals raping their women/killing their men/ stealing their jobs/ making their crops fail, what is the issue exactly? It doesn't seem like you need to force the issue here.
They do mind. Minnesota goes red without the Somalis in Minneapolis (this I hear from a professional pollster, but you can just look at Wisconsin. These are liberals, up and down the midwest, returning to their homespun republican roots. Still liberals, though.)
They do mind? Homespun republican roots?!!?!? Man oh man is this wrong on many levels!
I couldn't find more recent polling, but most Minnesotans oppose Trump's immigration policies as of 2025 (https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-poll-most-oppose-trumps-immigration-policies-but-broad-support-outside-metro/601373769). I can only imagine that number has greatly increased in the recent weeks.
MN has been a presidential democratic voting state for the past 50 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elections_in_Minnesota) You have to go back to 1972 Nixon to see them vote for a republican and Eisenhower before that.
On a more personal note, you make a lot of comments here (55 comments (~6% of the total) as of this posting) and you're sometimes confidently wrong. Why?
Quoting your star tribune link:
“When asked about specific policy issues, public opinion tends to be quite nuanced — and generally quite liberal," he said.
But, he added, questions that have “partisan cues,” like Trump’s name, elicit responses that are more in line with partisan loyalties.
This tells me we've got liberals who, for whatever reason, trust Trump to do a dang good job -- or at least, we've got folks that are willing to call this "exceptional circumstances." I'm willing to do so -- when you decide, rather arbitrarily, to take away all the hurdles immigrants have had to deal with for centuries, and instead feed them and clothe them and buy them cellphones and cars and then they don't even work?**
**Original Hmong didn't always work, but nobody gave them this much shit. So someone had to work, yes?
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois -- these were the start to the Republican party. When I say return to Republican roots, I mean back to the fiscal discipline. If you want to hear that as "we're just 1990s Democrats" instead, put the other flag on it. Go right ahead. We're still talking about the same thing -- folks pretty well ticked off with billions of dollars lost.
While this gives me an idea about a post for next week's open thread, I'm going to bow out of this. You're shifting goalposts and have idiosyncratic definitions. I don't see a fruitful discussion going on.
I checked to see if this was true, and I think it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Minnesota says the Dems won by 140,000 votes last year. But https://cis.org/Report/Somali-Immigrants-Minnesota says there are only 75,000 Somalis. So even if 100% of Somalis voted, and 100% of votes were for the Democrats, this couldn't have flipped the election results.
Plenty of clear examples of laws in American history which shouldn't have been enforced. E.g. in the time of anti-sodomy laws, if you were an officer of the law and found out that somebody was committing sodomy, you should just look the other way.
Mostly people did just look the other way*. It's when blackmail and other more aggravated problems started cropping up that the goon squads started kicking doors in.
*constant jokes about Catholic priests ought to have normalized the idea that "this happens behind closed doors."
Tl; tr Democracy is important, rule of law is important. Much as I said in a below post that philosophy *just is* seeking truth thus disbelieving philosophy is incoherent, so democracy *just is* how differences of values are decided, thus "resisting" democratic laws (as opposed to legally dubious means of applying them) is the most maximally corrosive thing to a peaceful and free society.
The maximally corrosive thing to a DEMOCRATIC society, sure, but it's perfectly plausible to have a society both peaceful and free where the majority CAN'T impose its will without paying a ruinously high cost.
We have an ACX meetup group in St Paul! You should come, ping me on here and i'll shoot you the discord link
I cannot wrap my mind around this mindset. I'm not sure what you wrote but what I read is of a presumably perfectly pleasant middle-aged couple who took a ~ two-month vacation in Minneapolis and then started protesting ICE every morning and providing medical aid to the protestors before going bowling in the afternoon.
"Now our days were about protesting. It was like a part-time job, and we made sure to put in our time nearly every day at the Whipple, a Federal building where ICE and CPB were headquartered.
.....
Still, we got up in the morning, put on our long underwear and gloves, yelled at the interlopers until we were cold/had to pee, then went out to lunch. I have done some great cc skiing, and he really begun to improve my form in the 'skate' technique. We went bowling."
Like, on the first hand, I cannot wrap my head around actively going out and getting in the middle of this mess. When I was in China, a real authoritarian system, you stayed the hell away from any protest or the authorities or anything like that. And in the states, you stay away from the police. They're dangerous, you interact as little as possible, and you get a lawyer as fast as possible if you do interact with them. I can't imagine trying to get into this mess.
But you're not just getting into it, it sounds like part of your holiday, like it's the thing you're doing on your vacation before bowling. I don't want to say you're enjoying it but...man, why are you doing this on your vacation, why aren't you getting the devil out of there to literally anywhere else?
And that is why you are not the type of person responsible for the very freedoms you take for granted. The freedom and liberty that we live with today were fought for by the very people who run into the line of fire in the name of a just cause. I suppose you hear the story of Paul Revere and think "Wow, what an idiot. He should have just stayed home if he didn't want to get shot."
The freedom and liberty you have today were fought for, yes. Quite recently too.
Or for that matter marching across Edmund Pettus Bridge in March of 1965.
If I was visiting China I'd sure as hell not get involved in anything. I have no idea of the culture and it's not my circus.
I'd care much more if it was my own country.
There was a time when even the people of China had to learn things the hard way. Give it some time. I'm sure Americans will eventually learn to stop taking everything for granted.
I see you have a new user name.
People keep blocking me, which hides the comments and anyone who replies to them. I wouldn't mind if I could still see the posts, but given that it's so easy to just make a new account... Blame Substack, I guess.
consider why people keep blocking you. I have never blocked anyone so far but am seriously considering it from your posts,They are nihilistic, apocalyptic, depressive and exude some depraved desire for violence and the acceptance thereof.
I've considered it plenty, and... I kinda don't care. I'm here to vent, not to make friends. I do feel like my writing and rhetoric is getting better though, so maybe I'll eventually write some posts you'll enjoy.
Would you consider the lack of civil rights in China a good thing? It sounds like you're saying Americans ought to learn to act more like Chinese citizens, which is to say, giving up defending their constitutional rights in favor of an authoritarian regime.
I think it was an inevitability. While a democracy that pretended that everyone had equal say was doomed from the start, there is still a chance for this country to survive and even prosper under a new order. I would prefer if this situation resolved peacefully rather than everyone dying.
Thank you for an informative and dispassionate take.
Have you encountered the MN National Guard troops yet? Either at Whipple, or while out and about in town?
Oh, thanks for reminding me! Jill and our friend went from the Pettis memorial last night back to the Federal building. In the place of the poor beleaguered Sheriffs, the National Guard had come in relief. And they gave out donuts! And there was cheer in the air! I am not making this up, actual donuts were given to the protesters.
And that is how you do it.
> I am not making this up, actual donuts were given to the protesters.
I believe you; I've seen the videos! 😃
Good to know that spirits are high for now.
Thank you for writing this and everything you’re doing. You’re all in my heart out there.
Before we get into a discussion on the appropriateness of various law enforcement tactics, do you at least concede in the abstract that immigration laws should be enforced and that illegal immigrants should be deported?
I'm looking in from the outside, here, and I don't know the nuances of US immigration law and history. But it looks a lot like you've had a status quo of tacitly allowing huge flows of illegal immigration, and now suddenly you've flipped to a regime of brutal enforcement by a group that includes more than its fair share of thugs. And when they kill people, the government is not only failing to hold them accountable, but blatantly lying to justify their actions.
More orderly enforcement would be an improvement. But there also seems to be an argument for an amnesty + clear public announcement that the rules are real from this point on. Consistently enforced consequences for employers knowingly employing illegal immigrants would surely help, too.
Obama was quite loud about how well he enforced the law on illegal immigration (so was Clinton, for that matter). This whole "let everyone in" is very recent, last four years, tops.
Yes, before that, we did have some "leakage" of people who weren't properly accredited. We didn't have "free healthcare, free housing, free phones, free cars" etc. And gaping security holes in the refugee program (National Security got the military kinda riled up about some of this).
>regime of brutal enforcement by a group that includes more than its fair share of thugs
By the standards of, say, the modern UK, maybe it's brutal. By global or historical standards, barely on the scale.
>But there also seems to be an argument for an amnesty + clear public announcement that the rules are real from this point on.
That happened in the 1980s, utterly failed, and good number of people refuse to fall for the bait and switch again. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control_Act_of_1986
The problem is "the rules are real, we mean it this time!" only lasts till the next guy that doesn't give a shit about the rules, and you're right back to where you started.
The Modern UK has larger atrocities than have been committed in America within the last half century (trampling an entire group of schoolgirls, and then turning the horses back, and running over the schoolgirls again -- this in an alley, so the girls couldn't escape).
None of my searches turn up anything resembling what you describe. Source, please.
eyewitness on kiwifarms. Nobody's cared enough to cover it up, he's allowed to speak about the topic.
I continue to disagree with this premise.
I readily admit these two things will track together because that's how people think.
But, like, even I think noise ordinances and trespassing law are legitimate, I still will complain if you dispatch a SWAT team when somebody steps on my lawn or plays loud music at 9:30PM.
In the abstract I might agree with you, but I've seen enough videos and reports of absurd resistance that I think overwhelming force is warranted. Like in that Wisconsin judge case it took 6 (iirc) federal agents to arrest a single illegal alien from a courthouse because the state judge tried to distract the agents and sneak him out the back.
Those were 6 federal agents seemingly there to do their jobs, the state judge was rather unexpected in her willingness to be stupid and actually do illegal behavior.
I don't see any reason that 6 federal agents wouldn't be "relatively normal" after reading their report. (Bear in mind, they generally have more than one person to pick up at a courthouse).
Structurally speaking, the sanctuary city doesn't seem (in my mind) to have been the problem there.
[If someone else wants to pipe up and say, "Actually, in Texas, they only need two guys, because we help them out" -- I would love to stand corrected on this.]
First of all, "overwhelming force is warranted" why? What harm is being prevented that justifies it? If people started heavily opposing the SWAT raids on noise violations, would that somehow make them better?
Second, you're asking people to justify whether they even believe in immigration enforcement before you take their procedural complaints seriously; I think it's kinda lazy to say that there have been examples of people doing things you disapproved of, and therefore you can discount all future complaints that are directionally similar. Obviously there's only one conclusion you can come to at that point, regardless of the underlying facts.
>First of all, "overwhelming force is warranted" why?
Because not using overwhelming force to enforce the law in the face of resistance gives resisters a hecklers veto to decide when and where laws are enforced. If there is a noise complaint, and the source of the noise barricades themselves inside their house, then it is justified to call in a SWAT team to breach the house and shut off the noise.
I still think asking if he believed in immigration enforcement saved a few back-and-forth comments figuring out a crux. I do not apologize for jumping straight into the meat of the argument, but I guess I could have used less accusatory language than "do you concede".
I find the "you should totally deploy SWAT for minor infractions" thing pretty wild, but actually what I was asking is, why is it worth this level of aggression to enforce immigration restrictions? Deploying thousands of heavily-armed agents is messed up for everybody. Seeing people getting grabbed off the streets, or from outside schools, is upsetting. Going after people just because hey look foreign or have an accent makes people afraid even when they've done nothing wrong.
What actual problem is being solved here? The supposed problems of immigration are mostly crime and job loss but neither is something we're really suffering from.
Notwithstanding all of that, Minneapolis is in no way some hotbed of illegal immigrants. Minnesota itself has a lot fewer per capita than most states.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
Morally, no. But if you are going to do it your way, illegal immigrants should at least be stood in front of a judge and be approved for a pathway to citizenship if they can demonstrate their case. The way it currently works is barbaric and it's tanking your economy.
Yes, a country should be allowed to enforce it's own laws, including expelling illegal immigrants. But that's not relevant question here. ICE as an institution has existed for over 20 years, and the US has been conducting lawful apprehension of illegal immigrants for a long time before that.
You correctly identified the means as the major question. Enforcement of immigration laws cannot be at the expense of either fundamental constitutional rights or human rights. If you assume "being here illegally is a crime that you can be accused of," then the US justice system assumes innocence until guilt is proven. Restrictions on what LEOs are allowed to do have been codified into law throughout US history to protect you and I from overreach and oppression. What ICE is currently doing is so far outside the realm of what is constitutionally acceptable or morally acceptable.
A short list
* Apprehending citizens and non-citizens alike with no warrant or judicial approval, often for not showing "proof" that they are a citizen. Absolutely nowhere in the constitution does it say that you, as a citizen, are required to carry proof of your citizenship in order to be given your full rights.
* Breaking and entering homes of both citizens and non-citizens alike to search for illegal immigrants, again with no warrant or judicial approval. This is one of those sacred rules which was codified into the bill of rights and reinforced over and over in the courts (right of protection from unreasonable search and seizure).
* Using lethal force against non-lethal threats, as demonstrated multiple times in the past few weeks. I don't need to go further.
Aside from a gross overstep of federal authority bordering on constitutional crisis, these acts are also inhumane. Regardless of whether somebody is an illegal immigrant, legal citizen, violent criminal, or innocent bystander, everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and humanity. Beating people senseless, separating children and parents, killing detainees in prison and reporting it a suicide, and the myriad other acts by ICE in the past 12 months are morally unacceptable.
https://www.heritage.org/border-security/report/due-process-and-aliens-what-they-are-and-are-not-entitled-immigration
Apprehension of non-citizens is done with an administrative warrant, not a judicial one.
Quoting heritage:
The Supreme Court added that an alien being removed by the government is not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property” and that “the provisions of the Constitution securing the right to trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments [therefore] have no application.”
Using lethal force against non-lethal threats? A car is a lethal threat, it is 2000 pounds of metal. Shovels can kill, as can guns. These are all examples of aggravated assault.
It is immoral to separate children and parents? This is a new one. Kindly tell that to the 25+% of the Democrats that think children should be forcibly removed from their parents if their parents decline to vaccinate them for covid19.
Quick side note Heritage foundation is a far right/very Conservative Think tank whose policies have been directly adopted by the current administration.
Specifically the authors of project 2025 of the Heritage foundation have several direct contacts with the administration.
Project 2025 has at times been emulated by Trump and it arguably proposes a long list of actions that if implemented in their totality could likely mean the end of liberal democracy in the US.
Overall as a source its extremly dubious, it might be relevant in this regard thats a separate discussion but its a fundamentally tarnished source.
I also have a John Birch Society book at home. Yes, it's the constitution of the united states. I received it from a very liberal colleague.
I do know that Project 2025 was about as serious as "Defund the Police" (removing embassies would seriously compromise the CIA operations overseas, which is not a goal of the Heritage Foundation. This strikes me as fundamentally unserious, and designed so that Trump can seem moderate by disowning it.). (Likewise, Defund the Police was run up by the Biden Campaign so that Biden could disown it and seem moderate).
As with all sources, I read what's written. Heritage is citing chapter and verse, here. I consider them to be doing a credible job, with this particular piece of writing.
I would not be so quick to dismiss it as unserious given that some of it's advice has been followed.
https://www.project2025.observer/en?agencies=White+House
Yes this source is most likely partisan, I couldn't find a better tracker, however even dismissing 70% of the claims there is definitely more correspondance with Trumps policies and project 2025 compared to Biden policies on "Defunding the police"
Secondly I do ask if you would consider a think tank who writes long articles on why Biden has to abolish the police as a generally reliable source on the laws regulating police violence?
It is entirely possible that they would be honest and accurate in their analysis, but as a rule of thumb it would be better to use a somewhat neutral or at least moderately partisan source instead of this
A couple things:
1. Who is and is not an illegal immigrant is not clear until ID has been positively identified. Until then, people are assumed to be citizens. You can not preemptively ignore constitutional rights of a person because you assume they are illegal, only later to find out that was false. In addition, homes and businesses of legal citizens may not be entered without a warrant in search of a criminal, as is happening now.
2. Yes, ICE is using previously rare "administrative warrants," which are constitutionally dubious. The entire purpose of a warrant is that it is signed off by a neutral judge or magistrate. Otherwise, what's stopping a federal agent writing on a napkin with crayon saying "here's your warrant, get fucked." Warrants must come from a neutral party other than the one executing it, or what's the point? Much like executive orders, they are an extremely dangerous tool for circumventing constitutional limitations and should be viewed with extreme skepticism and uncertainty.
3. To make this very clear because its so pervasive online, you cannot defend something that is wrong by pointing out other wrong things others are doing. This is called "whataboutism." I don't support forcibly removing children from their families without significant due process, COVID or otherwise.
4. As for the lethal force thing, clearly people see different things in the videos. We all live in different realities now. That's why due process and the law is so critical to everybody getting a fair treatment under the law. If lethal force is used by LEOs in any capacity, that incident must go through serious legal review and the offending officers should be suspended from active duty as happens in police agencies. Again, demonstrating that killing an American citizen is taken extremely seriously, no matter the circumstances.
I have a strong feeling none of these things will ring true or matter to you, as our country seems so thoroughly and permanently divided in a way that sickens me. Just wanted to record my thoughts so you don't think I'm ignoring you.
I apologize for having to ask some of the following questions. Were we in a better world, or if I knew you better, I would not need to ask them.
"Until then, people are assumed to be citizens." -- can you cite chapter and verse on this? Where is this assumption codified into law or legal structure? Do we take someone hanging off the Border Fence (Wall) and say they're citizens? How about people being transported by known coyotes? (If what you're saying is "without objective priors, like known coyote" we should treat them as citizens, I'd like to see that as well).
re: administrative warrants. ICE is presumably saying "as an executive agency, we can decide how we want to execute the law."
I am glad you're willing to support due process for removal of children from their parents. : - )
I'm willing to cite trained video analysts, if we're trying to get a better handle on all the video (where I can, obviously -- when the trained legal analysts are saying "WTF" I think that's a redflag in of itself).
Noting that sometimes law enforcement officers are reassigned to desk jobs, instead of being suspended (I consider this to be "just plain good sense" -- if nothing else, PTSD is a thing, and shooting someone is going to cause some trauma if you aren't ex-military).
I'm sorry you've dealt with people operating in such bad faith! I do take what you say seriously, even when I'm asking for citations (I do so, because sometimes people are actually wrong, and just repeating others who were also wrong). There are plenty of bad cops, even if there are many, many more good cops.
> "Until then, people are assumed to be citizens." -- can you cite chapter and verse on this? Where is this assumption codified into law or legal structure? Do we take someone hanging off the Border Fence (Wall) and say they're citizens? How about people being transported by known coyotes? (If what you're saying is "without objective priors, like known coyote" we should treat them as citizens, I'd like to see that as well).
The obvious flaw in this reasoning is that it the government doesn't have to assume people are citizens by default then they can act like nobody has any rights, which is exactly the same thing as nobody having any rights.
Also, the presumption of innocence was established in the ominously-named Coffin v. United States in 1895.
I appreciate your tone shifting to a more good faith exchange. On that front at least, you've shown me that reasonable people capable of emotional deescalation still exist.
I'm not a lawyer, so I will not make strong claims about jurisprudence or what is or is not legal. But I was raised to have a strong admiration for and appreciation of due process and why it is so sacred, especially in the world of totalitarian states of today like Russia and China. For that reason I study it as much as I can.
From my reading, what is and is not allowed by ICE is highly contentious. In some areas above, the Supreme Court has clearly ruled in favor of ICE. In others, clearly in favor of the Fourth Amendment.
Examples showing unconstitutional acts:
1. Steagald v. United States (1981) - A federal warrant for a suspect does not give agents warrantless right to enter the home of other citizens in search of the suspect.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/451/204
2. INS v. Delgado, 466 U.S. 210 (1984) - Questioning citizens regarding their citizenship and asking for ID is ok, so long as citizens ARE FREE TO LEAVE AT ANY TIME. This is one of those lose-lose rulings that nobody wins. What's the point of asking for ID if somebody can just say no and leave? Such rulings leave much to be debated.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/466/210
3. Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266 (1973) - Warrantless and suspicionless searches of citizen's property more than 25 miles from the border deprives the citizen of their fourth amendment rights. What constitutes valid "suspicion?" Again, murky water that must be addressed on a case by case basis.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/413/266
Examples supporting ICE legal actions
1. United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543 (1976) - Warrantless and suspiciousness searches are allowed a pre-defined permanent checkpoints, such as border crossings (though I'm sure ICE would challenge this to include new temporary checkpoints).
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/428/543
2. United States v. Arvizu (2002) - Warrantless stops and brief holds are allowed under the "totality of the circumstances." Again, this is extremely vague and can be used to justify anything. Incidents must be brought in court to be considered on a case by case basis. But clearly federal agents are allowed to use "less than probable cause in brief investigatory stops of persons or vehicles."
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/534/266/
All this aside, at the end of the day, I want arrests to be boring. I want to see knocking, agents being patient, trying to catch suspects off guard, waiting for opportune times, and generally being respectful of the boundaries put on them. Boring is great. Boring means by the book. Boring is what we should all expect. Federal agents busting doors, beating up people, and apprehending large groups of people at a time should raise huge red flags for anybody concerned with due process. Disregard for norms and pushing the envelope to it's most extreme is precisely the strategy that authoritarian regimes use to test the limits of their power in order to erode the guardrails between them and power.
Also, I'd like to hear more about your "trained video analysis." Such things are hard to come by in a highly polarized and inflammatory world.
Thanks, well said, even the parts I don't agree with on a policy basis.
Of course, and thank you for sharing your experience on the ground. Hearing from those who are experiencing events first hand is just as important as reading the news and summaries.
That was already happening under previous administrations.
You are reading an account by an observant person who appears to have no ax to grind. Your question pushes him in the direction of ax-grinding (though he finds a way to respond without going there). I think you may have asked it because you were sure he was on his way there anyhow, because you start with “before we get into a discussion on the appropriateness of . . . “ as though he was about to start building a case for or against the appropriates of whatever. It’s not a hostile question, really, but it seems like a very unhelpful one. Detailed accounts by the fair-minded are a rare and wonderful thing in a situation like this. They lack that us-against-them feeling that saturates so much of life these days.
Daniel, what a nicely loaded question you have. Allow me to not take that head on. I'm more of an "obeyed" guy than an "enforced" guy. Once you get into enforcement, it's all about how, and the how here is really bad.
Many illegal immigrants CAN be deported, and are. Many should not, for reasons including due process, being a child on arrival, or fulfilling nationally important economic roles. Restaurant, dairy, meat-packing, produce packing, landscaping, construction and roofing are amongst the industries that would collapse if all the illegal immigrants working in them were removed.
But more to the point, Daniel, there are many legal immigrants getting deported as well.
>for reasons including due process
What sort of magical incantation do you think this is? A significant number of illegal immigrants *have had* years and years of due process. Many of them have multiple removal orders that just... never got carried out.
How *infinite* is your demand for due process before you just admit you don't actually want anything enforced at all, and this is a useful delaying tactic?
Citing a million "former refugees" at the start of the current Trump Administration. Court already said "get out" to these people.
> Restaurant, dairy, meat-packing, produce packing, landscaping, construction and roofing are amongst the industries that would collapse if all the illegal immigrants working in them were removed.
What do we do about illegal immigrants who aren't being paid minimum wage?
Great question! One answer is that is a crime called wage theft, and in some states (read: blue) it is policed and prosecuted. Of course, the burden is on the victim, but there are many NGO's that will be glad to help them for free.
These days the labor market is so strong that it is easier to get a better paying job through the grapevine. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's mostly a story about abuses that used to be really frequent. I love immigration advocates, but they are known to make some very bad faith arguments.
Do you (or anyone else reading, of course) have a good source for information about the administration deporting legal immigrants?
[Edit: to clarify, I'm aware of earlier deportations of students under the pretext of anti-terrorism statutes, but understood the OP to be saying there are ongoing deportations of legal immigrants.]
Considering they even deported citizens, the question is rather moot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deportations_of_American_citizens_in_the_second_Trump_administration#Deportations
Not sure if that's a good enough source for you, but for a hot topic like this, I trust wikipedia to get the basic facts right.
None of the five cases the Wikipedia entry describes were as simple as "the Trump administration deported citizens," though I believe the last case was equally bad.
The first three actions were callous, but clearly do not qualify: each describes the deportation of non-citizens, accompanied by their young dependents, who were US citizens.
The fourth instance was an order to deport Miguel Silvestre, but Wikipedia reports that his removal order was recognized as erroneous and canceled.
The fifth case was appalling. The administration deported Chanthila Souvannarath while his citizenship status was being adjudicated. In my opinion that's just as bad as deporting a citizen, but it's unhelpful and discrediting to refer to it as the same thing.
Thank you for the link. I don't understand why the question is moot, or even which question you think is moot.
I'd like to be able to deliver specifics, with an accurate understanding of the order of magnitude, and the ability to compare Trump's actions to those of previous administrations.
I say the question is moot because deporting citizens seems worse than deporting legal immigrants, since the legal barriers are higher or even insurmountable in the case of born citizens. I didn't understand the full intent of your question, which I can't readily help with.
Thank you for the frankness. I asked the question because nearly every debate about enforcement tactics I have seen in the last month is actually a debate about amnesty in disguise.
For example: If as you claim, the restaurant industry is so reliant on illegal immigrants for labor that the industry would collapse without them, then it seems perfectly reasonable for immigration agents to visit restaurants and look for people who can’t speak English. You disagree with this policy, as is your right, but it is also my right to point out that this is much more like typical law-enforcement raids than you let on.
The problem is not the search process it's the lack of due process after they have been found and yanked away.
Restaurants don't merely rely on immigrants for labor--and clearly not all do--but also for ownership and entrepreneurial spirit. As for typical law enforcement raids, I'm not sure what you imagine those are like?
Try a mental experiment: A new president from another party has decided to do something about the scourge of gun deaths in this country. He has declared that previously legal assault weapons are now banned, and will arrest and jail anyone caught with them that doesn't turn them in. Despite appearing to be at odds with either the constitution (although SCOTUS says assult ban legal) or the fact that laws are made by the legislative branch, he unilaterally decides to start rounding them up, and if you don't like it you can sue him, and he will appeal, ideally to his new hand-picked judges. He has the general idea of the demographic associated with gun ownership, and a recent SCOTUS decision says he can use racial profiling to achieve law-enforcement ends.
What happens next would be described by you as typical law enforcement raids?
As for Amnesty, its not a bad idea, thanks for bringing it up. Reagan did one in '86, IRCA, and I have known many recipients. Two of them are employees that I am proud to call friends.
> typical law enforcement raids?
That IS in fact how law enforcement in the US usually works. Congress includes vague language in an Omnibus Bill that could mean nothing or anything, an agency of the Executive Branch creates a new totally-not-a-law regulation, and then it gets enforced and there's not much you can do to stop it.
Your gun confiscation thought experiment doesn’t work because entering the country illegally and hiring workers without work authorization was already illegal when Trump took office. These were laws that existed, but that were enforced insufficiently. You admitted to me in your first response that restaurants rely on illegal immigrant labor.
>”Restaurant, dairy, meat-packing, produce packing, landscaping, construction and roofing are amongst the industries that would collapse if all the illegal immigrants working in them were removed.”
The violation of the social contract occurred by the previous administrations who didn’t enforce the laws on the books. Part of the compromise that allowed amnesty in 1986 was the promise that immigration law would be enforced going forward. That did not happen.
No, Daniel, the thought experiment does work precisely and specifically because the President has both willingly deported legal immigrants and attempted to end citizenship at birth. That is an equivalency.
Well said.
In my view the ICE/protestor conflict is a proxy war for the increasingly incommensurate opposing ideologies in the country. The Left's moral arrogance deludes them into thinking that they're above the law and the Right is now hardening itself to become the constructive refutation of that delusion. This is effectively becoming a religious war and I don't think it's going to end well. The two shootings thus far, while regrettable, are largely the result of the Left's informal guerilla resistance to lawful authority. The real social harm is the fact that they weaponize our shared values when they expect 1st amendment protections for what is in effect a violent partisan resistance - their goal is to materially impede federal officers. It's not unlike the Hamas strategy of placing ammo dumps underneath hospitals and then crying when the hospital is bombed.
You may agree with ICE or not, but law and order and respect for our fundamental constitutional norms comes first. The Left is committing the far greater harm here.
Why do you keep trying to turn this eyewitness report into a debate? Read it, ask questions about what Mark has seen if something's not clear, and create a new thread if you want to start a political discussion.
Mark seemed to refer to yelling “shame” indiscriminately at immigration officers leaving their headquarters as “moral clarity”. I am not the one bringing political discussion to this thread.
US citizens are being taken into custody based on race.
https://www.startribune.com/st-paul-mayor-livid-after-ice-wrongly-targets-family-friend-escorts-him-undressed-into-cold/601566974?utm_source=gift
Target stores are not sending Hispanic-looking employees outside to deliver grocery orders to cars.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was denied access to the scene of the latest killing by ICE, they obtained a signed judicial warrant and ICE still denied access to the scene of the shooting.
https://www.startribune.com/ice-raids-minnesota/601546426?utm_source=gift
Thanks, Tyrone
Thank you for the on-the-ground report. Can you help me understand: how noticeable is ICE presence to ordinary Minneapolis citizens (those who are neither seeking them out or avoiding them)? Are there more of them in ordinary public places than normal police? Do you see them every day? Would you just see them walking around, or would you see them arresting/harassing people? Do the protests cause disruption? Do you feel safe going wherever you want in the city? Where do the ICE officers stay while they're in the city? Do they have special marked ICE vehicles?
https://www.instagram.com/p/DUCR0ftiLvo/
Literally everybody always switches up. If someone says faggot you have no idea which way to interpret it. U have no idea who the “good” white people are bc everyone is “good” except ice who is the only thing we can all say is bad. Ressentiment lets u recognize you’re a slave, then self mastery through responsible and accountable use of power (with verification: as long as I have a credit card on me, I can “verify” my purchase, and more so with Apple Pay, but maybe less crypto and for sure not the gold standard) allows you to just make whatever you like, until trouble comes, and you have to take some things apart and put them back together until the problem goes away.
Banned for consistently making incomprehensible comments.
I'm not the author of the original comment but I live in Minneapolis and have for almost my entire life. Here's my perspective.
**how noticeable is ICE presence to ordinary Minneapolis citizens (those who are neither seeking them out or avoiding them)?**
I think the visibility for people is very dependent on where you live or work and can be radically different even a few blocks away. I live in what seems to be a heavily targeted area - Here is one of the crowd sourced databases of activity since Dec 1, 2025. I live in the biggest red blob. (I don't think I can post screenshots or I would)
https://airtable.com/appAmfaJz2c5aR2zA/shrHhEOxnonWYtDFo
Here are some anecdotes from the past few weeks.
- A friend who lives a block away from me woke up to the sound of screaming and cars honking and then watched someone get taken from outside her front window.
- A car crashed in front of my house the other day (I wasn't there at the time but this is from my housemates who were). The vehicle drove into a roundabout. A neighbor came outside to ask if the people in the car were okay (they were just people in plainclothes - no reason to think they were ICE) they got angry and then threw tear gas canisters in the street before leaving. We looked up their license plate later in one of the crowd sourced databases and it was a vehicle that was observed engaging in ICE activity.
- Someone I know lives on the block where Renee Good was shot and was home watching out of the window while it happened.
None of these folks were seeking out ICE or avoiding them. I have more examples of people I know having encounters like this. I personally haven't yet but it seems like pure chance and if this ICE presence keeps up like only a matter of time before I am there when something goes down.
**Are there more of them in ordinary public places than normal police?**
On Jan 8th, I attended an in person community meeting where the mayor of Minneapolis (Frey) made a surprise appearance and these are the numbers that he said were provided to him:
- 2270 total agents deployed
- 1500 ICE agents
- 270 Border Patrol agents
- 500 other (I don't have more details sorry)
More federal agents have arrived (possibly a total of 2000 ICE agents, and several thousand Border Patrol) but exact numbers are not known or I can't find reliable sources for them.
https://www.startribune.com/ice-raids-minnesota/601546426
(ctrl+F "exact number of agents", you may have to hit the 'load more' button because this is live updates and I can't link to the exact post.)
IIRC something like 1000 police officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.
**Do you see them every day? Would you just see them walking around, or would you see them arresting/harassing people?**
I have seen some SUVs driving around with men in buffs and lots of tactical gear. They are not in marked cars. The last week or so, I haven't even been seeing people in tactical gear driving around but they must be here because people are being detained.
My friend said it felt like when we were living in an apartment that had a mouse infestation. You mostly just see signs of them and occasionally one mouse might run across the floor. Except that mice don't pull up in a group at random and start pepper spraying people directly in the face.
I now operate under the assumption that ICE agents could be anywhere at any time.
**Do they have special marked ICE vehicles?**
Ha. No. They rent vehicles. Mostly seems to be SUVs and vans with very tinted windows.
Observers and witnesses to unambiguous ICE activity (armed people detaining or attempting to detain people) are recording license plates and photos of the vehicles involved into crowd sourced data bases. Recently, there have been entries popping up in here with more
There were a couple more questions but I haven't fully typed up responses and figured I should probably post what I had
how noticeable is ICE presence to ordinary Minneapolis citizens (who are neither seeking them out or avoiding them)?
Oddly enough, they are nearly invisible. The closest I have been is watching a Charger with tinted windows out my bedroom window in the morning, going a lot faster than prudent around the corner. Soon we were alerted that they were at the elementary school around the block. My host, a retired public teacher, went to respond, but it as all over before she got there. not sure what ever happened. Walking uptown, I have occasionally heard the sound of dozens of whistles being blown in the distance, and seen the rising cloud of dispersal smoke, a blob roughly 100' wide by 100' high, that is their parting shot, as if they were magicians. I have also been present while crowds waited for them to leave apartment buildings. I split those scenes.
Are there more of them in ordinary public places than normal police?
No, only in total. The people you see are local police. This kind of puts the lie to "never a cop around when you need one" and the truth tothe notion of "protect and serve": the policeman's conspicuity is a public good; ICE's secrecy is a public threat.
Do you see them every day?
No, but I see where they have been. Some follow them around all day, tailing their cars, videoing their actions. There are risks.
Would you just see them walking around, or would you see them arresting/harassing people?
Where I have seen them is at the federal building. I liken it to a beehive, the cars come and go through the security gate. They are rentals or out-of-state SUV's, with darkly tinted windows. There is an agent with a Grey Jeep, Rubicon edition, says it right on the hood, that I see frequently. They are masked in the cars. Sometimes they roll their windows down and stick their phone out the window to record us.
Do the protests cause disruption?
Yes, they do. Streets get blocked off, first by ICE, then by protester trash barricades, then finally by local police yellow tape. This is a lot of work for the local cops. After the shooting of Alex, Nicollette street was closed between 26th and 27th. This is a bus route. This is restaurant row. I have been avoiding comparisons to the George Floyd time, but the barricades and impromptu memorials are still up on that street, four plywood raised fists a block out on each approach to the intersection of Chicago and 38, and a giant memorial that has turned the intersection into a traffic circle. The city has still not decided on how to finalize the site for both traffic and official memorialization. My hosts daughter works for a parks organization that might have some good input on how to resolve it, but she says they stay out of that conversation because there are few to no black people on their board. No one knows how to resolve this, so I fear more of this semi-permanence of disruption in the future.
Do you feel safe going wherever you want in the city?
Always, and I like to walk where I go. I have been to SF/Sausalito recently and I liken the safety-feeling. To date, there have been 3 homicides in the city, and Metro Surge has committed two of them. Not a robust data set, but still...
Where do the ICE officers stay while they're in the city?
They are wholly occupying certain city hotels. This I know because those hotels are being publicly shamed, which i get, but still, they are not ICE, and they will be needed after ICE leaves. People go to protest and swear at the hotels. Our group has not done so.
Do they have special marked ICE vehicles?
Oh, Scott, what a good question no. They drive whatever kind of vehicle they can get, the more macho the better. But most of them are in rental cars, which means Rav-4's, minivans, Sentras, what-have-you. It's a motley crew. My hairdresser friend says he keeps his Tacoma in the garage. I'm like, 'because of the road salt, right?' and he's like 'no, so people don't mistake me for one of those assholes.'
Scott, these are great questions, and I'm glad you asked them. Thank you.
Thank you for your detailed and fair-minded takes. Reading your posts I was struck by how *novel* it felt to hear an account of the situation from someone with no ax to grind.
I'm interested by this take since I read it as clearly the account of someone with a substantial amount of bias and an axe to grind, albeit someone that stays within the relatively peaceful local writing style rather than being a deranged blowhard.
Two movies, one screen strikes again.
I cannot live up to your comment, for I certainly have axes to grind. Minnesota is an open-carry state, and I keep my axe closely by my side wherever I go (not a euphemism for gun).
The least i can do is be fair minded. I should tell you that my group is angry all the time, that we are weary of having to bear witness, and that we feel we need to be doing more. People I talk to on the street agree, its a real pressure cooker here.
I’ve lived in Minneapolis or Saint Paul for the last 40 years. My home is in one of the “We suggest you pack a go bag” neighborhoods during the George Floyd riots. That was a very tense period but this situation feels worse. Not because the immediate danger is greater now, but because of its source.
Pete Hegseth posting ICE > MN is unnerving.
Congressional Republicans could stop all this tomorrow if they dared to cross Trump.
I understand that you have strong opinions and feelings about what is happening, but I get the sense they are not interfering with you giving a fair and complete account of what you have seen, rather than one geared towards influencing the viewer’s judgments of the situation.
Thanks. We'll see where that gets me.
I’m not sure what you mean by “no ax to grind”, because this person was personally participating in the protests.
Do you really not know what I mean? I doubt that. I think you are still trying to pick a fight, while cloaking it under a request for clarification. Unless you are dumb as a piece of petrified dinosaur shit, you are able to recognize the difference between having a view and making a case for that view.
You seem to be grasping in a maximally impolite way for the difference between 'having an ax to grind' and 'grinding an ax'
> Oddly enough, they are nearly invisible.
Huh, I didn't expect that. I guess it's like the "Portland has been burned to the ground" hysteria from a few years ago, but from the other side.
Interesting contrast. I don't want to exaggerate, but their MOD is to move like kidnappers, carjackers or Special forces units. They do not want to be seen, or observed, above all.
Thank you for bearing witness to all of this. It matters.
“Last week, several police chiefs in the Twin Cities held a news conference where they said their own officers had been racially profiled and stopped by ICE agents. In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara referred to this as “uncharted territory.”
https://www.startribune.com/operation-metro-surge-is-sending-minnesota-law-enforcement-into-uncharted-territory/601570464?utm_source=gift
I missed the initial thread re Scott Adams, but I have to say I was surprised when Scott halfway through having documented all his flaws said something like "in case you can't tell, I love Scott Adams".
I get people are complicated, Scott has some special affinity for Scott based on taking inspiration from his writing etc, but my sense of Adams, which was reinforced by Alexander's article, is someone super obsessed with the idea of himself as a world-historical master intellect, never seeming to back it up, which is a pretty off-putting combination.
Like others here, I read Dilbert comics as a kid and think I read two of his books, and by the end of the second one was starting to get weirded out by it, again the combination of being obsessed with his own genius and never really backing it up and the whole "I'm not serious unless you agree with me then I am" thing.
As a kid I also assumed that the author stand-in was Dilbert, and he was lampooning his own work experience in a sometimes self-deprecating way. But I realize now the author stand-in was Dogbert ... He also had some email newsletter that was called "Dogbert's ruling class" or something, whose jokey shtick was "when Dogbert takes over the world you won't be enslaved like everyone else".
Some other points, from when I read some of his stuff after he became a Trump pundit:
* the fake "I'm just a disinterested observer" shtick when he was clearly a Trump supporter.
* the fact that his reasons for supporting Trump lined up with the qualities he'd previously lampooned the unwashed masses for supporting in a candidate.
* I think he once said that he, personally, could win a presidential election with 65% of the national vote, and also that if Trump won he'd be a "top 10" assassination target or something
* self-obsession with how great a persuader/predictor he is. He'd make some point that he'd introduce by acting like he's about to blow your mind and reprogram you forever with his awesome hypnosis/persuasion skills, and then say something exceptionally un-persuasive (e.g., Trump will build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it, by saying that the US will only accept highly educated immigrants, that will get Mexico to restrict emigration by building a wall).
* I remember one where he said women's value was going to decline because men would eschew sex for hypnosis related fetishes. IIRC it wasn't "sexual desirability", it was more like value as a person.
* I watched (part of) ~two of his "coffee with Scott Adams" podcasts after the 2020 election. He started one off with an obvious attempt at some sort of hypnosis thing - saying something like "you're gonna take a sip of coffee, you're gonna feel good", etc. Off-putting right off the bat. He also defended Jan 6, and said after the election was called in November that Trump had a 65% chance of winning (downgraded from 100%), and that if Trump didn't actually win then everything he knows about the world is wrong.
* re the race thing, the focus is always on white people staying away from black people, but to me the bad part was saying black Americans are a "hate group"
I'm sure he was a nice guy to his friends and family, but ... well, a lot of people are.
> I remember one where he said women's value was going to decline because men would eschew sex for hypnosis related fetishes.
What does that even mean? I know some people fantasize about hypnotizing women so they can sleep with them, but hypnosis itself? I was not under the impression that men like him were into that sort of thing...
Pleasurable or erotic hypnosis is a thing, so I guess he's imagining you could meet your need for orgasms with hypnosis sessions instead?
It still sounds pretty dumb to me - it wouldn't replace sex any more than masturbation does.
Adam's also claimed narcissism didn't exist. Given his reactions and obvious narcissistic injury over the years I found it quite ironic.
That sounds interesting, where can I read about his take on narcissism?
Found it here: https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1342847742435938306
Agh, it's a video. Oh well.
I might as well put it here-- Adams' advice to white people to stay away from black people is racist. He uses rather flimsy evidence (one survey that many black people don't agree with "white lives matter") to give advice which, if followed, will cost black people much more than white people and won't obviously do white people much good.
I suppose I should clarify, I mean that the *really* bad part is the "hate group" thing, not that the rest is fine.
Physical appearance plays such a large part in determining the course of our lives yet most of it is out of our control. As a loser in the genetic lottery, I hope that AGI will usher in technologies that allow us to completely change our appearances. Or is that just wishful thinking?
It might be worth thinking about how much change is feasible-- contrary to movies and tv, nanotech isn't CGI.
Some changes should be easier, though.
The other question what standards of beauty might change into.
Picking up the question from the other side, would you want to not be affected by other people's looks?
Standards are ever-changing but I think there are some universal metrics of beauty like symmetry and regular features. It's not so much that I desire to be beautiful but that I do not reach the baseline of "attractive enough" as I have pronounced asymmetry and lots of dysmorphic features.
This might be worth trying to fix, as in "find someone truly talented and pay them a thousand dollars, and see what they have to say." I'm no "fashion designer" nor am I a Hollywood hire, but I could see someone being able to custom-fit hairstyles/makeup/prosthetics for you.
> Picking up the question from the other side, would you want to not be affected by other people's looks?
This will basically never happen, though, right? Attractiveness is a two-sided optimization problem, and if either side drifts, the other will optimize towards it.
The most that will happen is the average floor of attractiveness will rise, and people will start focusing on ever-tinier details that demarcate the top quintile / decile / etc.
There's a story-- I think it's "Liking What You See" by Raphael Carter/Cameron Reed-- with a premise that being attracted to some faces and not others is a brain function which can be turned on or off.
That was by Ted Chiang, actually
Once I am fond of someone I like the way they look because they look like them. But then I lack that male wiring that links “beauty” to sexual attraction .
That's very interesting. But is it really male wiring that links beauty to sexual attraction? I'm sure being really physically attractive as a guy helps a lot with getting dates.
Yes, being physically attractive helps... a bit...
But many people, many of them women, really do find that once they are fond of someone, their looks are attractive because they belong to that well-liked/loved person.
Personality really is the important part though. Because that's what makes one become fond of someone.
> There's a story-- I think it's "Liking What You See" by Raphael Carter/Cameron Reed-- with a premise that being attracted to some faces and not others is a brain function which can be turned on or off.
Yeah, I remember reading this story. Really fun idea, but when I read it, I thought "obviously this is never going to happen."
"Status" is relative and zero sum, and the top people will always want to demonstrate their status / market power by getting as many good things as they can in themselves / their mates, including attractiveness.
So if all the genuinely high status people care about and demonstrate attractiveness, that's who everyone else looks up to, and it trickles down and informs norms down to the median, at least.
Might there be some "barber pole" countersignaling, or a cohort of earnest people who genuinely want to max "relationship quality" versus "status?" Yeah, probably - and they'll be like 10-20% of the population as a whole, max. The other 80-90% are still going to play status games.
As it is now, at least we can claim our looks are not our fault. If we ever reach the point that we can design our own bodies/faces, all the blame falls on us.
We're already at that point. It's about $50,000 for a totally new smile. And yes, it is worth it, humans judge each other quite harshly based on their teeth.
Great. Now I'm ugly and it's my own fault.
Are you from the states? I do think generally whitish and straight-ish teeth are attractive-ish, but for some reason Americans seem to care so much more about teeth than anywhere else, I'm pretty sure most of us find the veneer look a bit off putting
This is so true!
Americans put a much higher premium on glassy white, geometrically regular teeth than many other places.
There are many places where specific irregularities are considered highly attractive.
Slightly buck teeth on a woman, for example, a la Aimee Lou Wood.
I watched an episode of a panel show on youtube in which there was one American guest and maybe 10 or so from elsewhere.
The one American had freakishly white teeth that pulled attention like crazy. It didn't look attractive. It didn't look natural. It reminded me very strongly of this episode of Friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIK01MpwWGg
But, speaking as an American with a long history of living in the USA, 𝘯𝘰𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵. Except for this one guy (who lived in Korea), I guess. Notice how the indigenous American cultural commentary on very white teeth is "they mean that nobody will consider dating you; don't do this".
Fair enough, I'm happy to believe that Zanni isn't speaking for all Americans :p
Yes. Your charisma improves by +3 with a new smile. Politicians and public speakers generally have this operation by the time they're forty.
Consider the curiously high number of men on dating apps who list their heights as six feet even. Given the propensity of some women to have a six foot minimum standard for men, it is not uncommon for men an inch or two under that level to round up their heights in hopes of getting past the initial screening.
For similar reasons dating apps supposedly have a substantial number of 29-year-old women.
There's probably a significant subset of guys who know they're "at least 6 foot" and don't bother measuring before listing it on the dating app, as well.
> Given the propensity of some women to have a six foot minimum standard for men
And for those who've never seen this data, it's pretty ambitious / surprising:
https://imgur.com/a/P06aECI
Are women insane? Only 30% will accept a below-top-decile height?
It's because gender ratios are crazy - 75/25 on Tinder, and similar on others. When there's 3 men for every woman, they're inundated with likes and have 10-20 messages every time they open the app.
At that point why NOT only consider 6' plus grad degree men with abs? Anything to winnow the herd!
One final fun tidbit - the top 78% of women are going after the top 20% of men on most apps:
https://imgur.com/lD6rjCw
I wonder how much the preferences would change if the metric on apps was changed to "height difference".
I'd guess that a 5-foot woman might feel normal selecting for "6-foot men", but feel very weird selecting for: "at least a foot taller than me".
> I'd guess that a 5-foot woman might feel normal selecting for "6-foot men", but feel very weird selecting for: "at least a foot taller than me".
I just replied to a comment further down on this, you'd be incorrect. The median 5' 0" woman is completely fine with a man up to 6' 6".
We have additional data here - "too tall" is an extremely difficult threshold to reach in dating:
https://imgur.com/a/GofMRHv
This was using data from a paper (Pisanski 2022) analyzing the "fair height" calculated by using female height percentile and male height percentile, and then seeing empirically what height gap women will accept. ALL women want somebody taller than they are.
Surprisingly, short women were the most stringent and demanded the biggest height gaps. Tall women were a little more generous, and demanded smaller gaps. Men generally don't care about height in their female partners.
>Men generally don't care about height in their female partners.
Oh yes they absolutely do.
Many men are distinctly uncomfortable with a partner the same height or taller than they themselves are.
There are so many women out there wearing flat shoes to accomodate the sensibilities of their male partner...
> There are so many women out there wearing flat shoes to accomodate the sensibilities of their male partner...
Great point - I was only thinking the other direction, but you're absolutely right.
Presumably it's all about how tall the woman will be during a piggyback ride.
> Surprisingly, short women were the most stringent and demanded the biggest height gaps. Tall women were a little more generous, and demanded smaller gaps.
That's not actually surprising. It's entirely reasonable for taller women to recognize there are fewer men significantly taller than them, whereas short women have a lot more taller men to choose from!
> That's not actually surprising. It's entirely reasonable for taller women to recognize there are fewer men significantly taller than them, whereas short women have a lot more taller men to choose from!
Yeah, good point.
I guess it was surprising to me in the sense that enough men don't care about height that height literally isn't a consideration for them, and so there is no rate limit or filter on how high up a short woman can reach.
When you'd assume that men would care about the height of at least their male offspring, and optimizing at least a little on women's height, enough that insane gaps aren't so easily demanded and fulfilled at the shorter end of female height.
But you know, I say this and I'm as guilty as anyone, my wife is tiny, even though I was an athlete and hope I get a few athletes among my kids, and know that height is an advantage for both male and female athletes in many sports!
Why didn't I empirically act on this cluster of facts and motivations? It just wasn't a big enough consideration in the overall already-difficult optimization problem finding a mate presents.
This doesn't respond to my point; firstly, we know the "6 foot cluster" phenomenon is arbitrary to imperial systems. In China, for example, 1m80 (a bit shorter) is the "nice round number" for "tall men", so you get a bit of clustering there.
I'm pretty sure that, if you asked women for a cut-off point relative to their own height, it wouldn't cluster at 6-foot, and I guess it would end up being significantly lower.
Unless Bumble obligated women to set a height filter (and the fact that the chart mentions "Advanced filters" indicates this is not the case), that data is going to be pretty severely skewed because it's collecting the height preferences only of women who care about height enough to use the height filter!
> it's collecting the height preferences only of women who care about height enough to use the height filter!
Yeah, this is a really good point, I'd definitely be interested in the incidence and composition of the population setting these.
However, we have additional data here - "too tall" is an extremely difficult threshold to reach in dating:
https://imgur.com/a/GofMRHv
This was using data from a paper (Pisanski 2022) analyzing the "fair height" calculated by using female height percentile and male height percentile, and then seeing empirically what height gap women will accept. ALL women want somebody taller than they are.
Surprisingly, short women were the most stringent and demanded the biggest height gaps. Tall women were a little more generous, and demanded smaller gaps. Men generally don't care about height in their female partners.
Unless I'm super in a bubble I feel like something like this has to be going on - as a woman my impression has always been that most women care only about their partner being taller than them (mayyybe taller enough that they're still taller in heels?), not any particular cutoff
FWIW this has been my IRL observation, too.
"at what height does a man's tallness become a detriment on the dating market" (with the answer being ~it never does) is a very different question from "at what height does a man's shortness become a detriment on the dating market" though, which is what the original graph purported to address.
> a very different question from "at what height does a man's shortness become a detriment on the dating market" though, which is what the original graph purported to address.
Oh yeah, gotcha.
I've got some evidence for you here, too. Here's the height distribution of the top 20% of guys by income, who have something like an 80-90% marriage rate depending on where in the distribution they are:
Plenty of men under 5' 9"
https://imgur.com/prydyG0
I used this in a larger post I did on "male dating power optimization" where I argued height is maybe 10% of your overall dating score:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/dating-power-maxxing-for-men?r=17hw9h
"Are women insane? Only 30% will accept a below-top-decile height? "
I expect a few things are in play here.
1) More than 30% of women will accept a man in the bottom 90% of height. They just won't say so if asked directly.
2) Most women don't realize what the average height of (American?) men actually is. Ditto for the height distribution. And I have seen similar "data" for income. Yes, lots of women want a man making 6 figures or more. Most men don't make that money. Note that lots of women DO get married to guys who don't earn 6 figures.
3) As women age the ones who are still single become less picky (same for men, I expect, but I am addressing your comment).
> More than 30% of women will accept a man in the bottom 90% of height. They just won't say so if asked directly.
This isn't quite what's going on. It's true that more than 30% of women will accept a man they meet in person who is below the 90th percentile in height. But in an online dating context, women 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗼 refuse to meet men who are below the 90th percentile. The platform lets them filter, and that's what they do. So the problem isn't that they're unwilling to admit that they'll accept someone below the 90th percentile; the problem is that they're actually unwilling to accept someone below the 90th percentile, because of how the system works.
Oh yeah, I don't think they're insane at all, it was just dramatic contra-rhetoric to presage why they can do this.
> 2) Most women don't realize what the average height of (American?) men actually is. Ditto for the height distribution. And I have seen similar "data" for income. Yes, lots of women want a man making 6 figures or more. Most men don't make that money. Note that lots of women DO get married to guys who don't earn 6 figures.
On this note, I actually made a dating calculator using NHANES, CES, and ACS data where you can see just how rare your segment is by geography. "666 men," or 6 foot men with 6 figure incomes and 6 packs, are exceptionally rare.
More depressingly, people with discernible waistlines of both genders are exceptionally rare - but that's democracy for you.
https://cholmondeley.github.io/Dating-Calculator/
Note that if you do the calculations for a 6-6-6 guy you should probably try to get some correlation data. I be surprised if 6 foot tall men are not more likely than average to make 6 figures (or higher).
It is *easy* to assume the three are uncorrelated, but they probably aren't :-)
The *other* thing is that I believe that "6 pack abs" is really just a short-hand for "physically fit." There are also studies showing that women usually want guys to be less ripped than guys want. You don't get the abs without being ripped ... when Arnold wasn't peaking for a body building show he usually didn't have 6 pack abs. I find it unlikely that "fit but not ripped" Arnold would be unacceptable.
Still, "tall, good income and fit" makes *sense* for what women might want when dating. They just may not be as picky as commonly phrased.
> You don't get the abs without being ripped
This is untrue; if you watched Netflix's recent special with Alex Honnold, you will have seen that while he does not have particularly gaudy muscles ( https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/AlexHonnold.jpg?w=2000&h=1126&crop=1&resize=681%2C383 ), he does have visible abs.
> Note that if you do the calculations for a 6-6-6 guy you should probably try to get some correlation data.
Yes, the calculator was literally made with modeled correlations, and I triangulated correlation matrices from the resulting data set several different ways.
> Still, "tall, good income and fit" makes *sense* for what women might want when dating. They just may not be as picky as commonly phrased.
Yeah, and most of the dating app stuff is just because of the ratio - why not be maximally stringent in an environment like that?
But the majority (70-80%!) of women don't use dating apps, and don't like them, so they're obviously matching up in the real world by various means, and probably settling for more average guys, because you can't get as far out in the tails in a social circle of 150 or so, in the same way you can in a pool of 10k+ or 100k+ men on dating apps in a big city.
Of course, that brings up the question of why there is such a massive male surplus on dating apps.
When I looked into that a while back, part of the answer seemed to be that the male surplus was highly app-specific. The general trend seemed to be that hookup-oriented apps generally had a large majority of men, while relationship-oriented ones were usually majority women.
It seems like Tinder in particular, which is the most male-skewed app apart from Grindr (whose core demographic is gay men), tends to dominate the conversation because 1) lots of men using it seem to find it particularly frustrating and vent, and 2) Tinder releases a lot of detailed statistics which make it easy to analyze.
> It seems like Tinder in particular, which is the most male-skewed app apart from Grindr (whose core demographic is gay men), tends to dominate the conversation
As far as I knew, literally every app is male skewed - the BEST you can do is 2 men for every woman.
Tinder
75/25
Bumble
68/32
Okcupid
75/25
The League
70/30
Hinge
66/33
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/ynxg6i/the_gender_ratio_of_users_on_popular_dating_apps/
The numbers seem to be a bit of a mess. A lot of the figures circulating don't seem to be well-sourced, and those that are well-sourced are likely very methodology dependent (i.e. comparing registered users, active users broadly defined, active users narrowly defined, and volume of user activity seem likely to give you different figures if there's a gender skew in volume of activity).
The best apples-to-apples comparison I found was from Pew Research, which surveyed US adults in 2022 as to which sites they have ever used. Grindr, as expected, is overwhelmingly male by this metric. Tinder and Hinge were a little less than 2:1 male. Bumble and OkCupid were around 3:2 male. Match and eHarmony have slight female majorities. HER appears to have a large female majority (for a similar reason as why Grindr has a large male majority) but total usage is too low to draw detailed conclusions from this survey's sample size. "Other" sites have a small male majority overall.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/the-who-where-and-why-of-online-dating-in-the-u-s/pi_2023-02-02_online-dating_1-04-png/
Globally, 34% of men and 27% of women have ever used any dating site, so about 55% male. This is a smaller male skew than the per-site figures, which I would guess suggests men are much more likely than women to have tried several sites either sequentially or in parallel.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/the-who-where-and-why-of-online-dating-in-the-u-s/pi_2023-02-02_online-dating_1-01-png/
Pew did collect some data in the survey based on only active users (defined at those who have used a site in the past year), but unhelpfully don't seem to provide a breakdown of active users by gender either per-site or globally.
So what's stopping the men from going on the relationship apps? Can't they just lie about wanting a long-term relationship?
Let's turn those long-term dating apps into pure enemy generators.
Not sure. My guess would be that the gender disparity being app specific isn't widely appreciated. Or even that there is a huge gender disparity on Tinder: more often, I see problems that are very likely downstream of the disparity attributed to general and pervasive issues in dating culture.
A bigger mystery to me is why women (anecdotally) have no success on these apps either!
> A bigger mystery to me is why women (anecdotally) have no success on these apps either!
It's selection effects - if 80% of women are going after a tiny slice of the men, those top men are in an Empyrean sexual Valhalla and have no reason to settle down. So the "20%" is a bit of misnomer, it's actually a power law - the top percentile of guys get twice as many likes as the 95th percentile, and likes peter out entirely at the 80th percentile. So the top ~5% of guys get the supermajority of likes.
https://imgur.com/a/kewNj8h
BUT all those guys get all the matches! So they have an arbitrary bench of girls of whatever flavor they want (as long as they're in a real city). Okay, so any <5% guy who is actually after an LTR pairs up pretty quickly, because he can go on 3-5 dates a week, and finding somebody you're compatible with is basically a numbers game. They find somebody great after 20 different dates, and leave the app. Woohoo!
Okay, so if the guys who actually want an LTR drop off relatively quickly, who does that leave on the app though? All the guys who just want to screw around and have fun - and why not? They have a bench of thousands of matches to have fun with.
What they SAY they want on the app doesn't actually matter - I'm sure you know that many men are less than fully honourable when stating their intentions, if it means they get to sleep with more girls. All that matters is that the only <5% guys who *actually want an LTR* are on way shorter than the guys who want to have fun, so all the <5% on the app are 80-90% guys who want to have fun. And the 10-20% who actually want an LTR relies totally on new onboardings of <5% guys, because they pair up and leave.
And I feel like I should point out - this doesn't even require active deceit! Like the <5% guys who are there just having fun may even BELIEVE they're open to an LTR, because they are! If Helen of Troy and Aphrodite descended from heaven on a gossamer beam of feminine perfection, I'm sure a lot of these guys would actually go for an LTR. But what's the rush? Why not just take your time and really see what's out there? You know, just date and take things as they come, and if somebody really blows your socks off, THEN you're open to the LTR.
But the end results are still the same, even with that internal conviction being true, even with them considering themselves open to an LTR.
My basic argument is that when you have a pool of guys that can get what guys want, it's going to be biased towards short term and having fun anyways, because that's what guys in the aggregate want, then it's going to get WORSE from there, due to selection effects because all the LTR guys drop off the platform.
Like look at gay guys - famously polyamorous, famously high body counts, etc. In the data, gay men have 2-4x higher body counts than heterosexual men, because men in general are rate-limited by women. But not gay guys, they can live the male fantasy of matched sex drives and matched drives for variety and short term fun. I'm saying the <5% guys on the apps are in that position - they're more able to get what guys want, because of their relative bargaining power. So it's a lemon market for both sides.
I've written about this broader trend in a post titled Dear Manosphere, women legit have it harder than men, fight me:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/dear-manosphere-women-have-it-legit?r=17hw9h
I imagine there's also a selection effect based on who you find on dating apps. Desirable guys who actively want relationships tend to find them, and then not be on the apps anymore. Whereas the cad sleeping with a different woman every weekend is always going to be around.
It's not dating specific, but Robin Hanson (nobody's idea of a feminist) has a post on how a social asymmetry favors men: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-male-gender-war-advantage
> Of course, that brings up the question of why there is such a massive male surplus on dating apps.
Probably a lot of reasons, but I think it's mostly laziness and loss aversion and approaching in person being hard / scary.
But manifestly, most men would be better off looking for dates in their social circles, doing real-world things with favorable gender ratios, and approaching in person.
On a comment to a recent post I followed a link to a link to a link and ended up here: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yFvZa9wkv5JoqhM8F/p/oTX2LXHqXqYg2u4g6 . This discussion, which I hadn't seen before, illuminates a lot about both what rationalists think they're doing and what they're really doing. (I.e. It illuminates both the rationalist perspective and the rationalist fallacy.)
I've complained before about "rationalists" (I'll use the word to mean the Less Wrong ideology, not its original meaning which is almost the exact opposite) refusing to learn, acknowledge, and/or situate themselves within analytical philosophy. I haven't been very satisfied with the responses; they often seem to be different ways of asserting that "we're interested in what's actually true!" (implying either that most philosophers just like arguing for no reason and are unconcerned with truth, despite talking constantly about seeking truth and producing arguments purporting to prove various truths--a claim that would require some very substantial evidence--or that "true" is being defined as "in accordance with my own beliefs and premises, which I'd rather not be subject to any challenge or questioning").
But on the linked page are two arguments that can at least be engaged with.
The first is Yudkowsky's claim that "mainstream philosophy" is "diseased" and "much of it is wrong"; therefore, it's not worthwhile to learn and engage with something that's built on bad premises. The problem with this is a simple equivocation fallacy. "Philosophy" can mean at least three different things: (1) "any kind of thinking about truth", (2) "thinking about fundamental truth using logic and avoiding dogmatic assumptions, in the manner of academic philosophy journals", (3) "the particular positions and arguments most often held by practicing philosophers". Obviously, 3-philosophy is just a part of 2-philosophy and is opposed and challenged by other parts of 2-philosophy (and everyone who gives any kind of opinion on anything, especially on whether philosophy has any value, is doing 1-philosophy). So Yudkowsky's argument above is saying that if 3-philosophy is bad one should avoid engaging in 2-philosophy at all, a clear non-sequitur. (Notice "in the manner of" in the definition of 2. Academia is often corrupt and so outrageously politicised that there may well be good reason to avoid doing philosophy through actual journals; no reason at all though to avoid learning and engaging with the arguments made in the journals, on a different platform.)
The second is the argument that learning too much philosophy might teach bad mental habits. This one I'm much more sympathetic to, in the sense that if you've got a certain set of ideas built on certain assumptions (particularly if you think modes of thought built on those particular assumptions are underexplored, whether or not that's actually true), it makes sense that during your initial stages of developing your ideas you might want to avoid reading more mainstream arguments on those topics, lest your thinking be subtly shaped to be more in-line with mainstream thinking, thus losing track of your original perspective. But once you've got your own ideas and arguments clear and you've moved on to trying to promote them to others, to avoid learning about ideas similar (even if not the same) as your own, as well as the arguments against them, and to avoid engaging with those arguments directly because you're sure they're obviously wrong and you knew this since you were 14 (an unironic claim by Yudkowsky in the linked discussion)...is surely the height of arrogance.
Now, of course you can build a community or an ideology around an explicit "we accept these premises as foundational dogmas". That's perfectly valid, and that's just what natural science is: philosophy, but with the assumptions of materialism and empiricism and so on, a lack of interest in defending those assumptions against challenges, and a strict determination to stay within the confines of what can be uncontroversially reduced to those assumptions and consider any claims about all other things outside the scope of science. But it doesn't seem like rationalists are doing that at all. They take sweeping positions on all sorts of philosophical matters well outside the boundaries of natural science (morality, religion, mind, knowledge), but then decline to engage with the arguments of actual philosophers on these matters.
So rationalism seems to be a bit of a massive shell game. When told to read more philosophy, dismiss the whole field and suggest you're only interested in dealing within scientific premises...then take blatant positions on philosophical questions on the grounds that all truth matters. And hope no one notices the hopping back-and-forth. The only thing more amazing than the gaul of this is the fact that so many smart people apparently fall for it hook, line and sinker. Unless I'm missing something huge.
(Note: I invite people telling me why I'm wrong, but I often need a long time (=more than the length of an Open Thread) to think over my answer to an objection. So most replies will probably be unanswered, and neither "conceding the point" nor "don't respect your argument" should be inferred from that. Also, if you think I'm misrepresenting Yudkowsky's position and that he and/or most rationalists are actually fully willing to engage with philosophy and *do* consider themselves to be defending a position situated within philosophy, I'd rather not hunt around for the many other quotes denigrating philosophy in numerous ways, so consider my objections to be based on that interpretation as a premise.)
Just wanted to chime in that I agree completely.
Also wanted to add that I understand the reticence as to engaging with philosophy, I am a software developer and quite often when I read an essay by a trained philosopher I just get this overwhelming impression that this person never had to produce an idea that survives contact with reality, and I get all suspicious about whatever he's arguing about. This doesn't happen to me when I read someone with a STEM background that is now philosophizing. But rationalists also give me a different ick, like they're trying transfer the scientific mentality into domains where it does not apply (I kinda don't get what edge rationalism is supposed to have over learning to think like a scientist).
>that this person never had to produce an idea that survives contact with reality,
What does that mean? Empirical testing?
I think it means something like epistemic humility and exercising common sense when the extrapolated conclusions of simple models appear to give absurd results. Compare this to how scientists regard their models. The Ideal Gas Law works great at low densities, but if you take it as infallible then you can extrapolate to arbitrarily high pressures and never have phase transitions. Same for infinite field strength around point charges in classical E&M. Scientists never worry about the absurd implications of those extrapolations, they just sensibly conclude that such absurdities are alerting you to the limitations of your model. The world is heavily nonlinear and one should never have much faith in linear extrapolations of models far beyond the realm of their empirical validation.
Philosophers seem constitutionally incapable of this level of epistemic self-awareness. Instead of admitting that the simple math of Utilitarian calculus is obviously just a rough heuristic that can't possibly capture the complexity of human morality, they publish paper after paper fretting over absurdities like the repugnant conclusion. The relevant empirical testing that they seem opposed to doing is just looking around the world and recognizing that their simplistic models don't accurately reflect the way humans actually behave.
>I think it means something like epistemic humility and exercising common sense when the extrapolated conclusions of simple models appear to give absurd results.
Are philosophers all.lacking epistemic humility, or.just some.if them?
>Philosophers seem constitutionally incapable of this level of epistemic self-awareness
Are they? which ones?
>Utilitarian calculus is obviously just a rough heuristic that can't possibly capture the complexity of human morality
Not all the philosophers are utilitarian , and.many rationalists are. Yudkowsky 's Torture versus Dust Specks is an example of extreme bullet biting that was criticised by a mainstream philosooher!
Oh sure, Yud isn’t any better, but at least he doesn’t have an academic credential to hide behind. Generally speaking the rationalist community is even worse since they marry poor thinking to a weird cult like lifestyle but their social impact is limited because mainstream society rightly regards them as weirdos. Academic philosophers unfortunately inherit the legitimizing aura of their institutions.
>Are they? which ones?
Nick Bostrom? The doomsday argument is so stupid it practically drools. Peter Singer is also pretty bad.
This is a super nebulous intuitive thing, but I think it's that when you're in a domain where your ideas frequently fail against an external objective standard (the exact standard varies depending on the STEM discipline), it does train you into being more cautious, into pre-emptively trying to think of all the ways your idea might fail. With philosophers, I don't see this, they regularly make wildly extravagant claims with seemingly zero reflection on all the ways actually implementing their idea might fail.
In software, the test is whether the software has no bugs, no weird edge cases where it breaks (bunch of other stuff too). In science, it would be whether you're proposing a hypothesis that makes real testable predictions, and then thinking of all the ways you could find out whether those predictions are wrong or not.
There are no such tests for philosophy.
If the lack of tests is an inherent feature of the subject -- "domains where it does not apply" -- what's the problem? You can't hardly blame them for not using something that can't work. You could blame them.writing with a high degree of certainty, despite the lack of tests .. but who is actually doing that? Some examples would be useful.
Lack of tests means you should be even more cautious as opposed to more reckless, like proposing the repugnant conclusion is a valid result, to pick a banal example of philosophical recklessness. But philosophical minds have not been shaped by developing actual reasoning ability, which can only be gained through contact with reality.
The repugnant conclusion is hypothetical, what-if reasoning. It's not supposed to be something that happens with certainty.
Rationalists tend to have a contemptuous attitude towards mainstream philosophy , as expressed in the notorious post https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FwiPfF8Woe5JrzqEu/philosophy-a-diseased-discipline ...yet are clearly engaged in their own version of philosophy, often engaging with the same questions.
The question needs to be viewed through at absolute versus relative lens. Academic philosophy Isn't broken or diseased in the sense that there is a relatively more efficient way of solving the same problems. It nonetheless isn't good at solving problems in an absolute sense. LessWrongian rationality isnt either. There are about 200 open philosophical problems, and the rationalists claim to have dissolved about three of them. Rationalists don't even have clear answers to questions like "how does consciousness work, anyway".
So there is no evidence that rationalism is better in an absolute sense.
There is also the issue of expectations. Philosophy can seem frustratingly vague and inconclusive to science and engineering types ... but is STEM really the default? Maybe STEM subjects are unusually well defined, and humanities subjects are the norm.
How easy or difficult philosophy should be is a philosophical.question ... it depends on how truth , evidence , etc, work. If everything is visible, empiricism.should be able to solve everything .. if not, not. If there is a single set of axioms everyone can agree on, armchair reasoning should be able to solve everything ...if not, not. Judging by the slow progress , we are in the least convenient world.
Rationalism is based on Bayes. Bayes tells you how to adjust subjective credences up and down with evidence. It doesn't tel! you where to get objectively correct axioms from, and it doesn't tell you how to handle lack of direct evidence -- it doesn't tell you how to solve either of the problems I mentioned.
>Philosophy can seem frustratingly vague and inconclusive to science and engineering types
To be fair, it also seems to be frustratingly vague and inconclusive to humanities types. But that might be because I've mostly encountered continental and postmodern philosophers.
I think the main issue is that philosophy seems very self absorbed and also break far too easily. For example, Kant universability breaks in the axe murderer scenario for the vast majority of people, it's sometimes even hard to argue the position in a way that students see what he meant by that. There's other examples like that, like the classic drowning child scenario.
It is not unnatural to untrust most philosophy then, especially since it is hard to verify that a concept is valid and in a way "exists in the world".
It's not very clear "rationality" is a better path to solve the hard problems either way but it spawned a good part of the AI ecosystem which is making good empirical work on consciousness, qualia. I don't think another unread reinterpretation of Kant or Deleuze will help there.
I also think the big issue with philosophers is expecting all truth to be expressible. We communicate with words, but brains don't really think with words.
Are you sure every single one of them believes that? And, if it false, what can you usefully do in response? It seems to stymie the idea of philosophy as a group enterprise. And rationalism, ditto.
I can't pretend to know of all of philosophy, just stuff I have seen. However, it's true, I believe the intuitionists at least were onto this.
> to stymie the idea of philosophy as a group enterprise
So? Astrology and alchemy had to be discarded too, at some point.
>However, it's true, I believe the intuitionists at least were onto this.
Who , the mathematical intuitionists?
>So? Astrology and alchemy had to be discarded too, at some point
And rationalism would have to be, as well.
This is a school I never engaged with directly, but I seem to remember Bergson being about that, I think he wasn't a mathematical intuitionist.
> rationalism would have to be, as well.
Yeah, maybe. Not if it really becomes about being the science of winning. Maybe. But if it does have to be discarded, so be it, I think that is one aspect of the scientific mindset that has universal applicability, the willingness to discard a model when you discover it's not working.
I agree with you on virtually all of this and I think Scott and his community of readers are much much less susceptible to the fallacies you outlined than Eliezer and the LW crowd write large. I always found Eliezer and the Sequences off-putting so I've only read a small percentage of them. I do plan to read HPMOR sometime but I'm not going to go systematically through the Sequences.
I find it annoying when Scott or others use LW jargon that outsiders don't know, because of precisely the issues you outlined; very often there are well established ways of referring to the phenomena they're referencing. Of course, being a seasoned reader and admirer of Scott's, I'm sure there are many instances where he does this, I don't notice, and it doesn't bug me. But I find that the *way* he introduces jargon or references his own or LW jargon is much humbler-seeming and more hospitable to outsiders than that of LW in general. He usually includes a link or two to past discussions and often gives a brief summary.
I appreciate that Scott makes an effort to let his essays stand on their own two feet and not require the reader to read the whole literature for themselves.
I'm going to stop there because I was about to go further into comparisons between Scott and Eliezer and I don't think that's useful -- I already did more than enough above. I didn't mean for this comment to be an Eliezer bash fest. Obviously he has had an incredible influence on Scott's thinking, and others I admire, and to dismiss him would just be silly. I'll just close by saying again that I agree with your analysis of the problems with LW and that I find ACX refreshingly low on those problems.
Has anyone here used AI to automate non-coding tasks or workflows? Very curious to hear about your experience
Probably not what you are pointing at, but I'm using Claude to help me design and deploy a combination excel/power automate workflow to grab data exports from an email address, load the data to an excel sheet and run scripting on it to sort/format/output the data, then email out the finalized results to a distribution group.
I tried to use it to do an oil change on my car, but the lack of interface with appropriate mechanical actuators and tools made it quite impractical.
I’ve tested it with underwriting insurance applications, which is illegal, but it was just a test so I guess it’s fine. It was definitely significantly better than the average person doing this stuff when given a clear goal.
My lab has used it to automate our data entry from datasheets (hand written), although we still use human QAQC post entry to catch and correct errors. The entry is more error prone than human entry (although improving rapidly and I expect it to reach parity/better than in well under a year), but the time savings is more than worth the slight increase in QAQC work.
I would be somewhat surprised if our QAQC team more or less stopped catching errors (because the AI essentially stops making them) within 2 years (there is a separate set of errors where what was originally written on the sheet is incorrect, but that's dealt with via a separate process)
Pretty basic text generation based on editorial guidelines that existed, with plenty of examples to go along. Think: Video titles, learning objectives for courses, assessment questions, text summaries, automatic translation of limited text sequences etc.
Mostly non-demanding, but occasionally very time consuming stuff. The overall quality has suffered a bit, it still needs human review (especially for the more sophisticated items like assessment questions), and sometimes the automation just fails to run at all.
All in all, it makes those activities maybe 20-35% faster (more for translation), but all those issues are capping the efficiency gains for now, plus, my impression is that quality has still gone down, even after review, because review catches errors, but not if the output is just a little worse than it otherwise would have been.
I figure this will be the only place I could ask this, and I promise this time will be the only time I ask this, but would somebody give me feedback on my post going into the Deep Q nets paper in reinforcement learning? You can find it here: https://nadagrad.substack.com/p/deep-q-networks
I understand it might not be very accessible without a lot of pre-req's, but I would love some human feedback on if it's readable or not. I plan on doing a post for a bunch of deep reinforcement learning papers until I am caught up to cutting edge research like https://www.pi.website/blog/pistar06, but I want to make sure I have a good base to start from.
The Inkhaven residency is interesting but isn't that compatible for people with jobs. Is there anything similar that is either part-time or for a shorter duration?
I think economics is basically fake, and would welcome a dialogue about it.
Taleb and Mandelbrot have both made a pretty strong case that the great bulk of economics is “not even wrong,” in the sense that to even play with most of the models and econometric conclusions they come to requires assuming distributions and facts and error bars that we authoritatively KNOW do not exist in the world.
The great majority of the finance and global trade and currency worlds are NOT gaussian, after all - black swans exist because of fat tails and power laws, and power laws are intrinsically much more sensitive to errors and omissions - so sensitive, in fact, that our predictive powers for the things that matter are negligible.
Economists are essentially witch doctors, after all - they successfully predicted 9 out of the last 3 recessions.
And even if more of the world were Gaussian, there are fundamental epistemic limitations to being able to forecast even Gaussian things, due to the innate sensitivity to model error:
“One of the most misunderstood aspects of a Gaussian is its fragility and vulnerability in the estimation of tail events. The odds of a 4 sigma move are twice that of a 4.15 sigma. The odds of a 20 sigma are a trillion times higher than those of a 21 sigma! It means that a small measurement error of the sigma will lead to a massive underestimation of the probability. We can be a trillion times wrong about some events.”
Back to "they can't predict anything actually important," even taking simple economic 'best practices' nets nothing. My general impression is that Washington Consensus economics has been pretty bad for most of the developed world. Typically what happens is you get a bad combination of open markets (so no tariffs to protect nascent industries and to forge export discipline over time) that lock you into being a commodities supplier for the rest of the world, or a source of cheap labor unable to ascend the value chain, and a central bank under the control of politicians with zero impulse control who hit the “do the populist thing” button too much and end up like Venezuela. After all, we’ve been pushing Washington Consensus for many decades, but only 3 non-EU countries have moved from “developing” to “developed” status in the last 40 years - Ireland, Israel, and Korea.
I’ll admit, I’m coming at this from a stance of fundamentally doubting 80%+ of the discipline as practiced, but will readily agree 20% is great. Economics 101 concepts and macroeconomical concepts? Genuinely useful, great heuristics, we would all do well to use those lenses more as we observe the world. Auctions, paying attention to incentives, even behavioral economics? Yeah, genuine value there - all based on 101 concepts, OR based on refuting the main body of economics.
Macroeconomics-as-practiced and econometrics? Not even wrong, literally just wanking, like philosophy but worse, because we actually make decisions based on some of it, and it’s all witchcraft. We might as well be doing haruspicy.
The great majority of economists are employed in places like the Fed and the rest of the government doing haruspicy and pretending they're not idiots with no idea what they're doing. Like if you break down what economists are employed to DO, as actual economists and not some actually noble other profession somebody with an economics degree can go into? It's mostly to predict things they can't predict, and to "soothe the animal spirits" or whatever the hell Greenspan was on about while crashing us into the Great Recession because he didn't actually know what he's doing - which he was at least classy enough to admit after the crash! And yet we continue to pay a bunch of folk to pretend to predict and do things they manifestly cannot predict or do, and it's literally mathematically provable that they can't!
But I’m not ideologically committed to this viewpoint, and I’d welcome having it challenged. What are the valuable things economics gives us beyond macro and 101 concepts?
Let's think about where is our opportunity cost of economics:
First, you say "economics is basically fake", which implies that 80% of economics is useless to gain a correct understanding of the world.
Then let us create a hypothetical scenario where "mainstream" economics doesn't exists. Do we actually get a more correct understanding of the world? Do we actually get to make better choices.
In the first reply, I argue that we wouldn't. In fact, I argue that "macro and 101 concepts", despite being 20% of the discipline, give us 80% of the value, and that is a good thing! It follows Pareto's law, another econ 101 concept.
Next, in the second reply, I argue that the "other stuff" that makes up 80% of economics research is very good, and is getting better.
Finally, in the third reply, I'll tackle your question about what economists *actually do* all day, and is not just getting paid for "hiding our ignorance" and being "constantly wrong."
********
*** SECOND REPLY: HOW GOOD IS THE 80% OF ECON ***
An Econ journal "paper" has basically the same structure:
1. INTRODUCTION:
Self-explanatory.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
This usually consists on three things
2.a. A basis on existing "Econ 101" (and "Econ 102") concepts - This is the "20%" of econ which you already believe is not "fake", and which we both agree provide 80% of its value.
2.b. A literature review of existing academic consensus on this topic. - This is the other "80%" which you believe is "basically fake".
2.c. A mapping of the concepts to one or many mathematical functions.
3. METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK:
This is where the journal tries to operationalize the mathematical theory into real empirical data.
The usual stuff is the application of statistical methods to a new or existing historical data series; but you can also sometimes have some sort of "experiments" such as a Randomized Control Trial (RCT).
4. RESULTS:
Self-explanatory.
5. DISCUSSION:
This is where the researchers defend the robustness of their methodology, and discuss the implications for the literature and, sometimes, policy makers.
****
*WHICH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ANY GIVEN PAPER?*
Now, we are on Astral Codex Ten and Scott has, in a previous essay, referred to academics as forming some sort of "priesthood".
On the one hand, this is pretty evident in any econ paper, given that the literature review will usually make sure to "stand on the shoulder of giants".
You see, at some time during the past century, new fields of economics would open up: Institution economics, Behavioral economics, Industrial economics, etc... Nowadays, even as the number of "papers" have gone up, it´s no longer usual for any one of them to create a new discipline.
Neither is it usual for them to introduce a revolutionary new conceptual framework for an existing discipline, such as the concept of "rational expectations" introduced on the 60s - 70s.
On the other hand, since the 90´s we have seen a proliferation of new, better methodology, in order to either defend or attack the existing consensus on the basis of how well does it fit the data.
In fact, in any given econ "paper" most of the action is going to be in 3. METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK, as the researcher tries to defend the validity of their data and the robustness of their method, knowing that others will usually focus their attacks *on the methodology*, not their ideas.
For example:
I´ve recently been reading the blog "The Original Sin of Why Nations Fail" (1) where it´s discussed that most economists agree with the basic insights of Institutional Economics (as portrayed in the bestseller "Why Nations Fail"), but kind of reject the specific methodology of the seminal paper for the discipline (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson. (2001). "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation").
***
So, we have established that the "80% of econ" that we want to debate currently consists of an ample literature on several disciplines that mostly build on themselves and have been recently focused more on better empirical methods instead of grand new theories.
Therefore, now the debate is no longer about whether Econ 101 (and 102) are fake, but about whether *the way that 20th century researchers structured the diverging disciplines of economics and their related concepts* is "fake" or not.
***
ECONOMICS: NOT ONE, BUT MANY.
Based on your other comments, you seem to subscribe to the idea that microeconomics is the "good" econ (i.e. the actually scientific one), whereas macroeconomics is the "bad" econ (i.e. the one where "most of the voodoo happens").
This kind of makes sense:
After all, in microeconomics you can potentially have access to an inmense amount of data at the level of individuals, firms, etc...
But with macroeconomics you:
a. Can´t really have access to many more than the 200+ countries that currently exist.
b. Your access to historical data is rather limited.
c. Can´t run an RCT at the country level.
Regardless, I think that this is too simple of an approach because, as I´ve stated before, economics is divided in *many disciplines*.
Take for example the field where I´m most familiar with:
Development economics.
Most of development economics is concerned with macroeconomic ideas (i.e. Whether poor countries are "catching up" or not to rich countries). But there is also a lot of microeconomic ideas (i.e. What is most cost-efficient healthcare intervention), which is also the field that has pioneered what I think is the best and more scientific methodology: RCTs!
Or let us take the field that you seem to me more familiar with:
Financial economics.
This is mostly concerned with microeconomic ideas (i.e. Optimal portfolio allocation), but it does have insights which help orient macroeconomic ideas (i.e. Whether private investment will be crowded out by Big Government expenditure or not), specially in the models which seek "microfoundations".
***
CONCLUSION: SOME ECONOMICS IS BETTER THAN OTHERS.
You know, I actually started this very long comment with the clear thesis that the other 80% of econ is *not* fake, and very prepared to defend my focus - development economics.
But, now I realize that it´s actually *not possible* to say whether 80% of economics as a whole is "fake" or not.
Instead, you need to analyze it sub-field by sub-field to be able to say "This sub-field of economics is kind of fake, even as Basic Econ is right".
I´m convinced that development economics is *not* mostly fake, and if you want to discuss that I´m willing to do it.
But I just don´t know enough about *financial economics* to be able to defend it adequately. That´s not to say that I think it´s fake, instead it´s to say that if your main concern is financial econ, then I´m not its most adequate defender.
***
FOOTNOTES
1. https://statsandsociety.substack.com/p/the-original-sin-of-why-nations-fail
*** FIRST REPLY: A WORLD WITHOUT ECON ****
What would a world without (mainstream) econ look like?
Thankfully is easy to answer that: If mainstrem economics didn't exist, then another economics "school of thought" would take its place.
What are these "schools of thought"?
If you are an American, then probably your view of econ has been (mercifully) restricted only to mainstream economics. I, for other part, have been unmercifully subjected to ther forms of "heterodox" economics. This label of "heterodox" is actually an umbrella term for such different disciplines as "Austrian economics" or "Marxist economics".
Now, for an American the failure of Marxist economics will be obvious. But make no mistake: The failure of Marxist thought comes directly from a rejection of Econ 101 principles such as those who were provided by the Marginal Revolution (the historical one, not Tyler Cowen).
So, these basic concepts which you belittle as "only macro and 101 concepts" are actually of tremendous importance. If we didn't have them, then politicians would have (an easier time) falling again and again against the same rock: Nationalization, price controls, tariffs, and a million ways of economic mismanagement.
***
It is not a coincidence that the governments of regions such as Latam or Africa have much worst economic mismanagement than western governments. It's obvious that part of the reason is that these regions have a greater propensity towards authoritarianism, which might allow bad policy decisions to last longer than in a democratic government.
But I believe that, in these regions, a bigger share of the technical staff are "economists" who actually secretly believe, like yourself, that econ is mostly fake and as a result adhere to any one of the heterodox schools of thought.
Just look at Trump: In order to find a pro-tariff economists he had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Navarro. If he had been willing to hire a latino migrant, he would have had no shortage of pro-tariff "economists".
***
ADDENDUM: ON MEASURING THE EFFECT SIZES OF A WORLD WITHOUT ECON
I see after writing this reply that Sol Hando has already mention this point, and that you´re "a little skeptical it matters / has much effect size" whether or not a country has an intelligent cabal of economists given the basic ideas some weight.
Of course, we can´t really measure the effect size of this because the most scientifical way of doing it would be conducting an RCT with different countries completely isolated from each other, one with economists and other without economists.
But my point is slightly stronger: Not only what would happen if there weren´t economists, but what would happen if *no one* had made the basic insights of Econ 101 and Econ 102.
After all, without economists and universities continuing to teach this basic insights, they would soon fall into disregard.
So when I talk about the effect size of economics, I´m not talking just about the effect of a couple of very lauded economists putting out an op-ed on The New York Times or whatever. I´m talking about having the knowledge *actually existing* and into the education curriculum of most of the elites (and most of the LLMs).
I´m of course convinced that this effect size is enormous, and without it the leaders of most countries would turn into basically Chavez.
I have a degree in economics (meaning very little tbh) and I basically agree with this take. The *actual* insight of macroeconomics can be boiled down to the relations between inflation, interest rates, GDP growth and fiscal policy.
I think the real function of macroeconomics is providing a rigorous basis for policy that works. It’s too easy for populist leaders to believe that cutting interest rates cuts inflation (https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/19/economy/erdogan-turkey-election-inflation-promise) but with an intelligent cabal of economists, at the very least *definitely bad* ideas have pushback, with some broad gesturing at a lot of well-respected economists, schools of thought, and highly cited papers, that give the more basic ideas weight.
Good work is done in statistic analysis on how rule of law affects economic growth, and things of that nature. Basic macroeconomics took a very long time to arrive at though, so I don’t want to degrade the profession itself, since for all we know there may be economists working on problems now that in a hundred years, are seen as relatively obvious macroeconomic principles.
> with an intelligent cabal of economists, at the very least *definitely bad* ideas have pushback, with some broad gesturing at a lot of well-respected economists, schools of thought, and highly cited papers, that give the more basic ideas weight.
Yeah, a couple of people here in the thread have made this point.
I'm a little skeptical it matters / has much effect size. I mean for one thing, look around you - even the biggest economy in the world is run by absolute morons, and it's not like all the rest of the world is doing all that great, either.
And there's a flipside, that **Mark Roulo** pointed out - a lot of government or institutionally employed economists basically exist to whitewash and give an academic / smart person stamp of approval to whatever idiotic stuff the suits in charge want to do.
Which is just back to "literal haruspicy" again.
I think economics is like nutrition. People bag out nutritionists because they don't know anything, their studies fail to replicate, and their recommendations keep changing. This gives the impression that nutrition science is rubbish and we don't really know anything about human nutrition.
But we do! We know a lot about human nutrition, it's just that most of this knowledge has become so diffused that it seems obvious. Humans can't digest grass. Humans can't digest rocks. We even know a lot of non-obvious things, like a big list of vitamins and minerals that were unknown to the ancients but are now known to any reader of cereal boxes.
Economics is like this; the basics are very sound and useful, and only the bleeding edge is rubbish.
> Economics is like this; the basics are very sound and useful, and only the bleeding edge is rubbish.
Yeah, this is a pretty good analogy.
Maybe I'm just taking for granted how much value there really is in considering incentives and 101 concepts like supply / demand and price discovery and specialization and benefits of trade. Not that everyone wasn't doing all of those things for millions of years of hominin existence, well before any economics books at all, but being able to quantify the degree of effect size for them at the societal level is pretty compelling.
nah, even today, the average joe doesn't believe in supply & demand. They'll say they do if you ask them directly, because that's what they were taught in highschool (because it's the teacher's password). But in practice, everyone seems to believe in Just Prices or some variant of the Labor Theory of Value.
> nah, even today, the average joe doesn't believe in supply & demand.
Sure, but back to the "hominin" point, the average joe today never trades or barters for anything. All of life is so abstracted away into larger systems and epicycles they think grocery stores are how people get food and Amazon is how you get "stuff!"
So yeah, if all you ever do is exist as a kind of occasionally-perambulatory sessile blob who drives to some job you hate every day for money that you then use to buy Big Gulps and useless tchotckes on Amazon, sure you're not going to understand supply and demand. Your entire existence is embedded within systems that make use of average joes, that protect you from ever having to really think about things.
But a hunter gatherer trading things-they-effortfully-created with another tribe member, or somebody in another friendly tribe? They definitely need to understand supply and demand, and price discovery, and the benefits of trade, and things like that!
Also, I can't defend this rigorously. But like, I've been trying to figure out Moldbug's obsession with Freidrich List lately. And it led me down this rabbithole where I find myself agreeing with Karl Marx, of all people.
TLDR "free-trade" was a myth promoted by the British Empire (which is why it's called the "British System") because free-trade is advantageous to economies who are higher on the value-chain. This is a consequence of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, maketh the rules. The British had the gold, so they set the rules. And the rules were: Britain gobbled up all the manufacturing; while the peripheries handled the low-value resource extraction. (it's Comparative Advantage! econ 101, bro.)
This is in contrast to Henry Clay's "American System" which promoted protectionism. As in protection of nascent, domestic industry from the predatory Brits.
Protectionism is still fundamentally a defensive posture. So I don't think it's a one-way ticket to being a superpower like the U.S. or anything. I.e. you still need to have strong underlying fundamentals. (E.g. protectionism will not fix the fact that Africa has no navigable rivers.) But it's probably better on the margin, in appropriate scenarios.
I'm not married to this idea though, so I'm prepared to be wrong. Mostly though, maybe this will give you another perspective on the Washington Consensus, which basically advertises neoliberalism to the periphery.
> I'm not married to this idea though, so I'm prepared to be wrong. Mostly though, maybe this will give you another perspective on the Washington Consensus, which basically advertises neoliberalism to the periphery.
Yeah, TGGP and I had a whole exchange about this upthread, contrasting WC consensus economics and Studwell's success sequence.
In that exchange I pointed out that Vietnam has done pretty well following the Studwell success sequence - massive export focus, "export discipline," trying to ascend the value chain. They just haven't gotten to developed status, and if they do, are on a very slow boat there compared to Korea or Japan or China, and they're having trouble ascending the value chain because a huge percentage of their exports are Chinese companies coming there for cheaper labor, and Chinese companies generally don't process-and-knowledge share like Western companies do.
And I think they're genuinely better off not having followed WC, for basically the reasons you're articulating here.
I also think WC is genuinely a bad choice for a lot of countries, because when a country has the combination of market dominant minorities (which is a plurality of them), WC locks in a dynamic that benefits those MDM in a way that basically won't trickle down, and keeps incentive structures in place in a way that strives to keep labor cheap and the manufacturing value tier low. There's no real incentive to share the wealth, MDM + political buy-in and collusion ensures that taxes and benefits stay low and regulatory barriers remain high. There's basically a gap where entrepreneurs can be small or mid tier but can never break into the large tier due to systemic barriers and entrenched MDM players. WC policies in countries like that (a majority of countries in SE Asia, South and Central America, etc), just tend to entrench that dynamic.
It sounds like you believe that: today, the average joe outsources everything to specialists. But ancient peoples had to do everything themselves. So logically, they *must* have learned about things like supply & demand via first-hand experience.
Now, I don't know what the official stance of "the literature" is. But my impression is that this wasn't really the case? Or at least, I'd be surprised if that were the case. E.g. if you look at the Maori, instead of concepts like "profit" and "ROI", they had "mana" [0]. "mana" means something like "if you give things away, you get a lot of prestige and magic powers".
Or another influence was reading about Kevin Simler's breakdown of status [1][2]. basically, ancient economies ran on status. but status actually came in two types: admiration and dominance.
Recently, i read the Psmith's bookreview [3] of a book about cargocults. the book argued that cargocults were completely logical from the standpoint of their belief system. which was that "if you dance and offer things to the gods, you get rewarded with cargo". The airplanes from the whiteman had lots of cargo, so logically, their gods must have been more generous or something.
To me, none of this gives me the impression that modern concepts like "supply & demand" are intuitive in any way. ("trade is vaguely beneficial" is the only exception I'll make.) Like, the namesake of LessWrong refers to the fact that everyone's minds run on cheap heuristics instead of computing reality with six-sigma precision.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana_(Oceanic_cultures)
[1] https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole/
[2] https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-ii-cults-and-loyalty/
[3] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-peter
Yeah, interesting point.
I love the Psmith's and remember that review fondly - however, I think this is sort of a degenerate case, where one side is so vastly overpowered relative to the other economic concepts don't really generalize or apply - after all, the cargo culters really had nothing of value to exchange.
If we think back to the worlds where it was HG's interacting and trading with each other, your status and prestige points I think map back to supply / demand and price discovery again, at least at a certain level of abstraction.
Because what was the primary occasion when a lot of wealth / value was most useful? Bride price! Attracting mates! Reproductive success, the ultima ratio regum of what matters in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness.
And status and prestige have always been more powerful than dominance, roughly 1.5x as powerful in terms of "being attractive to women" in the literature.
I think this shows us that people were still very much considering hours invested and ROI, and they were mostly cashing it in on the most valuable, important thing there is - the highest ROI thing being "fertile women being attracted to you and having your children."
They were arguably doing much sharper economics than our perambulatory blob earning money and buying Big Gulps!
Back to the prestige and dominance point.
Prestige is generally ~1.5x stronger than dominance in terms of "being attractive to women," and men routinely, vastly overestimate how attractive dominance is, thinking it's close to prestige when it's notably weaker.
https://imgur.com/a/7onYusg
We can take this back to HG's too. In the Tsimane, the trend continues, and prestige is a positive buff on descendants for the last two quartiles, but dominance only for the last quartile.
https://imgur.com/a/kMmyqaG
From an entire post I wrote titled: Men think women want dominance, but what they really want is prestige
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/men-think-women-want-dominance-but
> To me, none of this gives me the impression that modern concepts like "supply & demand" are intuitive in any way.
Yeah, I think you can probably argue this. We've obviously been tuned over millions of years for the "status and prestige" game, and don't necessarily need to think about it, it's been baked in even at the less wrong "low resolution heuristics" level.
I still do think that a HG trading a bow and arrow they made for an axe or article of clothing somebody else made (for example), and certainly doing so at a larger aggregate level (like the infamous "one tribe lays things out on one bank of the river, your counterparty tribe lays out another quantity of stuff, and eventually when both sides are acceptable, the trade happens," directly taps into supply and demand and price discovery concepts, and does so in a more direct-at-the-individual-understanding way than our blobs buying stuff on Amazon.
But maybe this is a special case, and the vast majority of HG existence is in an altruistic, egalitarian framework where everyone has been tuned and cultured into sharing and sharing alike for most things, in direct contravention of most economic concepts.
Also maybe-obvious-in-retrospect extensions like applying supply and demand to the value of money, of risk, etc.
Also, my limited understanding of causes of crushes suggest being much more forgiving for the inability of economists to predict them. They won't be able to predict wars or trade wars, neither large enough companies successfully confusing themselves with complicated financial instruments, or similar correlated irrationality. It's much, but not everything
Fama followed Mandelbrot in pointing out distributions were stable rather than Gaussian in his EMH paper many decades ago. Few cared about that because stable distributions work the same as Gaussian ones for so many purposes used in econ.
Taleb is unreliable. On economics, he claims that the mainstream is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller while his approach of betting on black swans works better. Logically this means sellers of insurance should be the sort of company most prone to going bankrupt... but the data indicates otherwise https://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs-black-swan.html
He's also notoriously unreliable on IQ, but that's not what you were talking about.
Most economists weren't trying to predict recessions at all. Per the EMH, we shouldn't expect to be able to predict them in advance, as they would then happen immediately.
The Washington Consensus is blamed by people who argue on behalf of protectionism, but protectionism hasn't worked that well for developing countries that tried it. There have been posts here about Studwell's "How Asia Works" discussing that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how
I wanted to link to a recent blog post criticizing Ha Joon Chang on English history, but can't find it now.
> The Washington Consensus is blamed by people who argue on behalf of protectionism, but protectionism hasn't worked that well for developing countries that tried it. There have been posts here about Studwell's "How Asia Works" discussing that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how
Yeah, I actually wrote an "against Studwell" post too.
But you can be both against Studwell and against Washington Consensus! I actually think there probably ISN'T a well-defined rules-based road to full economic growth and prosperity for a good 2/3 of the world, and this is why neither Studwell nor WC economics can get anyone there.
Some places may be hampered by bad geography, human capital etc but that doesn't mean they'd be better off deviating from the WC.
> Some places may be hampered by bad geography, human capital etc but that doesn't mean they'd be better off deviating from the WC.
I don't know - Vietnam has done pretty well following the Studwell success sequence - massive export focus, "export discipline," trying to ascend the value chain. They just haven't gotten to developed status, and if they do, are on a very slow boat there compared to Korea or Japan or China, and they're having trouble ascending the value chain because a huge percentage of their exports are Chinese companies coming there for cheaper labor, and Chinese companies generally don't process-and-knowledge share like Western companies do.
I think they're genuinely better off not having followed WC.
I also think WC is genuinely a bad choice for a lot of countries, because when a country has the combination of market dominant minorities (which is a plurality of them), WC locks in a dynamic that benefits those MDM in a way that basically won't trickle down, and keeps incentive structures in place in a way that strives to keep labor cheap and the manufacturing value tier low. There's no real incentive to share the wealth, MDM + political buy-in and collusion ensures that taxes and benefits stay low and regulatory barriers remain high. There's basically a gap where entrepreneurs can be small or mid tier but can never break into the large tier due to systemic barriers and entrenched MDM players. WC policies in countries like that (a majority of countries in SE Asia, South and Central America, etc), just tend to entrench that dynamic.
Of course the biggest factor for the great majority of countries (US very much included) is quality of leadership. When your institutions suck and your leadership sucks and everyone from the top down is maximally grabby and short term in thinking, you're never going to get anything done, because those things destroy all capabilities for longer term planning and growth.
You acknowledge that Vietnam is doing worse than other east asian countries, and the reviews of Studwell's book pointed out that the relative success of those countries doesn't line up with how much Studwell approves of their policies.
As Garett Jones points out, market-dominant minorities like the overseas Chinese make their host country's economies better off. Vietnam wound up worse off for so many of them leaving as "boat people", just as Uganda wound up worse off after expelling Indians. Economic growth really does "trickle down", which is why even the poor want to be near the rich driving growth. Labor isn't cheap because some minority decides it should be, labor is cheap because there's an abundance of it in low-productivity sectors like agriculture and informal businesses. Who is going to build factories to soak up labor and increase productivity? Capitalists, themselves frequently MDMs.
India has lots of small businesses in the informal sector. This isn't because MDMs rigged the game to protect a small number of big companies. It's because the Indian regulatory system has long been hostile to big business (Nehru was sympathetic to socialism, and Gandhi liked small-scale traditionalist agrarianism) and has lots of regulations that come into place beyond a certain number of employees. People rely on their relatives rather than searching for the best employees, because they know they can't rely on the legal system for disputes. Really, if a country started importing lots of overseas Chinese, then it would no longer be a matter of a small number of them that could constitute a monopoly/oligopoly, and instead a large number competing with each other.
Yeah, I think we agree about 70% here.
Yes, I agree the Studwell "success sequence" largely isn't working for Vietnam in the sense of replicating Korea or Japan or even China's path, but I also think it's actually true they're probably better off having tried vs going for WC policies, because they do have a better shot under this regime, it's just harder / slower than their E Asian compatriots. I also agree the Studwell "success sequence" is probably fake overall!
My review to that effect: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/studwells-how-asia-works-review?r=17hw9h
And I think we mostly agree on MDM's - MDM's are good! They're literally job creators! The countries that have expropriated them always nuke their economies for ten years and then have to beg for them to come back!
The point where MDM's turn bad is this one:
If you look at all the billionaire families in Asia, they get there largely via connections and built-in monopolies backed by regulation / government contracts in things like electricity, commodities, telecom, casinos, and so on. And then these same families build other businesses, the "conglomerate" model is huge out there - think Vingroup in Vietnam, or SMDC in Philippines, or CP group in Thailand. So at the core of each one is a giant money printer monopoly built on the backs of the tens of millions of people in the country, where they provide genuinely worse services for genuinely higher prices than in the West, and then they use that money printer to diversify into a bunch of other stuff. But because they're plugged in at the very top, nobody else can really enter the spaces they enter, at the scale they enter - they lock out genuine competition at the large scale. And this is a big drag on growth and efficiency for all these countries.
Why don't the other connected billionaire families compete with each other? Because that social sphere is small and connected across all of Asia, and they're smart enough that they basically collude and carve up the markets such that they don't have to.
Studwell actually wrote a book that touches on this one too, that's in my own opinion, better than How Asia Works - it's called Asian Godfathers. Amy Chua, of "how to tiger-mother your kids into Harvard" fame, also wrote one, and she herself is from an MDM family from the Philippines. Hers is called World on Fire.
We may not know how to cause growth reliably, but we certainly know a lot of things that will reliably reduce growth, and people keep doing them anyway.
I might actually go further than this; I think a lot of economics 101 concepts are based on fundamentally false premises. Not that literally everything within the field of economics is false, but some very basic and foundational notions in economics are wrong, and reasoning based on those is necessarily unsound.
For one, basic economic notions about preferences are rooted in false assumptions. Liking and wanting things are separate and highly decoupled processes in humans. It's possible to want very badly to do or have something, to know that you do not like that thing, and will not be happy doing or having it, and still be unable to resist doing or getting it anyway. The whole notion that people will systematically become happier or better off by pursuing preferences which are defined in terms of things that they want, rather than things that they like, is fundamentally faulty.
For another, many, perhaps most people, do not act like rational agents pursuing the best satisfaction of their wants with limited resources anyway. For these people, if they have limited resources, and access to a wide range of things that have value to them, they will spend their resources on things that they think are valuable to them (possibly above a certain threshold) in whatever order they notice first, until they no longer have resources available to spend, at which point they're forced to stop.
These two factors mean that basic economic assumptions about value- whether economic activities generate it, how much they can be inferred to produce, etc., are also faulty. Some economic activities clearly do leave people better off, but we cannot infer from the fact that the market reinforces an activity that it leaves people better off on net.
Personally, I am very, very bad at avoiding drawn-out online debates, and I don't enjoy having them (I want them, but don't like them.) So, I usually avoid discussing this online, because it seems like a risk factor for having extremely drawn-out debates which I would dislike very much, but wouldn't be able to resist if the temptation were right in front of me. But I'm prepared to discuss the evidence that leads me to these conclusions, and if you'd like to collaborate on putting together a larger case against economics which I wouldn't have to be responsible for presenting publicly and dealing with the reception of, I'd be willing to participate.
> For these people, if they have limited resources, and access to a wide range of things that have value to them, they will spend their resources on things that they think are valuable to them (possibly above a certain threshold) in whatever order they notice first, until they no longer have resources available to spend, at which point they're forced to stop.
Yeah, I'd be pretty interested in the evidence around this one.
> Some economic activities clearly do leave people better off, but we cannot infer from the fact that the market reinforces an activity that it leaves people better off on net.
I think even economists would agree here? Isn't this what most of behavioral economics is about?
> But I'm prepared to discuss the evidence that leads me to these conclusions, and if you'd like to collaborate on putting together a larger case against economics which I wouldn't have to be responsible for presenting publicly and dealing with the reception of, I'd be willing to participate.
Sure, I have a decent number of subcribers and would be happy to write a post about this if we get it to an interesting place.
>Yeah, I'd be pretty interested in the evidence around this one.
So, the thing that coalesced this impression for me was a reddit thread a couple years or so back on r/changemyview, where the OP offered the position, for other commenters to argue against, that a purchase can be not worth the money, even if you enjoyed it, if you could have spent the same money on something else that you would have liked even more.
Under standard economic models, this is too obvious to be worth having a conversation about. This is the basic preference-optimizing operation people are assumed to be doing all the time. If your money can make Purchase A, which buys you 100 utils, or Purchase B, which buys 200 utils, you should always choose B over A, and doing otherwise is a waste.
But this discussion was full of people who argued that this was insane, that nobody would possibly live like that, that the very idea was absurd. And since this was a debate thread, where the whole point was to engage with people to try to understand and potentially change their views, there were a lot of people involved representing the standard economic position, who pushed back on this and probed the people who disagreed to expand on what they meant and explain how they operated in real life, and expected other people to. And so, the discussion was full of people who explained that when they get their paychecks, they'll make whatever purchases seem like a good idea to them, as they notice them, up until they run out of disposable funds, and they can't buy anything again until they get their next paycheck. They explicitly affirmed that they do not hold onto their money and wait until they take stock of the different options available to them, prioritize them, and spend their money on the things they want more. They often find themselves thinking it'd be nice if they'd hung onto their money so they could buy some other thing instead, although they do not necessarily spend their money on that thing next time they get paid, because something else may grab their attention instead. The idea of prioritizing so that you maximize the value to you of each purchase was so alien to many of them that many refused to believe that anyone does anything like that, even as a broad abstraction. Most of them insisted to the ends of their respective threads that if you enjoyed something you spent money on, then it cannot ever be considered a waste, no matter how much more you could have enjoyed something else you could have spent the same money on.
Some people, I think can be modeled as basically behaving according to economic models of value maximization (at at least want-maximization. Liking and wanting being separate processes, I don't think it's good modeling to collapse these into a single notion of "preference maximization.") But if a significant portion of people are not behaving in a way that corresponds to that model, then the model can't be used to accurately describe the behavior of the population as a whole.
>I think even economists would agree here? Isn't this what most of behavioral economics is about?
At least sort of? Behavioral economics recognizes that people don't necessarily make rational decisions according to classical economic models, but the behavioral economics I've read has largely framed this in terms of exploring biases that impede people from behaving optimally according to classical economic models. I don't think this goes far enough, I don't think classical economic models even describe a broad level approximation of behavior that people deviate from in certain key respects.
To use an analogy, it's kind of like classical economics says that people navigate by compasses that seek magnetic North, allowing them to find their directions by heading, while behavioral economists point out that there are things that can bias people's ability to navigate, like power cables distorting local magnetic fields, or a difference in location between magnetic North and geographical North. By contrast, I'd argue that most people don't even have compasses in the first place.
> Some people, I think can be modeled as basically behaving according to economic models of value maximization (at at least want-maximization. Liking and wanting being separate processes, I don't think it's good modeling to collapse these into a single notion of "preference maximization.") But if a significant portion of people are not behaving in a way that corresponds to that model, then the model can't be used to accurately describe the behavior of the population as a whole.
Your conclusion is false. The model can accurately describe the behavior of the population as a whole even if it is inaccurate as to every individual within the population. The operation of the system is enough to ensure that the results closely match what would have happened if people wanted nothing more than to follow the model.
Consider how we say "water seeks its own level" even though water molecules do nothing of the kind.
I don't think that's actually true in this case. I mean, yes, we can model water with a model that doesn't apply to individual water molecules, but it isn't meant to apply to individual water molecules. Economic models actually are meant to be able to model the behaviors of small numbers of individuals in ways that I think that they simply fail to do. You can make a model which is perfectly valid as an extrapolation of its premises, and still have it fail to correspond to reality.
Liking and wanting being separate and highly decoupled processes, so that it's entirely possible for people to vigorously pursue things that will not make them happy, even things that they know will not make them happy, and people en masse not prioritizing their expenditure of resources to maximize expected value, are not deviations from standard economic models that we should expect their predictive power to survive, in much the way that you would not expect the ideal gas law to correctly model the behavior of a crystalline solid.
Okay, I think this is the Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/18vfjra/cmv_money_spent_on_having_fun_can_still_be_wasted/
Can you confirm?
Reading through it I didn't really see anyone directly advocating for the pattern you suggested, although many pointed in their direction in a theoretical sense.
And even if we take it as given, how broken is that approach, really?
It's basically a "limited information" approach, right? Just timewise rather than research-wise. It's "of the limited options in front of you right now, which do you choose" instead of "in a time-independent array of options, which do you choose."
And unless people were going broke doing this, it seems fine? Like as long as they're covering their bills and obligations, why is it any worse? Value is subjective, revealed preference is a good heuristic, etc? Those people probably intrinisically value NOT "doing the research" and not thinking about tradeoffs and not thinking ahead all the time to the extent the premium they're paying in foregone efficiency is demonstrably worth avoiding those things.
> behavioral economists point out that there are things that can bias people's ability to navigate, like power cables distorting local magnetic fields, or a difference in location between magnetic North and geographical North. By contrast, I'd argue that most people don't even have compasses in the first place.
Okay, but wouldn't "not having compasses" be not meeting your obligations? Like you see a shiny and buy that and you can't cover rent?
If not, isn't it just a matter of degree and not kind? They value not being really analytical and long-term in their thinking, and happily pay the premium.
People pay for convenience all the time - paying somebody to do your laundry, watch your kids, clean your house, pay for takeout and restaurant food every meal - arguably all dumb moves from a maximal efficiency standpoint for a lot of people. Yet they're happy to pay, because that's their revealed preference, and they don't necessarily value "efficiency" in that way.
I guess I don't understand why this is a damning indictment of "homo economicus," because it just seems like it's a different set of preferences, or a different set of acting under limited information.
>Can you confirm?
So, I'm honestly not sure, the topic seems similar to what I remember, but the comments don't elicit a sense of recognition, and I can't locate a number of specific exchanges that I distinctly remember following. But, memory being as fallible as it is, I can't say for certain that this isn't the right thread either.
>Reading through it I didn't really see anyone directly advocating for the pattern you suggested, although many pointed in their direction in a theoretical sense.
>And even if we take it as given, how broken is that approach, really?
>It's basically a "limited information" approach, right? Just timewise rather than research-wise. It's "of the limited options in front of you right now, which do you choose" instead of "in a time-independent array of options, which do you choose."
>And unless people were going broke doing this, it seems fine? Like as long as they're covering their bills and obligations, why is it any worse? Value is subjective, revealed preference is a good heuristic, etc? Those people probably intrinisically value NOT "doing the research" and not thinking about tradeoffs and not thinking ahead all the time to the extent the premium they're paying in foregone efficiency is demonstrably worth avoiding those things.
I'm not saying it's necessarily worse, but I am saying it's a significant deviation from how economists usually model people's behavior. Although, I absolutely have known people who go broke from this behavior, who need to "borrow" from friends and family (read, continually beg for money which they will never be able to pay back) in order to pay for necessities like rent and groceries.
But I think this is a significant departure from standard economic modeling, even if that were not the case. Because it's not just "of this limited array of things in front of me, which do I prefer?" In many cases, it's "Do I want to get this one thing in front of me, not considering any alternative uses of my money at all?"
While the reddit thread (whether that was the correct one or not) was the impetus that coalesced that understanding for me, I have a lot of people in my social circles who live paycheck to paycheck, whose behavior I've had the chance to observe over time, and since reading that thread, I've taken the time to question a number of them about their choices and reasoning, and I think it's reasonable to say that for a least a substantial number of people, they're genuinely just not thinking about tradeoffs when they make these purchases.
>Okay, but wouldn't "not having compasses" be not meeting your obligations? Like you see a shiny and buy that and you can't cover rent?
>If not, isn't it just a matter of degree and not kind? They value not being really analytical and long-term in their thinking, and happily pay the premium.
>People pay for convenience all the time - paying somebody to do your laundry, watch your kids, clean your house, pay for takeout and restaurant food every meal - arguably all dumb moves from a maximal efficiency standpoint for a lot of people. Yet they're happy to pay, because that's their revealed preference, and they don't necessarily value "efficiency" in that way.
>I guess I don't understand why this is a damning indictment of "homo economicus," because it just seems like it's a different set of preferences, or a different set of acting under limited information.
In a sense, I think this can be considered as a particular set of preferences, and I've described it as such before. But, I think it's a set of preferences that breaks some pretty fundamental assumptions of economic models.
I think that the first point I mentioned, that liking and wanting are separate processes, is extremely important here (of the two, I'd regard it as significantly more important than the second.) I'm more introspective about my purchases than most people I know, and I can attest that I've spent money on a repeat basis on things that absolutely made me less happy in comparison to buying nothing at all and just deleting the money from my bank account. I don't think I'm an outlier in this, I've talked to plenty of other people who acknowledged doing the same when I invited them to consider the question. The value people receive from purchases spans a wide range which includes negative values, and people do not reliably order their purchases according to what will give them more satisfaction, businesses systematically take advantage of this in their own pursuit of profit.
I think that phenomena like the "vibecession," which cash out as "people think things are doing badly even though economic indicators are actually good," are best understood at least in part in light of the context that economic indicators are not actually well aligned with things that make people feel like their lives are doing well in the first place.
Still gathering my thoughts on the rest of it, but this one really struck me:
> I'm more introspective about my purchases than most people I know, and I can attest that I've spent money on a repeat basis on things that absolutely made me less happy in comparison to buying nothing at all and just deleting the money from my bank account. I don't think I'm an outlier in this
I'm genuinely surprised! I don't think I ever do this, but maybe I'm just not introspective enough?
Like is this a "I buy junk food / ice cream and then end up eating it all and regret it" type thing? That's the only case I can really come up with that might be common enough to happen in a broad cross section of people.
Oh, maybe gambling too?
Like what are the cases where you've seen this to be true in yourself and others?
What economics really needs is some kind of credibility revolution! Hey wait that sounds kind of familiar.
I suspect that you have a negative view of econometrics because Taleb likes to make himself sound smart by painting everyone else as morons.
What do you think about the work being done by Chetty on social mobility? I feel like most people aware of economics have probably heard of his stuff.
> I suspect that you have a negative view of econometrics because Taleb likes to make himself sound smart by painting everyone else as morons.
Yeah, he definitely does, but I worked in finance for a decade, and a lot of it comes from that, too.
> What do you think about the work being done by Chetty on social mobility? I feel like most people aware of economics have probably heard of his stuff.
Thanks for the pointer. I would put this in the "not even wrong" category, because Greg Clark has looked at the higher level and shown really comprehensively that measuring "income" as a social mobility endpoint is basically measuring noise, and all the happy "hooray, we have .15 social persistence" endpoints in Sweden and Denmark and whatever are fake.
If instead you look at a conjoined endpoint containing more status markers (educational attainment, income, wealth, occupational prestige), you see that basically every country in the world has ~.75 persistence rates, and has for essentially all of observable history. This includes going across educational regimes from "only rich sons get educated in expensive private schools" to everyone gets state funded education through Phd" too, so education doesn't move social mobility at all.
The impossibly large gains Chetty points to are fake, too. $400k more lifetime earnings for moving from 25th to 75th percentile neighborhoods? Roll to disbelieve.
It's not an observed effect, it's an extrapolation, aka they made it up. They're literally saying okay, now pretend the kids that move are now EXACTLY like the kids in the better neighborhoods and applying their distribution signal SD's to the poor kids. But Clark's point is that you CANNOT assume that! The blank slate is affirmatively NOT true! The reason social persistence is so high is because the gene + culture package in high and low attainment families are incredibly strong and persistent.
In real life (aka observed results), some portion of the poor kids moved a third of the way up to the richer kids' delta's medians, and some of the poor kids actually did WORSE after moving. And they haven't really been tracked enough to observe fade out effects. But I would bet very strongly they are not going to attain $400k more lifetime earnings, even in the "net positive" subset of kids, and certainly not across the aggregate including "winners" and losers." I'm betting on 0-$50k (66%), maybe 0-$100k (33%) lifetime effects.
There's a fun paper here that looks at "birth length" which cannot be affected by neighborhood and sees similar effects.
"The neighborhood exposure effects estimated in prominent recent studies only reflect the correlational estimates of place effects and not causal effects."
"This paper also conducts a placebo test to examine the credibility of the estimation strategies for identifying long-run neighborhood effects in the extant literature. I exploit the dataon birth characteristics such as birth length, realized at age zero, i.e., before neighborhood exposure comes into play. The destination area cannot directly impact children’s birth characteristics for the sample of children whose families move across neighborhoods during childhood. One would expect to obtain statistically insignificant estimates from the methodology of Chetty and Hendren (2018a) when investigating the relationship between characteristics realized at birth and later moves across neighborhoods during childhood. Nonetheless, the estimated relationship is similar to that of Chetty and Hendren (2018a) and Chetty et al. (2020). The similarities between the placebo estimates and the exposure effect estimates suggest that the estimates of exposure effects on adulthood outcomes in the literature pick up the sorting of heterogeneous families across areas rather than neighborhood causal impacts. Moreover, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that the placebo estimates closely imitate the disparities in the exposure estimates across specifications and subgroups, further challenging the validity of the recent approaches to measuring causal effects of place."
https://jenni.uchicago.edu/econ341/readings/Eshaghnia_2023_Zip-Code-Destiny.pdf
> If you're listening to Greg Clark over Chetty, you're not seriously interested in empirics and falsifiability. Chetty is pretty much the gold standard for data-driven social research, and Clark is somewhere between "guy with interesting contrarian ideas" and "crank".
Thanks - do you have any debunking of Son Also Rises you can point me to?
Because it's not just a sui generis story, it plugs into a lot of outside stuff, like education sucking and not moving the needle in any country, parents provably overinvesting in their kids with zero buff to actual outcomes, and literally what you see with your Mark 1 eyeball in terms of persistence. If persistence were really the .15 - .25 some places like to pretend, you'd visibly see HUGE moves up and down in children relative to their parents and grandparents just in your immediate monkeysphere - nobody does.
And on Chetty, I read that paper myself and it really looked like dogshit to me, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to pass out houses to 25th percentile people for a rounding error buff in half their kids' adult income based on it, but maybe I'm just not well versed in the domain. There's certainly no way that nets positive in terms of expense-to-state vs returns-to-state.
Care to write a few bullet points on why he's the gold standard?
Any outside sources you can point me to? Like sure, he has a kinda impressive h-index, but that really doesn't mean anything, I'm sure we can point to high h-index people in any academic domain. It doesn't mean their ideas are correct or predictive.
Do you have macroeconomics and microeconomics backwards? My understanding is that MICRO-economics is the generally unobjectionable and basically-mathematics one,while MACRO-economics is the horseshit "Eye of Newt, and Wing of Flea, what is next year's GDP" which South Park perfectly depicted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY.
Yeah sorry, I was unclear, I meant "macro concepts" like specialization and trade being good, I agree macro is the main voodoo domain.
What do Mandelbrot and Taleb actually say?
It seems to me that your argument proves too much. Apply it to earthquakes, which definitely have a power law distribution. The standard deviation of the strength of earthquakes is not useful. Predicting earthquakes is nigh impossible. But we should still measure the strength of individual earthquakes. And we do use gaussian methods to do that. The standard error of the measurement of the earthquake is useful, even if the standard deviation of the earthquake is not.
> What do Mandelbrot and Taleb actually say?
They're literally book-length topics, but here's my best crack at a synopsis:
“Remember this: the Gaussian–bell curve variations face a headwind that makes probabilities drop at a faster and faster rate as you move away from the mean, while “scalables,” or Mandelbrotian variations, do not have such a restriction. That’s pretty much most of what you need to know.*”
“Let us look more closely at the nature of inequality. In the Gaussian framework, inequality decreases as the deviations get larger—caused by the increase in the rate of decrease. Not so with the scalable: inequality stays the same throughout. ”
“Consider this effect. Take a random sample of any two people from the U.S. population who jointly earn $1 million per annum. What is the most likely breakdown of their respective incomes? In Mediocristan, the most likely combination is half a million each. In Extremistan, it would be $50,000 and $950,000.The situation is even more lopsided with book sales.
If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies. For any large total, the breakdown will be more and more asymmetric.Why is this so?
The height problem provides a comparison. If I told you that the total height of two people is fourteen feet, you would identify the most likely breakdown as seven feet each, not two feet and twelve feet; not even eight feet and six feet! Persons taller than eight feet are so rare that such a combination would be impossible.”
“Likewise, Gerd Gigerenzer reports a more serious violation on the part of Harry Markowitz, who started a method called “portfolio selection” and received the same iatrogenic Swedish Riskbank prize (called “Nobel” in economics) for it, like other fragilistas such as Fragilista Merton and Fragilista Stiglitz. I spent part of my adult life calling it charlatanism, as it has no validity outside of academic endorsements and causes blowups (as explained in the Appendix). Well, Doctor Professor Fragilista Markowitz does not use his method for his own portfolio; he has recourse to more sophisticated (and simpler to implement) cabdrivers’ methodologies, closer to the one Mandelbrot and I have proposed.”
“I’ll summarize here and repeat the arguments previously made throughout the book. Measures of uncertainty that are based on the bell curve simply disregard the possibility, and the impact, of sharp jumps or discontinuities and are, therefore, inapplicable in Extremistan. Using them is like focusing on the grass and missing out on the (gigantic) trees.
Although unpredictable large deviations are rare, they cannot be dismissed as outliers because, cumulatively, their impact is so dramatic.The traditional Gaussian way of looking at the world begins by focusing on the ordinary, and then deals with exceptions or so-called outliers as ancillaries.
But there is a second way, which takes the exceptional as a starting point and treats the ordinary as subordinate.I have emphasized that there are two varieties of randomness, qualitatively different, like air and water. One does not care about extremes; the other is severely impacted by them. One does not generate Black Swans; the other does. We cannot use the same techniques to discuss a gas as we would use with a liquid. And if we could, we wouldn’t call the approach “an approximation.” A gas does not “approximate” a liquid.”
Yeah, I've read several books by Taleb, although not by Mandelbrot, and he doesn't say "economics is basically fake." Maybe he says finance is fake.
In your quote he says that the distribution of wealth is not normal, so you could make mistakes by treating it as normal. Does anyone make such mistakes? With out such a concrete complaint, it makes as much sense to apply that paragraph to earthquakes and say that seismology is fake.
Or to take another example, Taleb condemns Pinker's Better Angels. I think what he's saying is that the long-tailed distribution of deaths in wars is much more important than the normal distribution of deaths to murder. Pinker is paying too much attention to deaths from murder. Does that make that work fake? If we traded higher variance deaths from wars for lower average deaths from murder, we made a bad trade. But it wasn't a trade, so we should analyze the components separately. In net, maybe the world has gotten worse and Pinker's conclusion is backwards, but is it useful to summarize that as Pinker's book is fake? Does this example make you confident you know what Taleb is saying about anyone else?
Maybe the condemnation of Stiglitz is the start of a condemnation of all of economics (as opposed to Merton and Markowitz, who do finance, irrelevant to, eg, central bank policy). But I think you just have no idea what economists say, let alone what is Taleb's disagreement with them.
> Does anyone make such mistakes?
Yeah, finance and banking does, repeatedly, in risk and reserve models, I've seen it myself.
In the broader sense, anytime an economist looks at a "natural experiment" and pretends it's generalizable, it's making a series of assumptions about the underlying distributions and tails that is nearly always wrong, and this is why things like minimum wage, negative income tax, etc have no economic consensus, and why natural experiments and other things like that so rarely contribute anything to our broader sphere of knowledge.
> In net, maybe the world has gotten worse and Pinker's conclusion is backwards, but is it useful to summarize that as Pinker's book is fake?
Yes, if we made policy decisions that neglected the tail risk of war and then slipped into a bigger megadeath than any war up to that point, it would be useful to have considered Pinker's work fake / inapplicable to geopolitics and other domains.
> But I think you just have no idea what economists say, let alone what is Taleb's disagreement with them.
Well, this is why I started this thread - sure, I admit I'm ignorant. What great stuff are economists coming up with that I'm ignorant of? That's the purpose of this thread.
I think I've basically covered all the areas where economics drives value, and admit I have pretty limited knowledge, so I'm looking for those areas I've missed.
Usually I try to opt towards mistake theory rather than conflict theory. But I think a conflict theory take on macro-economics is interesting, at least as a thought experiment. One function of economists is to do things like say "you can't cut spending during a recession. Spending needs to be counter-cyclical." And this promotes the interests of the political classes who want to maintain the flow of cash, especially discretionary spending, flowing through their hands.
Of course, spending is never cut during a boom. At most, it is restrained like during the Clinton years due to partisan conflicts. The result is that government spending is never cut.
Isn't macroeconomics ludicrous trash with that viewpoint? (The haruspicy you complain about is going on in macro, not micro, you know.) However, it should be recalled that a lot of macro decisions are made wrt politics, not economic optimality. For instance, why target a 2% inflation rate? It seemed politically acceptable at the time. Never mind that the targeting tends to fail. (Is this what we call a Schelling point?)
At the other end, I seem to recall that one can measure price elasticity and such, so microeconomics might at least have some empirical foundations. Other things are still at the spherical cow stage. For example, assuming economic man might be better seen as 'best possible outcome' rather than 'everyone is like this'. Yet in some high-value areas, like certain auctions (or finance??) it seems people are moving towards optimal behavior.
Econometrics: trying to measure GDP might be a fool's errand. Notice how often it gets substantially adjusted months after the numbers were released.
Is there really a pure apolitical economics, though? It seems to me there are left and right wing economists.
There are lots of topics within econ. I don't think they all have such divisions.
A too complex topic for me to venture into here and now. (Perhaps ever!)
They target 2% inflation to address "sticky wages." I'm kind of surprised the far left hasn't spent more time howling about that.
Perhaps it's set at a level to keep the howls down.
> (The haruspicy you complain about is going on in macro, not micro, you know.)
Yeah, sorry, I realize what I said might seem confusing. The 20% I consider good stuff includes macro *concepts* like specialization an trade being good, but you're right, as practiced, most of the voodoo is macro.
I think you've picked out the hardest and, in some sense, some of the least scientific test cases*, and applied it to the whole field. Things like GDP forecasts and the stock market are what the average person might think of when the think about "economics" but, contrary to your claim, I think a significant majority of economists are employed at universities and work in micro (and/or work at private companies, but in either case you just never hear about them).
There's also a major problem where economists say something, get ignored, and then get blamed for failures of policy they advocated against.
I think if you were to look through the bulk of the academic research, rather than the parts that get the most attention from the public and government, you would find a great deal of work that is not related to any of the parts you criticize, and at least potentially valuable.
*As in, cases that are the most difficult to evaluate. For example, if a whole country over decades is a data point, there are inherently few data points, and also many factors involved other than just what economists say (e.g. politics) which are impossible to control for, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to evaluate the field's performance. Or anything involving stocks, for EMH reasons.
edit: oh yeah, and nothing about economics assumes Gaussians. Not sure where that part came from.
> I think if you were to look through the bulk of the academic research, rather than the parts that get the most attention from the public and government, you would find a great deal of work that is not related to any of the parts you criticize, and at least potentially valuable.
Sure, and I've read Tim Harford's books and Freakonomics and Thinking Fast and Slow and things like that, and many of the ideas and practices they talk about seem useful to know. But again, a lot of those are just 'pay attention to incentives' and other 101 concepts, the 20% I already pointed to.
What does the more rigorous academic research get into that isn't covered by those?
> edit: oh yeah, and nothing about economics assumes Gaussians. Not sure where that part came from.
Yeah, this is mostly banking / finance - I was in that industry for a while, and most risk and reserve models use Gaussians, even though it's blown up countless times.
Incentives are a wee bit more complex than the introductory level. Not to mention that they are even harder to apply.
I would consider finance to be at most a highly specific subfield of economics, or a separate field with overlap.
> But again, a lot of those are just 'pay attention to incentives' and other 101 concepts, the 20% I already pointed to.
How are you counting things, such that this part ends up at "20%"? My point was that I think this is actually the bulk of the field, it just receives less attention from non-economists. And there is a lot of work beyond "pay attention to incentives." Especially think Thinking Fast and Slow. If you want a one-sentence high level summary of lessons, then yeah, there's only going to be so many of those before you have to dive into the details.
>*As in, cases that are the most difficult to evaluate. For example, if a whole country over decades is a data point, there are inherently few data points, and also many factors involved other than just what economists say (e.g. politics) which are impossible to control for, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to evaluate the field's performance. Or anything involving stocks, for EMH reasons
That's not saying macroeconomics works, it's saying there's a reason why it d oesnt.
If someone refuses to take a vaccine and dies from a preventable disease because of it, does that mean medicine doesn't work?
Not analogous, because most people take vaccines, and they mostly work. But most governments take economic advice, and it mostly doesnt -- recessions keep happening.
There really was a "Great Moderation" as the Federal Reserve managed to keep inflation low & stable for a long time.
> But most governments take economic advice, and it mostly doesnt -- recessions keep happening.
I don't think this is true. Or at least, it's not true in sense that would mean economics "not work" in any meaningful way. Governments sometimes take some advice from economists, when it's convenient. They often ignore it. And to simply say "recessions keep happening"--I follow my doctor's advice, but I still keep getting sick! Sometimes there's only so much you can do, and forces outside of your control become relevant.
Looking at an entire government and an entire economy introduces many confounding factors. Consider something narrower, like a central bank. There's a lot of research showing that places with an independent central bank (i.e. one run by economists rather than politicians) have lower and more consistent inflation (e.g. look at Hungary before and after Orban took it over).
Most governments *don't* take economic advise - not the credible economic advice at least. They may take advice from "economists" whose role is to give advice that promotes the interests of people in power.
Consider, for example, all the corporatist policies like subsidizing this or that or spending money on boondoggles, which is not at all what disinterested economists would recommend, but is highly profitable for those will good political connections.
Economics doesn't assume that everything has a Gaussian distribution. Some economists may, even when there is every reason to think it's not appropriate, but there are idiots in every field.
More fundamentally, the basic concepts that you accept are (in more elaborate forms) the core of the discipline. Actually predicting things is not. In fact, in many cases, it's fundamentally impossible
Consider the current rise in the price of silver. What will happen next? Will industrial demand keep pushing it up, even past $1000/oz, say? That depends on how easily substitutes for silver can be found. Economists don't know that. You could ask engineers what their thoughts are, but a crucial point is that they *don't have* thoughts on this - until the price actually rises. Only then is there incentive to find substitutes that are viable at that price, so only then will we find out how easy such substitution is. One can speculate, of course, but there can be no exact science of economic prediction for such things, unless you assume economists are super-intelligent beings operating outside the system.
Now, admitting that many quantitative predictions are not possbile is disappointing, so you see plenty of "economists" pretending otherwise. And plenty who pretend to knowledge for political reasons. In general, "macroeconomics" is not to be trusted, but "microeconomics" is more reliable.
I'm a statistician, by the way, not an economist, but this is the internet...
You can make the defence that economists are the least incompetent people to answer economic questions , relative to everybody else, , but you could make that defence about philosophy and other derided fields as well.
> More fundamentally, the basic concepts that you accept are (in more elaborate forms) the core of the discipline. Actually predicting things is not. In fact, in many cases, it's fundamentally impossible
Okay, then what does the discipline as a whole get us, beyond "pay attention to incentives" and "specialization and trade are good?" We can make up a little placard that says those things, and look at them at appropriate intervals.
Like what are actual economists doing, and why are we paying them to do it?
You would know what they were doing if you were reading econ papers. Marginal Revolution frequently highlights new ones for a large audience of laymen.
> You would know what they were doing if you were reading econ papers. Marginal Revolution frequently highlights new ones for a large audience of laymen.
I read Cowen, Caplan, Hanson, and Nicholas Decker, and have for years (well, not Decker, he's pretty new), it seems like between those it should have pretty good coverage?
Hasn't changed my mind at all, if anything it's increased my convictions on this front.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are not actually doing anything useful. One can certainly argue that all the ones at central banks shouldn't be there, because the central banks shouldn't be there, for instance.
But even though precise predictions are seldom possible, an economist may be able to do better than an uninformed guess. For instance, there may be empirical evidence regarding the price elasticity of demand for, say, tulips. This would be relevant to what the revenue and dead-weight loss would be from imposing a tax on tulip sales - sales might not decline at all, producing a transfer of money to the government without economic inefficiency (very low elasticity), or there might be no tulips sold at all, so the government gets nothing while pointlessly depriving people of the joy of tulips (very high elasticity). Likely somewhere in between, of course. Whatever empirical evidence there is (perhaps from past price fluctuations) isn't going to be definitive - perhaps tastes have or will change - but better than nothing.
I am glad you said at the end that you are not ideologically committed to this view, because your comment reads like it was written by a devotee to Austrian economics, and those are very ideologically committed. So assuming that is not the position you are coming from, I sort of agree with you that a lot of economics cannot be considered a science. However, there is such a thing as experimental economics, which deals with natural as well as designed experiments. The trouble with natural experiments is that they cannot really be performed for macroeconomics.
> However, there is such a thing as experimental economics, which deals with natural as well as designed experiments. The trouble with natural experiments is that they cannot really be performed for macroeconomics.
Could you point to some of the big positive outcomes / knowledge / prediction we've gotten from looking at natural experiments?
I've run across some of these, but the ones I saw seemingly come to really banal conclusions that everybody already suspected was true, and maybe I'm just not noticing the really interesting / impactful ones because they're already in the water supply.
https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf
Okay, but I thought minimum wage was still debated and not really settled either way? I agree it seems a pretty decent read on "does minimum wage decrease employment," but to broad applicability, is there actually a consensus among economists that this is broadly true? I thought not.
Before this paper, if you said a higher minimum wage wouldn't decrease employment and could in fact maybe increase employment, people would have called you an idiot, since saying that disagreed with ECON 101 theory and common sense. The methodology in that paper also revolutionized the field, which is why it got a Nobel prize later.
The effect of minimum wage on employment broadly is an open question like you say, but this is what progress looks like. Obviously the answer is going to be some form of "it depends." What it depends on and by how much is what labor economists studying this question try to answer.
Here you go: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292108001153
The full version of the paper is available online if you look in the usual places
Thanks. Fairly interesting reading going over electricity usage differences by pricing regime, work training, negative income tax, and other experiements, and yes, I agree there's some value here in terms of surfacing empirical reactions to things that were under question (ie does putting 5x more hours into helping people get jobs actually end with more jobs and employment, are electricity pricing regimes able to shift consumption, and does negative income tax reduce or incentivize working hours compared to welfare).
But it all seems pretty over-specified and ad-hoc. Sure, for this small town in Sweden, now they have a coefficient on how many incremental counseling hours nets in terms of jobs and employment - but is it generalizable to large towns in Sweden? Is it generalizable outside of Sweden?
And on the expensive negative income tax experiment, everyone went back and forth and basically concluded it was mixed at best - no really clear signals either way.
They themselves point out:
"The early social experiments were voluntary experiments typically designed to measure basic behavioral relationships, or deep structural parameters, which could be used to evaluate an entire spectrum of social policies. Optimists even believed that the parameters could be used to evaluate policies that had not even been conducted.
As Heckman (1992) notes, this was met with deep skepticism along economists and non-economists alike, and ambitions have since been much more modest."
So these natural experiments are fine for the narrow domains they might be applicable to, so probably an argument for any given city above X size to have an economist surfacing these, but not really adding to the broader body of human knowledge.
And then the last section just seems to bear this out. Auctions where economic theory vs practiced diverged by threefold, Hawthorne effects galore, inability to distinguish different hypotheses, and direct mail marketing optimization, which isn't even economics any more, it's just straight analytics / data science.
So I think you've convinced me there's a role for practitioners at the lowest levels, but it still seems to not be generalizable knowledge, and certainly doesn't argue for letting them be in charge of anything actually important, like Fed interest rate decisions.
Tangent: Ireland is in the EU, since 1973.
And difficult to say which "economic miracle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_miracle counts as successful development. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus has a veeery long Criticism section.
If you don't want companies and governments to make decisions using economics, what should they use to make financial decisions instead? How should central banks set their interest rates if they're not following some kind of theory? How should governments decide what barriers they want to erect to trade if not using economics?
I'm not in agreement with your idea that economics is basically fake, but I am interested in what the next step would be. If everyone agreed with you that economics is fake, what would you advise replacing it with?
> If you don't want companies and governments to make decisions using economics, what should they use to make financial decisions instead?
Accounting works, and most of those decisions are driven by simple accounting, or pro forma financial projections. When decisions have to be made about the future in a way that touches macro, they should be made by reducing exposure to unpredictable outcomes (ie hedging), and increasing exposure in regimes that are predictable.
> How should central banks set their interest rates if they're not following some kind of theory?
How do they do it TODAY? Basically they kill a goat and look at the entrails. They already don't know what they're doing - maybe they shouldn't even be messing with interest rates, after all it got us to the point 22% of our federal budget is debt service, largely due to Covid stimulus.
> How should governments decide what barriers they want to erect to trade if not using economics?
The same way the only successful countries (Japan, Korea, China) have done so - looking at what worked in the past for other countries and copying them.
"They already don't know what they're doing - maybe they shouldn't even be messing with interest rates, after all it got us to the point 22% of our federal budget is debt service, largely due to Covid stimulus."
Once one gets to public finance one has the problem of conflating what the politicians DO which what the economists SAY. The US got the federal debt that it has today because of congressional votes rather than because of anything the economics profession as a whole advocated.
> Once one gets to public finance one has the problem of conflating what the politicians DO which what the economists SAY. The US got the federal debt that it has today because of congressional votes rather than because of anything the economics profession as a whole advocated.
You're right, and this points to what is probably an empirical major function of employed economists - to whitewash and give the veneer of academic / smart people approval to whatever idiocy the politicians / corporate leadership in charge want to do.
Definitely still not painting the profession in a good light, or pointing to any value they're driving overall though, rather the opposite. Literal haruspicy again.
I'm sure you can find some economists who would say that it's fine, but my impression is that the general consensus among economists is that the levels of government debt we have in the US are quite a serious problem.
It seems to be a case of much of it being unfalsifiable. You can fit almost any theory to the few decades of comprehensive historical data we have and people tend to get defensive when they believe they are obviously right.
I'd love to see the widespread deployment of UVC lamps, but its important to remember that they won't stop everything. Covid-19, Measles, and H5 flu might primarily spread via the aerosols but most respiratory infections do most of their spreading via droplets and/or fomites. So using brass for surfaces that everybody touches can be just as important for stopping communicable disease.
I would certainly not mind a world with more brass in it from ab aesthetic perspective.
an*
$500 for a room-sized light isn't the only solution to covid19. You can use cleanroom grade air purifiers (like IQAir sells), and those, being physical traps, are known to be safe.
You're also overselling an indoor air pollutant, the way I read it. Yes, the radiation doesn't directly cause damage to people, but ozone is a health hazard in of itself (Just ask Los Angeles).
Totally--air filters should absolutely be first line (especially since they mitigate the concern about indoor air pollution from UV). I just think that's not necessarily feasible at scale to achieve the kind of clean air delivery rates you need to transmission suppression with air filters alone, especially in very large rooms. To get equivalent disinfected air in a space the size of a high school gym, you'd need about 4 100 mW far-UV lamps or >20 CR boxes.
Tbh--we don't really know *what* would be sufficient to prevent such and such % of transmission for almost any pathogen. It's a big uncertainty. Far-UV should be thought of as a tool in the toolbox, not the silver bullet.
I'm usually the one arguing that people are unnecessarily scared of side effects from novel therapeutic modalities, but in this case I feel like there should be two lifespan studies of some furless animal before putting this into general use:
1. With continuous exposure throughout life.
2. With irregular exposure throughout life.
The reason for the second instead of the first only is because it is known that some animals (like mice) build up resistance to long term consistent radiation and live a normal lifespan, but the same dose irregularly will result in a shorter lifespan.
The reason this particular modality is worrisome is specifically because first principals suggests that we should expect to be more damaging than UVB/UVC. The higher the energy of the photon, the more likely it is to cause a molecular change. I understand the idea that the surface of your body has stuff (like collagen proteins) between the outside world and the more critical inner parts (like nuclei, but I would want to see pretty robust data before subjecting myself to high energy particles that are outside of what we would expect to have encountered during evolution.
To be clear, this may be fine, I just feel like someone should do the above 2 model organism studies first.
I wonder to what extent these lamps could be designed to closely replicate sunlight, which has a known safety profile (likely with the most carcinogenic bands cut out). In particular, I think keeping the ratio (UV intensity at any given band) / (Visual brightness) less than that of sunlight should allow people's existing sunlight safety intuitions and instincts to continue to function, without any reduction in germ-fighting ability.
It is a common belief these days that the sun is bad for you, and I suspect it would be harder to convince people that isn't the case than it would be to convince people that far UV (which doesn't make it to the surface of the earth) is safe.
That being said, I think you can buy "sun lamps" today that mimic sunlight wavelengths?
ha, that’s a pretty severe misunderstanding on my end – it hadn’t occurred to me that in their relevant spectral band these things could be way brighter than sunlight.
Oh oh we have those--66 weeks of hairless mouse exposures
Focused on skin: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/php.13656
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/02713683.2025.2524564?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed and this one focuses on eyes
The same experiment that produced the above paper has some pending results for skin as well, just not published yet.
The skin study is close to what I was hoping for. I still argue that non-chronic needs to be tested, and the study should run for the full lifespan not just "until first deaths". It is directionally promising though!
Yeah, well a light reading of their report https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/u/2025/06/Blueprint-for-Far-UVC-V1.0-9.22.25.pdf
makes me wonder if the unknown risks are worth whatever the reward is. (Personally, I'm not worried that much about flu and such.)
Fine or not, OP is saying that a known indoor/outdoor air pollutant is safe. Which doesn't make me think he knows much about this technology (I will be reading the research on the website with interest, having already imbibed significant quantities of ozone from a different air purifier).
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-417/comment/201882504.
7 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 6 % on January 19, 2026).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
21 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 20 % on January 19, 2026).
72 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 74 % on January 19, 2026).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Previous update was driven by The Greenland Crisis, so its deescalation (yes, I do think it has been pretty definitely deescalated) means I am getting my prediction where it was before January 19.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
This are exceedingly strange odds and I would be curious of your rational behind them. Particularly this
"72 % on Ukrainian defeat, I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions"
Given that Russian demands are so vast and range from the predictable to the ridicolous.
Currently Russia demands both the remaining area of Donbass, that Ukraine obtains no serious security guarantees and that Ukraine demilitarizes. All this to reach the ultimate Russian goal which is a political or territorial control of Ukraine, now or in the near future.
As of now there is 0 incentive for Ukraine to both cede crucial territory both de facto and legally while also not obtaining any serious security guarantees and remaining disarmed.
Such a scenario would only unfold in the case of a serious and systematic breakdown of the Ukrainian military and the Russian ability to exploit it. Therefore unless you expect that such a scenario has a 72% probability of happening the odds of Russia obtaining it's initial goal or it's currently stated goal are in my opinion far lower then 72%.
Additionally it's a bit odd to put the Ukrainian recognition of the conquered territory as a key Russian objective, it's a strong concession for Ukraine but not a big victory for Russia which given their actions consider treaties and formal recognition almost meaningless. This makes it quite unlikely to be one of the key aspects of any negotiations.
This post also doesn't mention the military situation at all and I would at least like to now if the basis of your judgement is built upon military situation on the field, US political pressure on Ukraine or something else entirely.
Good day
People tend to take "Opening Bargaining Positions" as what the Sides actually want. This is a logical fallacy. It is normal for both sides to come in with some
"Red Line" points -- without which, they MUST leave the bargaining table, as politics by other means is the best way for them to obtain what they NEED.
Some "Orange" points -- not "walk away" territory, but demands that you think are more central to you than the other guy (so, if person A and Person B both want C and D, but they want C and D differently -- one wants C more, the other wants D more, you can sit at the bargaining table and both sides can be happy.)
Some "Nice To Have" points that you pretty much intend to give to the other guy, in exchange for concessions from HIS side.
You sit down with all of these points, on both sides, and you start horse-trading. Your game is to get the most points, while making sure that both sides get their RedLine (or the negotiation's off), and while giving the other guy "enough concessions" that the deal isn't "holed below the waterline" (and likely to dissolve later).
Except that Russian demands not only tend to be very maximalist, with at times them being not far off from demanding an uncoditional surrender in practice if not in theory. But also that the Russian red lines as presented by alesziegler directly cross the Ukrainian red lines.
Ukraine has a very practical need of knowing that Russia is not going to renegade on any deal and attempt to come back for more, until that request is sufficiently satisfied there is little incentive to negotiate something like that away on top of additional concessions. It would only make sense if as I said the Ukrainian army was close to a complete collapse but somehow Russia was still willing to negotiate. And I find no signs yet of 72% odds of an Ukrainian army complete collapse.
To summarize my critique
A the victory and defeat conditions for Russia do not represent very well the actual Russian desires and demands
B assuming such maximalist demands stay in place the 72% odds are a prediction of defeat in detail of Ukrainian forces, which does not seem that likely as of now
C There is a lack of motivations behind this number which I would like to know (is his estimate based on Ukr desertion rates, Rus casualty numbers, political pressure ecc)
GD
First, I guess we likely agree that even what I define as Ukrainian defeat is not something which would be good for Russian people (EDIT: I mean it would not be good for most of them; there are exceptions). Whether to call it “Russian victory” is debatable.
Russian desires are outside the scope of my analysis, and their explicit demands are purposefully vague. E.g. perhaps "disarmament" might be interpreted as Ukrainian army having a cap on its peacetime strength at 600 000, as the US proposed (though Putin did not say he would accept it)? Note that Polish military is around 300 000 strong (says Google) and Poland has around the same population as Ukraine.
At this point, unfortunately I do not think that the possibility of Ukrainian collapse in the style of 1918 Germany (I am a WW1 nerd, so my references point comes from there) in 2026 is something that could be completely discounted, though it is certainly not 72 %. Let’s say 10 % in 2026 and more in 2027, conditional on war still continuing.
BUT, it is quite wrong to suppose that collapse actually happening is the only thing that would force Ukraine to accept ceasefire on what would be highly unfavorable terms. Plausible threat of the collapse in the future might be sufficient, as well as the threat of continuing loss of more and more territory. And my base-case scenario is that Ukrainian situation will continue to gradually deteriorate.
Also, note I still give 28 % odds to compromise or Ukrainian victory. It is not my base-case, but it is not nothing.
Thanks for the clarification.
Shouldn't we though take into account Russian desires and goals to define what victory means? Indeed they are vague but at least some
Yes a Ukrainian collapse as you say is definitely possible, maybe even 15% and if Ukrainian reforms or European aid don't improve increase in 2027.
Personally I find that the odds of the Ukrainians forces improving relative to Russians are contingent on the quality of European aid and Ukrainian manpower reforms.
"Plausible threat of the collapse in the future might be sufficient, as well as the threat of continuing loss of more and more territory."
Here is where I disagree, the terms as you put them are not ones that Ukraine would accept unless they believed a collapse was a near certain thing and if that were the case the Russians who already have little risk in continuing trying (sunk costs) would be even less ready to negotiate.
Abbandoning Donbass a good fortified area for nothing would only guarantee renewed Russian aggression.
In essence the problem is that the terms as you put them postpone but guarantee a Ukrainian defeat, while also being politically impalatable now, the current path doesn't and therefore Ukraine is likely to take that.
Russian Demands were about to be met by the Ukrainians four years ago.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/05/06/2022-secret-ukraine-russia-peace-negotiations
I don't believe that Ukraine does have a "very practical need" to ensure Russia is not going to renege on deals (I also don't believe that the Ukraine is very smart about finding ways to encourage this. You either have the bigger military (including NATO, possibly?) or you do an economic deal that ensures that the oligarchs behind Putin will lynch him if he invades again). Given that the EU has already signaled that they intend to renege on any deal that Trump creates (once there's a better behaved American President), I'm going to say that their "security" is already "well protected."
The victory and defeat conditions of Russia Absolutely Do Not represent the actual desires or demands. Good, we agree!
Russia is going to make maximalist demands, even if their red lines are pretty minimal. (Sevastopol, plus water. Since the Ukrainians committed war crimes*, "plus water" now means significant parts of the Ukraine, to ensure that said water can reach the Crimea).
*cutting off water to civilians is not part of warfare. Hence warcrime. Not in the mood to consider whether this is "big bad" or just "normal warcraft."
Ukraine has lost the Russo-Ukrainian war, if its stated goals are taken to be true (returning Crimea to the Ukraine). I state this, not because I believe the goals to be true, but just to remind you that "maximalist demands" are not just a Russian thing, and both sides came up with some pretty extreme ones.
Not really. What that good article states is
1 "The Russians wanted a much smaller army for Ukraine, and they never resolve this, Putin would later claim this was all a done deal and we agreed, et cetera, et cetera. No, we can see that there was a huge gap between the two parties on the question of demilitarization, for example."
There are also one fact that they don't mention is that while they were negotiating that treaty Russians added a spicy detail to the guarantee section, that Russia could veto the intervention of the other guarantors.
While the security guarantees discussed at Istanbul which Russia was seemingly supporting did not have clear support from western potential guarantors they still could provide some security guarantee to a neutral Ukraine.
This last twist though made them utter rubbish which is among the things that led that agreement to fail after the size of the military. Additionally Russia was if i remember well also offering some territory back in the Donbas (though I should check that again) and some sort of compromise regarding Crimea.
Currently the Russian demands would be
-no security guarantees
-demilitarization
-additional territorial concessions.
Demands that altogether are virtually unacceptable for Ukraine. Current talks about swapping Donbass area for solid security guarantees are already something closer to what an actual lasting peace deal could be, but even assuming such theoretical (and extremly difficult) deal would go it does not seem Russia is interested in negotiations and most likelihood it won't be until continuing the war brings it the chance of a better position.
2 "economic deal that ensures that the oligarchs behind Putin will lynch him if he invades again" If this were the case given the cost of the war and Russian economic conditions his head should be parading through Moscow right now. The oligarchs mostly bend to Putin's will and Putin's will seems a continuation of imperial ambitions. If economic considerations were part of continuing the war the war would have ended years ago.
3 "Given that the EU has already signaled that they intend to renege on any deal that Trump creates"
I am not sure what this means or where you have extrapolated this position. If you mean that if Trump made a deal over EU countries shoulder over an issue that fundamentally touches their own security first then most likely yes. But then it would also not really be anything to renegade from.
Currently the EU still has a lot of security ties with the US, if Europe can get the US to committ, even partially to became a security guarantee with them then they will gladly take that opportunity.
Ukraine relying solely on something like the coalition of the willing and a strong army is a possibility though far from an optimal one. In any case Russia has rejected that possibility too (back at point 2)
4 Absolutely. One could even say that if we take the maximalist positions of both Russia and Ukraine both have lost this war at least 2 years ago. What's currently happening is that Russia is trying to create an agreement that will allow it to try once again and obtain it's maximalist goals in the future and possibly it's minimal goals now. While Ukraine tries to avoid that, to keep it's minimal victory goal and obtain anything more then it can.
5 Completly disagree that Sevastapol is the only red line, if that were the case Istanbul agreement would have been wrapped up in 4 hours and everyone is happy. Russia has not fought for 4 years at an immense cost and repeated it's maximalist goals everywhere from the negotiating table to the pubblic forum, to private interlocutors because it doesn't believe in them. Those red lines might evaporate the moment the cost for keeping them is too high and the possibility of obtaining them low to zero, until that's the case (and currently it's dubious this is the case) expecting successful negotiations is quite optimistic.
Also I feel like it's correct to point out that Ukrainian war crimes, while definitely present are a fraction of Russian war crimes committed from 2014 onwards, doesn't justify either but I feel it's correct to remind this.
6 But Ukraine does not seriously propose this at negotiations and has signaled possibility to work around this, Russia has not.
GD
I do think Ukraine of course has a need to ensure that Russia does not renege on any deal, since EU guarantees you are referring too are very doubtful. Unfortunately is is quite likely that they will have to accept a deal which will not ensure anything of the sort, because alternatives might be even worse.
I also think your definition of warcrimes is, well, debatable, but I am not in the mood to actually debate it, so let's leave it at that.
Yes this. Also I am trying to look at the situation from Ukrainian perspective, and what Ukraine would consider as a victory or defeat. Though it is of course complicated by the fact that "Ukraine" is not a homogenous entity.
What I define as Ukrainian defeat, would be in a sense a Russian victory, but it is not a victory in a sense that it would be, like, good for the wellbeing of Russian people.
Are arctic paratroopers still on high alert? (Sources said their projected deployment was Minneapolis... Incredible, no?) If so, does this amend your thoughts on the deescalation of the Greenland crisis?
I mean, 1) I have no idea, 2) no. I think just like with Liberation Day, Trump did the stupid thing, realized based on the monumental backlash that it is stupid, and backed down.
Trump does do "really stupid things" sometimes, like his discussion of 50year mortgages (which I think several Executive Branch people stormed his office to explain to him in Very Clear English why it was so Dumb).
I wouldn't put tariffs under that heading, because Trump's movement on tariffs both affects a lot of things (including Stock Market), and his movement alone is enough to "get things done." (Also, see my above post about negotiation...)
I find it hard to think of a way that 50 year mortgages are dumb that doesn't also make 30 year mortgages equally dumb.
Well, they can't be equally dumb; 50 years is worse than 30 years.
But they're similarly dumb. The perspective you say you can't think of is that 30 year mortgages are current practice and 50 year mortgages aren't. In a vacuum, both of them are terrible ideas. But it's politically easier to 𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗱 doing something stupid than to 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 doing something stupid.
How about: most people have careers that last more than thirty years and less than fifty years.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/trumponomics-50-year-debt-and-a-worrying
"with a 30 year mortgage, a homeowner will have paid off 17% of the balance in the first 10 years.
with a 50 year, that plummets to 5%."
This was a genuinely stupid idea, and it is very good to see that Economically Literate People stormed the Oval Office to tell Trump to stop this nonsense
From a finance perspective there is no reason to even require amortization at all. In fact most loans out there don't require any principal repayment at all until the end of the term.
But if slow principal repayment is going to be your metric for how dumb a loan is, then 17% in 10 years is just about as dumb as 5% in 10 years. And if the holder of a 50 year mortgage wants to repay principal at a faster rate, he is free to do so at any time.
Reposting a comment I made on a recent post, like to get some opinions:
"The word "nerd" has lost all comprehensible meaning around here, and probably everywhere. It's just become a massive motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that "nerd" means smart but socially inept, and the bailey is that it refers to possessing about a dozen different very specific qualities that have almost nothing to do with each other and that I'm not sure anyone has even demonstrated are statistically linked, though maybe I missed it. It needs to be totally tabooed, in my opinion. It does nothing but make discourse murkier, rather than clearer, and is a bizarre exception to the general norm of evidence-based and clearly-defined assertions among rationalists."
Hot take but I'm pretty sure people use the word incel where nerd used to be. Imo they point to the same people across time
The most bizarre example I've seen of that is Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. He is LITERALLY a brothel-owning pimp who owes his station to a much higher-born woman being in love with him!
I think I agree with this. I don’t really know what people mean when they say “nerd” anymore.
Surely shyness/social anxiety, experience/lack of experience, and the like are better concepts for exploring the issue of social success.
I was surprised that people thought Dilbert is about nerds not being popular or whatever, because no one in the Dilbert world is “cool”.
I feel like this statement lacks context? In which comments, in particular, do you feel like the word "nerd" is being used as a motte and baily?
You seem to mean that the word nerd has lost meaning in general (at least in this comment section). I disagree with that. Nerd, like many words, have a fussy meaning. One can come up with central or non-central examples of a nerd, as well as examples of not nerd. That a word has fussy meaning does not mean that it has no meaning.
I also disagree that the a word can be said to be a motte-and-baily in general. A motte-and-baily usually implies some argument is being made, so again I wonder what context you are thinking about?
Imagine if someone tried to claim that animal was a very bad word, simply because it encompasses platypuses and echidna and wrens. Some English words are designed to be "large and expansive" while still having clear borders. The Church Lady isn't a nerd, neither is The Jock (See Freddie deBoer for rants on how "nerds are no longer discriminated against, they've won, stop celebrating"), or The Pretty Girl.
This is a stock archetype, and can be defined "against" other stock archetypes.
I don't think "animal" is a good analogy. There's a lot of different types of animals, but "animal" is also well defined.
"Nerd" is a vague cluster of traits that some people have. Maybe a better analogy would be something like "preppie" or "Valley girl". Do preppie-adjacent people spend as much time obsessing over the question of the exact definition of "preppie" as nerd-adjacent people spend obsessing over trying to define "nerd"?
Probably not, because nerds are highly analytic and preppies aren't.
Valley girl is extremely well defined, as far as archetypes go. Preppie is apparently not, as "prep to college" would (in my mind) generally mean "analytic" (at least somewhat) -- it's a more photogenic "nerd" archetype (in that preppie doesn't generally mean jock, nor slacker, nor artsy).
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Preppy
Well language tends to evolve, words take on different meanings. Nerd culture is perhaps expanding, but that will change also.
All-important question: is far-UVC completely safe for cats? Can I use it in the litterbox without making my cat permanently blind?
I think yes because it gets harmlessly absorbed by anything with protein on the outside (eg skin, eyes), but hopefully Misha will see this and give you a firm answer.
However, I'm not sure litterboxes are a good application; I don't think litterbox germs are airborne, I don't know if UV-C can reach/kill non-airborne germs, and I think the biggest litterbox risk (toxoplasma) is a complex parasite and not a virus and so it might be less vulnerable (again, Misha might know more).
(I'm not Misha but I am the science cofounder)
I would definitely not use it *in* the litter box. That's a very confined space and I'm not really sure what the benefit would be. I do expect far-UV to be perfectly effective against parasites but...why?
In my experience of massively overdosing my own eye, what happens is mild irritation/itching, not blindness, and if you have it mounted downward facing then you aren't likely to get an overdose anyway because you usually aren't looking straight up, but also...not really the intended use case at all.
*Near* the litter box is fine, my home lamp is mounted near the litterbox. *In* the litter box would just be kind of strange.
Toxoplasmosis concerns, maybe? When the numbers are showing something like half of Americans infected, I could understand somebody wanting to protect themselves.
(It seems like it's more like 10-30% not 50%?) I looked into this when I got pregnant and most toxoplasmosis exposure risk doesn't come from litterboxes but from raw meat. It looks like only outdoor cats are liable to even be actively shedding it and only if they're quite young--once they've been infected and clear the infection, they're immune.
I'm skeptical that this is a serious concern, but I'd say if someone is really worried about that, having a covered litterbox + a lamp that is Near it is more than enough. *In* the literbox creates all sorts of extra difficulties.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting the lamp is the best way to deal with the parasite, just that that might be what they're trying to do. I should've been clearer on that. The obviously correct solution is to not let cats into the house in the first place. Keep them in the barn, eating mice, where they belong. Dogs are better.
That said, I've heard the story that it's from raw meat, but are millions of Americans eating raw contaminated meat? Is Upton Sinclair rolling in his grave? Because every cat owner I know has cats who climb onto the counters with their paws which were just in the litterbox, and then the cat would lick its paws and then its fur, which it then rubbed all over everything, and nobody's washing their hands after touching the cat. It's not like you have to eat kitty litter in order to be exposed to their feces--without some pretty significant cleaning procedures, it's going to end up on every surface.
I just don't buy that all the crazy cat ladies whose symptoms neatly match with those of t. gondii infection are pure coincidence.
Open question here—how does everyone feel about the usage of AI in producing articles on Substack? For instance, to aid in doing research, or maybe even idea generation? Is it disingenuous, or simply more efficient?
Why should I spend time reading something no-one could be bothered to write?
Honestly so valid
I use it constantly as a kind of dumb but useful editor for my Substack posts. Always use it to suggest improvements on what I've written, not write the article for me, and most of the time it changes - screws up in my opinion - the tone of what I've written, though it still makes pretty good suggestions when it comes to vocabulary and fixing some awkward sounding phrases (which I only realize sounded awkward after Grok points it out to me).
If I didn't use, I would definitely: a) Take longer to write. b) Sound more like some cartoonish stereotypical Mexican/Caribbean/South American wannabe writer trying to practice his English one post at a time. Maybe more amusing, but not in a way that would please me.
Points a and b are important enough for me that I would rather risk the occasional (I hope) AI-sounding phrase that might slip trough, rather than stop using it. I do hope to reduce my use of AI for writing over time, but probably increase its use for research, which is the other main use case for me (also thumbnails sometimes).
Hum, my daughter, who teaches high school and community college, says that using AI to generate or polish essays gives each chunk of text the same 'voice'. And it's a very recognizable voice. So once people get sensitized to that 'voice', they will start discounting the content as AI created.
This seems to be true of the visual arts as well. On a Reddit sub devoted to visual art, I posted some images created by an artist (painter, printmaker, and photographer) who digitally manipulates his originals and sells the prints. His work was so flashy, that before I posted his work, I asked ChatGPT if he was using AI to generate the images, but ChatGPT said that although he's been accused of doing so, he's denied using AI. Moreover, his digital manipulations have been generating controversy for three decades now. So, I posted some of his work, and immediately, everyone accused me of posting AI slop. On one level, it was slop, rather like the kitschy work of Maxfield Parrish. It made me wonder if future generations will mistake the works of 20th-century illustrators like Parrish and N.C. Wyeth for AI art?
If it improves the final product I think it's fine, but currently LLMs have quite weak writing skills so they wouldn't be worth using other than for research for most people. I wouldn't claim to be especially good at writing but AI isn't good enough for me to consider just copying and pasting its output. Sometimes I'll ask it to come up with a phrase or paragraph structure.
> Sometimes I'll ask it to come up with a phrase or paragraph structure.
This is a very good use case for AI in my experience.
Yeah writing for me would be silly. But paragraph structures or idea generation could be worthwhile—especially since you could say the product is the blog itself, rather than individual posts
It's ok as a research aid (always need to check it didn't hallucinate though), but not for idea generation, an essay is supposed to be self-expression.
Nothing inherently wrong with it, but:
- you are fully responsible for the accuracy of the end product;
- you shouldn't use it to posture as more knowledgeable than you really are.
The second point is a bit fuzzy, but I'm thinking of cases where someone adopts the pose of a well-read expert while actually just summarising what an LLM told them. This already happens with human-written sources to some degree, but in that case it's easily remedied by good citation practices. If you're relying heavily on LLM research, I think you should either check the original sources carefully and cite those, or be (proactively) honest about your true epistemic state.
If I can ask AI about a topic and get the same results I would see on your blog, there's no reason for me to go to your blog.
That sounds almost tautologous, but I think I actually disagree. Blogs can be worth visiting merely because they do a great job of curation. (It's one thing that I *could* have found the same content without the middleman, and another thing whether I would have thought to look for it.)
But also, I wasn't envisaging a copy-paste job. If you knew that, and you were intending for your words to apply quite broadly, then I think you're ruling out too many worthwhile posts. LLMs have access to a huge portion of the world's information, so if your criterion for dismissal is that you could have learned all the facts in the post by asking a chatbot, I think you're dismissing most non-personal writing.
> (It's one thing that I *could* have found the same content without the middleman, and another thing whether I would have thought to look for it.)
Sure, but then your blog is as useful as a bunch of prompts I should be typing into AI.
>LLMs have access to a huge portion of the world's information,
Whether or not they 'have' those facts in the nebulous sense is one thing, whether you get them in your query is another.
One of my favorite podcasts is called 'You're Wrong About'. They look at popular narratives from famous events and topics in the past, and do deep research to show where the media and popular conception got things wrong. They weave compelling narratives out of disparate facts, and tie them into ongoing observations about how the public digests and uses information.
If you used AI to google one of their topics, I am pretty confident that it would mostly tell you the incorrect media narrative/public consensus version, because that is by definition the most common formulation of the topic in its training data. Even if it somehow gave you only all of the obscure true facts and none of the popular falsehoods, I am skeptical that anyone could capture the context and contributing factors in a way that ties it into a larger cultural narrative the way they do - I think you need to directly access raw records in order to notice things like that, instead of having it filtered in a narrative fashion at you.
I think we might not be too far apart, as I do expect reliance on AI to correlate negatively with interestingness. And when I imagine a good AI-assisted blog post, it's less "I had a conversation with an LLM and summarised what it taught me" and more "I used an LLM as a combination of Google replacement + research assistant". If the primary sources are on the internet somewhere, I think something like ChatGPT's deep research mode might to a better job of surfacing them than you expect.
(I do think using the LLM as a plain old conversation partner/tutor could be useful, too, as long as this is done carefully and treated as a first step rather than the main or only step. Some good posts are written by people who started with little knowledge of the topic, and in those cases I think there's nothing inherently wrong with a workflow of asking naive questions -> independently checking the details -> using what you've learned to guide your research.)
Will try to talk my kids' daycare into an Aerolamp but they're probably not the type that reacts well to the words "UVC radiation."
That's why we don't use "radiation" anywhere in the copy :)
The good news about far-UV light in childcare settings is that they're short. The recommended Aerolamp installation height is gauged to a 6'4" person. Inverse square law means kids are getting way less than the recommended dose limit.
You can also use the human presence detection feature in the Aerolamp to make sure that doses above the international ICNIRP limits at 222nm aren't exceeded.
(Also re Mark's comment--air filters are great and you should definitely agitate for those first. You might just need kind of a *lot* of air filters to get equivalent pathogen inactivation, and that might get very loud/expensive. Far-UV is useful layer of infection prevention, but it's a layer, not a silver bullet.)
Instead you should try to talk your kids daycare into being less clean and spreading more germs. Low exposure to antigens in childhood leads to auto immune conditions.
Yeah, this is probably the correct take.
"Will try to talk my kids' daycare into an Aerolamp but they're probably not the type that reacts well to the words 'UVC radiation.'"
Why not try to talk your kids' daycare into a HEPA air filter? Seems like you'd get less push back and I don't know why the UV is supposed to be better.
Why is there so much dating advice on Substack and social media, and so little relationship advice (as in advice for having a good relationship, resolving conflicts, "keeping the spark alive", and not getting divorced)?
My first guess was that it's low-status to admit you need relationship advice, but this doesn't make sense - wouldn't it be equally low-status to admit you need dating advice?
Maybe dating advice is often more culture war adjacent and therefore gets more engagement?
Easier to blame problems on strangers (rightly or wrongly!), relationship advice points the finger at oneself and/or their presumably adored partner.
If you want to write advice for how to be in a relationship it invites a lot more scrutiny, questions for your wife, and potentially dramatic situations
if you're mostly writing about how to interact with strangers you avoid this
Claude suggests that this "makes sense" because there are far more people actively dating at any given time than there are people in relationships actively looking for help. This seems plausible.
I'm not sure this is true. I did Google searches for "relationship advice" (*) and "dating advice" (**) and got 32 and 34 pages of results respectively. In terms of likes, both sets of results looked similar to me (a few posts with hundreds of likes; most only tens of likes), though Google doesn't show the number of likes for each link, and I'm too lazy to click in every link.
(*) https://www.google.com/search?q=site:substack.com+%22relationship+advice%22
(**) https://www.google.com/search?q=site:substack.com+%22dating+advice%22
For the same reason there's more people seeking advice how to start a book than how to end one. Fewer people get there. With the demand comes the supply.
(Caveat: I'm going by feel based on my algorithm-curated feed, of course. We're all trying to see out of our snowglobe, darkly.)
It probably has something to do with the average person unable to find a date/long-term relationship being more desperate for solutions and help than the average person in a long-term relationship? As in, not that every relationship is perfect or will last forever, but most people currently deciding to stay in their relationship think it is going pretty well, and do not anticipate it being ended by problems any time soon. Furthermore, when a long-term relationship ends it's usually because at least one of the people want it to for some reason, so by the time they know they have a problem they may not be interested in advice to fix it.
Another big reason may be some version of 'every bad relationship is different, but everyone desperate for a date is the same'. Because a relationship is a specific highly contextual thing between two people, they have a lot of variance and there's not much blanket advice that applies to all relationships, you sort of have to know the person. Whereas everyone of a given orientation trying to find a date is appealing to mostly the same population of potential dates, and dealing with the same apps/spaces, and facing a lot of the same challenges; broad advice is a lot more generally useful, individual context is less important.
Because relationship advice will center around partners' mess ups and its not good for the relationship to do a tell all on your partner's issues. And people are unlikely to write about their own deep faults.
Its ok to discuss a relationship's difficulties after the relationship has ended.
Hmm, maybe a combination of sunk cost fallacy and unwillingness to consider negative hypotheticals on your own personal life? It famously takes a lot for couples to go to a marriage counselor for example, even in our therapy saturated culture, people just really do not want to entertain the thought that they are doing badly.
This actually leads to a second, more cultural consideration: (caveat: in the western civilizations I know), there is an expectation of "fitness at t=0" for relationship, the prince charming effect. If we are having problems in our relationship, it is not because of fixeable things, it is because we wre actually not that compatible to begin with! This comes in tandem with the removal of parental advice on relationships as a legitimate source (we tend to want them not to meddle, and distance / social norms enable that).
Because being good at dating is “cool” so there are lots of people who want to claim to be experts at that. Whereas relationships are good but not “cool”.
Also because relationships are personal and the facts of a relationship are specific and private, whereas dating advice can be generic.
I think it's because dating has a general strategy, it's a numbers game so you try to appeal to as wide a group of people as possible which takes widely applicable strategies. Relationships feel a lot more specific and intimate. Everyone is different and it's easy to believe that nobody would know enough about you and your partner's mutual quirks to help fix your problems.
My guess is that "success" at dating and relationship are correlated enough that a lot of people who need both dating and relationship advice seek out the former because they haven't gotten to the point where they fail enough at the latter to understand it's an issue yet.
Another thing might be that getting to the point where you feel like you have something useful to say about relationships probably takes longer just in terms of a successful relationship in the common understanding of the terms being on the order of years. (Or at least certainly longer than a successful date.)
My guess (but I'm not super confident about this) is that with dating advice, both the advice giver and the advice receiver are on a similar playing field in terms of knowledge of the other person, in that both parties don't know that much. However for relationships, the advice receiver knows *much* more information about their partner than the advice giver does, so it's probably better for the person in the relationship to just come up with something on their own. Obviously there are good general pieces of advice for relationships, but there's probably much more for dating due to the more symmetric nature of the information.
Maybe it's a natural result of a split demand curve? You can often solve relationship problems by talking to the person you're in a relationship with. Dating problems require outside help, since there's no pre-existing relationship to work with. So, more people look to the internet to solve dating problems than relationship ones.
Advice is also split for long-term relationships; you can either recommend that people stick it out, or recommend they break up. Seems like the current cultural zeitgeist is for long-term relationship advisors to advocate for the break up. Which conveniently nudges them back into giving dating advice.
Dating Advice is generally advice for people who want sex but do not want to pay (much) for it*. Expecting fundamental drives like The Male Human Sex Drive to be a very small part of what drives "self-help" is kinda silly.
(The rest of Dating Advice is "how to find someone not just looking for unpaid sex.")
*Sex Workers in a legal brothel will run you upwards of a thousand dollars.
Try totally legal brothels in Germany. Should not be more than 200.
By paying a thousand dollars in a legal brothel you’re paying a massive premium for legality. I have no doubt the same “service” can be obtained far more cheaply in one of the “Asian Bodywork” spas found in local strip (heh) malls.
... you also generally pay a premium for illegality (in that you're now paying the pimp, or protector, or whomever "not judge/not cop" is in charge of making sure you pay your bills and don't do acts that weren't agreed to).
If anything, the price of female prostitution suffers from the perception that it is a low-skill job that anyone can do. Take male prostitution for female customers, and I'm fairly sure you'll find a higher cost (and, perhaps, a more discerning clientele).
It seems like you're intimating that female prostitution is as difficult as male prostitution, which is obviously false.
Is that true? Maybe it's a bubble effect but I feel like I see more relationship advice even as a guy who's not in a relationship.
I don’t have any data to add, but I too am automatically skeptical of Scott’s claim that relationship advice is universally less common, just because it strikes me as intuitively wrong. Like, back when late night FM talk radio was popular (inspiring sitcoms like “Frasier”) there were shows where callers would ask about dating or relationships, and I don’t remember one or the other type of question being dominant. (I’m sure there are still many such shows; a couple nights’ listening could provide more data to anyone so interested in gathering it.)
Blogging, radio, etc. are the same in that there is a strong incentive to create the kind of content you think will attract an audience. Unsuccessfully trying to start a relationship and unsuccessfully maintaining one are both high-drama situations.
Interesting! What good relationship advice blogs/posts have you found?
It's not so much who I follow but just what the algorithm puts on my notes feed. But I do follow Anahadra Pandey who analyzes past relationships and why they failed, Cartoons Hate Her talks a lot about modern marriage, division of labor/”emotional labor” etc., Michael Owen is more general men’s self improvement but talks about maintaining attraction in relationships.
As far as notes topics, I get a lot of content from more trad-leaning women about marriage and family dynamics, often through the lens of criticizing modern attitudes. Although I'm not red-pill, you would think I would be the prime market for “how to get women” content, but I feel like I don't see very much of that.
+1 for CHH. I feel like following her got more of that content into my feed.
Easier to measure success in dating than in having a good relationship?
Are these questions about moral permissibility some kind of Cold War-esque dead drop for information?
If so, please take them to Reddit.
Okay.
Assuming that is accurate, they strike me as being rather out of step with the general culture around here. Aside from a few trolls, the vast majority of commenters approach discourse in a spirit of candid forthrightness. People generally state their agenda if it isn't clear from the comment itself. I seem to recall from another thread that you said you were using them as a proxy for some other question but did not want to bias the users with the subject matter, is that accurate?
Assuming *that* is accurate, my opinion is that you should knock it off and ask whatever the actual question is, because right now, your question doesn't have a moral quandary attached to its premise, which makes it, well...
...kinda dumb.
Or, if not kinda dumb, then cryptic in a teenage edgelord doing a "research project" way that is out of keeping with that candid, forthright culture I mentioned. I think that's why you're getting jokey responses here, rather than sincere engagement.
Just ask the real question and have done with it.
The commenters here have not consented to participate in your one-sided thought experiment. I feel the need to gatekeep because gates exist keep bad things out, and the thing you're doing is annoying and rude. You should stop intruding on the attention of the commenters.
Maybe you should make a sock puppet account to answer your cryptic question so you can continue with your point, whatever it is. Or do you need someone to answer a series of uninteresting questions before you get to the interesting ones?
Counter question; is it morally permissible to stand in front of my house if I tell you to go away?
No it would not be but it would be permissible to throw one at them
What if I live in a glass house?
You might end up with egg on your face
Since the eggs are made from "soy or whatever" and not from stone, it should be fine.
Minor point: you posted this as a top level comment instead of a reply.
Oh woops I don't really comment much on substack this interface has defeated me
>Leaders of a ruling party commonly asserting that the political minority should not only be outvoted, but should not have a voice in politics.
Nazis, communists, and theocrats should not have a voice in politics. You may have to pragmatically work with them, but the goal should be a society where these ideas are viewed as inherently illegitimate and evil.
As I was reading through this list it occurred to me that this is pretty much the same rhetoric the political right was using during the last years of the Obama administration. With a few of the specific examples changed, this reads as a post from a Tea Party forum in 2016.
Did the right wing conclude that political violence was justified? I think yes, by and large, but they thought it would be pragmatically unwise and so it was better to just keep stockpiling guns for the Revolution that would inevitably come at some later date. It was Trump who relieved that pressure by showing that maybe elections were efficacious after all.
I was reasonably happy with the comment I wrote on that post (note that Beehiiv apparently limits comments to 1000 characters):
"I think the strongest argument—which is also 'intertwined with practicality'—is that it's hard to be sure that you're really in the equilibrium where political violence is justified because nonviolence has failed, and if you're not sure, it's morally safer (i.e., makes you less likely to end up doing something you shouldn't) to err on the side of assuming you're not.
This is particularly important in a highly charged discourse environment, where people don't always differentiate 'we haven't yet reached the point where nonviolence has completely failed' from 'the current trends are fine and there's nothing to worry about'. So if you're worried about being read as saying the latter, you might be overly hesitant to say the former.
A couple writers more eloquent than I have made, not quite this exact point in these exact words, but closely related ones:
- https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/against-assassinating-nazis
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fascism-cant-mean-both-a-specific"
> Truly there is no amount of violence that can be unjustified to prevent such an occurrence
Yes there is.
All I'm going to say is... have you seen what's been happening in Iran? Whether it's morally justified is irrelevant. You are going to die if you keep doing this. What are you even trying to accomplish? Things are never going to be the same again regardless of what happens.
> You are going to die if you keep doing this.
Why do you say this? The insurrection has continued for four weeks now without being contained. Khamenei is hiding in a bunker somewhere in SE Iran. Defections from the police and military are happening. IRG bases have been burned down. Someone hacked the Iranian TV networks to broadcast Reza Pahlavi's speech before they returned to regular programming. To me, these are signs that the regime is losing its grip on things. Push harder.
30,000 are already dead. More will follow. US intervention will only exacerbate the situation, seeing as there is no reason to believe that they aren't exclusive acting for their own interests. What worth is "freedom" when all you have left are corpses and ash?
That is a price that the people of Iran may be willing to pay for their freedom (assuming the number is correct). Some people are willing to die for causes they believe are greater than themselves. I hope that I would be willing.
Sometimes a government or regime holding on to power or a specific unpopular policy is simply more costly than conceding it. Protestors increase the associated costs by exerting economic and political pressure. It definitely is not worth it for a rational ruler to completely destroy his country and decimate his population to hold on to power or support an unpopular policy.
What worth is "power" when all you have power over is corpses and ash?
When people see no value in a world desecrated by the opposition, then there is no cost too great for the sake of power. That goes both ways, of course. Maybe this does all end in ash, with everyone feeling vindicated as they fade away. More reason to not participate in such nonsense.
30,000 were reported dead by the regime as of January 9, after 11 days of protests. The uprising has been going on 28 days now. At that rate, another ~46,000 should be dead. Either the regime doesn't want to update that number because it's so large, or they're no longer able to. I suspect the latter. And so what if 30,000 have died? Roughly 100,000 died on both sides of the American War of Independence. Was it worth it for the combatants? Obviously, it was.
Which is why if Customs and Immigration come to my town, I'll be out protesting and filming with my camera.
An off-shore colony attempting to break free of its declining colonizers is not remotely comparable to an armed state purging internal civilian opposition. And that's before we get into the difference of military capabilities between then and now...
Regardless, you are free to use your life as you wish, as is everyone else. I simply question what your end goal is here. Even successfully stopping Trump won't return things to normal. The causes of this situation will continue to be present, and you would simply be delaying the inevitable.
So what path of action do you recommend?
(Changing the causes? Inner emigration? Something else?)
I agree that Trump attempting to cancel/rig the midterms is the kind of thing that would justify violence but I think it's still pretty important to ask: violence against whom, specifically? Violence to what end?
IMO, unless you're in a situation where the army refuses to obey Trump's orders, there's very little prospective of violence from anti-Trump forces being decisive; and even then, prior to the moment where he loses control, you'd want to maximize the chances that security forces refuse to follow his orders, in which case violence might be counterproductive: convincing police/national guard/army to stay loyal and put down "violent insurrectionists" or whatever.
If the plan is to like, send mail bombs to administration figures, I'm doubtful that will achieve much; in which case I think the justification declines pretty significantly.
Ken doesn't worry because he'll be sitting on his ass posting on the Internet, not getting the in-person blowback from people who do on the ground organizing.
All that said, I see with most of his points as "if political discussion is off the table, political violence is on the table."
>MO, unless you're in a situation where the army refuses to obey Trump's orders, there's very little prospective of violence from anti-Trump forces being decisive;
How many of your friends and relatives you would have to mow down in the street can be a decisive factor in whether or not the military refuses orders.
Oh sure, but I think if the people in the street are trying to mow you down in return, it'll be a lot easier to say, "I don't agree with his election cancelling, but I do agree with his protestor shooting"--it's not clear that violence accomplishes anything that just being out in the street protesting fails to accomplish.
But the issue is that the street protests also aren't accomplishing anything. Sometimes there is simply no path to winning.
I'm usually pretty sceptical of the efficacy of protest, but recently I think the anti-ICE protestors have had a real impact, and one that they would not have had if they had been more violent. The killings of Good and Pretti (and the administration's easily-disprovable lies about them) seem to have meaningfully turned the tide of public opinion, to the point that even some Republicans are pushing back and Trump seems to be backing down slightly. If they had been violent protestors killed in actual-self defense, that wouldn't have happened.
Is public opinion actually that relevant here? If congress consents, federal law enforcement consents, and the military consents, that's all that is necessary. If public opinion is against the state, what does that actually accomplish? As you said, they can't fight back because that would simply justify a purge. They can only self-harm so much until they run out of ways to hurt themselves.
This is about a hypothetical where Trump cancelled elections... In that world I think there'd be a lot of pressure on other political actors, even ones beholden to him, to try and force him to back down; I think street protests absolutely could contribute to that pressure, and the comparison to Iran would probably fail in that, in America and unlike in Iran, state security forces would find it very troubling to support the cancelation of elections, and there would be a lot of internal pressure on them to refuse to deploy in circumstances that would involve nakedly overthrowing America's constitutional order.
I think your view is way too cynical: mass protests have caused governments to step down or change policies multiple times in recent years; it's failed a lot too of course, but I think "no path to winning" is not really true, and certainly wouldn't be in a world where Trump was way way way outside the bounds of American constitutionalism, e.g. cancelling elections
He should have no issue if he has the bare minimum excuse for postponing elections, such as the threat of internal violent opposition. Some violence is simply inevitable due to law enforcement instigating it intentionally. That is all the justification necessary. And then, even the peaceful protests will be seen as nothing more than a shield for terrorism and treachery.
I'm sure they're smart enough to assign soldiers to areas they're unfamiliar with for that very reason.
I'm not sure that'd help much in the US.
I think for any American an old lady advancing towards them waving the stars and stripes is going to code mentally as "their granny" ... or a middle-aged wine mom doing the same will code mentally as "their mom".
With the possible exception of very southern troops being deployed in historically union cities... I don't think location in the US is going to matter much.
People are no longer loyal to the flag of the state of Virginia, or the flag of the state of Kansas. US troops are going to be *extremely* reluctant to fire on any group who is unarmed and carrying the US flag no matter what orders they are given.
> I think for any American an old lady advancing towards them waving the stars and stripes is going to code mentally as "their granny" ...
I think that might be true even if she wasn't American. Regardless, I don't know why you think they would have to shoot the women and elderly. At the very least, they would presumably shoot at some men first, and the rest would scatter. If they start charging at them or draw a gun... well, now they have their justification. Nobody's going to feel bad about killing a wolf in sheep's clothing.
> I don't know why you think they would have to shoot the women and elderly.
Because if you're advancing on armed troops whilst unarmed, you put the old ladies/women up front (and you give them US flags to wave)... or even arrange a womens only march a la the Women's march on Versailles.
>If they start charging at them or draw a gun... well, now they have their justification.
That's why you've got to be unarmed (at least in a US context). Shooting at unarmed protestors is an extremely different thing to "shooting back at a group that is already shooting at me" or "shooting at a group that killed my mate Geoff last week".
If we're envisaging a confrontation a long the lines of "the current admin" vs the current "resistance" then these are likely scenarios.
I think the current Trump administration have a skewed and unrealistic view of how a "federalised troops" vs "home grown protest" would play out.
They're envisaging the troops post "Insurrection Act/Martial Law" acting like the PLA in Tiannamen, of the IRGC in Iran, of at the very least "ICE if ordered to round up some protestors" if they order them to do so .... I just don't think they've got a handle on how that would really go with actual US troops vs actual organised peaceful US resistance. Their mental model of how that plays out is wrong.