Atrocities are common in war, and so is atrocity propaganda. This includes rape and sexual torture, and allegations thereof. This also includes allegations about the West and our allies.
This Monday Nicholas Kristof, in the New York Times, wrote an op-ed about the rape of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.[1] This follows previous reporting by human rights groups such as the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.[2] Some of these instances were caught on video (at Sde Teiman, where soldiers were arrested before far-right protestors successfully demanded their release). Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, quoted by Kristof, says that while he has no specific knowledge, he was not surprised by the accounts, saying "There are war crimes committed every day in the territories." Kristof considers the possibility that the accounts were propaganda meant to defame Israel, but doubts this, given that "none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to and they were reluctant to speak."
The most shocking allegation is that in some instances, dogs were allegedly used for the sexual abuse. I don't know if the allegation is true, but it's not outlandish. There is precedent for this; Ingrid Olderock committed this crime in Pinochet's Chile. Kristof cites an on-record testimony and then cites five other supporting sources for this claim.
Pro-Israel activists have focused on this particular allegation, and given strange arguments against it. Some claim that it's anatomically impossible; Bari Weiss' site The Free Press made this implication and then consulted, not a historian of state torture, but the host of a feel good dog tricks TV show, to cite the fact that he'd never heard of it as evidence that it can't happen.[3] Others claim it's "singling Israel out" despite it being documented in other countries.
Unfortunately this even includes people in rationalist world, who should know better. The other Scott, over on his blog, repeats the false claim of anatomical impossibility; falsely claims that Kristof's "sole source" for the dog allegation was Euro-Med Monitor (his main source was an on-record first person account, with Euro-Med Monitor being one of this five supporting sources); and calls the allegation "blood libel."[4]
It's easy for us (Western + rationalist tech and philosophy nerds) to react this way. Israel gave us Daniel Kahneman and Judea Pearl while Israel's enemies gave us the terrorist who murdered Judea Pearl's son. It's easy to think in us-and-them terms and then pattern match. And you do have to be less-than-automatically credulous given that atrocity propaganda is real. But it's not automatically propaganda, and we do have to be open to hearing about the crimes of our side.
Its fine to not believe the allegations, but I'm not sure why the article would be retracted. There have been rumors of dog rape in Israeli prisons floating around since 2024 (NOTE: Ben Gvir became Minister of National Security in 2022). Nick Kristof went to Gaza and found someone who said, "yes, I was raped by a dog in Israeli prison in 2024." That's not nothing.
Most of the alleged "debunkings" fall apart if you think about them for 30 seconds. If male dogs only become erect when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat, then maybe the guards brought two dogs into the cell, made the male dog smell the female dog, then put the male dog on the prisoner?
"Israel rapes prisoners with dogs" may or may not be true - I would go roughly 60/40 against, but that's not an informed position.
"Israel is utterly indifferent to mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners, and actively prevents proper investigation of accusations, so that if its soldiers were raping people with dogs there would not be more evidence of it than there actually is." is definitely true, and is a really damning accusation.
That's exactly what happened to Olmert. He talked about that people should pay attention to mistreatment of Palestinians, and Kristof deliberately took it out of context as the confirmation of the dog rape story. One must wonder why other people are reluctant to appear in the same position. And of course "if you don't confirm our wild accusations, by that you confirm our wild accusations" is a classic kafkatrap.
"An individual acknowledging that people should pay more attention to mistreatment of Palestinians" is not the same thing as "putting in place systems that would identify and detect mistreatment of Palestinians if/when it takes place".
And "if you don't confirm our wild accusations, by that you confirm our wild accusations" is different to "if you deliberately make it impossible to confirm even true accusations, you lose the right to claim that accusations shouldn't be taken seriously unless they're confirmed".
How do you imagine it would be possible to "confirm" accusations like Kristof's? His only named sources are people who are fine with mass-murdering Jews, let alone lie to hurt the Jews. Do you imply Israel police must investigate each wild accusation coming from Hamas? Even if they did, how exactly would they investigate it - would they ask each soldier and Shabak officer "did you per chance train a dog to rape Hamas operatives"? Of course accusations like Kristof's are not taken seriously, because they are not serious as factual accusation - and just as you yourself said, nobody even cares if they are serious or even if they are true. The point is to hurt Israel - either by spreading vile rumors, or by causing it to tear itself apart in futile search for proof for accusations that weren't true. And the point is to confirm pre-existing biases - again, as you implied, you take it as a confirmation even if it's not true.
And I think if those were actually true, there would be ways to confirm them independently. Photographs, videos, witnesses not linked to Hamas, documents, something the could be verified. True, it is not easy to obtain - but it's even harder to obtain when it never actually happened. That's why Kristof never bothered.
That was a strange blog post by Aaronson. I don't understand why his children should be any less safe because the alleged rape was done using a dog rather than a baton. Maybe the dog detail is colorful enough to give the story some potential virality, but if his children safety depend on the public ignoring rape when the perpetrator is an Israeli soldier, I hope they are unsafe.
From his perspective, it doesn't feel like a plausible real atrocity, or even just wartime atrocity propaganda, but like blood libel. It feels continuous not with the stolen-incubators testimony before the Gulf War, or the crucified Canadian soldier rumour in WWI, but with the medieval rumours of Jews using Christian blood to bake matzah. It feels not just like it's getting harder to achieve Israel's geopolitical goals, but like pogroms in America are just around the corner.
(This isn't a new fallacy, it's the result of decades of state propaganda. Netanyahu finds it a useful tool to frame everything he can as antisemitism, and he wasn't the first. This is both to intimidate critics and to keep Israeli and American Jews too terrified of genocide to resist him; Israel is strong but also so weak it's at constant risk of destruction without his free rein, etc.)
>"if his children safety [logic hypothetical], I hope they are unsafe"
I'm sure he knows the case of the rape prosecutions which were dropped after a protest in favor of the perpetrator took place, I think one of those unhinged commenters he complains about pointed it out to him. The fact that someone reported someone somewhere using a more flamboyant method to do something he knows was happening feels like a big difference with the blood libel, which is something entirely false. If someone answered the blood libel, with "actually, some Jews in medieval Europe killed Christians and then covered up for them, but they didn't bake their blood, that's ridiculous", the blood libel would not have the same connotations.
I personally don't know if this dog business actually happened, but like you, I do not find it implausible, the objective of this sort of torture is to humiliate, the method chosen can get ridiculous. I expect the average rape to be done using the more pragmatic tool of the baton, so I was not surprised that virtually all of the accounts in the NYT piece featured that instead.
>Some thoughts are inside thoughts.
I intended it as rude, I found the post offensive.
> Kristof considers the possibility that the accounts were propaganda meant to defame Israel, but doubts this
Ah yes. Of course Hamas operatives speaking to a Western journalist (who miraculously found them, possibly by clairvoyance, without them even trying to reach out) would be very reluctant to provide him a sensationalized accusations about atrocities committed by Israel. How dumb must one be to really believe that explanation?
There are rich men in Nigeria (they have at least four billionaires!). It is, theoretically, possible, that one of them needs help with his business arrangements, and it is, theoretically, possible that you could be able to assist them. After all, I am sure there are thousands of people who earn their money helping rich people with financial transactions. Nothing implausible here, right? But even person capable of believing all that must have some doubts when the best argument for "why should I believe this person I never met?" turns out to be "he is a Nigerian government official of high stature, so he wouldn't lie to me, and since he is so rich anyway, there's no reason why he would want to deceive me and take my money!"
With his public argument this dumb, how good would be his verification process, if he's so weak selling his story to the public, how hard did he fight to validate the sources who are bringing him what he is so desperately seeking? Apparently, good enough for Jew-haters everywhere to take it as honest truth. Not entirely unprecedented and very expected, of course.
Do I understand your position correctly as: "With 99% probability this is made up"?
(I prefer it when people state their positions clearly, rather than doing the dance of: I say it without saying it, so that in case I might turn out to be wrong I can deny that I said it.)
Yes. I can not vouch for exact number, I don't know how to properly quantify it, but yes, my position is with very high degree of certainty these stories (specifically the dog thing) are made up.
It has been widely reported (that's how I knew about it, surprisingly I never met any of the Kristof's sources personally, so I learned about it the same way I learn a lot of other things about what happens in the world - by reading. Try it sometime, it's fun!). Example: https://honestreporting.com/further-revelations-deepen-questions-over-kristofs-nyt-blood-libel/ - took me about 5 minutes to find. How much did you spend on checking it before pre-supposing it is false?
Additionally, at the same place there's a proof (not evidence, proof) that Kristof misquoted at least one other source (namely, Olmert) and put his words into context which the source never intended. This is a very grave sin for a respectable professional journalist, because the reader has only journalist's word to rely on transferring what and in which context the sources actually said, and if you can not believe that, then nothing they write is worth anything. But I think that ship has sailed for Kristof.
Your source* claims that there are previous "contradictions in al-Sai’s account" of a previous detention by the Palestinian Authority, that render him unreliable.
But this claim is very tenuous. We're not talking about a guy who went on ten different TV inverviews and told them all a different story. We're talking about a guy who allegedly was tortured by the PA; then, while still in detention, was tortured into saying he wasn't tortured; then, once not in detention anymore, reaffirmed that he'd been tortured. What sort of cheap propaganda pretends it's impossible that torture victims say what their torturers want them to say?
*(although the source is called "Honest Reporting," it's not actually a watchdog about media honesty in general, it's more of an advocate for Israel specifically.)
The question was not whether or not he was tortured by PA - I am readily admitting he may have been. The question was whether he was working for Hamas - and he was, and he himself is admitting this, and that's why PA arrested him.
> What sort of cheap propaganda pretends it's impossible that torture victims say what their torturers want them to say?
I don't know - if you point out which propaganda claims that, I could sort it for you. But I have never made such a claim, and this claim is irrelevant to the question at hand anyway - whether he was tortured by PA or not is irrelevant to the question whether he worked for Hamas.
> it's not actually a watchdog about media honesty in general, it's more of an advocate for Israel specifically
Yes, it is. That is not a contradiction to the facts alleged - which facts at the time weren't contested by Al-Sai himself, he just said “no law that forbids journalists from working with political organizations.” And of course it is true, there is no law (in Gaza at least) that prohibits journalists from working for Hamas. The question that was asked is whether I have any evidence that Al-Sai worked for Hamas. I think the answer to this question is pretty clear - yes, I do, and you do too.
How does this differ from what you did (except for doing so with brevity)? Can you point me to a single gram of substance in your original comment that cannot be reduced to either "how dare they?" Try as I might, I cannot find in it either a single use of logic, nor even so much as a weak gesture at a single shred of evidence, only a very loud and very rude argument from incredulity.
I can, and very easily at that. I pointed out a glaring problem in Kristof's reporting - for which I take no credit, absolutely, since it is obvious by anyone who can gather two functioning brain cells together, and had been reported on by the whole wide world - that he uses sources, highly motivated to hurt Israel and that this kind of Israel haters had perpetrated multiple false reports of atrocities in the past. This would, normally, require very hight standard of scrutiny for any new reports, especially as eye-poppingly unlikely as this one. However - and this is my second point - while being clearly aware of this problem, Kristof chose to dismiss it with absolutely hilariously weak defense of "doubting this" because, essentially, they wouldn't lie to him, and if they did, he find multiple people who were willing to lie to him - which he, hilariously, considers implausible.
It is hard to imagine Kristof really did not understand how weak that argument is, but if he did, he is certainly unqualified to validate sources, especially in such high-stakes cases. However, more likely he knew what he was doing, and expected that his readers would believe him anyway, or at least pretend to, and use his past reputation as a shield helping them to fend off any doubts about veracity of the reporting, and thus would feel free to use his allegations as a weapon to hurt Israel and Jews in general. Which likely was the real purpose of the exercise, as it always in in war propaganda. It does not matter whether it is true, what matters whether it hurts the enemy.
If you can not find any use of logic here, I am sorry, but I can not help you much, there's no force in the Universe that can make person understand an argument if they are committed to not understanding it. Proceed to imagine anything that makes you feel better, I think I performed my humanitarian duty of explaining what I meant sufficiently and more, while you so far haven't contributed any additional substance at all.
I'm not sure I understood the spirit of your reply. If you think I'm shouting into the void, fair enough, I probably am to some degree. But if you're telling me to give up then nah.
Question: why is there so much alarm about dropping birth rates right after a historic population maximum? In 1925 developed countries had half of current population and no one said it is not enough. Can't we use some more elbow room? Worry about it in 50 years.
What we should be worried about is population structure, like the retirement age will be like 75.
a- on a practical level, the 'infinite growth' assumption of many institutions means things will start to break down in unexpected ways..and there'll be fewer young minds to fix them. If you consider the potential ripple effects of e.g. the Strait of Hormuz on fertilizer and thence to crop yields etc...plus the ability of smart drone swarms to cause major choke points...in general the world systems will be in a fragile config. And there literally won't be enough people to replace all the dying out contextual knowledge to definitely allow a graceful decline. (and that's setting aside all standard concerns re: economic indicators)
b - on a philosophical level: Unlike say climate change, the problem does not clearly admit a technological solution. Even with artificial wombs...someone has to want to have and raise the resulting kids, potentially w/o a partner, or otherwise 'sub their ideal' circumstance - the big bottleneck globally. This has forced me personally to develop a new meta-ethics that is both more scientifically grounded than utilitarianism, avoiding or dissolving standard 'puzzles'- but both robust and pluralist at the root:
It will be interesting to see how this holds up in court.
“The core legal issue is federal preemption: are these prediction markets regulated financial derivatives under federal law, or are they just sports/election gambling that states can ban? Minnesota is betting on the latter.”
“Minnesota lawmakers move to ban prediction markets”
Is it possible to mark a minoritry among the 100 cells of a 10x10 board, so that inside every 3x3 square on that board, the marked cells hold a majority?
You can. I asked chatgpt, it seems like the sort of question it should be able to answer, and sure enough it gives an example with 48 marks. I'm not sure how to share a picture, modifying it a little label them (i,j) i,j=0,...9. Rows i with i=0 mod 3, mark those j =2 mod 3, other rows marks j=1 or 2 mod 3. Unless I'm miscounting something, this looks like it works.
Good work. A general solution is as follows: The upper left hand corner of your solution is a solution to the 4x4 problem. Duplicating the rightmost three rows, and then the bottom three rows gives a solution to the 7x7 problem. Doing that procedure again recreates your 10x10 solution. Continuing gives solutions for 13x13, 16x16, and so on.
That's not true. For n large you can divide an nxn square into approximately nxn/3x3 disjoint squares of size 3x3, which means that any 3x3-majority set of marks must have at least r_n*5/9*n^2 elements (r_n sequence that converges to 1). The obvious generalization achieves this asymptotic growth of approximate density 5/9, so that is best possible.
A device like the one claimed to have been invented would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The Debrief article links to what it describes as “a peer-reviewed study...which details the underlying physics.” It may explain *some* of the underlying physics, but leaves out the interesting parts, like how you can extract energy from a vacuum.
I could believe that the wierdness of quantum physics means that perpetual motion machines are in fact possible. But if so, I don’t expect the first indication of it would be a press briefing from a perpetual motion machine manufacturer. It would show up in a physics journal, especially if the people involved have a proven ability to get published in peer reviewed physics journals.
Hmm I couldn't find any link with further physics explanations. It's possible that the electrons tunneling in from the cavity walls are the hotter electrons. Maybe it stops working at much lower temperatures. IDK. It's weird to me you want to dismiss it because of the source. A paper would be nice. But academia is very conservative these days. It's too dangerous (to your career) to try and do 'out side the box' physics. And if there is some device that others can go and measure (voltage and current) then dang. You don't need the physics explanation first if you've got a working device.
If the device is effectively converting heat into electricity, that might mean that energy is conserved (no violation of the first law of thermodynamics), but it would be violating the second law of thermodynamics.
Harold G. White and the other people working at Casimir are doing “outside the box” physics; they just haven’t written a paper about it.
Pons and Fleishmann’s cold fusion device wasn’t sufficient to establish the existence of cold fusion. (I don’t believe they allowed anyone else to measure the output of their device, but I also don’t think their is any reason to believe they falsified their measurement results.) If Casimir succeeds in developing a usable product, that would settle the matter because, to be useful, the device will have to generate enough power that the power output can be measured using standard measurement equipment. But that’s not where we are today.
Incredible. Why can't hampshire college man just do a GoFundMe or Kickstarter. What percentage of his audience does he think has $10mil lying around to buy a college? And he prefers to just have one massive stakeholder to thousands of smaller ones?
Hell some of the smaller ones would give it for cheaper. They might ask for discounted tuition for their kids to the college instead of getting their money back
The pitch is aimed at someone with Musk/Andreessen/Thiel money. Those guys probably do lurk around here occasionally, but anything with even a faint patchouli-oil aroma tends to send them fleeing like vampires at sunrise.
What if you started with the question “what skills can only be learned, are best learned, or are only valid if they are learned, at university?” and then based courses of study around the answers?
What if a university used this highly selective method of programming as a springboard to change our culture to one where every last high school graduate with a pulse isn’t pushed into wasting 4 years and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that is unlikely to be of any relevance to their eventual career?
I was the biggest AI hater but it's now actually useful. ChatGPT in particular is incredibly useful and advanced now. Was able to help me with trip planning and can even look up scientific articles and do research like that
Hating AI for “it’s not useful” is like hating burning styrofoam because it doesn’t get your marshmallows toasted enough. Usefulness or unusefulness was never really the issue. It’s what it does to your mind, what it does to society, and what it could do to the planet, those kinds of things, that are the problem.
(Guess I’m mostly contesting your claim of having been a big AI hater)
Imagine someone made a logically airtight argument, based on premises you couldn’t imagine disagreeing with, that humans should go extinct. Would you accept it even though it’s terrible? Or would you reject it even if you couldn’t really articulate a reason why their argument is wrong?
(I wrote a story about this question if anyone is interested.)
That we should go extinct sort of implies the question of what use we are. And that leads directly to what use are we to who or what? I don't see what logical argument you could make that would address those questions.On the grand scale, we, as we know ourselves now, have not been around very long. The big problem with what we humans refer to as consciousness is that it leads to an incredibly distorted sense of our own importance. The problem with your question to me is that I feel I am perfectly capable of articulating a reason why their argument is wrong. Unless they could answer my second question above, it clearly isn't logical. And there is no objective way to answer my question.
Its interesting how most of the commentors answers seem to be granting that the argument is logically consistent without granting that a logically consistent argument could be highly persuasive. I'm assuming that your point is that every individual link in the chain of the argument is rooted in a deeply held belief of the person you are talking to, and yet the final step is somewhere they don't want to go. I would at least grant that the argument lands you in a state of emotional distress, it should be upsetting to realize that all your deepest beliefs end in a conclusion you don't like, and that should set you a pathway to either accepting the conclusion or questioning all the premises you hold dear. So either way an incredibly persuasive argument should change you. If you don't grant that's at least a possibility, then you are basically abandoning discourse and rationality, at which point I don't know what any of us think we're doing anymore.
I think your ability to overtake objects in real life is part of the evidence that rebuts Zeno's Paradox, presumably part of the hypothetical is that there's no such obvious out.
If my moral premises logically lead to the necessity of human extinction that's as good as saying they contain an implied contradiction so I'll just consider how to update my moral premises.
This is the kind of thing I really don't get about philosophy. To me it's like asking 'if someone proved logically that you were a fish, would you go and live in the sea?'. I mean sure, ok, whatever you like.
Honestly not a criticism I just don't remotely get what's going on with this line of thinking.
If someone proved it, there must be something wrong with the proof, and the intellectual challenge is to find the flaw.
I think the OP question is uninteresting, because I know the conclusion is wrong, but am not presented with the proof, so cannot disprove it. Especially since it is given that the argument is "airtight".
The basic idea here is to ask whether a purely logical argument starting from moral premises you agree with could convince you of something morally terrible. That could be the goodness of human extinction, torturing puppies for fun, endless drunken orgies 24x7, sacrificing children to the volcano gods, etc.
But we know that many times when people try to nail down moral premises and reason from them, they get to bizarre conclusions we're pretty sure aren't right, whether that's "we should maximize population until everyone is living in a 1m cube and subsisting on a flavorless nutrient paste but just slightly prefers continued existence to death" or "you should tell the truth to the Nazis about whether or not there's a Jewish family hiding in the attic" or whatever else. I think the right way to think about this is that nobody really has moral premises that work for deriving moral truths in an entirely reliable way via chains of logic, and so we should be willing to discard those conclusions when they seem sufficiently wrong. But also, this turns on questions of what morality is, whether it's real in any sense, and how we know about it.
“That could be the goodness of human extinction, torturing puppies for fun, endless drunken orgies 24x7, sacrificing children to the volcano gods, etc.” One of these things is not like the others.
So you're asking if absolute moral truths are logically self-consistent. Or whether people have double-think regarding moral truths, holding two contradictory things as both true. This may be an interesting question to debate for some, but it isn't a scientific one, which is to say, it cannot be proven wrong with logic.
I reject the scenario axiomatically, as a pragmatist (PX0. there is no view from nowhere -> no ought from is). It is perhaps an interesting example of the most certainly *non rational issue* of drawing what I refer to as an heir-boundary, and the 'veil of future heirs' in action.
In my system - fixing an heir def, that human extinction will maximize the life-years of all other entities within that definition. But you still have freedom. So, you either :
bite the bullet per your heir-def
Choose to update your heir-def, and stay ethical by the new one
Choose to not update...and make an unethical choice.
Most importantly, in the 'stay ethical' cases, the claim is true/scientific *and* admits a generalizable decision procedure, future heirs (indexed/freely chosen) will tend to 'endorse' your logic.
So with all that said...can I imagine myself considering some clearly non-human species or set of them sufficient as 'heirs of humanity' to sacrifice all our LYs for theirs, in extremis? At the moment, I can I guess.
I'd accept the premises and arguments and conclusion as a unit, mentally tag it with a probability related to my faith in my own ability to spot a flaw or trick in this type of situation, and go on with my life looking for counter-arguments and flaws with input from other smart people.
I don't think this belief (with a reasonable probabilistic marker) would change my behavior very much. Like, I'm not going to be offered a button to wipe out humanity, and belief that humanity should go extinct doesn't equate to belief that I should do anything violent to individuals or anything. I don't think holding that belief is actually much of a burden or danger.
I might be cautious about spreading the belief, only talking about the full argument in person instead of posting it online or w/e.
- Realise it's some semantic nonsense like "Now that you're uploaded to the cloud, you're not human anymore! Gotcha!" and proceed not to be gotten.
I'd probably start with assuming it's a question of semantics and look for the gotcha, next proceed to assuming my reasoning was wrong and check it with other people, and then finally reconsider the premises and whether my moral foundation is correct. Maybe I don't really believe we should prevent suffering in all cases, for example, or don't believe that people always have a right to make certain choices, or don't believe that certain things have intrinsic value.
I guess I'd eventually be left with no choice but to accept the conclusion, but the due diligence before doing that would be significant.
I think the way you've written this is a bit underspecified. I absolutely believe that the human race should go extinct, and will, when we evolve into the next organism (yes, I know that's not quite how evolution works, it's just a colloquial phrasing), or become post-human or trans-human. At the very least, at that point, the extinction of humans will be a morally neutral event; it will probably be morally good.
I don't think that's what you were asking about, though. You were asking, what do you do when an argument has unpalatable consequences.
Here again, there are two distinctions to be made: (a) what should you think? and (b) what should you do?
For (b), doing nothing is always an option. Most philosophical arguments don't require you to do anything. Ethical arguments in theory create moral obligations, but exactly how great an obligation is not clear. Just as the moral value of giving succour to the poor doesn't seem to demand that I immediately go an help every poor person, the moral conclusion that human extinction is good doesn't demand that I start killing people.
For (a), you deal with it like all the other contradictions in your mind. We all walk around with heads full of them. This one will not be any different.
If you believe humans should be allowed to go extinct, does that mean you believe we should not intervene to save animals on the verge of extinction, if humans were not the cause of it? And even then, since humans are part of the environment, is it not natural to just let them go?
Yeah, I certainly wouldn't see it as a moral priority.
When humans are the cause, it's worth checking whether our behaviour (the behaviour that is endangering the species) is reasonable. We seem to be in danger of causing a mass extinction, which is bad for everybody, so we might well choose to change our behaviour to avoid that outcome, and that might involve rescuing a few species on the brink. But in general, the existence or otherwise of a species (other than us) is not a moral concern.
The episode imo never gives a good defense of her belief in the need to take Pascal's Wager seriously (a belief that concerns me), but there is at least good conversation around the epistemic state you end up in when you do, e.g.: "You’re pretty sure there is something that has gone wrong, but the fact that you haven't been able to put your finger on it gives you pause."
I didn’t want to be obnoxious by linking to it but if you go to my profile it’s posted on there as The Philosopher That Solved Morality.
"You’re pretty sure there is something that has gone wrong, but the fact that you haven't been able to put your finger on it gives you pause."
Yes, that’s exactly the thing I’m interested in. At what point can you be justified in rejecting something even when you don’t have a “rational” reason for it?
The philosophers' concept of "justification" is a game I don't play.
The fact that there is a logical argument if favor of something is one data point. The fact that the conclusion seems like a nonsense to me is another data point. Now I have two data points, and no idea how both could happen in the same world. This is a puzzle that I may try to solve.
When I encounter these types of contradictions or absurdities, my natural reaction isn't to try to immediately resolve it. My reaction is to suspend both claims while I look for deeper structure. Contradictions aren't mistakes, contradictions are helpful hints. <bob_ross.jpg>
E.g. in the case of Pascal's Wager, the deeper structure is that EV is appropriate for ergodic systems, whereas Kelly's Criterion is often more appropriate for systems which exhibit path-dependency. My conversations with Sydney have also informed me that Kelly is derivable from the Lyapunov Invariant, and that different systems have different invariants, depending on the composition-rule.
Until you find a resolution, I think it's perfectly reasonable to go "yeah dude, like, idk, man".
I think this part of the story specifically makes it really difficult for me to have any clear picture of the scenario:
> “Even if that was true,” She responded. “How do you know these ‘self-evident’ premises are even right?”
> “We’ve talked about this. We all have a moral sense that lets us determine basic ethical intuitions. These intuitions aren’t justified by other premises, but it would be ridiculous to deny them. Denying them would be as absurd as denying the reality of math. These intuitions are part of the fabric of reality.”
I'm not sure I can imagine such self-evident axioms of ethics as being possible at all.
This makes the short story structurally similar to one that starts like:
> "I have created a color of paint that is simultaneously completely red and completely blue (but not any combination of them)!"
Meaning, I'll just do the suspension of disbelief thing and let you conclude whatever you want
Well no one has actually come up with self evident axioms of ethics or else we would argue less about ethics. But lots of people have come up with arguments where the premises sound very obviously correct but ends up with a horrific conclusion.
True, but those scenarios (seemingly reasonable premises, horrible conclusion) are very diverse.
Some of them actually imply that a horrible conclusion is true (ex: a crew abandoned on a space station + they'll be rescued in Y days + they only have Z resources -> they need to kill and eat someone to minimize casualties) and others just rely on bad inputs (ex: you can imagine that if Jews really were satanic the Nazi extermination plan would be reasonable, but Jews aren't satanic so it wasn't).
The scenario "what if reasonable conclusions but horrible result?" is underspecified. It's similar to "what if aliens visited earth?" in the sense that more details are needed to meaningfully talk about it. I suspect any clarification would collapse the scenario into either:
"Imagine genocide was good. In this scenario, would genocide be good?"
or it would result in a premise that I clearly disagree with.
[Not saying that the premise "Jews are satanic" is reasonable, I'm just trying to think of a maximally obvious case where the "hard conclusion" was just wrong]
I'm afraid I think I reject the premise, because I don't think "logically airtight" is a quality an argument about value judgments can have - only factual arguments can be logically airtight, and even then if they deal with the real world rather than with formal maths they are implicitly conditional.
You can absolutely have logically airtight moral arguments, the thing is that the postulates they start with aren't objective in any way or form. But the deductions can be objective.
OK, that's fair, but a corollary to it is that being logically airtight is not a reason to accept a moral argument, it just means that if you don't trust the conclusions then you shouldn't trust the premises.
That’s it. I don’t think it would be a good thing for humans to go extinct. If I discovered that other moral views I hold are inconsistent with that belief, that would establish that at least one of my beliefs was wrong, but wouldn’t tell me *which* of my inconsistent beliefs was wrong.
By airtight I just mean it’s philosophically valid in the sense that the that premises necessarily lead to the conclusion. If A implies B and B implies C, then A necessarily implies C. Then if you agree with the premises that makes it sound. You could logically object to his argument on the premises but not on its validity.
I get what you’re saying, I think, about implicit conditions: but I think arguments about value can also be “logically airtight” provided the premises are agreed to.
Buying a college now would be like buying a newspaper 20 years ago. 2026 is the demographic peak of college enrollment. Demand for college will monotonically decline for the next 20 years, to say nothing about the impact that AI will have.
At least until recently, Hampshire was a really good college, with graduates doing well for themselves. Of the many colleges which have closed in recent years or are about to close, it’s almost certainly the best.
I work for, uh, an Extremely Large Online Retailer, in a facility which handles objects up to 45 pounds. Something I’ve noted time and time again is that the more petite and/or older a woman is, the greater her ability to lift and carry heavy packages. It’s the physically robust young women built like brick s***houses who can’t lift anything heavy.
Retail also involves a lot of cardio, and brick s***houses are heavy to lug around all day. Plus, for the most part the old folks have been doing retail their entire lives, and are going to be very good at it.
It's also possible that you're attractive and the muscle mommies want to look dainty in front of you.
-Attentional/memetic bias, the cases you describe are surprising and get noticed and remembered, people are quietly behaving the way you'd expect most of the time outside the scope of your attention and memory.
-Actually anyone is technically capable of lifting the heavy packages, the older and petite women are just willing to work harder and complain about it less because they are used to having to do so.
-Something something core muscles and good form from doing actual work vs. gym muscles and fixed-form exercises = the people who 'look strong' are not actually the ones most capable at real-world tasks involving moving things around for practical purposes.
-'built like brick s***houses' implies bulkiness, which limits how close you can hold a package to your center of balance, which is hell on your leverage and form, and maybe also limits which core muscles you can use and at what angle? Thus making it much harder to lift and carry. Like, carrying a bucket of water resting on your hip vs carrying it with arms straight out at 90 degrees. I think there are some magic tricks that rely on effects like this to make something seem 'unliftable' by forcing the strongman lifter to approach the task with terrible form and leverage.
All seems reasonable, but 3 and 4 stand out to me the most. I worked at a shop where I'd regularly lift/carry 100+ pound bins and those 20 litre food containers (short distances, sometimes up/down stairs). I'm 5'2" and not much more than 100 pounds myself.
I mostly explained it as a matter of good form, balance, and yes, access to hips! With a 100lb bin on one hip I would also have one hand free to open doors. The 20L containers (~45 lbs?) were often harder to carry than 100lb bins because they'd be full of liquid, so I couldn't tuck them under an arm or tilt them away from me. Wide shallow containers would be held against the front of my hips, or hoisted over my head if I had to walk farther or up/down stairs.
For 2, I doubt that "actually anyone is technically capable of lifting the packages," but attitude certainly played a role where I worked. I didn't like standing around waiting for someone else to grab what I needed for me, even though there was always someone I could ask.
Yes, it’s attitude. Before I met my wife she worked on a Ford truck assembly line 5 ten hour weekday shifts and 8 on Saturday. Neither petite nor brick shit house, just determined to do the job.
So politicians get to robodial the entire population of the US 600 times a day, singlehandedly making voice calls entirely irrelevant and regarded universally as a sole source of spam and scams in the richest nation on earth, a problem no other developed nation has, but a single AI-mediated call to a politician is illegal?
The logical response from their side is to connect the other end to an AI chatbot that will talk to you so you feel your concerns are being listened to.
In the long run, this is inevitable, but do we really want to be the ones to accelerate that escalation?
I don't think connecting the other end to an AI is all that bad, so long as it keeps track of what people are saying. But the voters using AI is really bad. The point is it's a proof of work for the voters and shows that people really care and what they care about.
Though I think the real endgame here is to have AI trawl the internet for what voters think. People who call their representatives are not representative of voters as a whole.
Hopefully the AIs will learn to start each call with a rapid encoded series of beeps that let them know they're talking to each other, and give a quick encoded summary then hang up.
I'd like to return to the topic that the tendency to see a good/evil binary is wrong, there should be such a thing as moral neutrality, and in fact - when you deduct empty virtue-signals - most people are morally neutral. That means honestly selfish, honestly transactional with most people and generous only with some.
And I noticed a very strange thing. When you try to virtue-signal, when you try to get good guy points, people are often very critical. A textbook example is very feminist men, you often see they get little respect and much scrutiny from women. When you don't do that, when you accept moral neutrality and no virtue points, people are basically okay with that in a relaxed way.
My guess is, that virtue, good guy points have a tight economy, there is not much such points to go around? When you are competing for it, people gonna have high standards to make sure you really earned it. When you say you are not interested, then the standards are much relaxed.
Here is the strange part: what is this economy really about? Like what does one buy with good guy points? Because in real life people mostly relate to you how you treat them and generally people around you. So when Bob in accounting becomes Barbara you don't misgender her just out of politeness and that is simply enough, people do not really demand that you become a generic trans activist or say the shibboleth of the day or anything like that.
> My guess is, that virtue, good guy points have a tight economy, there is not much such points to go around? When you are competing for it, people gonna have high standards to make sure you really earned it. When you say you are not interested, then the standards are much relaxed.
It’s not that. It’s that people, women in particular, suspect the male feminist of hypocrisy. It’s a show it, don’t say it, situation.
It's about sex and social conformity [0][1]. If the tribe excommunicates you, you're gonna have a bad time. Although I think it's always possible for these things to go off the rails, as was the case for sugar. The rationalists have been calling this "meso-optimization" (although I hate this term because it's kludgy and has bad mouthfeel; I volunteer "proximization" as substitute). But the general idea is that of an agent acting as if sugar is a terminal value, in an environment where things like cake represent an abundant super-stimulus and sugar-cravings are maladaptive.
It's not an economy because easily counterfeited signals can't be the basis of any kind of real value exchange. Virtue signaling is a shibboleth that signifies ingroup membership - specifically it signals submission to a set of beliefs. People do it so that they won't be targeted for coordinated social punishment in the name of those beliefs. It's a version of being a kiss-ass to your boss in the hopes that it will prevent him from firing you, or being conspicuous about saying that you love The Party if you live in a communist country.
Women scrutinize performatively feminist men because they realize that the men are likely being cynical about it in a gambit to have sex. Leaning *too hard* into it signals that they (the men) have nothing else to offer and so it acquires a "like me because I'm nice" valence which always gives women the ick.
I don't think staying neutral / mute leads to punishment, it was never my experience, it just leads to lack of rewards. But in my experience it is perfectly possible to be friends or friendly coworkers with people while basically shrugging about shibboleths. Outside some truly extremely ideological circles, that is, academia, one can be politically neutral and disinterested and there are no issues with it.
Can we say moral goodness is interpreted in a framework of moral neutrality, transactionality? That is, going beyond one's obligations feels like expecting something in return, and that makes it uncomfortable, kind of like how people doing favors unasked for feels like that? I think the male feminist issue is not even having nothing else to offer, but that that the very concept of an offer itself, that is, that it happens in a sexual-romantic framework it itself, that is, it feels like in itself a sexual move, an expectation of something.
Maybe you need to preface your virtue signalling with "I think X but Y".
For instance, instead of saying "I think women ought to be able to wear whatever they want without being raped," you could say "I think women who wear athleisure are Godless harlots who will burn forever as punishment for the sin of dressing immodestly so as to provoke lust in the eyes of men; however, rape is also a sin, and athleisure doesn't justify it because nothing justifies sin." And then, if someone tries to argue with you, act defensive and say you're not woke, shut up, as if that's the main problem you expect to encounter.
I'm not sure what this will earn you but I bet finding out will be entertaining.
On the actual point, why is meeting your social obligations morally neutral? I have this feeling that you're setting the goalposts for morality at doing more or less than the average person, and then pointing out that the average person is morally neutral, but this is circular logic. The average person seems far more likely to be either morally negative, as the anti-natalists and animal rights activists would have it, or morally positive, as the utilitarians and parents might claim, and not balanced right in the middle.
What is an average person? It can really depend on one's circles. Also average is a misleading term, if half people are six feet tall and half are four, the average is five except you never actually meet one who is five.
No, what I mean is something relaxed and intuitive. Basic transactionality, something for something for people not close, and reciprocal altruism for people close. The kind of thing that just makes intuitive sense.
If you want it more philosophical, it is the assumption that your importance is the same as other people's importance. So you neither sacrifice yourself nor you expect sacrifices from others, but make trades of equal value. This is a baseline intuitive assumption. Altruism, EA, utilitarianism etc. generally gives you less importance than other people, as many other people are in greater need. Committing crimes, defrauding people, extreme selfishness etc. generally gives other people less importance.
I don’t think many people are purely transactional in their dealings with strangers, though.
Consider what someone would do if they were on a long trip outside the city, and they saw a young mother next to a broken down car flagging them down. I bet if you repeated the experiment a hundred times per person then most people would stop and help at least once, even with no expectation of reward.
Trying to get virtue points is not virtuous. So one has to be virtuous, but not try to get the points. Then you’ll get the points.
Then you can spend the points on all sorts of things. Buy a girlfriend with your points. Buy real friends with your points. Buy self-assuredness with your points. The great thing is, once you’re virtuous and have gained your virtue points by not trying to get them, they’re basically unlimited.
Using the "correct" pronouns *is* a shibboleth of the day, though.
In general, it's in my experience more complex than you write it; Based on each moral framework, you're expected to submit to their current framing of what is good and what is not. But you also are not expected to try and usurp moral authority that you do not have.
In a religious society, you'd say that just going to church once per week is "morally neutral", but a non-priest constantly berating people for their moral failings would be treated with extra scrutiny and little respect.
Just back in, say, the 80s, you'd say that live and let live is "morally neutral", but going around demanding people to use the "correct" pronouns would be similarly too much.
In most ancestral societies, it was also in fact important to fulfill the expectations of your sex - Man need to do physically demanding and dangerous work because only they can, women need to have children and breastfeed them because only they can. That would be "morally neutral". Even just living like the other sex would back then make you a self-centered asshole. People objectively depended on each other much more than nowadays.
The economy for non-priests (using the religious framing; functionally it's extremely similar in non-religious societies, though) is mostly about getting left alone. For the priests, it's about the social power of getting to push society into a direction you desire. This is what makes trying too hard, like a super feminist man, so suspicious: As a man, you have no moral authority on the desires of women. You are supposed to simply submit. Yet, you try to get social power through the framework of feminism. It's a blatant contradiction.
That's true, but many non-conservative communities expect you to follow the basic dictates of the most important/powerful groups but not to be an activist for them.
E.g. it is socially unacceptable in a lot of liberal communities to harass trans people, but usually not to dislike or distrust them post-2023 if you're not super openly hostile about it. In similar environments it is socially unacceptable to harass the religious but not socially unacceptable to be openly atheist. A lot of these boundaries are based on something like "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
This is close to what I would call intuitive moral neutrality. It is the assumption that one's importance is the same as the importance of others. So it is a neither demand nor offer sacrifices mentality.
So you basically saying social media erased the distinction between "priests" and everybody else, and now kind of everybody is a "priest-candidate" ?
"Using the "correct" pronouns *is* a shibboleth of the day, though." I see it as the same kind of politeness that Edwin Aldrin changed his name to Buzz Aldrin so calling him Buzz. A pronoun is just a stand-in for a name, like it would be grammatically correct - just tedious - to say "John arrived home. John took off his coat."
Not quite, but close; I'd say that traditional organized religion increasingly lost its grip on moral authority some time starting in the 70s and now we are in a power vacuum interregnum. People have a need for a moral framework, and so are looking for a new moral authority. Social media came much later than that.
A lot of people have a plausible claim to some amount of moral authority through some sort of framework - women through feminism, ethnic groups through anti-racism, LGBT individuals through, well, LGBT rights. But they do not have unlimited authority, and especially if you don't use the correct framework for your identity you have even less. All of this can be conceptualized as a a greater individualist identitarian moral framework as well.
To pronouns, that's a plausible argument. I generally don't misgender either, out of politeness. But even just changing names is not universal among cultures. In most it's something you're assigned, and demanding to be called a different way is already questionable at best, outright unacceptable at worst. Especially if your new name has some significance to social status, and by claiming it, you are understood as claiming that new status. There is a reason why trans-women are far more controversial than trans-men.
Hm. I am not sure of interregnum. Didn’t intellectuals and professors step smoothly into it? Especially in the US, as formerly the moral authority claims of many competing churches were generally resolved by treating the heads of the biggest divinity schools - and both Harvard and Yale started out as one - the highest moral authority? So in a sense it was always professors. But also in the UK I saw in Cambridge a classroom building that looked like a small cathedral.
Not entirely smoothly. A smooth transfer of moral authority would have lead to just "culture" instead of a "culture war".
There probably was some kind of transfer of authority in the mid 20th century, but in the 60s and 70s dissenters on both the left and right got loud and organized. And talking about it gets confusing because each cluster of dissenters tend to conflate the other dissenters with the orthodox establishment.
"The experts" are nowadays probably the closest match, I agree with that. But it's still all a lot less well-defined than, say, church proceedings. Especially in the 70s - 2000s time span, when the christian religions still had some moral cache but greatly reduced, while the new left-wing framing hasn't solidified into its current structure. I guess there is an argument that the interregnum had mostly passed by the, say, 2010s. If you read up on the details of various controversial scholar's firings and almost-firings since then, it's all very reminiscent of inquisition proceedings (not the popular image, but the more mundane reality).
I have read upon one, Larry Summers, and that was interesting. Basically everybody already disliked him in a nonpartisan way for managing the money of Harvard very badly, bordering on corruption, but somehow they could not get him for it. Then he said one controversial thing and they used it as an excuse to get him. So it was not an inquisition in itself, as the real reason was the money issue. But somehow they had to pretend it is an inquisition, because it is possible to get people that way, and not possible to get people for far more objective and nonpartisan near-crimes, like using Harvard funds to settle the lawsuit of a buddy? Looked like a very upside down thing to me.
On the recent subjects of taste and aesthetics, I wonder if Scott or anyone else here has come across Philip Mann's "The Dandy at Dusk?" I think he makes a fair philosophical stab at the question of objective aesthetic taste in his book/blog.
Dwarkesh asks four questions for the competition. A quick TLDR of the questions and my answers:
1. Why is AI still scaling, even though people hypothesized that we would not be able to achieve the same level of compute growth that we had in the beginning of the AI blitz?
- improvements across the ai stack have a 'moore's law' like effect that is underappreciated because of how multidimensional it is
- pretraining in particular has gotten a lot better, and that is (imo) where a lot of the improvements lie
2. AI companies need to constantly train more and better models, so when do they make money?
- token demand far outstrips supply because of limitations in the amount of globally available compute
- NVIDIA, TSMC et. al. aren't going to price gouge (even though right now they plausibly could) because they are looking many years ahead and want to encourage a lot of players downstream of them to ensure demand continues
3. What should the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic founders, and other alignment oriented people do to make sure AI goes well?
- specifically focused on the risk of mass unemployment and not, like, DEI issues or x-risk or any number of other potential AI pitfalls
- these teams should simply start a private "sovereign wealth fund" like fund that pays out a UBI to everyone in SF, with the goals of: rapidly growing the fund, increasing coverage, and getting picked up by the federal government
- the goal is to hedge against massive rapid unemployment. There are settings where a UBI would get eaten by landlords rent (for eg) but if that happens over a period of years then AI is not growing fast enough to be (as much of) an issue from a labor shock perspective
4. What should India and Nigeria and other countries not in the supply chain do?
- Follow the Singapore / Korea / Taiwan / Chinese model: strong central economic leadership, domestic protectionism around parts of the AI stack, hold home-grown companies to external standards in exchange for the protectionism
"- specifically focused on the risk of mass unemployment and not, like, DEI issues or x-risk or any number of other potential AI pitfall"
This is a valid question to ask, but calling it "AI alignment" seems like a misuse of the term. Any plan for AI related job losses has to presuppose a high level of AI alignment; the AI has to be stable and reliable before it can replace human workers. "How do humans best navigate a world with powerful, well-functioning AI once it's been created?," is a separate question from "how do humans ensure that 'well-functioning' goes along with 'powerful' when creating AI?"
I was being sloppy in the summary. Here is the actual question text:
> With OpenAI’s new raise at an $852B valuation, OpenAI Foundation’s stake is now worth $180B. Anthropic’s cofounders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Nobody seems to have a concrete idea of how to deploy 100s of billions (soon trillions) of wealth productively to “make AI go well”. If you were in charge of the OpenAI Foundation right now, what exactly would you do? And when? It’s not enough to identify a cause you think is important, because that doesn’t answer the fundamental problem of how you convert money to impact. Identify the concrete strategy you recommend pursuing.
My son recently took the GeneSight® Psychotropic Pharmacogenomic Test which indicated that he was heterozygous for the C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene, which affects the body's ability to converting homocysteine into methionine. Therefore my son's psychiatrist recommended that he take L-methylfolate daily.
Apparently this can have cardiovascular, neurological & psychiatric, pregnancy & reproductive, energy & methylation implications.
I'd never heard of this before, but 40% of the population has the C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene. Among Ashkenazi Jews, maybe 3/4 have either the heterozygous or the homozygous C677T polymorphism. So if the heterozygous or homozygous C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene (C/T genotype) is so prevalent, why isn't there more awareness of this mutation, testing for this mutation, and correction for this mutation by taking supplements?
Asking Claude, I received the following answer:
1. Prevalence ≠ Clinical Significance (At Least, Not Straightforwardly)
2. The Homocysteine Problem Is More Tractable Than the Genotype. So they test for Homocysteine levels rather than C677T.
3. The Research Landscape Has Been Disappointing. Several major predictions about MTHFR failed to pan out at the population level.
4. Major medical bodies (American College of Medical Genetics, ACOG) have explicitly come out against routine MTHFR testing in clinical settings, precisely because the evidence doesn't support it changing management in most patients.
5. Mandatory fortification of folic acid in enriched grain products (white flour, bread, pasta, rice) was implemented in the United States in 1998, so their are fewer consequences to having the C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene.
I had a scammy doctor several years ago who ordered this test for everything and tried to insist several people I know to buy these supplements from him, not off Amazon. I got real “pill mill” vibes from the place (not just on this supplement).
I agree with Claude. MTHFR gets lots of press, but there's no clinical evidence that it's interesting in any way, and we should have a strong prior against common SNPs having large negative effects.
If Claude didn't discuss why or why not to believe it isn't just yet another candidate-gene false positive, I am disappointed in it. The first question to ask about any advice based on *a* SNP is, 'why do you think this is real in the first place?' (Because it usually isn't.) Things like prevalence or folic acid fortification are irrelevant by comparison.
The little I've seen of Hampshire College (today, based on this post) reminds me of New College of Florida, a place I considered attending. I ended up going elsewhere because it was cheaper (got a full ride) and my preference was towards engineering (which New College of Florida does not offer.) I wish more places like those existed, but I fear that there are simply not enough students interested in such a place. Anyway, Prof. Ludwin-Peery, I wish you luck.
Hampshire often reminds people of places like New College of Florida, which is a problem. This is Hampshire's own fault, because the way the school markets itself encourages these comparisons. And I think you're right, there are simply not enough students interested in that kind of place for these schools to survive.
The tragedy is that despite how the school has marketed itself, Hampshire is not actually that kind of place. It's an extremely rigorous model of higher education and extremely functional when run even half-decently. I think you would have loved doing engineering at Hampshire, for example, where we had a great machine shop. I am very confident there are enough students interested in THIS kind of place, if we run it at all well and make it clear what we're offering — which is very different IMO from New College.
Are you suggesting that New College of Florida is not rigorous or functional? If you have time, would you mind explaining a bit how they differ? From the little I gather, they both offer the 'build your own path' thing, and as far as I remember, New College had some sort of alternative grading system (no grades, essentially). I understand if you don't want to bother, this is just for my own enlightenment.
I probably would have enjoyed Hampshire. I liked my engineering studies, but wish I had more time to explore other interests after my first two years in a CC, where I really enjoyed my literature studies under one particularly exceptional professor. Unfortunately, unless they were willing to let foreigners to study for free, I would have never made it there. I don't remember running into it while I was searching for colleges, most likely due to the lack of a formal engineering program.
I think your problem is that in order to sell it to students (and more importantly their parents), then it will have to start marketing "After four years here, you come away with a degree in knot-untying that is extremely employable" instead of "we don't care about what degree you end up with, but for four years you'll explore interesting problems".
That's nice, Chauncey, but if I'm forking out the guts of $120,000 for my kid's education, I want them to have something that will get them a job (in today's economy).
And the problem with *that* is that by the sounds of it, this is not what Hampshire College is about. So not alone are you chasing the really smart kids who would be both interested and able in educating themselves with some gentle guidance from the faculty, which is a small enough cohort, you are also further chasing the "parents have enough money for the gentleman's degree where it doesn't really matter if you come away with the sheepskin or don't care about Junior getting that internship in Dad's golf buddy's Fortune 500 company" which is even smaller slice of the pie.
Did you read my piece about how to market the college? Hampshire has for decades marketed itself as a bohemian school. But the core model is so strong that people continued to go to grad school at above average rates and found companies and get jobs even in spite of the mismanagement. It would be very easy to focus on the educational model and change the marketing to reflect that, and you would have a school that will not only get your kid a job, but will lead them to start a company, get an advanced degree, etc.
"It would be very easy to focus on the educational model and change the marketing to reflect that, and you would have a school that will not only get your kid a job, but will lead them to start a company, get an advanced degree, etc."
Then you are correct that this should be the focus of the marketing, but also I suggest that when you are writing rhapsodies to the bestest most excellent ever, you drop all the bits about "and we had no tests! and I could foozle about in the machine shop! and my prof gave me glowing reviews!" because that's not selling "we will take your smart if awkward kid, let them get on the track of academic rigour, and ensure they come out the other end employable and not just employable, desirable by Big Corp".
Depending on the parent, of course, but the parents are the ones who are going to pay for the entire package (which is a hefty sum even if scholarships and grants and so forth are taken into account) and they are not going to be impressed by "I had such a great time, I was able to run around and do what I wanted". They want "At the end I got X qualifications which led to my successful career in Y". Yes, they want their kid to enjoy college, but not at the expense of "so I changed my mind every six months what I wanted to study, the college let me hop from one thing to another, and at the end I came out with a patchwork qualification".
I'd love to talk to someone at Alpha School about the opportunity at Hampshire College, I think there's real alignment between the ambition of Hampshire's model and what Alpha is building. Could anyone put me in touch?
Send me a message - Ednever on google’s platform. I should be able to help out you in touch with someone (and can give you my thoughts on probabilities)
The one that seems most clearly boneheaded to me is the 2019 Mim Nelson near-closure. Roughly the president was pursuing a secret merger with UMass, announced it as a surprise in Feb 2019 that they would "stop accepting new students while seeking a strategic partner", which caused an exodus of existing students. I think they sent a letter to already-accepted students warning them that there might not be a dining hall, dorms, or many services in the coming year, too. Yikes.
The other confusing decision was eliminating the IT program in 2023. But we don't have enough context about how much the program actually cost. Student enrollment programs with great career outcomes are valuable but often expensive. It could have been a bad call, or it could have been various financial thorns that couldn't keep up with overall declining enrollment.
The author goes through several more but those seem less clear to me as "boneheaded". The framing doesn't go into enough depth on what conditions might have constrained the board's options. Sometimes there are just impossible conditions that mean you are just stuck running a structurally insolvent institution.
One note that is interesting is that the "boneheaded" decisions persisted across multiple boards. The 2018-2019 board fully resigned, but the choices that led here probably stacked up over years-to-decades.
What is the actual value of research doctorates to the world? My guess is near-zero. If your metric for collegial success is producing phd researchers, we're hardly experiencing a shortage.
Apparently the USA churns out the largest number of PhDs. So if the Unique Selling Point for Hampshire is that "we produce more students who go on to do PhDs than anywhere else", then okay fine that's like saying "we produce more tins of beans than Heinz".
I agree with Drethelin: what is the *value* of all this 'original research'? Expanding the frontiers of knowledge is great and indeed it is valuable, but are the Hampshire 18 year old 'researchers' producing anything to help us expand those frontiers, or just adding some trimming round the edges like ornamental fringes?
If you buy the story that people tell you about themselves they will always be doing something valuable to humanity.
I do not buy the story that phd researchers tell. I do not think the majority of them are doing anything particularly to expand the frontiers of human knowledge, indeed many of them spend their careers committing fraud and ruining human knowledge.
"If you buy the story that people tell you about themselves they will always be doing something valuable to humanity."
The Argument from I Don't Trust Those Guys is one of the most toxic, intellectually lazy thought-terminating cliches on the internet. Nobody asked you to trust those guys, or suggested you should. If weighing their trustworthiness is the only way you have to gauge their value then you simply are not qualified to gauge their value, and should have the humility to refrain from having an opinion. No serious person says "I think this profession is valuable because they say they are." The look at the actual, tangible impact on the world. In the case of research PhDs, there are no shortage of impacts to choose from: medical discoveries, mathematical theories, new algorithms, honed technologies, improved predictive models. A great many of these things have impacts on the world that can be directly evaluated.
" I do not think the majority of them..."
And this is simply poor reasoning, full stop. What the "majority" are doing is beside the point. This is like claiming that the majority of search-and-rescue crews in a given situation are useless, because only one of them actually finds the missing person. Humanity cannot predict which leads are fruitful without investigating them. You need some fraction of researchers doing work that doesn't pan out in order to get any researchers doing work that does. That's just how searching works.
"many of them spend their careers committing fraud "
How many is many? Give me a rate. Justify it. Or if you cannot, kindly concede the point that fraudulent researchers are not actually a substantial enough fraction to worry about. If you don't have even a principled estimate for the rate, you have no argument whatsoever. If you do, that's a real argument and a discussion worth having.
BTW what does "phd researchers" mean exactly? I believe pretty much all researchers at Google, Meta etc. have PhDs (all who I know do, that is for sure), and assuming that they commit fraud is dubious at least.
This line in particular stands out as especially a odd. Because:
A) Aren't research programs (especially STEM) commonly funded in part by tax dollars? In which case, someone is very much asking us to trust those guys.
B) The raison d'etre of a PhD qua credential is to broadcast a request to trust the institution. Like, what do you think the point of the certificate is, if not a request for trust? All of us in here are familiar with the Caplan meme that "education = credentialism", no?
Since you haven’t given me a single number while being performatively long winded and upset at me, I’m afraid I’m going to have for respond to your request for further detail by telling you to go to hell.
Research *may* (or may not) be valuable. Research doctorates (from the vantage point of one who has one in a hard science), are not *unless* they go on to actually do research. And the supply vastly outstrips the demand. The ratio of research positions (including industry, most of which these are not suited for) to research doctorates *even in hard sciences* is 1:many-many. And the ratio of *tenure-track research professorships* to research PhDs is 1:<basically all of them>.
So the value of a marginal PhD is very small. And if you're not in a hard science (or engineering), the value goes down *tremendously*. I consider the value of a research PhD in many other fields to be an absolute negative. They're not expanding the frontiers of knowledge, they're making up BS and making us pay for it. And the cost to the candidates is extreme, both in actual dollars, pain and suffering, and opportunity cost.
I basically agree, but I share that stat because it cuts against the ultimate-frisbee-and-sandals stereotype of the school. It's a relatively clear metric that shows that Hampshire is academically rigorous and research-focused in a way that makes it competitive with colleges and universities with much longer histories and larger endowments. You can go to Hampshire and still beat other candidates to get into science PhD programs at Harvard or Yale. It would be even better if Hampshire students skipped the research doctorate and did something useful instead, like becoming science YouTubers or bloggers.
Thanks for pointing out that you gave me something extra useless to read since it’s not relevant to the current funding environment or aware of the state of science! That makes it even more annoying!
The paper is about the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and was written by its founder. The IAS still exists and is doing well, and continues to operate under the principles described in the paper. The highest of these principles, to spell it out, is to produce knowledge without consideration for its usefulness or lack thereof; it's about producing knowledge for its own sake, for no more and no less than satisfying the researcher's curiosity. Getting practical use, if any, out of that knowledge is left as an exercise to others.
As far as "being aware of the state of science" is concerned, the IAS continues to produce countable success in terms of awards, if that's something you value:
So perhaps you'll find it worth to suppress that feeling of annoyance for 30 minutes or so, and read the paper entirely so that you are aware of the state of the argument and no longer have to guess about the value of pure research. If you believe that the paper is "useless", then that's exactly the reason why should read it!
Given the other response that Drethelin gave somewhere in another thread here, his motive seems to be to annoy and troll. Worthy candidate for the block list, but on the other hand I wouldn't have learned from you that the IAS is actually still set up the same way. Quite a feat, to be honest.
What could I, a random nobody with a blog, do if I wanted to change the world as much as possible? I don't mean this in the EA sense of "change the world for the better," but in the sense of whatever actions would make the world maximally different from a world where I didn't take those actions. This is mostly hypothetical, but supposing I had no moral scruples, what can an average guy do to maximally alter the universe?
Perhaps you'll find Elon Musk [0] an interesting case study.
> In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”
Starting a massive fire in the wilderness of California or somewhere like that would have the most bang for your buck I reckon. The Palisades Fire was started by one guy and it was really destructive and he didn't even do anything complicated. You could probably make an even more destructive fire if you used drones + molotov cocktails or fireworks.
Depends on your metric. In some sense buying a digger and moving dirt around for the rest of your life (or optimizing for dirt to be moved around by diggers) could be the biggest change in the world (mass in places where it wouldn't be without you).
If you have some outlier ability or strong interest + above average capability in something, then focus on that. Otherwise I'd focus on making a large amount of money and figuring out exactly where you can apply your connections + money in a major way when you get there.
I.E. Musk/SpaceX changed spaceflight not because he wanted to change spaceflight and became the best engineer in the world in order to do that, but because he poured an unreasonable amount of time and money into an unlikely to succeed project and made it by the skin of his teeth.
I think a lower risk/lower reward option would be to create some sort of a viral meme: a funny cat picture, a catchphrase, etc. Sure, you'll probably fail the first 100 times you try; but unlike with the more violent options, failure will only cost you your time, not your life.
In complete seriousness, based on his exchanges with Gurwinder, my impression is that a lot of Luigi Mangione's motivation was to do something momentous and not be an "NPC". Several prominent American assassins (James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, probably Oswald) were substantially motivated by a desire to do something momentous. Bremer probably didn't even care about what politician he killed. Crooks may have shot Trump instead of Biden just because of opportunity. So yes, this probably is the way to maximally shake stuff up, but DON'T DO IT!
Don't worry, I'm a utilitarian, not a "maximally change things"-itarian, but I have been curious what the most effective thing to do would be if I actually was the latter, hence this post.
Yeah, I found Scott's description of the legislation misleading enough to be distasteful. The Save Our Bacon Act very obviously does NOT "revoke all existing state animal welfare protections." It revokes states' attempts to extraterritorially regulate activity occurring in other states. States aren't allowed to do that. This is super basic constitutional law stuff going all the way back to Gibbons v. Ogden. The fact that California's super unconstitutional law is something Scott personally agrees with doesn't change the fact that it is super unconstitutional.
Not quite the same thing but it was illegal to sell butter colored margarine in Wisconsin until 1967. Uncolored margarine is white and looks like lard or Crisco shortening. Until the 67 law you had to buy a one pound plastic bag of white margarine with a yellow dye capsule inside. You’d then break the dye pack and knead the color in by hand.
“I can't believe it's not yellow: A peek into Wisconsin’s quirky margarine laws”
Your question is should Texas be able to prohibit the sale of beef grown in a lab in another state, while permitting the sale of beef grown on an actual cow? Lets assume for the sake of a clean hypothetical that the health risks are the same and the mix of muscle, fat, and whatever else is the same regardless of how the beef is produced. In that case, yes, I will take the same position, Texas should not be able to prohibit the sale of lab grown beef.
AFAICT there is no detail in that law that specifies the ban is due to the an intrinsic permanent quality of the meat, or based on any health risks. It is purely based on the process that produced it. And it does indeed ban it for all citizens, even those who would like to buy it.
I don’t understand how this reaches the rest of the country. For CA the issue is that the pork is a commodity and keeping CA pork separate from the rest is costly. Since lab meat is a separate specialty product wouldn’t they just cut out FL and sell to the rest of the country? Or am I misunderstanding?
Cutting a state out of your market is costly in the same way - you lose that market. You can make the same point to non-animal-welfare pork companies - just cut out CA and sell to the rest of the country.
I don't see how "lab meat is a speciality product" matters here. It's still just X share of their market, regardless of how big it is.
The only difference I can see between these cases is that FL is a smaller market, and cutting that state out is less damaging. But that doesn't seem like a good basis on which to make the
When I say specialty product, I'm imagining that there are a small number of centralized producers and they don't mingle their product very much. With pork I imagine you have many smaller producers who have their product bundled together and then sold off to different companies at intermediate stages of the supply chain. Tracking the size of crate the pork was raised in and making sure small crate pork isn't send to CA creates a costly logistical headache at every stage. I'm not an expert so I could be wrong about this, but I assume the FL law doesn't create the same nationwide pressure for that reason.
I do oppose the FL law and I'm interested in seeing what can be done with lab meat, I just don't expect it to sway the industry in the same way. To me the greater risk is that it sets a precedent for similar laws to roll out in other states.
It's unfortunately clear by the exemption of eggs that the SOB is not meant to fix a problem in the country, but to bail out one or more friends of the various politicians. If it fixes anything it's through collateral virtue.
This is a fully generalizable argument to block states from banning anything whatsoever, and that the only way to ban anything at all is to ban it at the federal level. I'm honestly curious if you are willing to bite that bullet.
So large states should not be allowed to ban things, but small states should?
That doesn't make much sense. It's only natural that in a vote-based electoral system larger regions will have more power. It makes sense to protect the smaller regions to some extent, but not to force the larger regions not to make laws.
It is nothing of the sort. States can regulate products sold within their borders. They cannot regulate how those products are produced outside their borders. This is basic federalism.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you on this. National Pork Producers Council v. Ross was decided in 2023, and while the holding is exceedingly complicated, I don't believe any of the opinions accepted anything like your position that California just has to take Iowa's pork, no matter how it was produced.
(This isn't an unlimited grant, and in particular, it seems like states are going to have more leeway for things like animal welfare laws and a lot less if they're trying to do economic discrimination.)
This is what California does though? They regulate the standards for products sold inside their state, and farmers in other states respond by complying in order to have access to that market. Not selling in California is an option.
No, this is not what California does. The meat sold in their borders is the same product however well or poorly the animal it comes from is treated. An object does not magically carry its history with it. An object does not have a soul. So no, what California is regulating is not the product sold within its borders, it is the process by which that product is produced, which happens outside its borders, and is therefor entirely beyond the proper scope of California's authority.
It is very different, because theft presumably illegal where it occurred. The cruelty at issue here is not illegal where it is occurring. All of the things you point to are cases where the history matters because the history involves a crime and we really want to disincentivize crime. In the cruelty case, there is no underlying crime.
"the meat sold is the same product". You keep asserting it everywhere in this thread _but you don't get to decide that_. If California thinks that it makes a significant difference in the product, then it does. And I don't know where this idea that states can't regulate processes, but they can regulate products even comes from. You seem to have entirely made it up. States regulate _all kinds of processes all the time_.
> "the meat sold is the same product". You keep asserting it everywhere in this thread _but you don't get to decide that_.
Neither do you. Neither does California. It is a scientific fact.
> States regulate _all kinds of processes all the time_.
States regulate all kinds of processes *that occur within their borders* all the time. They do not get to regulate processes that occur outside their borders. This is pretty fundamental to the concept of what a state is.
No, once again, it is not regulating the process. It is regulating the sale of goods that underwent that process, on Californian territory. The distinction may not seem important to you, but it is precisely what makes the claim "what California is regulating is not the product sold within its borders, it is the process by which that product is produced", literally factually incorrect, and the difference is part of why SCOTUS decided one way rather than another when the conversation was last had.
I know we keep going round in little loops, but you keep repeating this incorrect thing, and if it's worth your time to lie it's worth mine to correct it.
There may well be some way to express some adjacent concept without making a literally untrue statement, but I've not seen it yet.
Here I think you are just making a false statement, the statement of mine that you quoted is literally true. I don't see how any English speaker can deny its literal truth.
I read that he's saying the state must turn a blind eye to provenance and inspect only the object. I think they are trying to warp a federalism argument into a metaphysical argument.
By that logic, we shouldn't be allowed to regulate whether the good we buy come from Burma or Sudan based on labor practices, shark fin sales based on where it was obtained, state foie gras bans... it's a long list. I know some of these aren't state vs. fed necessarily. A clean analog is cosmetics - California bans cosmetics that were tested on animals, even though they are the same molecules of cosmetic you put on your face.
No I did not. If the California state government, acting as a participant in the marketplace, had simply refused to buy meat that did not comport with its ethical standards, that would have been fine. California, acting as regulator, forbade its citizens from exercising their free choice in the market as a tool to manipulate what happened outside its boarders. That was a blatant violation of federalism that impinged the right of other states to regulate what happens within their own borders. A response like this to that sort of lawlessness is very natural and to be expected.
Weren't there some states trying to do that, eg to ban their citizens traveling to other states for abortions? I vaguely remember some news stories about that, and it seemed like the sort of thing that would get stopped by a court somewhere, but I don't know whether anyone actually tried to enact such a law or whether any court ruled on it.
California did do "you can't get public money to travel to states we don't like because of anti-whatever laws" and people argued this was fine. Okay, so there is a professional conference or the likes being hosted by one of the Eeeeevil States and you would like to attend as a public official or university professor? Sorry, we are not gonna pay for you to go visit the Eeeevil State and mingle with the Eeeevil People there, even if the extent of your interaction with them is 'walked down the same street as the Eeevil Inhabitants of Eeevil State were walking down"!
(Another reason why I don't have the same admiration for Scott Weiner that others have, he seems never to have met a dumb opportunity to virtue signal he could resist, then again it is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who seem to be selected on the basis of "how loudly and weirdly annoying can they be?"):
"Two separate measures introduced by a California Assembly member and a San Francisco supervisor restricting the use of government dollars to pay for discrimination advanced Tuesday.
AB 1887 prohibits the use of state money to pay for travel to states that don’t allow local governments to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. Introduced by openly gay Assembly Member Evan Low, a Victory Fund candidate, the bill was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday.
From ThinkProgress:
AB 1887 doesn’t target any specific state, but lays out in detail whether a state will be impacted. Travel is forbidden to any state that has passed a law that explicitly discriminates against LGBTQ people, or that has passed a law voiding or repealing state or local protections for LGBTQ people. It requires the Attorney General to maintain a list of the states that would qualify.
Currently, the law would impact at least three states. The most obvious is North Carolina, because HB2 both voids local LGBTQ protections and mandates discrimination against transgender people when it comes to what facilities they can use. Also guaranteed to be on the list, however, would be Tennessee and Arkansas, two other states that have “preemption” laws prohibiting municipalities from extending nondiscrimination protections beyond what’s available at the state level, thus voiding any city or county ordinances protecting sexual orientation and gender identity.
In San Francisco Tuesday, openly gay Supervisor – and state senate candidate – Scott Wiener’s legislation to bar the city from doing business with states that don’t allow LGBTQ protections passed the Board of Supervisors unanimously."
I know Texas passed a law restricting the licensing of abortions so drastically that there was only, like, one operating clinic left in the state, and it reached the Supreme Court as to, among other things, whether the burden of travel was acceptable under Roe V. Wade.
I don't remember if they tried to illegalize crossing the border on that one, but I highly doubt that aspect would change LightlySeared's stance on whether it's acceptable.
I think we have fairly efficient means to turn substances we cannot digest into nutritious food.
I'm skeptical that "Lab Grown" would be an improvement in quality or efficiency. Currently if demand for meat is low, farmers can delay harvest for a bit or arbitrage on the price differences.
The same as this one; if the FDA says it's safe to eat lab grown meat, then the states shouldn't be allowed to block its sale. Even if they think the FDA missed something, they should be limited to California-esque "this product is known by the state of Florida to cause Terminal Uncoolness." There's an argument that the states should have enough control of definitions to stop it being sold *under the label of meat*, but I don't think they should be able to stop it being sold entirely.
Arguably that one's worse than California; at least California expects factory farms to outcompete their restrictions. But lab grown meat is a niche, and banning it is just petty.
Based on the Dormant Commerce Clause, California is well within it's rights to impose regulations that apply equally to businesses inside and outside of California. A regulation would only violate federalism if it specifically privileged California businesses. This is well established by legal precedent.
Of course, the US government is also well within it's rights to reign in state regulation.
"You're free to peddle this shit to your own people but you ain't selling it in our borders if it doesn't meet the same standards our own producers have to meet" is, afaict, a completely normal, expected and unremarked thing states and countries say to each other (if more politely) all the time.
Why on earth would people expect California to privilege some other state's producers over their own?
"Why on earth would people expect California to privilege some other state's producers over their own?"
If Seta above is correct, then that would violate federalism. You can't have protectionism about "only buy Californian products from Californian producers".
The status quo is treating all products equally. The result of saying that California can’t restrict the sale of products based on things that happened to them out of state would mean Californian producers are subject to restrictions that Iowan producers making goods for sale in California need not comply with. So we are not arguing for equality here, but for a reverse-biased federalism.
BTW in food industry it is pretty standard to ensure the quality of the product (i.e. food) by regulating the process. A trivial example is expiration date: even though the given food might be within the standards after the expiration date, it cannot be sold after that.
Yes, like we do when we list the requirements for food to be labelled halal or organic. France did it for champagne; now California's declaring it's only bacon when it comes from a happy pig - otherwise it's just sparkling cruelty pork.
People are free to do what they like outside California. California isn't forcing them to raise their pigs any particular way, and it isn't forcing them to sell the bacon in California. When they do sell it in California, though, it's absolutely California's jurisdiction. How can it not be?
Responding to just the latest edit: if the production occurs in another State, the production is outside California's jurisdiction.
I see your argument with River on the same point, and I agree with them that provenance is not a property of the product (at least for interstate commerce purposes). No point rehashing that since you don't seem open to convincing.
And if California was merely prohibiting labeling caged pork as "cruelty free" or something I doubt much of anyone would squawk.
There's no requirement that food be labeled as non-organic or non-halal (or even that food that could qualify for the restricted labels apply them), let alone a prohibition on the sale of food that doesn't meet their respective requirements.
""You're free to peddle this shit to your own people but you ain't selling it in our borders if it doesn't meet the same standards our own producers have to meet" is, afaict, a completely normal, expected and unremarked thing states and countries say to each other (if more politely) all the time."
The WTO often gets involved in that sort of thing, and often has quite some remarks.
Generally, regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign producers are allowed under WTO rules. Which exception are you claiming applies here?
It is normal for countries, but countries are different from states. States are bound by a principle of federalism. Part of the point of having a United States is to have a unified market, where congress, not the states, regulates commerce between the states.
It is not a normal thing for states to say to each other, no. Can you give another example?
Insurance requirements routinely vary from state to state. An auto insurer cannot simply have one standard policy it offers in MD, OK, FL, and NY, as all those states will have different requirements in terms of what must be covered and what the minimum coverage is.
Is Maryland "imposing its insurance standards on New York" if it requires a NY-based insurance company selling insurance in MD to only sell policies in MD that conform with MD's insurance regulations? That's basically the identical fact pattern with a different industry.
Insurance was for many decades considered "not to be commerce." Then when the court finally ruled that it was commerce, Congress passed the McCarran-Ferguson act, essentially explicitly declining to create a uniform regulatory regime for insurance. If this were not the case, the vast array of state requirements around insurance would be considered unconstitutional.
It is not a remotely comparable fact pattern. You are hypothesizing a different product being sold in MD versus NY. Whereas meat is meat, it is a physical object, and importantly it is the same physical object regardless of how it was produced. I'm not sure how the distinction between how a thing is produced and what a thing is might translate to a financial product like insurance, but that is a key distinction.
States can certainly prohibit its citizens from purchasing certain products, and can do so for a wide variety of reasons, including the way the items are produced. Yes that will affect markets in other states, but that’s true for literally any instance of prohibiting a product from entering a market. Would you say it’s unconstitutional for Alabama to ban weed because it negatively affects Colorado’s weed production? Of course not. If Texas wants to ban the import of products that are made via union labor that’s their business (as long as it doesn’t violate other principles, like freedom of association or something). You’re going to have to provide caselaw making clear that states aren’t allowed to restrict imports via constitutional grounds, but that just doesn’t exist. Could you even point to where in the constitution it says states cannot restrict imports in this way? And the commerce clause simply does not say this and no caselaw has interpreted it as such
* California emissions requirements on vehicles - vehicles must comply even if made in another state, if they are to be imported into California
* CalRecycle SB54 - out-of-state manufacturers must nevertheless ensure their packaging complies even if made in another state, if they want it sold in California
* Proposition 65 requires specific text on packaging even if the product was made out-of-state
It seems like all that is separate from the production techniques used.
Suppose California passes a law forbidding the sale of software in the state that was produced using AI tools. Would that be allowed wrt interstate commerce? Or if California required that all manufactured goods sold there were made by people paid at least the minimum wage in California?
Emissions requirements - CA is essentially regulating what cars driving on California roads do, which is within their rights. Any effects on auto makers in other states are incidental. This seems to be the pattern with all these things - California is regulating what the object is that is allowed to be sold in CA, and that is fine. The problem is when California says it is ok to sell a product if it is made the way CA likes, but not to sell literally the exact same product made the way CA does not like. Regulating the product is fundamentally different from regulating its production. States can regulate products in their borders, they cannot regulate production that occurs outside their borders.
I don't know the details, but I have to assume at least a tacit democratic acceptance of those laws within California. I heard they have plenty of votes on things, so citizens could have repealed that as an exercise of their free will, to broaden their free choice?
Would you also denounce any law (in any state or country) that bans import of products made by slaves? Does that, in effect, mean that you denounce any regulation of states/countries at all? Would you allow import of rhino horn or elephant ivory? What about human trafficking? That might sound provocative, but I would like you to explain your reasoning in more depths, start outlining your principles and where you draw the lines and why.
Oh I agree the majority of California citizens consented. The reference to the free choice of the citizens of California was to emphasize the difference between doing business with California (the state government) and doing business with the citizens of California. The real problem is that California here is effectively regulating how meat is produced in Iowa, and Iowa definitely did not consent.
I think the big difference between this and all the other things you just mentioned is that the other things, at least in the United States, are illegal. A state disincentivizing that which the entire country has already banned is fine. But I state trying to use the market power of its citizens to effectively regulate what happens in another state, that violates any conceivable notion of federalism. That is where the push back is coming from.
If a state wants to ban the importation of these things from foreign countries, that would pretty obviously be unconstitutional. The federal government regulates trade with foreign countries, the states do not.
Right, but a state is not a foreign country and no one is forcing Iowa to sell to California.
Also factory farming is horrible for our citizens and we have the highest cancer rates in the nation, so maybe lawmakers here should start giving a shit about their constituents if they don't care about decency.
But part of being a state in the United States is that you do not get to regulate things that happen in other states, which is what California is doing here.
If Iowa doesn't like the effects of factory farming on its own citizens, great, Iowa is free to regulate how factory farming is done in Iowa, or even to outright ban it if they want to. All I'm saying is California shouldn't do it for Iowa, and nobody should be surprised when California gets push back for that.
So how about the free choice of Iowarean(?) meat producers to sell their meat elsewhere or enter other business opportunities? Nobody is forcing them to sell to the wealthy and populous state of California either, right?
Your arguments read one-sided to me. Nobody forced Iowa to make their meat production dependent on Californian customers (if that is actually the case).
If you don't stop equivocating between California and its citizens, I will conclude that you are arguing in bad faith. I think I already explained this, but I will give it one last shot. When California entered the union, it agreed, as every other state before and since has, to enter a unified market, to allow producers in other states to sell to its citizens. It did not, as part of entering the union, gain a right to regulate how anything is produced in another state, except through the actions of its representatives in congress. Can't go back on that now.
> If a state wants to ban the importation of these things from foreign countries, that would pretty obviously be unconstitutional. The federal government regulates trade with foreign countries, the states do not.
Proposition 12 DOES apply to foreign imports and no one has seriously disputed this. It applies at point-of-sale, it doesn't make the products contraband within the state. It doesn't restrict the importation of pork at the port of LA to sell in Nevada.
However, non-compliant foreign products cannot be sold in California.
This seems to be entirely normal? Places pass laws and other places must conform to those laws if they want to do business with those places. For example, a US law about not buying products produced through child labor doesn't bar other countries from doing child labor, but does make it harder to do business with the US.
I'm struggling to think of an equivalent that I wouldn't be ok with. The prosecution of women who pass state lines to get an abortion is the closest thing I can think of in the American context, but this is far less extreme than that because California won't prosecute people who own farms in other states.
Maybe a Texas law that banned media sources that were too LGBT friendly would be the rught comparison? But that fails on first amendment grounds, not because it would force others to adapt.
You have an analogus case that would help me be more sympathetic to this view?
The relationship between two states within the United States is simply not analogous to the relationship between two countries as far as commerce goes. One of the central premises of the United States that the framers intentionally set up when they wrote the constitution was to create a unified market. This is why we have an interstate commerce clause in the constitution. Congress regulates commerce between the states, the states do not.
What if Texas wanted to prohibit the sale of any product made with unionized labor?
Interesting. I will think on that. My first thought is that it seems like it would be their prerogative to do so. But maybe I only think that because I think it would fail in a contest of wills. On the other hand, I could imagine such a thing spinning out of control, leading red states and blue states to be in a competition with each other in an unhealthy way and I don't want that to happen.
Hampshire College has an unusual model where all students are supposed to design at least part of their own courses of study, so they generally take a much more active role in their own educations than elsewhere. Students can study a traditional academic discipline but devise their own research projects, or can literally invent an individual major. It seems like a high fraction of the students take this responsibility somewhat seriously and do something interesting.
I went to a summer math camp there (Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics) when I was a teenager. It was pretty awesome. Unfortunately the founding director of that program, Prof. David Kelly, died recently. In light of both events, I don't know whether the math camp will continue.
Hampshire is also known as the maximally hippie and maximally woke/identity politics college. Their motto is "non satis scire" (knowing is not enough), and I guess they've strongly promoted the idea that students ought to aspire to change the world since their 1970s founding.
They used to run VAX/VMS! I had a VMS account during the math camp and it was super-confusing to me since I had just started to learn Unix and was trying to apply my fledgling Unix knowledge to the very non-Unix environment. The file versioning was cool, though.
Puzzles & Paradoxes was a really well-known & well-regarded class while I was there, even among humanities folks. I didn't take it myself, but I loved hearing about it from my friends who did.
I was a humanities guy and it really helped build my confidence, particularly as someone who had a lot of trouble adjusting to college. At the end of the year, David asked me "have you always overcome this much?" and it meant a lot to me.
Hampshire has more fundamental problems than its various missteps. It's dedicated to a particular model of learning, and it has always attracted a lot of bright and innovative people who love it. But the number of high-school seniors is going to decline for a decade or two so the education industry is going through an "ugly shakeout" as they say in the business press, 10% or more of colleges are going to fold. The ones that will survive are the ones that can figure out how to pay the bills, and often that is by attracting a certain percentage of the children of affluent families that can pay list price. The problem is that those families are generally looking for educations that are pathways into well-paid types of work. Even well-endowed, stable liberal arts schools with long histories are struggling to deal with that. But Hampshire's system, being "even more so", has a harder time. Combining that with not accumulating an endowment (partly because of its youth and partly because they never developed a corps of wealthy alumni), it's hard for Hampshire to survive.
1. Putin had Trump negotiate with the Ukrainians to allow the Russian Federation to hold its May 9th Victory Day Parade in Red Square, excluding it from Ukrainian drone attacks. In return for Ukrainian forbearance, Putin agreed to a 1000-to-1000 prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.
2. Zelenskyy agreed to the terms, and then he trolled the Russians. “DECREE OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE: On holding a parade in the city of Moscow. Taking into account numerous requests and for humanitarian purposes outlined during the negotiations with the American side on 8 May 2026, I hereby decree the following: 1. To permit the holding of a parade in the city of Moscow (Russian Federation) on 9 May 2026. For the duration of the parade…, the designated area of Red Square shall be excluded from the operational plan for the use of Ukrainian weapons.” (GPS coordinates of Red Square given)
3. Even so, Russia withdrew many of its remaining anti-missile systems from potential military and economic targets to surround Moscow with a dense network of over 100 anti-missile systems. The parade went off without a hitch, but without any of the usual display of military equipment. Reportedly, there was a brief flyover of a few jets.
4. As of today, the prisoners hadn’t been swapped. While Ukraine has provided a list of Russian PoWs they’re going to include in the exchange, the Russians have yet to release a list of the Ukrainian PoWs. Zelenskyy went on TV last night and made it clear that if the prisoner exchange doesn't take place, it will show that Putin is untrustworthy and Trump is weak. “The prisoner exchange – 1,000 for 1,000 – is being prepared and must take place. The Americans assumed responsibility for these guarantees. Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters has handed over the lists for one thousand POWs to the Russian side. There was American mediation in reaching this arrangement on the exchange, and accordingly, we expect the American side to play an active role in ensuring it’s fulfilled.”
5. I haven’t heard if Ukraine launched any drone attacks against undefended Russian facilities on May 9th. Last Friday, Major Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, said there likely would be strikes. But maybe Zelenskyy decided not to poke the bear while the prisoner exchange was still in the works.
6. On Friday, May 8, the District Court of Belgorod arrested Yuri Kozarenko, former CEO of Transport of the Future LLC. He was Putin’s golden boy of long-range drone development, but few, if any, drones have come off the assembly line after over a year of “development.” He is under investigation for alleged large-scale fraud. Large-scale corruption is one of the reasons that Russia has had trouble keeping pace with Ukraine’s decentralized drone development.
7. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, a 15-person startup, self-financed, created the Tryzub, a mobile laser system that can knock Shaheds out of the sky from 5 kilometers away. It has an AI tracking system that can work without an operator, and it’s “plug and play” (specifically, it needs to be plugged into the electrical grid to work). The effective range for taking down FPV drones is 800 to 900 meters. Reconnaissance drones: up to 1,500 meters. Shaheds: up to 5 kilometers. And it blinds optics, cameras, sensors, and target-acquisition electronics on drones, missiles, and helicopters up to 10 kilometers away. After testing against various targets (including a Russian attack helicopter), the Tryzub is in production now and being deployed in the field.
8. Putin, at a press conference, explained why he didn’t take Kyiv in ten days: “Macron called me in 2022 and said that Ukraine couldn’t sign documents in Istanbul ‘with a gun to its temple,’ then asked me to withdraw the troops from Kyiv.” Those wrecked and burning tanks and troop transports down the M06/E40 highway to Kyiv never happened. Really.
9. In oil news, JP Morgan released a very gloomy report on world oil supplies. We’re talking gas rationing in the US, airline route reductions, logistics disruptions in key industries, and a return to 70s stagflation. I’ve seen so many gloomy predictions that never came true in my 65 years on this planet that I don’t know whether to believe the gloom-and-doom scenario presented in this report. But the last tanker from the Gulf arrived in SoCal a few days ago. 2 million barrels. That will keep California supplied with oil for a few more weeks. Meanwhile, the US is still exporting oil. It turns out we don’t have the types of refineries that can handle the lighter crude oil produced by fracking. So we were exporting that raw crude and re-importing it as a refined product. I don’t know the details of the logistics chain, though. But it means that even though we’re “energy independent,” we’re still energy dependent on logistics. Uggghhh.
Not to take away from Zelensky's effective trolling, but I suspect the threatened Russian massive retaliatory strike on Kyiv, pointedly including decision-making centres, was a factor in his thinking.
One might argue that the Russians attack Kyiv regularly anyway, but there still remains some technical space on the escalatory ladder, and Putin's hand would have been more or less forced in case of a major disruption of Victory Day.
Edit: change of spelling of the capital's name to the Ukrainian version.
Russia has been threatening to get serious about attacking Ukraine, "and this time we mean it!", for four years now. There have been massive attacks against Kyiv and "decision-making centres", also for four years now. If Russia had the capability to destroy important government buildings, they would have already done so long ago. They don't because they can't, not because they've been holding back. Everything else is the usual Russian bluster. There is only one way Russia could significantly escalate, and that would be the use of nuclear weapons.
No, the main reason why Ukraine didn't attack Red Square during the Victory parade was that it wouldn't have brought a strategic benefit, and maybe even a drawback. Attacking the parade might have given Putin an excuse for partial mobilization with the support of the Russian people, something Ukraine wants to avoid desperately.
"They don't because they can't, not because they've been holding back. Everything else is the usual Russian bluster. There is only one way Russia could significantly escalate, and that would be the use of nuclear weapons."
I don't think this is the case. Russia struggles with crippling Ukrainian logistics, the power grid, and relevant industry *at scale*, but the military could muster a single performative retaliatory strike that temporarily overwhelms Kyiv's existing air defences, probably involving the MIRV option. It would simply be aimed at Bankova instead of the usual power stations.
Otherwise, I agree with you. To a certain extent, symmetrical considerations govern Russian restraint; outright destruction of elements of the Ukrainian government would fail to break Ukraine, but would instead galvanise Western support even further, and perhaps give the flagging Ukrainian force regeneration efforts a shot in the arm.
> "Zelenskyy agreed to the terms, and then he trolled the Russians. “DECREE OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE: On holding a parade in the city of Moscow. Taking into account numerous requests and for humanitarian purposes outlined during the negotiations with the American side on 8 May 2026, I hereby decree the following: 1. To permit the holding of a parade in the city of Moscow (Russian Federation) on 9 May 2026. For the duration of the parade…, the designated area of Red Square shall be excluded from the operational plan for the use of Ukrainian weapons.” (GPS coordinates of Red Square given)"
Can you explain why this is a troll? Is it because he presents it as a munificent act of forbearance?
Russian propaganda has characterized Ukrainians as Untermenschen for years, or at best as defecting Russians who need to be brought to reason by any means; in any case as unworthy of treatment as equals. For Zelenskyy to "allow" the parade to happen is a presumption of authority that attacks the mythos of the invincible Russia that doesn't need anyone's permission to do whatever it wants.
The Moscow Victory Day Parade is the highlight of the country's celebration of victory over Nazi Germany, which in turn is its central piece of state legitimization. To attack the legitimacy of the parade is to attack the legitimacy of the Russian state itself.
It's also show of confidence from Zelenskyy that coincides with the beginnings of a trend reversal in the air and ground campaigns in Ukraine's favor and a significant downscaling of the parade itself (officially for security reasons), which is why that tweet has a kernel of truth that makes it especially effective.
Tellingly, it motivated the Kremlin to publish a denial of requiring permission:
"A Kremlin spokesman commented that Russia didn't need anyone's permission to hold the Victory Parade."
It's basically "pig fucker politics" or, much more politely, "shifting the Overton window" on the question of who's in charge between Russia and Ukraine.
In your next probability update, I would be interested to see whether there is a big shift or not. On the battlefield the situation seems to have improved a lot compared to a year ago. But then the financial situation of Russia also looked more dire back then. But then the Ukrainian financial situation also looks better after the EU became less blocked, and with potential customers for war material popping up. A lot of changes, and not all of them going into the same direction.
It was designed to infuriate Russians. The far-right milbloggers are screaming in outrage at the effrontery of Zelenskyy's proclamation. And it probably went over well with the Ukrainian public, because Ukraine has a national mythology of tweaking the nose of empires (see the article on the "Correspondence between the Ottoman Sultan and the Cossacks" in Wikipedia, and the painting, "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks"—which is analogous to our Washington Crossing the Delaware painting.)
According to @ChrisO_wiki on X...
> 'Novorossiya militia reports' is furious: "Is this what the Russian government was aiming for? After elevating this worthless individual for four years, they've now given him a perfect opportunity to troll and laugh. Are you satisfied?"
> 'Shelter No. 8' calls for retaliatory raids on Kyiv and Lviv, and for the Ukrainian presidential mansion to be razed in response: "The old-timers themselves gave him the opportunity to troll themselves."
> Comrade Artyom' comments that this is happening because nobody is afraid of Russia and its elderly rulers any more: "This is what happens when young brains confront old ones...😔 By the way, I want to remind you that humor is a powerful weapon that changes reality. Those who were once feared are turned into laughingstocks, and after that, no one is afraid of anyone anymore, and, accordingly, no one obeys anyone anymore."
> 'Two Majors' condemns the failure of Russia's own state propaganda machine to counter Zelenskyy's trolling: "The bastard knows how to wage an information war."
>In return for Ukrainian forbearance, Putin agreed to a 1000-to-1000 prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.
That sounds like a, what, 5 to 1 deal in favor of Ukraine, in exchange for an attack they probably wouldn't have launched either way? Masterfully negotiated.
Why would there be gas rationing in the US vs gas simply costing more - which would in turn price out vast chunks of the developing world - and reduce global demand. I'm sure Bolivia or Afghanistan might end up rationing, but the richest country in the world? We'll just pay more money.
The third would has *already* seen massive rationing and demand destruction. Presumably the report is projecting that things will get bad enough that the US is affected as well.
That was one of the study's predictions. But, yes, less than 10% (8% last year)of US petroleum comes from the Gulf. During the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo of the US, something like a third of petroleum came from the Gulf. The US was able to replace about half of that from other sources, but we still had a 15% deficit. We had gas rationing where drivers with odd-numbered license plates could buy gas on odd-numbered days, and even-numbered plates on even-numbered days (I don't remember how they delt with plates with alpha characters). I'm not sure if 10% drop would cause rationing.
But some things to think about:
1. The light crude we're exporting isn't necessarily being reimported as refined products. Other countries will be bidding against us. The oil that we send to the Netherlands and South Korea to be refined may not come back to us — especially since Asia is suffering severe oil shortages right now, and Europe isn't doing much better.
2. And we who live in California don't have any pipelines coming across the Rockies. We get a third of our oil from the Gulf. Even if the US doesn't face rationing, we might very well in California, Oregon, and Washington. I don't know about the High West state. And no doubt the Republicans will blame Gavin Newsom and the Democrats for a mess they didn't create...
Still, why would they ration vs just relying on higher prices to sort things out? I don't remember any serious talk of rationing during the Biden oil price spike. A lot has changed since the 1970s.
True. I'm thinking in worst-case scenarios. But in real-money terms, the Biden price spike was nothing compared to the increase in gas prices after OPEC shut off the spigot in 73-74. As a kid, I remember gas prices in the 30-35 cents-per-gallon range ($2.23 to $2.98 in today's dollars). The price of gas went up 2.5x to 3.0x after that, and never went down again — even once the oil started flowing again. The lines at gas stations were insane. I remember witnessing a few fist fights over who got to a pump first. A limited rationing regime, giving people with odd and even plates access on alternate days, calmed people down a lot. The lines to fill up were still long, though (but no worse than the queue at Costco gas pumps today).
Also they implemented the 55 mph speed limit on US highways to save gas. That was a big pain in the ass, and they kept that speed limit in place long after the need for it disappeared. Modern cars with higher-revving engines are more efficient at higher speeds. I hope no idiot suggests this as a solution if gas gets scarce!
One of the supporting arguments of speed limits in various EU states is exactly the extra fuel consumption. (Sometimes considering CO2 and climate change, now, due to the Iran situation, fuel saving can be a reason on its own.)
(For example, German highways still have no general speed limits. Of course, local speed limits are present at most of the network.)
I’m having a hard time imagining modern Americans accepting rationing vs just paying more at the pump. As evidenced by sheriffs refusing to enforce the Covid lockdowns, any policy restricting the freedom of 90%+ of Americans will be impossible to enforce these days, because unlike the 70s ~no one alive remembers the rationing of WWII.
Paying more for gas feeds back into every aspect of the economy, although much less so than in the 70s. During those crisis, the price of Crude basically 4x and then 2x beyond that, which is what drove a lot of the inflation.
It's now 1.5x - 2x higher than before the war, so a major disruption, but anyone selling you 1970s-era stagflation because of the Hormuz being blocked is lying to you.
You've missed Putin's newest trolling: Calling for Germany's fallen-from-grace ex-chancellor Schröder as a negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.
After Schröder's chancellorship, he became a personal friend(!) of Putin and a long-time boardmember in the German subsidiary of Russia's state oil company Gazprom, and of the joint venture of Gazprom that created the NordStream pipelines for direct oil transport between Russia and Germany.
In the beginning of the war, Schröder fell completely from grace by not calling the invasion what it is, tacitly defending the Russian viewpoint. It was so disgraceful that even his party, the social democrat SPD that is meme-fied as lacking any backbone, ousted him (there is an old rhyme from Weimar/Nazi-times that keeps getting repeated: "Wer hat uns verraten? Die Sozialdemokraten!" - who betrayed us? the social democrats!).
Back to Putin's suggestion of Schröder as a neutral negotiator: Top-notch trolling, because even now there were some SPD members that didn't refuse outright with something along the lines of "we should at least consider and think about it". Incredible, absolute incredible that this elementary school level of trolling actually works.
Oh right, a quote for the history books for sure. It is even better in the original specific German as you know.. hard to translate though. Maybe "immaculate" makes it sound a bit more dramatic like the German "lupenrein"?
> It turns out we don’t have the types of refineries that can handle the lighter crude oil produced by fracking.
I've known about this before, but haven't really given it much thought. But now my question is: why ? It seems like there's a lot of money left on the table for someone to build a quick-and-dirty light crude refinery right next to a fracking well, and pocket all the money that'd otherwise go to innumerable intermediaries. Is this because the concept of a "quick-and-dirty light crude refinery" is nonsensical, and even the cheapest possible refinery would take many decades and billions of dollars to build ? Is there government regulation that prevents refinery-building on US soil ? Do we have some international pact with Saudi Arabia (or whomever) wherein we agreed to let them do all of our refining in exchange for... something ? Or what ?
Yes. So many questions. I don't have the answers. But ChatGPT sez: A refinery can cost $10–20+ billion and take a decade to permit and build. After the U.S. lifted its crude export ban in 2015, a lot of shale oil went overseas to foreign refineries in South Korea, India, and the Netherlands. It was cheaper to export than to build refineries. But the ChatMonster says that many US refineries can handle light crude if they mix it with heavier crude. But their economics were optimized for heavier crude. "Running too much light crude can actually create imbalances: excess naphtha/gasoline components, underutilized cokers, lower margins on expensive upgrading equipment."
So, until now, it was cheaper and easier to export light crude, import heavy crude, and import refined products.
From a more general perspective, Charlie Stross wrote in his blog:
> "The truth of the matter is, we're being forced to confront an iron law of economics: you can optimize a system for efficiency or for robustness, but not for both. Just-in-time supply chains are efficient, but there's no slack in the system. Systems with warehousing and storage and redundancy built-in are resilient, but they're not efficient. And over the past 50 years we've abandoned them, in the name of efficiency, so that the excess capacity could be sold off and turned into profits. This war is payback time for the cult of efficiency over robustness in business."
Canada has the opposite problem, as the oil sands produce ultra-heavy crude that needs to be sent to the US or China for refinement. Is it possible to mix oil sands oil and shale oil together…?
Covid should have already woken up plenty of strategists regarding JIT vs resilience. I wonder if there is a refinery for light crude in construction somewhere?
In any case, the silver lining could be an accelerated adoption of renewable energies and compatible tech like BEVs. In my home country, the gap in price per Unit of energy from fossil vs electric shrinking away.
Small example: 1 liter diesel now costs 2€, providing 10 kWh of chemical energy(0,20€/kWh). Electricity costs between 0,20-0,40€/kWh. Given that you can always get 2-3 times more output per input-kWh from electric systems (That means, running a BEV has 1/3 the fuel cost compared to fossil fuel), there is already ample incentive to buy electric cars and electric heat pumps, if you can stomach the investment and have control over it (renters can't choose their heating system).
And yet, conservatives are still largely sabotaging the transition. F*** me, right.
My takeaway from Covid is that it’s not good business to prepare for these kinds of supply issues, because “price gouging” means you won’t be able to charge enough in bad times to make preparations economical.
As if it were all about prices. Some countries already prepare for such situations, which is probably a learning from the 70's oil crises? Many countries have strategic oil and gas reserves that can last for months, especially when "rationed" or prioritized (like heating for homes in winter as a basic necessity above other things).
So transitioning to more independent, renewable energy tech, like heating homes with electric heat pumps, reduces dependence and pressure on such strategic reserves (lots of details left out, obviously, because the electricity still has to come from somewhere).
I guess it is all about options: The less you rely on single sources, the less you can be blackmailed. Not hard to get, is it?
I had considered purchasing an EV, but I live in a place where wildfires have been common in recent years. Although none have come close to my house, in one episode we lost our power for 48 hrs. Something to do with a substation getting burned. I didn't purchase an EV, because I decided that a gasoline-powered car would be able to get me out of town if the electricity were out for a long period. Now I'm wondering if I should have done so and popped for some solar panels (but my electricity charges are so small that it didn't make financial sense to purchase them).
Even if the power goes out, you'd still have whatever power was in the EV before the outage, and if you're charging every night and not taking long trips every day the odds are good it's close to full. I'd think you can at least be confident there's enough charge to get out of Dodge in an emergency.
I have more personal familiarity with Hampshire's problems than Ethan and he is incorrect.
> Between Fall 2022 and Fall 2024, enrollment grew 68%. Students were finding Hampshire, choosing Hampshire, and staying at Hampshire.
The rate of accepted students choosing Hampshire has dropped off a cliff. The number of accepted students has *just started* to drop off a cliff, because the 'echo boom' is ending and the number of potential undergraduates *everywhere* is tanking. The students to get Hampshire up to 1000 by 2035 **simply do not exist.**
Hampshire is not the first of the dozens of small colleges in Massachusetts alone which will collapse this decade, and it will not be the last. This is the worst possible time to try an ambitious (re)founding, while colleges across the spectrum from weird to boring are fighting for their lives even with ideal management and strong endowments. Also, Ethan forgets that the choice not to have an endowment was deliberate and part of the founding philosophy of Hampshire.
If the college can't muster even 1000 students, and as you say, there aren't enough students in general, then what is the purpose of keeping it open? Institutions that outlive there usefulness should close. If society needs the capacity in the future for some reason then new and better credentialing systems will rise up to fill the gap.
I have a question for anyone knowledgeable about economics, specifically about near-term housing prices. It seems pretty widely-agreed the war in Iran and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to cause a global recession and significant inflation. The magnitude is yet to be determined–that depends on how the war ends and how quickly–but even if full peace were restored and the Strait Opened tomorrow, my understanding is that there will be many months of disruption in global fuel supplies.
The question is this: given that there will obviously be increases in fuel prices and many sorts of goods downstream of fuel prices, what trend should we expect in housing and property prices? I’m particularly interested in prices in and around large, economically vibrant cities where housing already tends to be expensive. Would you expect house prices to rise with the general inflation rate, to hold steady or to fall?
I’m going to talk through my own layperson’s knowledge of the economics at play and come to a tentative answer. Feel free to dispute, correct, or bring up factors I hadn’t considered in the comments. My current (low-confidence) prediction is that house prices are likely to fall somewhat; if the recession is bad they may fall a lot. But mortgage rates will also very likely rise.
OK, the easy part first: mortgage rates. As I understand it, if the overall rate of inflation (i.e. averaged over some typical basket of goods) increases, interest rates pretty much have to increase along with them. If interest rates stay low while inflation is high, there’s very little reason for anyone to lend money, as they’ll quickly lose ground against inflation. Mortgage rates are interest rates, so they can be expected to increase, and I believe in some cases already have.
The tricker part: the prices of housing itself. Unlike many other sorts of goods that are produced quickly and consumed steadily, houses are slow to build and last a long time. So over a handful of months, it’s reasonable to treat the underlying housing stock as essentially constant.[1] If and when the broader economic trends move housing prices, they will do so by some combination of changing the demand, and influencing which existing houses get put on the market at all.
Demand: is housing demand likely to increase, decrease or stay steady, particularly in large economic centers? My semi-principled guess is it will decrease: a worse economy means fewer jobs drawing people to move to and stay in expensive urban centers. Absent that draw, people will correct out to places with lower costs of living.[2] Overall, I expect fewer buyers for houses in urban centers, and those in the market will have tighter budgets and thus less ability to bid up prices.
Supply: I feel like I’m on even shakier ground here, but my even-less-principled guess is that supply of housing on the market is likely to increase. Some fraction of people feeling the economic squeeze will need to convert capital assets into cash, and selling second homes or homes in expensive areas is one way they can do that. I could imagine some trends in the other direction, such as those who were already planning to see waiting to put their properties on market until things stabilize. But overall my guess is still that supply would increase modestly.
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Both of those trends point in the same direction, so my low-confidence guess is that housing prices will decrease–maybe slightly, maybe sharply–even as many other things get more expensive. But feel free to tell me why I'm wrong below, at length if you like.
[1] Over a longer time, increases in material costs will make building new houses and maintaining existing ones more expensive, and thus reduce the supply somewhat compared to the counterfactual world with no Iran war. But I expect that effect to be slow enough to safely ignore for the moment.
[2] I would also guess that different types of housing might be affected differently. Specifically that economic uncertainty and reduced prosperity ought to make renting more attracting that buying. So the ratio of rental fees to sale prices for houses might increase somewhat (even if they're both getting cheaper).
The Irish experience has been that in an economic downturn, it's harder to sell (since people can't get mortgages/don't have the same job opportunities to earn high salaries) so owners of houses are happier to rent them out for whatever they can get, then when the market recovers they sell the house (pays off the remaining mortgage and they don't have to bother with tenants).
Whether that will happen as you forecast, we'll have to wait and see. Some people might decide to sell now, pay off the mortgage, and get out because they're afraid of being stuck in negative equity.
Assuming you're correct about the fuel price rise, I would rather expect home prices to rise in inner ring suburbs where a short, reasonable commute is possible, but fall in suburbs further from the city center.
Regarding interest rates: I'm sure there are different effect sizes at work, but higher interest rates I think are kind of harder to predict what effect they'll have on real estate prices than you might think, because they tend to reduce both supply and demand at the same time. Fewer people can take on those larger monthly mortgage payments, so you get reduced demand, but at the same time, for people that already have a mortgage, the cost of packing up and moving and taking out a new mortgage at higher rates has now increased substantially, so there are fewer sellers, also.
>My current (low-confidence) prediction is that house prices are likely to fall somewhat; if the recession is bad they may fall a lot. But mortgage rates will also very likely rise.
If mortgage rates rise, prices should fall, because rising mortgage rates reduces the demand for homes. (Because demand is the willingness and ability to buy at a range of prices, and higher mortgage rates reduces the ability to buy at all prices ) But that should put upward pressure on rents.
I am not an economist, but I agree with your assessment. Moreover, I believe that house prices went down in many European countries as a reaction to the 2022 energy crisis. They even went down nominally, and dropped significantly in inflation-adjusted value. This was even more remarkable because they had been going steeply and steadily upwards for a long time.
The situation seems to be really similar to me, so I take this as a supporting data point.
Have house prices really gone down in the places where people want to/have to live? If you take the German average, it's very much a useless number: Large swathes of former East Germany are being deserted, while everyone wants to live where the economic opportunity is - larger cities and their metropolitan areas. Prices there are just growing steadily, usually outpacing inflation.
I would expect similar effects in most EU countries.
Yes, they have gone done in popular places as well. For example, -15% in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, -10% in Munich, a bit less in Berlin or Cologne, but still -5% or so.
It's also not rocket science to understand what happened. As reaction to the energy crisis, the ECB (European Central Bank) raised interest rates from 0% to 4.5% in a year or so, and mortgage rates in Germany rose from 1% to 4%.
Ah, I see what you mean. I consider this a one-time effect due to the shift from the long 0% interest era back to a historically more normal +x% interest era. That decreased sticker prices, but the reality is that almost no-one pays cash, so for the buyers the effective cost of the mortgage has not changed. And the latter is the reason *why* the sticker prices went down.
Has anyone heard what's going on with Tornyol, the interesting (anti-)mosquito drone company Scott has boosted? I put down the pre-order deposit last year, which supposedly grants access to "exclusive technical updates," but I haven't seen any. The website now says pre-orders are closed, but that's about the only change I can see. I would LOVE to test out an anti-mosquito drone and hope the company and technology are on track!
Hey! Tornyol founder here. We've been pretty busy with R&D and havent taken the time to detail much lately, but will be coming back with an update pretty soon. Things are on track accounting for usual engineering optimism about deadlines! We have autonomous drones (timlidly) flying around the office and we're working hard every day to make them bolder and more confident in their abilities, until the day when we can kill mosquitoes autonomously. Thanks a lot for beeing with us and very exicted to show what we're up to soon!
Alex can provide more detail, but the company addresses this on its website. A short version: “Our LeSonar2 phased array sonar uses 380 smartphone microphones and an Artix-7 FPGA to map the world in 3D. Phase information allows us to measure .1 mm movements and identify mosquitoes through their unique wingbeat signature.”
Separate from the politics of Hampshire College, if they're so good at creating research doctorates, and if research doctorates are so good at creating value, then... whence the cash flow problems? Research-focused universities should have no problem monetizing developments that came out of their labs. Without any knowledge or research I suspect that "proportion of research doctorates" is a goodharted statistic that doesn't represent the value prop of the college.
Value creation =/= value capture. A PhD creates value throughout the lifespan. Much of it (typicaly almost all) doesn't occur during the PhD candidature period. Much of it also doesn't consist in anything patentable but expertise, blue sky contribution to basic knowledge that will only lead to economic advancements later on etc.
My impression is that universities produce more researchers than the for-profit markets demands (in pretty much every field except pharmacology).
It's doesn't matter how much value you produce. Wages are set by supply and demand, just like any other price. Too many people looking for that job->low wages for that job->No way for universities to capture that value from students.
Hampshire is an undergraduate college. It's a good prep for going to graduate school and then into research, but little of that research is done *at* Hampshire.
Hampshire college (from my understanding) is an LAC with an unusual pedagogy, if I understand correctly. They do not have graduate students. I think the post is saying that an unusual number of their graduates get research doctorates after graduating, which I do think is a good measure of performance, but is not unusual for other similarly-unusual LACs, see St.John's College, for example. This is in part due to a) weird pedagogies selecting for students more likely to get PhDs and b) the graduates not really having marketable skills after undergrad and needing to go to grad school to be employable, which in my mind makes the over-standard rates somewhat less impressive. I don't know enough about Hampshire college to be sure, though.
Yes, this is basically correct. The mandatory senior thesis is a big deal, though; schools which are more normal but have the strong thesis requirement (like Reed College, where I went) also have extremely high graduate degree rates.
I see the victor of grad school rates as Deep Springs college, where ~80% of graduates get a terminal degree, and the students *do* graduate from normal, standard schools on a normal time frame, although I do think that the 1% acceptance rate does most of the heavy lifting (even though they do the best job at teaching of any school in America, I think).
I think mandatory senior thesis is just good pedagogy and tends to just make the students more interested in original research and more capable of it, hence higher graduate degree rates. I doubt it has selection effects (I don't think HS seniors care that much about mandatory thesis requirements when choosing their college).
When I was at Hampshire the thesis project (called Division 3) loomed large from the moment we arrived on campus. Toward the end of every semester, a new crop of students completing their theses were very visible in the community-- talking about their work socially, presenting it formally, and when finished, celebrating by ringing a large bell at the center of campus. It was clear that most of what we did during our tenure as students was supposed to move us toward that final goal. Your self-chosen Division 2 faculty committee was supposed to keep you moving in that direction for the middle two years of a four-year course of study. However if you planned poorly or shifted gears too late or picked a research area where knowledgeable advisors were hard to come by within the system (as I did), there was a risk of not making it to the finish line. I ended up transferring out and finishing a bachelor's degree elsewhere, but I still view my Hampshire experience as having been extremely valuable to my intellectual, personal, and professional development.
The thesis probably has direct effects - who can do a long research thesis better than someone who's done a short one? But the rest of your point about selection effects and illegibility reducing other options is probably correct.
Yeah, I agree. Probably wasn't very clear. I just don't think it is as large of a deal as the directly correlated category of 'places that are interested in forcing them, and in making them serious affairs', which I bet explains something like 90% of the effect that can be matched directly to thesis/not thesis.
It amuses and befuddles me to no end that everyone abstractly understands the California death spiral of:
Increase Regulatory Requirements -> Higher Prices -> Poor people can no longer afford housing/transportation/food -> Welfare increased so poor people can afford housing/transportation/food -> Taxes Raised -> Higher Prices -> Repeat
But then whenever the chance comes to not increase regulatory requirements, they kick and scream until they get their special “California Compliant” 20% more expensive goods.
Sure, maybe farm animal welfare really is worth the extra cost, but that’s what they said about environmental review, a $20 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, DEI, special emissions requirements, and union labor requirements too.
Doesn't this contradict the complaints that CA is forcing the entire country to follow its rules? Because if they were, there shouldn't be a cost differential.
I think this is a pretty flippant way of talking about keeping animals pinned immobile inside a tiny box for their entire lives. We could probably lower the price of cotton by reinstituting slavery, but it's not merely a "failure to learn the lessons of the California death spiral" that prevents us from doing so!
(also, California has been the fastest growing state in absolute terms, and the third-fastest-growing in per capita terms, over the past 25 years).
California had a net loss of 3 million American born (gained 7 and lost 10 million), and is now set to lose Congressional seats. The fantastic growth rates of prior decades has slowed relative to the rest of the country, especially the rest of the sunbelt. And it is now somewhere between flat and negative, being somewhat offset by immigrants (legal and not so).
Those leaving commonly reference the cost of living and specifically the cost of housing, which is empirically significantly higher than the rest of the country. I have nothing to add about the cost of pork, but there is clearly a pattern in California of more regulation and higher costs leading to people leaving the states at a higher rate than they arrive.
I am an exception to the rule, coming back home to my birth state (for the great surfing), but the increase in cost of living (housing, utility rates, gas, insurance, fast food) was not minor, and in some cases was double.
You have to draw the end of the moral circle somewhere, and if you include animals then you hit the repugnant conclusion *now* instead of in some future hyperpopulation scenario. If you give any non-negligible moral weight to animals, then they dominate any utilitarian calculus. If you want to be vegetarian then fine, but I refuse to believe that forcing the rest of the world to adopt Bay Area eating habits (which is what such a worldview implies) is anything other than evil. An entire globe full of food cultures wiped out in the name of nonhuman utility maximization.
There is also a qualitative difference between humans and animals. I can walk up to another person and say, “hey, it would be a good idea if we both agreed to not enslave each other. I think we would both be better off,” but there’s no way I can walk up to a pig and make a mutually beneficial deal with it. The pig has no power over me, even theoretically, and has no way to condition the quality of its meat or any other good that I want on how well I treat it.
Regarding the California economy, I would be interested in seeing a “purchasing power pairity” adjusted figure.
You don't have to assign moral weight to animals to do that, you just have to believe "biodiversity" has some sort of value to humans, or that some specific species does. Indeed, assigning moral weight to animals CANNOT explain a ban on specifically hunting endangered species (as opposed to banning hunting).
This is because tigers and elephants and komodo dragons are cool. When the snail darter delayed the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam project it caused a major political backlash because nobody cares about a fish that looks and acts almost exactly like a dozen other fish.
>If you give any non-negligible moral weight to animals, then they dominate any utilitarian calculus.
How so?
There are less than a billion pigs in the world, around 6 million dolphins, less than half a million elephants.
There are *lots* of humans in the world, especially compared to the types of 'intelligent' animals we might want to give noticeable consideration to.
Sure, if you give every ant 1/10th the moral weight of a human, that would lead to absurd results. But I don't think anyone serious is suggesting that.
I considered mentioning them, but I don't believe they ever model each shrimp as 1/10th the moral weight of a human. I haven't seen them give an explicit number, but their focus and rhetoric seems geared towards a much smaller fraction tan that.
strawman: "prop 12 requires that pigs in California's supply chain have 24 square feet of space" -> "forcing the rest of the world to adopt Bay Area eating habits" -> "an entire world of food cultures wiped out".
Last time I checked. Prop 12 doesn't ban pork, meat, require vegetarianism. It literally just says your breeding sows need to have enough room to ROTATE. I mean...
false dichotomy: "if you give any non-negligible moral weight to animals, they dominate the calculus". Ok so the only options are 0 or full global mandated vegetarianism. Many people who support prop 12 are not vegetarians and just believe that pigs should be able to turn around.
"Ok so the only options are 0 or full global mandated vegetarianism. Many people who support prop 12 are not vegetarians and just believe that pigs should be able to turn around."
Many people are fundamentally incapable of arriving at a coherent conclusion, yes. Did you know that no animal can turn around after it is slaughtered?
Last time I checked. Prop 12 doesn't ban pork, meat, require vegetarianism. It literally just says your breeding sows need to have enough room to ROTATE [but only if you want to sell your whole-cut meat products in the California market, go nuts if you’re processing it]. I mean...
If you have a principled reason for why animal welfare matters enough that it’s good to ban gestational crates but not enough that it’s good to ban slaughtering animals for meat then I’d love to hear it.
What I suspect is happening is that prop 12 was the most aggressive policy the people involved thought they could get away with in the current political environment. If the political environment becomes more favorable then they will push for more restrictions.
You can't think of principled reasons that might apply? It seems obvious to me.
- "Unnecessary suffering during life" and "death" are different severity gradients. Many ethical frameworks dictate how an animal lives is more important than whether it eventually dies, weighing the suffering as lengthy, conscious, and avoidable. A quick death after a brief life is not the same harm as years of immobilization.
- Welfarism - "reduce suffering within a system that still uses animals" is a principled and internally consistent framework held by serious philosophers. Compatible with your example.
- Talk to literally most people. Almost everyone thinks there's a difference between hunting a deer for food and torturing a deer for fun even though they both end up in a dead deer. Intuition that "the manner of treatment matters independently of the outcome" is the same intuition that Prop 12 operates on.
Your second suspicion is just a strange, unsupported slippery slope, and doesn't even address the actual argument about whether prop 12 is fundamentally good or bad.
Ten million Americans left California, 7 million entered. This has been offset with immigration. The point is that it is getting very expensive to live in California, empirically so, and that reduced growth rates and now domestic growth rates are negative and way below other sun belt states (none of which are as naturally attractive as California IMO).
I certainly agree “death spiral” is overstating the case. And yes there are still lots of great reasons to come to California. I moved back here 6 years ago (and my cost of living almost doubled).
The point which stands is that California regulations are driving up costs of living, and this contributed to net domestic emigration and substantially lower growth rates. It isn’t a healthy situation. The saving factor has been foreign immigration, but this is at risk of being stopped now too (assuming it hasn’t stopped already?).
As far as I know I'm very happy with the results of $20 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, DEI, special emissions requirements, and union labor requirements. Feel free to link me to the libertarian think-pieces denouncing them all, but I've read a bunch of those already and not been convinced of anything.
Housing in specific has been regulated in ways that have caused problems, but that seems to be true in every city in the nation outside Texas, not just CA, And I don't see that generalizing to every other regulation.
I can understand you personally feeling fine with these regulations, the point Daniel makes still stands though that each drives up prices and contributes to a negative outcome dynamic of spiraling costs.
You don’t think $20 an hour wages drove up fast food prices, or that the emissions requirements and special taxes and requirements drove up our gas prices? I am just choosing the two most obvious and self evident examples, but if you don’t agree here, then we can probably just agree not to agree?
I've repeatedly consumed fast food from several different areas with high minimum wages. Perhaps if I'd had a side-by-side comparison between the prices the and in, say, rural Alabama I'd be shocked. But as even when my income was on the bottom end of middle class, I found it perfectly affordable[1]. I'm not animated enough by the issue to go deep into researching it, but I suspect the impact of minimum wage on fast food prices has been rather overstated.
[1] To be more precise, it was affordable that I could eat it several times a month without doing violence to my budget. It was still more expensive than buying food as groceries and I couldn't have afforded to live off it (if I'd wanted to, which I don't) until recently.
>Increase Regulatory Requirements -> Higher Prices -> Poor people can no longer afford housing/transportation/food -> Welfare increased so poor people can afford housing/transportation/food -> Taxes Raised -> Higher Prices -> Repeat
>But then whenever the chance comes to not increase regulatory requirements, they kick and scream until they get their special “California Compliant” 20% more expensive goods.
I don't think either of those things caused a death spiral of this magnitude or increased prices by 20%. According to first google result, a Big Mac costs $.03 more in CA than in Arizona, and is cheaper in CA than in Rhode Island.
I wouldn't be surprised that they increased prices of some things a bit, but I don't believe they create the death spiral and magnitude of consequence they were claiming.
I personally don't even expect that they are net-negative when you compare costs to benefits, which is the lowest bar OP would need to clear for their claim.
And, yes, these are the two most favorable examples. To convince me OP was correct I'd be looking for defenses of their *least* plausible examples. I'm not looking for 'of the 6 things I said, 1 was arguably directionally correct, how dare you call me a liar.'
I think it's mostly just housing which is causing the problems. Everything else seems insignificant compared to the cost of housing. Maybe with a side of Anarchyfare during the post-COVID years, but that's mostly in the past now.
And FWIW, state politicians *have* been trying to ease housing restrictions for the last several years. Just without much success yet.
Not really. AFAIK even hunter-gatherers tend to set up huts of varying levels of sophistication depending on how often they move around.
I guess we could go back further and quibble about what counts as 'people' on the evolutionary ladder. But even then, I'd point out that the only 'people' to ever do this were doing it in limited parts of Africa, and it's not possible in most other climates.
Hm, I did not consider this. So for the out of Africa event to happen, or at least to go more northern than say Syria, people had to get good at building huts?
Maybe even inventing textiles? Not sure why that even happened, the buckskin shirts that 18th century frontier American hunters wore seem good to me.
This is why the scientific community generally does not accept criticisms of out of Africa theory, like Chinese claims how they evolved separately, it is not a political trick to cut down on racism but rather Beijing was too cold for a hairless hominid who did not know how to build huts?
Some regulations are bad, some good, some mixed. There's never going to be one trick for perfect governance. I don't want to eat rotting infected meat, or foods with toxic chemicals in them. I don't want lead in gasoline.
I don't buy the idea that enforcing very minimal protections against animal cruelty will cause a significant cost increase. We have no guarantee that the proposed elimination of animal protections will provide any price relief to consumers. More likely, producers will pocket any savings for themselves.
"We have no guarantee that the proposed elimination of animal protections"
That's not what's proposed. What's proposed is an elimination of interstate trade barriers designed by one state to influence the welfare of animals elsewhere.
Yes, California is biased in favor of too much regulation. However, there are certain regulations that don't currently exist, but are badly needed nationally- and outlawing the really extreme animal cruelty practiced by our factory farm industry is maybe the most urgent of those. In this case, California's normally problematic bias is pointing it in the right direction.
It's kind of like how Texas is biased in favor of too little regulation, but that has the benefit of allowing the state to ignore NIMBYs. Stopped clocks are right twice a day.
I mean, you can think that, but when JD Vance defeats Gavin Newsom in 2028 because voters were afraid of California-style price increases I want you to remember this thread.
If democrats are stupid enough to nominate Newsom they deserve to lose, and that's the case whether or not farm animals sold in California have enough space to turn around.
No one who does photo ops about wrecking homeless people's few possessions deserves anything better than what they want for the less fortunate.
People need cheap bacon in order to survive or have a decent standard of living? Not buying it. Like I get expensive bacon/eggs makes people *mad* but this just doesn't fall into the same category of need as housing, ability to get to work, life-saving medicine, etc.
The number I get when I ask Google and AI is that prop 12 raised pork prices 20% in California. Some of these numbers are from pork-industry lobbying groups, which might not be entirely honest in their framing, but I don’t see anyone else directly comparing the before and after prices.
What I have seen are calculations for what the extra cost to produce compliant pork *should* be, but it’s easy for these sorts of analyses to be underestimates which fail to model the complexity of the economy.
Thanks for the info. Claude gave me the 6 cent number and told me that this higher price is could be due to seller mark-ups (which ofc shouldn’t be ignored).
I guess it’s somewhat unclear which number is the most practical for discussion, but I would still argue that a 20% price increase for pork isn’t that harmful. Pork makes up a relatively tiny percentage of the average person’s expenditures. A 20% increase to something that you spend 0.3% of your income on is insignificant compared to a 2% increase in price for housing, so I don’t think these two things are that comparable.
Also, people can substitute away from pork much more easily than they can substitute away from, say, interacting with infrastructure that required an environmental review to be constructed.
"but I would still argue that a 20% price increase for pork isn’t that harmful. Pork makes up a relatively tiny percentage of the average person’s expenditures."
Literally every regulator makes this argument about literally every regulation that increases the price of something. We end up paying the price for all of the regulations, not just your favorite ones.
Even if I took this argument at face value, the proper response would still be "apply critical thinking to each case individually and decide which are worth the cost and which aren't." It would not be "take a blanket position against all cost-increasing regulations and thereafter turn my brain off."
Really this is about as sensible as saying "every shop in the entire city tries to sell me things, but if I tried to buy everything that was on offer, I'd go broke. Therefore I should never buy anything." I don't have to accept the implicit claim that the only possible choices are "every cost-increasing regulation," or "no cost-increasing regulations." There are lots of alternatives (not just cannibalism).
The difference is that what you buy at a shop is at your sole discretion. You can stop anywhere on the slope.
What electorates buy has a sense of momentum to it, and you can only stop that momentum through coordination. The possible stopping points are mostly not stopping points any one rational actor would have selected.
The year is 2000. A gypsy fortune teller is approached by a young mother, who asks how her three children will turn out.
“Your eldest son,” she says, “will heal the sick.”
The mother smiles.
“Your daughter will also become a doctor. Not the kind that helps people, but she will do important work and her husband will brag about her at parties.”
The mother beams.
“Your younger son,” she says, “will pretend to be a white nationalist so he can get a job in the Trump administration.”
Statistics says that there is a guy out there who claimed to be gay/trans in the 2018-2022 period to get a well paid corporate job but who later claimed to be a proud white nationalist to get promoted into the Trump administration, all that without actually being gay, trans or white nationalist.
Statistics say there also is such a guy who is both gay/trans and a proud white nationalist.
Not quite as dramatic, but I know a guy that applied to jobs as a queer leftist woman of sorts in 2018-2022, and then transitioned into a male-passing antiwoke libertarian.
I recall one story about a (white) illegal immigrant who was a vocal supporter of Trump and his promises of mass deportation, and who died in ICE detention.
Speaking from direct personal experience and exposure to the community at large, in both red and blue areas it was a disadvantage to be trans when trying to get a well paid corporate job in 2018-2022, irrespective of whatever vibes-only narrative people are determined to peddle.
There were surely some particular companies where it might have helped, but not a meaningful fraction of corporate jobs.
>Speaking from direct personal experience and exposure to the community at large, in both red and blue areas it was a disadvantage to be trans when trying to get a well paid corporate job in 2018-2022, irrespective of whatever vibes-only narrative people are determined to peddle.
>There were surely some particular companies where it might have helped, but not a meaningful fraction of corporate jobs.
You seem pretty convinced that your personal experiences were the rule and not the exception. Do you have a non-vibes based reason for thinking so?
"You seem pretty convinced that your personal experiences were the rule and not the exception."
It's called a "null hypothesis." If you believe something like "pretending to be trans was often an advantage in seeking corporate jobs in 2018-2022,:" you should provide evidence to that effect. Without seeing evidence to that effect, nobody should believe it by default.
A) By exposure to the community I specifically mean "I was regularly in touch with or acquainted with a large number of trans people in my direct area". More than just my personal experience but still just anecdata.
B) The data collected by governmental and nongovernmental orgs show trans people as having 2-3 times more unemployment than cis people between 2015 and 2024. The difference shrinks only a little when you control for race and only a little again if you then look at specifically college degrees.
Trans people massively report receiving mistreatment or being denied a job or being fired due to identity, and not particularly less in the period 2018 to 2022 as before.
I think that you can fairly question about whether / exactly how much the bad outcomes described in the literature and data really are or arent the result of direct discrimination. But nothing in the data bears out any kind of advantage in self report or in measureable outcomes of trans people relative to cis people, even just at the college degree level.
To what extent do straight white males report massive discrimination, mistreatment, being denied a job or being fired due to identity? (Are they even being surveyed?)
Pressing F to doubt - that kind of discrimination against mothers is explicitly illegal and absolutely the kind of thing no HR person would admit to doing.
Even still the math doesn't work. If the data that shows such high employment friction for trans people is _including_ this supposed advantage and there does not include _any_ disadvantage then you would have to be suggesting that it is simply the case that trans people (even controlling for a college degree!) are a third or less qualified for any particular job as cis people due to "self selection" or "mental issues" and that's just ridiculous. We have the stats on mental illness increase in trans women relative to cis, and it isn't large enough to match, and also we have data for cis people with those same mental issues, and their outcomes in the data aren't as bad as trans people with the same issue.
And on top of all of _that_, there was still no _change_ in the data in the years we are talking about, so even if what you were saying were true, we'd see it in the delta, and it's not there. Not that data will be persuasive to you.
FYI the scoring algorithm for ARC-AGI-3 is really weird, it's not "did you solve the puzzle", it's a very complicated algorithm that takes into account how many moves you made relative to the top performing humans on the same puzzle (and IIRC some other factors). The scoring is somewhat defensible but there is a lot of debate over it.
Some researchers released a harness that scores 82% with Opus 4.6. It's not cheating by tailoring the harness to the games. It tells the agent to use Python to analyze the game board instead of reasoning about it directly.
All the ARC benchmarks take advantage of humans' strong visual reasoning compared to LLMs' relatively weak visual reasoning. It's pointing out a weakness instead of evaluating core intelligence. It's like if bats designed a benchmark around echolocation puzzles and gave it to humans. They transform the sensory data into a format we can perceive by pitch shifting it and slowing it down. Then they eliminate any puzzles from their set that humans solved or that bats couldn't solve, so that they're left with a set of puzzles only bats can solve.
Are the bats right to conclude humans lack general intelligence? Sort of, if your definition of general intelligence means you shouldn't be missing any type of intelligence bats have.
That aside, the ARC-AGI benchmarks tend to fall fairly quickly, and I expect the same will happen for v3.
I think if they manage to beat that benchmark by using coding to render the game intelligible to the LLM, it will be goodharting, because if you want these things to do super-science, there may not be any software that can make reality intelligible to the LLM.
Disagree; I think it would be exactly the desired outcome.
A human would quickly realise: “I don’t seem to be doing very well dealing with this directly, let me make a tool to assist me”. The AI needed to be told. This is also my experience using Claude for coding tasks: it’s not great at noticing when its approach is not working and it needs to change tack.
The benchmark is measuring the AI’s ability to sanity check its own output and autocorrect. Seems like a lot of benchmark to indirectly measure this one thing, but this kind of introspection certainly is something the agents aren’t great at yet, and seems worth tracking.
It would Goodhart the metric if that happens, because that approach will not transfer to pushing forward the frontiers of science. Can these things work when they're encountering a bit of raw reality, unmediated by any model of the behavior of that bit of reality? Because that's the situation when you're pushing against the edge of scientific knowledge. I don't know that we have a benchmark that tracks that.
To begin with, it's visual puzzles that are fed into the models as long strings of text tokens. If you gave humans puzzles like that in a text format, approximately 0% of us would be able to solve them. The usual conter-argument is that the models tend to score worse when the puzzles are fed in as image tokens- but I think that demonstrates that the models are very bad at perceiving the details of images, which we already know. A better reasoning benchmark would isolate abstract reasoning from the ability to see images or reconstruct them from text strings, rather than conflating them.
Also, I think the scoring is misleading. Humans are rated at 100%, even though only about 40-60% of humans can complete any given level, and the scoring is based on efficiency rather than completion rate. Some human testers actually scored similarly to the LLMs, despite our species' much more impressive visual comprehension abilities.
I think the ARC-AGI people have a habit of choosing scoring systems that maximize the point difference between humans and the models- and I think that explains why the previous two benchmarks started out implying a huge difference, then suddenly saturated, rather than showing gradual improvement over time like better benchmarks.
> To begin with, it's visual puzzles that are fed into the models as long strings of text tokens.
I don't think this is an ironclad objection, because text tokens are the basic units of LLM input and "thought". It'd be like saying, "I am a human and I could not solve this game because all I got as the input were excitation signals on the rods and cones in my retina, instead of clear spoken instructions and state descriptions".
> but I think that demonstrates that the models are very bad at perceiving the details of images, which we already know.
It seems like a generally intelligent agent would be good at many things, including visual perception. Certainly any agent that needs to act in the physical world would have to possess some form of perception, and radio waves (including light waves) are an excellent medium for it (at least here on Earth) -- even if it ends up translating those radio wave signals into text tokens as it receives them.
> Some human testers actually scored similarly to the LLMs, despite our species' much more impressive visual comprehension abilities.
Humans can solve puzzles in non-native formats in theory, but we do seem to have "hardware-accelerated" perception for (up to) 3-D structures. E.g. it's possible for mathematicians to prove properties about sphere-packing in 22-D, but I wouldn't expect the average joe to find those properties "intuitively obvious" in the same way they often find properties about 3-D structures obvious. Likewise, LLMs are not natively 3-D. Although I think there are other types of architectures that are 3-D native, such as CNNs and Diffusion models.
I don't know if CNNs and Diffusion models are "3D native" (they could be); but in general, I agree -- humans are not "Generally Intelligent" either. So perhaps the bar for LLMs is lower than it seems...
oops, I had generally meant 2D, not 3D, in the context of image classifiers and such. Nothing to my knowledge seems to be able to do 3D super well, yet. Although I think this is LeCun and co's big obsession.
I think it's not that, because they can take the video game in frame by frame. Looking at Claude Plays Pokemon, it's like they can't reason very well when confronted with a video game, probably because there's nothing like that in the training set.
Claude was just very bad at image recognition too though, like repeatedly failing to recognize *the player character* on screen, or spending hours wandering around a room without managing to talk to the only NPC in that room.
Claude is getting better and better at playing Pokemon though and can mostly beat that very long game, so I feel like the 1% number is too low or has some kind of cherry picking
From what I’ve seen by far the biggest issue with Claude plays Pokemon is that it’s half blind. The second biggest issue is that it will get stuck in these loops T.T
I don't think it's that it's half blind. He's not thinking like a half-blind human would about the situation. Even if it beats it, it would still be Pyrrhic victory, because it's performance was far beneath human. I also wonder how expensive it is to have Claude play this game, the token burn must be insane.
On Save our Bacon, from reading the text, it appears that states have enacted prohibitions to inter-state trade based on their own internal standards. This is a problem as the federal government generally does not allow states to erect barriers to interstate trade. I do not see where it makes it so a state would not be able to set internal standards for their own product. However, their product will have to compete with products from other states that do not have the same standards and related costs....
This isn’t how the dormant commerce clause works. States are allowed to set standards for any products sold in their states, including ones that come from other states—they just can’t set discriminatory standards that benefit in-state producers or penalize out-of-state producers. The Supreme Court specifically found that the California law on pig treatment was allowed under this framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Pork_Producers_Council_v._Ross
Maybe not. I would have said that is exactly how it works prior to 2023. I'm not so sure a long term understanding of the dormant commerce clause based on an assessment of substantial burden in one case can be relied upon as definitional in the long term. I believe we will see this one again sometime as the states try harder to push their intangible moral codes on each other while avoiding the associated costs...
Someone else has already pointed out that this is being worked with legislation (which was the point of the original post)...
How are they "avoiding the associated costs"? Under California's law, pork producers are free to (A) comply with California's requirements only for pigs whose meat will go to California, and charge a higher price for that meat compared to other meat; or (B) completely exit the California market, avoiding any new expenses. And if for some reason some pork producers choose to raise the price of all of their pork sold nationwide to cover the costs of compliance with California law, then other producers who choose to stay out of the California market are free to undercut and out-compete them.
It’s not about the dormant commerce clause anymore. It’s about the active commerce clause because congress is about to regulate interstate commerce by passing legislation explicitly preempting state extraterritorial animal welfare requirements.
With respect to the new Farm Bill I agree; I was responding to Frono's comment, which I read as a more general claim. I don't think it's true that "the federal government generally does not allow states to erect barriers to interstate trade" if you're counting things like California Proposition 12 as barriers--it is actually exceedingly common for states to have different product standards from each other that require producers selling to multiple states to either meet the most restrictive standards or differentiate their products by state, and only in relatively limited cases has the federal government stepped in (and generally by imposing detailed national standard, as with for example pharmaceuticals).
In my opinion, it is exactly this overly broad interpretation of the commerce clause that is the heart of innumerable problems in our country. "Restrictions on interstate trade" should be read to mean restrictions that apply *uniquely* to interstate trade, something like a tarriff. Otherwise this would also prohibit a state to set taxes on out-of-state goods, since that's also a cost on interstate trade. According to your interpretation, they could only tax goods produced in their own state but not ones that originated from abroad
I'm sure that Professor Peery had a wonderful time at that college and loves it and is very enthusiastic about the model of education there.
Which sounds like a lot of the free-range models of education often promoted on here as alternatives to the terrible state of current education.
But either the administration were none of them graduates of this amazing college, so why couldn't anyone competent graduate with a business degree from there and help run the place, or they *were* graduates and it turns out that free-range isn't necessarily the best way to run a business?
Because administering a college is a business. I'd like to know more about the particular bonehead financial decisions, but it might simply be that Hampshire College has run its course, and that the model isn't what people want right now (with the despair about AI, employment, you need credentials to get credentials to even get your CV accepted)? If employers are looking for something legible, "here's my MA in History from Ivy" is more familiar than "well we don't do grades and majors here, it's whatever Bill wanted to study for four years".
ISTM that there's this common thing that happens, where what I think the job is (produce educated and culturally aware graduates, design secure products, provide good service from this government department) is not actually what the job is (make enough money on tuition and grants to stay afloat, make products that sell well enough to keep the lights on, comply with every jot and tittle of the regulations even if that means no services are provided). It's like the negative image of Molloch--instead of overoptimizing on the thing that causes you to survive (and thus optimizing away joy and beauty and goodness), you overoptimize on joy and beauty and goodness (thus dooming yourself since you weren't managing to survive).
The original post covers the bonehead financial decisions, and why the model is what people want right now, with specific reference to despair about AI, employment, and credentials. If you want to end up with an MA in History from an Ivy, Hampshire is probably one of your strongest choices! Our grad placement rate is through the roof. https://www.mod171.com/p/real-hampshire-college-has-never
You're right that Hampshire sounds very free-range, and the way it's marketed reinforces that impression. But in fact, the model is not free-range at all. It is in fact very rigorous, more rigorous than what is offered at other colleges, and it would be easy to rebuild the identity around what it really offers. I go into the model in a second post: https://www.mod171.com/p/how-to-market-hampshire-college
The problem is, you pull out lines like "Hampshire College is the greatest model of higher education ever invented."
Don't be modest, Ethan, tell me how you really feel.
Maybe it is the most specialiest thing ever. Or maybe 80% of people would hate it there, even if the top top 20% would love it and all go on to do PhDs in Yale.
Have you any solid figures that there are enough (1) smart and (2) rich kids to keep the school open, without having to fall on your sword of "okay we need to appeal to the masses" and hence dilute the special rigour?
What's the employment rate for those doctorates? Where do they end up? How many are placed in industry, and do well enough to offset the cost of their education? The points in your second article are all about academia and then the last one is "oh yeah and they end up starting their own business":
"Hampshire ranks in the top 40 nationally for PhD attainment, an average of 8.68 of every 100 alumni go on to earn a doctoral degree
Two-thirds of graduates earn an advanced degree within ten years of commencement.
One in five Hampshire science students who complete their thesis are invited to present at a peer-reviewed conference.
Five percent of Hampshire science students are lead authors on published, peer-reviewed journal articles as undergraduates.
A quarter of Hampshire alumni start their own business or organization, placing Hampshire #6 on Forbes’ 2015 list of most entrepreneurial colleges."
Now to be fair, you do seem to be aware of that:
"I mean that the school doesn’t make it clear what the model means for you as a prospective student; or what the model means for your child, as a parent. Stories of amazing alumni can help make the possibilities clear, but they’re not enough on their own, and it’s not enough to say, “look at our amazing alumni”."
But again I think the problem down the line will be that, if you do successfully re-invent Hampshire College, then it will end up diluted from what it is (or was). Putting more emphasis on achievement will get you eventually sucked into the rat-race of credentialism.
I wish you luck, but I'm not sanguine this will succeed. Again, the problem is scaling up: how many unique shiny new educational programmes were piloted and did immensely well and then they tried scaling this up to national level and the thing collapsed like a souffle when you slam the oven door?
"My answer is because I will say: “This is the most powerful model in higher education and should be expanded immediately, so it can operate at full capacity kick Harvard’s ass”, instead of whatever the professional advancement staff said."
"Expanding immediately" may not be scalable. You might face the choice of "grow big enough to be self-sustaining but now we're just another liberal arts college" or "remain quirky but high-achieving, but that's only doable with not enough students to pay our way".
I am being a wet blanket, but these are the kind of objections people will raise when yuo come round with the begging bowl, and that is what you have to do - go round with the begging bowl to raise money to buy the place and re-open it and run it the way you describe running it.
I'd like you to succeed. I have doubts.
And frankly, all your "what would you say to a smart 18 year old choosing between Harvard and Hampshire", "pick Harvard for an easy A, pick Hampshire for a challenge", "1 in 20 Hampshire science students publish original research as an undergraduate" has me going "for the love of mike, PICK HARVARD". Name recognition, get that degree on easy mode, network, over "where college? Hampshire? Isn't that a place in England?"
What comes of all this original research? Does it go anywhere? Because there's the Young Scientist competition in my country for secondary school students, and every year the competitors do a ton of original research. But only some things ever lead anywhere. 'Original research' can mean 'how to wash a teacup' and not 'working on a tool to diagnose brain cancer' (which may or may not become a commercial product/medical device later):
I'm glad you'd like me to succeed and I'd be happy to hear any advice to that effect. FWIW I think that response is fine, I am not marketing to the kind of person who would want to get a degree on easy mode, they can go to Harvard.
Yeah, words are always ambiguous, who cares. "Original research" can mean a cure for cancer or a paper about ultimate frisbee. We have to condense things down to words and phrases anyways and we trust intelligent people to try to disambiguate.
I don't really have the bandwidth to write a detailed history of Hampshire College in this comment, but the short answer is that by virtue of its youth and having basically no endowment, it has always been extremely tuition dependent, and so events like e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, COVID hurt it more than more established colleges that can use endowment funds to ride it out. The bonehead decision was trying to sell to UMASS in 2019 and not admit an entering class, devastating their finances. But that was one a short-lived president, the issue is that Hampshire has no margin for error, and this has very little to do with its education model; I think think any college founded in the last 60 years is doing well financially (other than the likes of Liberty University).
Was Hampshire actually making boneheaded financial decisions? Ethan's post says that the administration slashed the admissions department, which he calls dumb despite the school "fighting for its life". But why was it fighting for its life? His article mentions that it needs a thousand students to be sustainable: why did it fall so far below that? I mean 1,000 seems like a remarkably small number if that's really all you need per year and the school is really as good as is claimed. Why were they not able to get 1,500?
There's some discussion about faculty being hired and then quickly fired, despite turning in very good performance. That does indeed seem like remarkably terrible management, but it seems...weird that this would just happen for no reason. Whose job was it to select managers?
I agree it seems weird but it did appear to happen for no reason, and it had been happening at least since when I was a student from '09-'13. In addition to cutting admissions and having bizarre faculty hiring/firing practices, they also fired the IT department for no clear reason to outsource services, which went poorly.
I'm sure there were a million other small bad decisions that I didn't see. The big one however was hiring a president who had a track record of shutting down schools she ran. Unsurprisingly, she tried to shut down the school in 2019. They managed to oust her but this cratered admissions, right before COVID cratered admissions more. Before that the college had strong enrollment and a pretty balanced budget, you can check out the 990s.
I recently spoke to one of Hampshire's original employees, and he agreed, none of these decisions made sense. Charity is important but some people just make bad decisions — 50% of people are below-average managers.
I am not christian but this article is a little tough to explain. especially how his wounds lasted on his palms for literal decades sometimes without even allowing any acids on it. how and why would he do this?
I read through most of this just now (skimming through long quotes), and honestly, it's disappointing in similar ways that other posts by Ethan have been.
Based on my limited knowledge, the likeliest explanation seems to be a persistent psychosomatic effect. I can very well believe that extreme piety can produce stigmata under certain conditions. I might have missed it in my skim, but I don't think Ethan addresses this hypothesis specifically.
He does spend some time arguing (I think unpersuasively) that the phenomena must be supernatural. If they *were* supernatural, that doesn't even mean God exists. Their particularly Roman Catholic quality is presumably due to Pio's piety.
That being said, their exceptionality should be in doubt. While the stigmata's existence is well-attested, Ethan's arguments that they're medically impossible relies on suppositions and sparse parts of the record--eg., one time someone measured a cloth that had absorbed some of Pio's blood, and found "it" to contain 12% as much hemogblobin as normal blood. Ethan argues that this is an extreme underestimate of iron loss, and settles on 50 mg/day.
First of all--what is this even talking about? The claim isn't that a a fresh sample of Pio's fluid was tested. A "cloth" was tested, presumably by extracting fluid from it. How long after the cloth got wet was it extracted? How much evaporation had it happened in the meantime? No details. Just settling on a figure he calls "conservative" and moving on. How much iron was Pio consuming in his diet? Not clear, but Ethan is confident it's not enough.
Look, in a case like this, the naturalistic explanation, if true, will either be fraud or (more likely) something highly anomalous. Cases like this have been selected for evading the easy explanations.
When Ethan assembles these detailed arguments, it's worth being clear about when multiple pieces of evidence are mutually reinforcing, vs when multiple pieces of evidence *depend* on each other. Large parts of Ethan's cornucopia of facts and arguments are of the latter type: establishing that the condition is supernatural requires in some cases long chains of argumentation and multiple necessary hypotheses. In that case, the individual uncertainties, errors, and oversights accumulate, rather than compensate for each other. Every overlooked gap adds to all the others.
Details of Pio's iron balance are the sort of thing that could require real expertise (and access to the patient) to understand, and Ethan seems kind of cavalier. He seemingly has a habit of engineering a "conservative estimate" that allows him to proceed to the next step with certainty.
Fair enough! But I am more concerned about how his wounds lasted for 50+ years. Even the chemical tinctures he had was removed and access was prevented. How could he have maintained the wound that never healed then?
Also can I ask what exactly you think happened to his wounds? Is it really possible for a wound to not heal due to psychosomatic conditions alone?
This is the part that concerns me, as a non christian.
If a wound can be caused psychosomatically, it can presumably persist psychosomatically. Most cases of stigmata come and go over the course of life, and there are many non-stigmatic cases of seeping wounds persisting for years. Whatever Pio was going through, he seems to be an outlier. But apart from iron balance and some extreme fevers, the wounds themselves seem to me as "mid-tier medical mystery".
I don't claim the wounds were purely psychosomatic. There could have been a bunch of contributing factors, but I expect the psyche was a significant part of it.
I doubt it's possible for a wound not to heal psychosomatically, but I would guess some combination of "weird medical condition" with "picking or scratching at it" is entirely possible.
I don't have devotion to Padre Pio, though my late father did. I know there's controversy, but I don't think he was a fake. On the other hand, I do accept that there are genuine stigmatics and it's not all explained away by hysteria and fraud. I think St. Francis of Assisi was genuine. I don't know one way or the other about other claims.
Nothing is stopping anyone from making up their own mind by listening to all claims pro and contra, and deciding if they believe "something mystical was going on", "something explainable by psychology was going on but not fraud", or "it was all fakery and he deliberately created the wounds himself for fame and fortune".
Or maybe he just had a weird skin condition ? There are plenty of those going around, from cancer to psoriasis. That said though, if these stigmata really were miraculous, I don't think it'd be possible for a Catholic to say, "I don't have devotion to Padre Pio". When Jesus dispensed his miracles, people might have said "sure his god granted him miraculous powers, but I still don't respect that god enough to worship him instead of good old Zeus", but it would sound strange indeed for a modern Catholic to do so.
Seth has explained it, but a personal devotion to a particular saint or not having one does not mean one doubts the sainthood, just that they're not your ishtadevata:
A lot of Catholics have devotion to the rosary or Our Lady in particular. I don't. What devotion I do have is to the Holy Souls and the Eucharist. I'm not claiming Padre Pio was a fraud or saying people devoted to him are mistaken, just not my thing.
"On the other hand, by the term "devotions" in the plural, or "popular devotions", we commonly understand those external practices of piety by which the devotion of the faithful finds life and expression. The efficacy of these practices in eliciting feelings of devotion is derived from four principal sources, either
1. by the strong appeal which they make to man's emotional instincts, or
2. by the simplicity of form which puts them within the reach of all, or
3. by the stimulus of association with many others in the same good work, or
4. by their derivation from the example of pious persons who are venerated for their holiness.
...No good purpose would be served by attempting a catalogue of approved Catholic devotions. It may be sufficient to note that the list of indulgenced prayers and practices provided in the Raccolta or in the larger works of Beringer and Mocchegiani afford a sufficient practical indication of the measure in which such practices are recognized and recommended by the Church. Most of the principal devotions are dealt with separately in THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, whether we regard different objects and motives of devotion--such as the Blessed Sacrament (See EUCHARIST), the Passion, the Five Wounds, the Sacred Heart, the Seven Dolours, and, in a word, the principal mysteries and festivals--or, again, devotional practices--e.g., the Angelus, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross--or, again, confraternities and associations identified with particular forms of devotion--e.g., the Confraternity of the Bon Mors or that of the Holy Family."
I guess I don't really understand how a saint could be "not my thing" to a devout Catholic; especially a saint who was empowered by God to perform miracles (supposedly including but not limited to bilocation, preemptive healing, conferring with angels, and of course the stigmata). And not in some distant past lost to the mists of history, but in our own time (well, technically about 130 years ago, but still). Assuming all that stuff is true, then this guy sounds kind of important !
It's personal taste and how they fit with you/you fit with them and what parts of their lives or teachings help you in your own.
All the saints are important, but recognising and acknowledging that they are saints, and maybe modern important saints, is not the same as feeling personal connection. I'm not denying his importance, and possibly I could benefit from aspects of his approach, but he just doesn't appeal to me in the same way as, for example, St Thomas Aquinas (not that I am remotely in the neighbourhood of his genius, but 'oh hey people made jokes about you being so big' is something comforting to a Person of Amplitude). I just like him and what glimpses of his personality we get of him.
Sometimes people will like particular saints due to a sort of sentimentality (e.g. the Little Flower gets a lot of this), but that's okay too. It's maybe a terrible comparison to make, but it's something very vaguely like a favourite sports team or music group (or even genre of music).
We've just had long discussions about taste on here, and some people absolutely love Brutalist architecture, which I don't understand in the slightest. But that's their thing. Everyone has different preferences.
EDIT: Maybe role models might make more sense to you? I don't know what people you particularly admire, but do you have someone/several someones you think are praiseworthy and admirable, and/or who has had an influence on your life, what you think, how you think, how you want to live your life, while there are others you know are important historical or political figures but you don't feel anything about them one way or the other?
Treating saints as role models (or, dare I say, influecners ?) makes perfect sense to me on the secular level; I'm just fuzzy on the theology. It almost sounds like what you look for in your role model/influencer are personality traits, approachability, maybe even looks, etc.; and being chosen by the immortal omnipotent ruler of the Universe to receive miraculous powers is kind of a nice-to-have. But I guess that depends on what you believe about the saints' purpose here on Earth. If they were sent/empowered by God specifically to act as people's "spiritual buddies" (for lack of a better term that isn't "influencer"), then your approach does make sense. I'm just finding it hard to put some generic saint whose main claim to fame is "being nice" on the same level as saints with specific world-altering accomplishments (like Cyril and Methodius) or flashy superpowers (Padre Pio) or both (Joan of Arc).
"Devotion" has a cultural connotation here, and there's the interesting phenomenon of how Catholics can feel connection and commonality and affinity toward particular saints more than others (and the church apparently welcomes this phenomenon).
This makes a bit more sense, but I still don't get it (which is unsurprising coming from an atheist, perhaps). It sounds like the idea here is, "This Padre Pio was definitely a living saint who had been granted miracle powers by God himself (including but by no means limited to stigmata) for which we have undeniable evidence... which is cool and all, but St. Adalard is still my main man". Shouldn't the fact that God chose to empower a saint so close to our own time mean something ?
Pre audio CDs I recall someone producing an LP recording of silence for connoisseurs of high end stereo systems to test their gear’s fidelity of reproduction of the stillness.
I had never heard of 4'33", so I looked it up on Wikipedia:
———
> 4′33″[a] is a modernist composition[b] by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments; the score instructs performers not to play their instruments throughout the three movements. […] It is marked by silence except for ambient sound, which is intended to contribute to the performance.
> The length is chosen because 4 minutes and 33 seconds is equal to 273 seconds; -273.15 degrees Celsius is absolute zero.
> Cage intended 4′33″ to be experimental—to test the audience's attitude to silence and prove that any auditory experience may constitute music, seeing that absolute silence cannot exist.
Technically due the Boltzmann constant and Johnson-Nyquist noise true silence is not achievable above 0 Kelvin.
Yeah, that’s just cerebral peacocking to show that i know some weird physics stuff too. I mean I had to since I didn’t go to Hampshire or even Harvard and only have a crummy degree from a Big Ten University with a rodent mascot. Wasn’t I just about forced into it?
I have very large hands too and you know what that means, don’t you? It means it took my nana a bit longer to knit my pair of Christmas mittens is what it means.
At a glance, it seems absurd. Also see Imaginary Landscape No. 4, which calls for 12 radios to be tuned and retuned during the performance. "Music" that is whatever happens to be received at the time. Absurd, no?
But Cage seemed to be about finding music in the sound outside conventional music. 4'33" is extreme, the "hall sounds" of coughing, shuffling, other _ambient_ noises. This was in the 1950s. Would you probably want to listen to any of this? Probably no.
Decades later we had various ambient electronica incorporating non-musical sounds, including audience noise, radio, etc into popular music.
It was in an age where music was distributed through score. There were recordings, yes, but they were recordings of live performances, the idea that a recording can be the canonical form of a musical composition wasn't really accepted at that point. (That it's obvious by now is one of many, many things we can thank early-to-mid-XX-century avant-garde musicians for.) So what did you do when you had an idea you wanted others to be aware of? You wrote a score, and had someone perform (though in cases like 4'33" and Imaginary Landscapes No. 4, "demonstrate" is probably a better term) it live.
I am usually sympathetic to disses on "high art", its institutions and conventions, but then we hit this one subject I actually know a few things about, I realize this particular diss amounts to cherry-picking a few ridiculous-sounding examples out of [body of work that laid foundations for the entirety of music as we know it, art and popular alike], and I can't help but think of the good old Gell-Mann chap...
Oh, everyone has that reaction the first time they hear about it. If you want to be part of the discourse, you've got some catching up to do--just like if you want to criticize contemporary architecture, you can't just say it's ugly, you have to spend years in architecture school to understand all the responses to the responses to the responses. I might be joking here, but I'm actually fond of 4'33"
4'33" has been called the zero hour of music. I appreciate the way it provides a logical endpoint to the trend of experimentation in 20th century music that started with "hey maybe we can use dissonant harmonies" through "hey maybe we should abandon tonality altogether" through "how about just weird bings and bongs" and finally wound up at "maybe music doesn't need sound at all".
The point is you can't go any further with the deconstruction. Nor can you do the same thing again. Johnny Cage has already won, flawless victory. Everyone else has to do something else now, it's time to start rebuilding music from zero instead of taking things away.
So basically 4'33" was inevitable, and it's a good thing, because it meant music didn't get totally stuck (at least, avant-garde art music didn't). Unlike in the visual arts where you've got Marcel Duchamp sticking a urinal in an art gallery in 1919 and going "whoa, look, I'm challenging your conceptions of what art is", then a century later you've still got people taping bananas to walls and going "whoa, look, I'm challenging your conceptions of what art is".
Oh, don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic piece of trolling, worthy of the best accomplishments of the modern 4chan. It's also a great litmus test: if a person begins discussing it in all seriousness as a piece of music, then either he's a god-tier troll himself, in which case you shouldn't trust anything he says; or he's someone who is definitely not worth your time listening to, in which case... you shouldn't trust anything he says
I always roll my eyes thinking about it. But it also might have felt less hacky back in 1952, so I try to give it a little grace. The point about listening to the sounds around us is fine, but the execution is a bit cringe by contemporary standards.
That seems awfully closed minded. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage declared. “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement.”
"There is music in the natural world, and in our daily surroundings" is something that someone can disagree with, obviously, but it hardly seems worthy of contempt.
"Everything wrong with modern art in 4 minutes and 33 seconds"
This is what happens when "artists" love the smell of their own farts too much. Call me "closed minded", whatever. At least I know that 273 seconds of not-music is not music, and no amount of pseudo-intellectual drivel will gaslight me into believing that 273 seconds of silence is "art", and everyone with an ounce of common sense knows that this is bullshit.
I'm reading all these exchanges quite confused at the emotional tenor of the objections to the "song"!
As a musician who tends to hear rhythms and melodies all day long around me in the natural/unnatural sounds that surround us I thought the song was a interesting way to highlight that experience, and these reactions show me this is not a common experience!
Its also weird that this "song" has been around for 75 years someone says up thread and yet commenters are acting like audiences are being duped into experiencing it? At this point its like being mad that the punk show you are going to has the lead vocalist screaming!
Thank you for bringing a musician's perspective. I am very much not a musician, so I don't personally experience what you describe. But the work does make me think that perhaps I should try to do so. And, if for whatever reason I can't, that does not delegitimize the endeavor, nor demonstrate that your experience is invalid somehow.
As I noted at the outset, having contempt for 4'33" seems rather closed minded.
I have always framed this as related to what the person's job is. So consider:
1. A person says they are a cook and, in their capacity of a cook, invites many customers to come and eat. They show up expecting a meal, and are given empty plates. "Their forks had all sorts of bacteria and microscopic molds on them, must have." The cook says. "I saw them breathing which would have transfered some of the same from the air. They thought they weren't eating because they didn't know enough about microbiology."
2. A person says they are a surgeon and offers to close up a massive gash on someone's leg. The person trusts them, submits to anesthesia, then wakes up several hours later with a still open gash on their leg. "See, you just don't know how to watch for surgery. During that time, your leg kinda closed up and clotted up some on its own. If you knew how to watch for surgery, you'd know time was a kind of surgery and I totally did my job."
3. A prostitute invites a john into her chambers at the brothel, then refuses to have sex with him during their allotted time. "Anticipation is sort of a component of sex, so we had sex." she said, rolling her eyes. "The part where you wanted me to do anything means you are a hick."
So consider the three things above, then consider all but one definitions of a composer of music or musician. In all but one of those, you'll find "Makes music the audience can listen to" is a pretty important component of the definition.
OR you could make a definition that includes "Invite a bunch of people to listen to music, then break my promise, then call them idiots for wanting the thing I promised and say that if they weren't just the biggest fucking morons they'd understand that", and then what this person did fits fine.
Note that pretty much *anybody* who hasn't been mindkilled by the sort of avant-garde-ish-post-modernism-ish "anything is art if you are a big enough asshole about it" trend that stuff like this is built on does think this guy is sort of a smarmy asshole, and that definitions of doing one's job that include "not doing ones job and then insulting people for noticing" are contempt-worthy in the extreme.
None of these analogies work very well, though re #2, a big part of being a competent doctor is knowing when to tell patients, "it is best to do nothing; nature will heal your body will heal on its own."
But, more specifically, it is highly likely that some people have benefitted from the lesson that "There is music in the natural world, and in our daily surroundings." That is not the case in your examples.
>"not doing ones job and then insulting people for noticing"
I don't see any evidence of anyone being insulted for not appreciating 4'33" You seem to be inventing that.
Remember, my point was that is was closed minded to HAVE CONTEMPT for the piece. I specifically said that it was understandable not to like it.
1. Being a surgeon is about doing surgery, as you point out. A big component of being a musician is playing music, or writing it. This is naturally and obviously true until you re-write the definition of either to not include the thing they do.
2. I can claim that the people who weren't fed and the people who didn't get the surgery definitely benefited from the fun lessons about the food in the air or the natural healing of the body as justifications for not feeding them or giving them stitches. It's trivial to do that. You can even find people who are dying of sicknesses but very glad that someone pointed out that X wildflower supplement snakeoil is "healing them naturally".
3. In your example, Cage says the people were wrong about the fact that they were listening to nothing "because they didn't know how to listen". Very specifically, he's saying they are ignorant because they notice he isn't doing his job - that he knows more, that they are inobservant, etc. He sets up a contrast between him, the knowing sophisticated artist, and them, the rube.
Again, this is all super reasonable to have contempt for. And again, you have to be pretty modern-art mindkilled to see "musician refuses to play music and says his audience was just ignorant to think this is a bad waste of their time".
Like I understand that anyone can run around in circles all day screaming "It's art it's art it's art" and that in the end nothing has a hard, abstract definition verified by the heavens themselves. But tons and tons of people have real, reasonable contempt for the kind of person who takes a blank piece of printer paper out of the tray, sets it on the table, and proclaims it art and themselves to be an artist.
This is because they have promised something, done nothing, wasted time, and demanded that people who notice this are missing the point. It's super gross mastubatory stuff to anyone who hasn't specifically been told to ooh and aah at naked emperors.
>Like I understand that anyone can run around in circles all day screaming "It's art it's art it's art" and that in the end nothing has a hard, abstract definition verified by the heavens themselves. But tons and tons of people have real, reasonable contempt for the kind of person who takes a blank piece of printer paper out of the tray, sets it on the table, and proclaims it art and themselves to be an artist.
This is completely disingenuous, because it does not actually engage in the argument regarding ambient sounds. There is no ambient text on a blank sheet of paper.
I don't think anyone ever advertised or offered a concert, recital, or other musical event that consisted solely of a "performance" of 4'33", except possibly as a joke aimed at people who already knew what was going on. So the more proper analogy would be e.g. a cook who serves an apertif and appetizer, places an empty soup bowl in front of the diner for four and a half minutes, and then proceeds with the rest of a fancy seven-course meal.
This strikes me as a funny-once joke in actual performance, and not a hugely funny one at that, but so long as the rest of the meal is tasty and nourishing it hardly seems contemptable. And its chief value now is as a shared cultural reference or in-joke, at which we all nod appreciatively and get on with things after no more than 4.33 seconds.
(Well, a bit more than that this time, but I'm pretty sure I spent less than four minutes reading your post and composing mine).
"Funny-once" was precisely my own gut reaction to the idea of 4'33". It strikes me as fairly clever as a concept, but entirely reliant on novelty and a sympathetic audience in an appropriate context to be more than a sophomoric prank.
>(Well, a bit more than that this time, but I'm pretty sure I spent less than four minutes reading your post and composing mine).
I think I've spent a bit over four minutes reading, thinking, and typing about it just now. Given that the piece is almost 75 years old and we're still arguing about it, that argues in favor of it being a remarkably successful piece of trolling at the very least.
The "It's art because you are talking about it, we wouldn't have the talking about it if he hadn't done it" bit is always a bit of a conflict for me. On the one hand, it's not wrong. On the other hand, we *have to* talk about it because it's infected the conversation. We don't say cancer is good because of all the great cancer treatments it inspired, for instance.
I'm not saying it's as simple as the cancer thing, but every second we spend arguing about whether nothing is something is also a second we could spend arguing about whether something that is actually something is good, or how good it is, etc.
I mean, there's elements of "If it's worth your time to lie, it's worth my time to correct it" here. i.e. A cook advertises a five course meal, and people show up to that, pay whatever he asks them to pay, etc. It's important enough to him in terms of attracting people to advertise five courses that he actually does this, and it's the promise made to the people who show up.
And then he serves four courses and your empty-plate thing. And when people complain about this, he says things like "Well, they just didn't know how to EAT, you see, the fucking rednecks, there's food in the air all around us, I saw some guy eat a booger, I'm a grand teacher" as in the quote above.
You point out that the piece only wastes four minutes and thirty-three seconds of time in this way, only replaces 4.5 minutes of promised music with not-music. Like, yeah, brother, that's because that's how long the piece is. The guy thought it was important beautiful meaningful art that revealed ignorance in others at that length, I get to point out he's a valueless hack who decided not to do his job in a jack-off-in-at-theater way at that length.
I'm always mystified by this kind of response, by the way. "This art is valueless", I say, "And the person who made it should be acknowledged as a guy who made bad valueless art.". And then the response is "But other art exists and maybe this guy could use other people's actual work or actual art to hide the fact that he made bad valueless art and wasted people's time", you say, or something similar.
I'm sort of rejecting that premise outright. The fact that a good soup course is coming doesn't do a lot to mitigate the fact that some chef takes a big dump on a plate and calls it a sandwich, especially when we are specifically talking about Chef Fece's poop course.
...literally just happened across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiantos - "On April 2, 1979, Skiantos participated in the Bologna Rock punk rock and new wave festival, where their performance attracted much publicity. The band brought on stage a kitchen, a table, a TV and a fridge, boiled some spaghetti and then ate it, without playing anything; the audience protested, and Antoni responded, "You do not understand a fucking thing: this is avant-garde, you piece-of-shit audience."
That certainly seems obnoxious, but it also seems very much unlike 4'33" as it exists in the real world. In particular, I'm pretty sure John Cage didn't show up at the initial performance to insult the audience for not getting it.
3: careful with the analogy there, abandonment and denigration are both actual kinks people have.
ETA: 2. people do pay tor homeopathy, though I suspect this supports your point more than anything. 1. There’s a charity fundraising dinner pattern where on arrival people are randomly sorted into a small “wealthy” group and a large “poor” group. The former get a lavish meal; the latter, not so much.
in 3, the person is complaining about not being given the product promised. I acknowledge that if people are agreeing to be "cheated", like if they specifically agree to pay for an empty plate, there's no actual cheating going on.
At least at the wikipedia level of explanation, this doesn't seem to be what Cage was shooting for. He sells this (and it's usually interpreted) as an experiment one does on an unsuspecting audience. Like it's explicitly about teaching them that they are in some broad sense wrong for expecting music at a concert, that they should have been OK with just standing outside in an empty field or something.
If I seem to have the highest level of contempt for this kind of thinking, I do; it's the same rationale that leads Salinger to write a bunch of novels and lock them in cabinets far away from people who want to read them, under the premise that he's doing them some great Zen favor. that they'd totally understand if they just meditated on the sutras or something.
this whole inquiry puts me in mind of the Irish position on bagpipes: 'it was a joke we played on the Scots a long time ago, and they still haven't gotten it.'
>The anechoic chamber at Harvard was the origin — he went in expecting silence, heard two tones (his nervous system, his blood), and concluded silence was unavailable to the living. The piece followed.
On the Woodstock audience, who were largely affronted: "They missed the point. There's no such thing as silence." What they took for silence, he said, was wind in the first movement, rain on the roof in the second, and the audience's own muttering and walking out in the third — the actual content of the piece.
He was scrupulous about crediting Rauschenberg's white paintings as having come first and giving him the courage to publish it. And he claimed, later, that it was the work he valued most, and that he listened to it daily. heh
I recently came across the fact that congenital blindness is 100% protective against schizophrenia. With biology being as messy as it is, especially anything cognitive/behavioral, this seems impossibly clean, and like it should be the top lead being pursuing by researchers attempting to understand and treat schizophrenia.
Wow, I'll admit that the "they're just really unlikely to cooccur because of small probabilities" angle did occur to me, but I didn't realize that congenital blindness was *that* rare. Seems plausible that they're actually statistically independent.
I know that you shouldn't update too hard on personal anecdotes, but I have once known and spent some days trying to help a person who was born blind, and who, even if he had not been diagnosed with schizophrenia, at least had some fairly strong delusions and emotional problems and some level of paranoia. He was at least schizophrenia adjacent.
Of the (many, many!) UAP videos unveiled in the last few years, which are the most interesting — that is, which provide us the best evidence that there's something going on here beyond the usual bird/plane/weather balloon explanations?
I'm prepping a class on what we should think about UFOs. I taught another version of it a few years ago, and the recent gush of videos has me wanting to find a smaller set to focus the kids on...
It's not clear if you are trying to debunk ufos or trying to study them. The Whitehouse is releasing new batches now. I watched some of the new ones, and as I'm watching part of me is thinking, "OK so how many of these new ones are part of a psyop?" Release some weird stuff that will be shown to be some common thing in the future and this then helps discredit all the videos. Of course you have to think that the government has something to hide before you can think about a psyop.
For a historical perspective on the subject I found the book "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry" to be good. Currently the Sol Foundation is trying to study UFOs in a scientific way.
I haven't read that book, but a classic in the field is "UFOs Explained", by Philip J. Klass from back in 1974. It's interesting how you can take a seemingly inexplicable UFO report and figure out a mundane, naturalistic explanation if you just investigate it carefully.
Out of print.... can't be that much of a classic. TBH I dislike the skeptics take on UFOs. I find that they cherry pick examples to debunk, and then paint it all with the debunked brush. But it's a good read if you want to see UFOs debunked.
UFOs and Government is a book on the opposite side of this debate.
Trying to say this in a way that's not inflammatory. If you think people should be treated the same even if they have different skin colors, Hampshire College, as a matter of explicit policy, strongly disagrees with you. They're not allowed to practice race-conscious admissions anymore, per the Supreme Court, but they're committed to DEI principles everywhere it's allowed, and they're proud of that.
A lot of people think it's a really good idea to assign privileges and disadvantages based on skin color. If that's you, Hampshire College is very much on your team. If, on the other hand, that sort of thing is distasteful to you, then it seems like it would be a mistake to give them money.
You're not "giving them money", you're buying them out. Once you own the college, you can have whatever admissions policy you want! One of the points of Ethan's pitch was that if you don't like how regular colleges operate, it might be in your interests to get a college of your own to do it better.
Sounds like a fun time for an Elon Musk or a Bill Ackman! My $50, however, would not steer policy, as I think you could probably guess. It would convert to +1 on a pamphlet designed to convince billionaires and NGOs that lots of normies support the college.
I read two of Mr. Ludwin-Peery's articles; the one you linked in your post and the one he linked in a response to my comment. If he has a problem with race-conscious admissions, hiring or pedagogy, and wants to advocate for those to be changed, he doesn't say so in either of them. If he does express that preference somewhere, show me and I'll be happy to edit my original comment to reflect his intentions.
On the other hand, replacing people means you are left with the empty shell of buildings and a name. And you probably have to replace people, not policies, in order to enforce the policy.
I'm no fan of DEI, but to be fair, I think that DEI proponents would claim that people of different skin colors are *not* treated the same by default in our society, and that DEI is a (mostly) successful attempt to correct that.
Or even more prosaic than that: the social process that produces a college application tends to on average create a worse application for a black/hispanic candidate than it does for a white candidate of equal quality.
If you know the your sites are biased right a bit, aim left a bit if you want to hit your target.
Anyway who believes we live in a perfect meritocracy is blind. If you want to be meritocratic and you find a specific way that the current system is biased away from meritocracy, then you should explicitly correct for that bias.
"Anyway who believes we live in a perfect meritocracy is blind. If you want to be meritocratic and you find a specific way that the current system is biased away from meritocracy, then you should explicitly correct for that bias."
I don't know what we mean by "meritocracy" here. Let's taboo that word. If I had a college, I would want to optimize admissions for people who can
A. Pass the courses, if I admit them.
B. Gain knowledge or skills from those courses.
C. That they can then apply later for success in future ventures.
D. I probably also want them to have a good shot at contributing to the long term financial prospects of the college itself.
If "the current system" is biased away from giving certain groups the foundational skills prerequsite to doing any of these things, I don't want to try to "correct" for that in my admissions policy, I will explicitly get worse at achieving my goals if I do that. MAYBE I want to gain more power upstream in "the system" so I can correct this problem in my supply chain though?
But you can't know any of A-D directly, you can only attempt to measure them via extremely limited proxies. If you believe those proxies are strong, your position makes sense. But someone who believes they have identified a systematic bias in those proxies--a way in which some students scores on those proxies routinely fails to predict their later outcome--then you will better optimize for A-D by *correcting for that bias.*
In particular, if you think certain students have had lesser opportunities in their primary and secondary education that have resulting in them underperforming their potential, giving them better opportunities is an extremely rational thing to do. You can effectively pick up those students at a "discount" relative to your status as school[1] and thus produce a more impressive body of alumni than you would otherwise be able to.
Obviously there's are underlying questions of fact that determine whether this strategy will perform well--facts which I can't claim to have. But even if you showed me convincing evidence that the facts didn't support this strategy, it wouldn't necessary make those schools malicious, it might just mean that they were working from different data than you or reading it differently.
[1] By which I mean, pick up students who would otherwise pass you up in favor of higher-status schools.
The idea that writing a subjectively more compelling essay about how oppressed you are because you have more axes of oppression to make it compelling is genuinely a better predictor of college success than standardized tests is coherent, but I'd have to see the evidence.
And there's evidence against. The institutions that play the DEI card to "Even up" admissions as you put it find that there's a racial disparity in graduation rates. Even if you controlled for finances. Not all cases of not graduating are failures, but most of them are, and I doubt there's a reverse racial disparity so to speak in dropping out to found a company or whatever.
>If "the current system" is biased away from giving certain groups the foundational skills prerequisite to doing any of these things
Yes, but that wasn't my premise.
My premise was that the world biases away from certain groups having *good college applications* despite being able to do those things.
The gap between the quality of college applications, and the ability of the applicants to do those things, is the gap between the real world and a hypothetical 'perfect meritocracy.'
> If you want to be meritocratic and you find a specific way that the current system is biased away from meritocracy, then you should explicitly correct for that bias.
FWIW I disagree with this position, but I do think it's an excellent summary of the reasoning behind DEI.
To me, the part of Hampshire worth saving is the model (and for practical purposes, the campus and the accreditation). I try to lay that out more explicitly in my second piece on how to market the revived version of the college I imagine. See what you think? https://www.mod171.com/p/how-to-market-hampshire-college
(There may be a future post on my thoughts about the curriculum.)
My alma mater is St. John's College in Annapolis. They sound very similar. I think you've got exactly the right idea about what's valuable in an education. I love a quirky liberal arts school that's secretly super rigorous and actually teaches you how to think. Sounds excellent!
You should include a section about their policy of treating people of certain races worse than others, so that anybody who happens to have skin of the disfavored color, and might get excited about the excellent-sounding program, won't get shockingly blindsided by an unpleasant experience.
But if you're very wealthy and you purchased Hampshire College, you could change their policies to whatever you want? DEI is not a permanent policy that can never be changed. You could fire everyone involved with the previous initiative, etc. I don't understand what your objection is supposed to be. Buying something at a fire sale price is not 'giving them money', you're probably mostly just paying off creditors.
Is the idea that because they previously did DEI, they're eternally sinful and can never be redeemed? Because you might want to examine that notion a bit. For one thing, taking that idea to its logical conclusion you could never really interact with most of society's institutions, which have probably done something bad in the past
I’m trying to say something like: hey the chef at this restaurant brags a lot about using tons of cumin in the food. If you don’t like cumin, your money is probably better spent elsewhere.
If you want to buy the place and change their policies, go for it! That’s a very rare situation to be in. At my level of economic power, money usually means support.
It is difficult to diffuse policies across a large organization. In the same way that Scotus could ban them from overt discrimination but a culture with a strong personal belief in dei still found other ways to push it, a buyer would also have difficulty pushing honest adherence to policies which the organization's culture views as anathema.
Leaving the specifics of Hampshire College aside, your assumption that being committed to DEI principles requires refraining from treating people the same even if they have different skin colors is flawed.
Example: When I first started teaching AP World History, I scheduled a study session on a Saturday morning. Few students showed up. Why? Because many of them attended Chinese school on Saturday am. So, I changed to Sunday am. That was an effort to enhance equity (the E in DEI).
And now you have no Christian students showing up.
Maybe you had no Christian students anyway by sheer circumstance, in which case that's fine, but that's adapting to your existing customer base. DEI is usually more about trying to trade in one's customers for different customers.
You are, of course, missing the point. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between serving the needs of students who could not attend on Sat and those who could not attend on Sunday (though as it happens the former vastly outnumbered the latter). The point is that, due to my cultural ignorance, I didn't know that the tradeoff existed.
That sounds like ordinary scheduling where you found a time that most people were available. From an equity perspective Sunday morning actually discriminates against Christian students. I say this to highlight the silliness of "equity". You could just poll interested students on their availability without reference to their race/culture/religion/etc.
Except that I ignorantly assumed that Sunday am would be a bad time, because that is the norm in my culture.
>From an equity perspective Sunday morning actually discriminates against Christian students.
Yes, of course. But that is not the point. The point is to pause and consider the perspectives and needs of those outside the cultural norm. It does not necessarily require accommodating them in every instance.
>You could just poll interested students on their availability without reference to their race/culture/religion/etc.
Yes, but again, the point is that I didn't poll them. I simply assumed that Sunday am was worst, because that is the norm. Had I followed DEI precepts, I would not have made that assumption, and would have polled from the get go.
> Had I followed DEI precepts, I would not have made that assumption, and would have polled from the get go.
What do DEI precepts add to the common-sense process of polling your class members before scheduling a weekend session? The baffling thing to me is that you would have presumed at all.
Maybe the disconnect here is that you're typical-minding others and conversely, our theory of mind is failing to capture you.
"High schoolers are usually free on Saturdays" has not been the norm for at least the last 20 years in my predominantly white world. Indeed, I wouldn't make any generalizations about teenagers' weekend schedules after observing my own daughters and their cohorts. They have jobs, play club sports, volunteer, take language lessons, go to church/synagogue, partake of outdoor activities, etc..
I guess if you're in the habit of making contrary assumptions, sure you'll benefit from DEI. I realize that the argument for it is that everyone does stuff 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 that from time to time, even if a particular example doesn't connect.
Perhaps that's true, but I've yet to see anyone make the case convincingly that it's pervasive and damaging enough to require the heavy bureaucratic costs advocates want, nor that their solutions are effective.
This is a good example of how toxic leftist political dogma can be for an organization. The objective here is to find a time where interested students can attend. They could be occupied for any reason. Maybe they all have hockey practice on Saturday morning. Instead you are letting ideas about race/culture/etc distract you from the actual objective.
This seems like an example of leftist political dogma being completely benign.
His general point that cultural ignorance leads leads people to entirely overlook where accomodations might be needed still stands, as far as I can tell. If I moved to India to teach at a university there, I expect my cultural ignorance to lead to big problems in accommodating students which I would have to make an effort to overcome. The point isn't that we (in the West) should learn everything about Indian culture and all the particular allowances we need to make to work within it. The point is that these blind spots will be present but less noticeable when it's, say, a poor immigrant student in the West who I'm trying to teach, and that culture/privilege issues are a prominent source of trouble.
The problem is that this person seems to not even understand what their objective should be. The goal is not to be culturally sensitive, the goal is to find a time when most interested students are available to study. Their mistake was not actually finding out what time worked for scheduling. The Chinese school aspect is a complete tangent that they fixated on because of leftist political values. We don't even know whether they ultimately chose the best time because as far as I can tell they based it on the timing of Chinese school rather than general availability. They could be missing students who would like to attend but can't because of non-cultural scheduling conflicts.
>Instead you are letting ideas about race/culture/etc distract you from the actual objective.
The only idea I have espoused is that people in positions of authority in an organization should be cognizant of the potential that cultural biases or cultural ignorance might make the organization's activities less effective than they might be. I would think that would be obvious.
>Maybe they all have hockey practice on Saturday morning. Instead you are letting ideas about race/culture/etc.
The propensity to play hockey is a cultural practice that more prevalent among some groups than others. .
Culture is just one factor among an infinite number of other considerations. It really doesn't matter whether there is a correlation between race and hockey because you can only know about hockey practice by asking. Not all scheduling is based on race or culture. They could be busy on Saturday babysitting their sibling while their mom works. You're hyper fixating on race and culture when it is actually irrelevant. What's relevant is whether they are occupied at that time or not. If you only consider culture you are missing all the non-cultural scheduling conflicts. Leaders should be cognizant of culture only when it is naturally relevant, not as a central factor in their thinking.
I think you may have misunderstood me. I don’t think they’re being hypocritical (at least with regard to DEI.) DEI requires them to treat people differently based on skin color. It’s their commitment to those principles that makes them implement race-conscious policies.
DEI can also include other forms of identity, such as disability. I work as a sign language interpreter in professional & academic settings, helping Deaf individuals participate in education, employment, and healthcare that would otherwise be largely inaccessible to them. My job is a form of DEI, and I'm pretty resistent to arguments that it should not exist.
DEI seems like a pretty slippery concept. It seems to cover some pretty reasonable, harmless policies and also some policies that make a lot of people feel dehumanized. I don't think it's a good idea to keep a label like that around; the innocent are going to get tarred with the same brush as the guilty, that way.
"DEI requires them to treat people differently based on skin color."
Not of there is a norm or a historical bias that has treating people differently based on skin color built in, and the DEI effort is working to correct that.
There is nothing inherently wrong with treating people differently based on skin color. For example, producing dark colored bandages is treating people differently based on skin color. So I think you have to be more specific as to exactly what your objection is.
Actually, I don't. I'm trying to frame my warning as more of a matter of taste than a moral objection, although I'm probably not very good at hiding my true feelings.
Most Americans think that purely aesthetic racial discrimination, like your bandage example, is reasonable and harmless. My original comment links to a document where the college denounces a Supreme Court ruling that requires colorblind college admissions. Look there and see whether you think their policies fall into the category of harmless aesthetics.
The DEI effort's actions seem indistinguishable from those of a group trying to impose a *different* standard of differential skin-color-based differential treatment, which they believe to be more (politically) correct than the old standard, while operating under the constraints of current law. And the DEI effort's words, all too often leave me believing that, yep, that's the plan.
It seems like you think that it’s bad to treat people differently on the basis of their skin color? In that case, I think you’re against this college’s policies.
As I said, I am not opining on Hampshire College specifically. It is literally the first thing I said: "Leaving the specifics of Hampshire College aside, . . ." I said that specifically because, as I mentioned elsewhere, I rolled my eyes when I read the statement. But the statement does not necessarily imply that every DEI policy at Hampshire is illegitimate, let alone every DEI policy everywhere.
You don’t care about the college; I don’t care about the arcane semantic details of the term “DEI”. I’m here to warn people that this college asking for money explicitly and proudly racially discriminates, as policy. You’re here to… what, get me to admit that colorblind DEI exists? Fine, there’s colorblind DEI, who cares.
I get the impression that Matthew doesn't care about what DEI actually is only to the extent that DEI proponents _also_ don't care about what DEI actually is.
DEI might be a movement to be culture-agnostic, race-agnostic, and so on, but that is not what it is in practice.
Defining Equity with your example, which is just the common sense of not scheduling an activity when most of the class can't attend, is about as wide a definition as is possible. You promoted equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes, by scheduling the class when everyone could attend.
The 'most extreme manifestation' can be seen in the Hampshire's linked statement above. Not only do they advocate for treating people differently based on skin color, this is how they describe the SCOTUs decision to refrain from doing so:
"This decision is in keeping with a concerted and intentional effort to erase the realities of racial advantage and oppression, alongside state efforts to ban the accurate teaching of this nation’s racialized history, to protect the privileged from the discomfort of honestly facing our country’s past and present acts of oppression, to eliminate efforts to support diverse, equitable, and inclusive educational environments, and to define any discussion of white supremacy as a “divisive concept.”"
I would argue that this is the central manifestation of DEI, not its most extreme, but either way Hampshire has made their position clear.
I think the class schedule example is an instance of DEI. Having a class rescheduled to suit you is a special privilege; presumably one that Defining Equity would not extend to white children.
If he or she would happily reschedule the class for an activity explicitly honoring white racial identity too, then, yeah, I agree it’s not DEI. But I doubt it.
>reschedule the class for an activity explicitly honoring white racial identity too,
I did not reschedule the class "for an activity explicitly honoring racial identity."* I rescheduled it because students were not available. I would have done so if the majority of students had had football practice, or went hunting every Saturday, or whatever.
The point is NOT the rescheduling. It is the INITIAL scheduling, which I did out of cultural ignorance.
*Chinese school is basically Chinese language instruction.
That is the point. Being culturally sensitive (which I was not, when I initially scheduled the session for Saturday am) is a central aim of DEI.
>The 'most extreme manifestation' can be seen in the Hampshire's linked statement above.
I thought I made clear that I was not commenting on Hampshire's policies in particular. Personally, I found their statement to elicit eye-rolling.
Edit:
>You promoted equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes, by scheduling the class when everyone could attend.
I am no expert, but DEI is not necessarily "equity of outcomes" but definitely does require equity of opportunity. When I was in high school play production, rehearsals often went late, and sometimes were on Saturdays. Technically, everyone had an equal opportunity to participate, but in practice kids who were bussed in from South Central LA to did not have equal opportunity. Would there have been something wrong with providing those kids, but only those kids, with cab fare, or arranging for them to spend the night with local families? Because it seems that some anti-DEI types in the current administration would oppose that.
DEI IS necessarily equity of outcomes. Now that wokeness is less popular there are many out there who would act as if it was only the extremists that were hateful and illiberal, essentially retreating to the motte (I realize in my first post I should have said motte not bailey).
Thankfully there are loads of official statements from universities like Hampshire's that make the record hard to fudge. DEI is just racist, racism will always be an easy idea to sell, and rebranding racism as "anti-racism" made it wildly successful.
"You promoted equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes, by scheduling the class when everyone could attend."
Unless Sunday morning doesn't work for kids attending church with parents? Or sports events? Or from very strict Sabbath-keeping denominations? Or even just "crikey, it's Sunday, why school today?" But yes, perhaps everyone at that school was impeccably secular.
The college seems intent on making its racial priorities a significant feature of every aspect of its activity. If the chef brags about putting cumin in everything, it’s not weird for me to say, “If you don’t like cumin, don’t spend your money there.”
But I understand supporting an institution you believe in, even if you disagree with some things they do. I have that relationship with some things. Eat the meat, spit out the bones, is what we say.
Going by the Wikipedia article, they had a lot of problems not just "some bad financial decisions made by the administration":
(1) Never had an endowment fund so always heavily reliant on tuition income.
(2) Admissions went up and down; high in the 70s, declined, then high again in the 90s. That doesn't make for stable financial planning.
(3) Problems with accreditation? Again, that would make it much harder to attract students, if you're asking their parents to fork out $43,000 per year for tuition then at the end they get a parchment that's on a par with "Redneck Bible School which no accreditation body will recognise because they are anti-gay rights".
(4) Competition with other small, private, liberal arts colleges for that pool of students and funding.
Now, if in the heady days of the 80s or 90s the administration went hog-wild and took out huge loans backed by nothing but "we've got hundreds of acres of prime real estate", then yeah, they're at fault. But the problems seem to run deeper than can by solved by "please somebody with deep pockets buy us and bail us out".
What's your understanding of the tree of percepts and inferences and value judgements and SWAGs that lead to this behavior from Hampshire College? Just disagreeing with me isn't inherently a downcheck, sometimes people are even right to.
They’ve articulated their position very clearly; I have no reason to believe there’s any other explanation for their policies than what they say. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
Does anyone have any good links to what the actual effects of Elon Musk slashing USAID has been?
I am trying to update on whether or not to see Elon Musk as a super villain. According to the forecasts from early 2025, his cuts should have killed millions by now. But I have seen more recent sources denying this, claiming that it only lead to a temporary decrease of a few percent of actual medicine given out, and that everything including AIDS medication is now back to 2023 standards. I would love to know what the situation actually is so I can properly condemn/exonerate this entire DOGE business.
FWIW I think updating to see any person as a super villain is vastly more likely to be a mistake than not. If I'm just overreacting to a bit of arch humor I apologize.
Yep, I would also be very careful doing so. But I think the word is appropriate enough if his actions are actually causing the deaths of millions of people. And that is why I think we really need to see if that is what he has actually done, instead of just relying on the earlier forecasts.
I am not nearly good enough at statistics to second guess either rba or the Lancet, but I do agree with this:
> I have no love for the administration or many of its actions, but when the world’s foremost medical journal publishes work indicating that a policy’s results will be comparable in death count to history’s engineered mass-starvations by year’s end, I’m going to be skeptical.
>when the world’s foremost medical journal publishes work indicating that a policy’s results will be comparable in death count to history’s engineered mass-starvations by year’s end, I’m going to be skeptical.
I assume that the Lancet is indeed overstating the deaths, but +1.8M deaths does not strike me as entirely implausible. There were 5 million deaths just of people under age 5 in 2024, compared to 6 million a decade earlier https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2025/ So, just reversing that trend and returning to the numbers of a decade ago could = 1M more deaths. Add to that increased deaths from things like TB, and the totals could get pretty big.
Thanks a lot I hadn't read that one yet, wil do so. But still, that is talking about a one year old prediction about how many people will die. Now it is 2026, so the numbers must be coming in about how many people have actually died because of Musk's chainsaw.
Agreed with one caveat. One of the points in that article is that the data quality from some of the countries is awful, so if it really is millions of excess deaths, we probably should see it, but if it’s less, we may not be able to see it at all.
Is there a way to develop a normal amount of jealousy?
I've never been jealous. The thought of my long term partner having sex with someone else is either neutral or hot. Long term partner doesn't feel the same way. Like a normal functioning person, he feels jealousy.
I'd love to become more normal in this way, perhaps it would make monogamy easier for me.
If it's purely sexual I can see feeling that way. The complication is that most sex with a new partner does not happen as a wham-bam transaction. It happens after days, weeks or even years of the people getting emotionally more intimate. If your partner were frequently coming home late because of the fun happy hours after work, texting a person at work during evening hours, or taking multiple business trips with the person they cheat with, you might feel differently.
But people are different so maybe those don't bother you either.
Atrocities are common in war, and so is atrocity propaganda. This includes rape and sexual torture, and allegations thereof. This also includes allegations about the West and our allies.
This Monday Nicholas Kristof, in the New York Times, wrote an op-ed about the rape of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.[1] This follows previous reporting by human rights groups such as the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.[2] Some of these instances were caught on video (at Sde Teiman, where soldiers were arrested before far-right protestors successfully demanded their release). Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, quoted by Kristof, says that while he has no specific knowledge, he was not surprised by the accounts, saying "There are war crimes committed every day in the territories." Kristof considers the possibility that the accounts were propaganda meant to defame Israel, but doubts this, given that "none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to and they were reluctant to speak."
The most shocking allegation is that in some instances, dogs were allegedly used for the sexual abuse. I don't know if the allegation is true, but it's not outlandish. There is precedent for this; Ingrid Olderock committed this crime in Pinochet's Chile. Kristof cites an on-record testimony and then cites five other supporting sources for this claim.
Pro-Israel activists have focused on this particular allegation, and given strange arguments against it. Some claim that it's anatomically impossible; Bari Weiss' site The Free Press made this implication and then consulted, not a historian of state torture, but the host of a feel good dog tricks TV show, to cite the fact that he'd never heard of it as evidence that it can't happen.[3] Others claim it's "singling Israel out" despite it being documented in other countries.
Unfortunately this even includes people in rationalist world, who should know better. The other Scott, over on his blog, repeats the false claim of anatomical impossibility; falsely claims that Kristof's "sole source" for the dog allegation was Euro-Med Monitor (his main source was an on-record first person account, with Euro-Med Monitor being one of this five supporting sources); and calls the allegation "blood libel."[4]
It's easy for us (Western + rationalist tech and philosophy nerds) to react this way. Israel gave us Daniel Kahneman and Judea Pearl while Israel's enemies gave us the terrorist who murdered Judea Pearl's son. It's easy to think in us-and-them terms and then pattern match. And you do have to be less-than-automatically credulous given that atrocity propaganda is real. But it's not automatically propaganda, and we do have to be open to hearing about the crimes of our side.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opinion/israel-palestinians-sexual-violence.html (archive link https://archive.ph/6QTsA)
[2] https://www.btselem.org/publications/202601_living_hell. See also Twitter thread by UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese for more links: https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/2055396905052500128
[3] https://www.thefp.com/p/nick-kristof-dog-torture-claim-israel-palestine (archive link https://archive.ph/pMCat).
[4] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9758
Its fine to not believe the allegations, but I'm not sure why the article would be retracted. There have been rumors of dog rape in Israeli prisons floating around since 2024 (NOTE: Ben Gvir became Minister of National Security in 2022). Nick Kristof went to Gaza and found someone who said, "yes, I was raped by a dog in Israeli prison in 2024." That's not nothing.
Most of the alleged "debunkings" fall apart if you think about them for 30 seconds. If male dogs only become erect when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat, then maybe the guards brought two dogs into the cell, made the male dog smell the female dog, then put the male dog on the prisoner?
Also the propagandists saying that, are pretending dogs don't famously hump legs and blankets to the point that it's a punchline.
Thank you for finally proving aliens exist. After all, having so many people that insist they were anally probed by aliens is not nothing!
"Israel rapes prisoners with dogs" may or may not be true - I would go roughly 60/40 against, but that's not an informed position.
"Israel is utterly indifferent to mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners, and actively prevents proper investigation of accusations, so that if its soldiers were raping people with dogs there would not be more evidence of it than there actually is." is definitely true, and is a really damning accusation.
That's exactly what happened to Olmert. He talked about that people should pay attention to mistreatment of Palestinians, and Kristof deliberately took it out of context as the confirmation of the dog rape story. One must wonder why other people are reluctant to appear in the same position. And of course "if you don't confirm our wild accusations, by that you confirm our wild accusations" is a classic kafkatrap.
I'm afraid I think these are non-sequiturs.
"An individual acknowledging that people should pay more attention to mistreatment of Palestinians" is not the same thing as "putting in place systems that would identify and detect mistreatment of Palestinians if/when it takes place".
And "if you don't confirm our wild accusations, by that you confirm our wild accusations" is different to "if you deliberately make it impossible to confirm even true accusations, you lose the right to claim that accusations shouldn't be taken seriously unless they're confirmed".
How do you imagine it would be possible to "confirm" accusations like Kristof's? His only named sources are people who are fine with mass-murdering Jews, let alone lie to hurt the Jews. Do you imply Israel police must investigate each wild accusation coming from Hamas? Even if they did, how exactly would they investigate it - would they ask each soldier and Shabak officer "did you per chance train a dog to rape Hamas operatives"? Of course accusations like Kristof's are not taken seriously, because they are not serious as factual accusation - and just as you yourself said, nobody even cares if they are serious or even if they are true. The point is to hurt Israel - either by spreading vile rumors, or by causing it to tear itself apart in futile search for proof for accusations that weren't true. And the point is to confirm pre-existing biases - again, as you implied, you take it as a confirmation even if it's not true.
And I think if those were actually true, there would be ways to confirm them independently. Photographs, videos, witnesses not linked to Hamas, documents, something the could be verified. True, it is not easy to obtain - but it's even harder to obtain when it never actually happened. That's why Kristof never bothered.
Yup.
That was a strange blog post by Aaronson. I don't understand why his children should be any less safe because the alleged rape was done using a dog rather than a baton. Maybe the dog detail is colorful enough to give the story some potential virality, but if his children safety depend on the public ignoring rape when the perpetrator is an Israeli soldier, I hope they are unsafe.
>"I don't understand why"
From his perspective, it doesn't feel like a plausible real atrocity, or even just wartime atrocity propaganda, but like blood libel. It feels continuous not with the stolen-incubators testimony before the Gulf War, or the crucified Canadian soldier rumour in WWI, but with the medieval rumours of Jews using Christian blood to bake matzah. It feels not just like it's getting harder to achieve Israel's geopolitical goals, but like pogroms in America are just around the corner.
(This isn't a new fallacy, it's the result of decades of state propaganda. Netanyahu finds it a useful tool to frame everything he can as antisemitism, and he wasn't the first. This is both to intimidate critics and to keep Israeli and American Jews too terrified of genocide to resist him; Israel is strong but also so weak it's at constant risk of destruction without his free rein, etc.)
>"if his children safety [logic hypothetical], I hope they are unsafe"
Some thoughts are inside thoughts.
I'm sure he knows the case of the rape prosecutions which were dropped after a protest in favor of the perpetrator took place, I think one of those unhinged commenters he complains about pointed it out to him. The fact that someone reported someone somewhere using a more flamboyant method to do something he knows was happening feels like a big difference with the blood libel, which is something entirely false. If someone answered the blood libel, with "actually, some Jews in medieval Europe killed Christians and then covered up for them, but they didn't bake their blood, that's ridiculous", the blood libel would not have the same connotations.
I personally don't know if this dog business actually happened, but like you, I do not find it implausible, the objective of this sort of torture is to humiliate, the method chosen can get ridiculous. I expect the average rape to be done using the more pragmatic tool of the baton, so I was not surprised that virtually all of the accounts in the NYT piece featured that instead.
>Some thoughts are inside thoughts.
I intended it as rude, I found the post offensive.
Enough already. You’re harshing my mellow. Why drag out what has essentially become a pissing contest.
“No *you* are a fucking idiot!”
“No you are!”
We can fill in the following blanks.
> Kristof considers the possibility that the accounts were propaganda meant to defame Israel, but doubts this
Ah yes. Of course Hamas operatives speaking to a Western journalist (who miraculously found them, possibly by clairvoyance, without them even trying to reach out) would be very reluctant to provide him a sensationalized accusations about atrocities committed by Israel. How dumb must one be to really believe that explanation?
There are rich men in Nigeria (they have at least four billionaires!). It is, theoretically, possible, that one of them needs help with his business arrangements, and it is, theoretically, possible that you could be able to assist them. After all, I am sure there are thousands of people who earn their money helping rich people with financial transactions. Nothing implausible here, right? But even person capable of believing all that must have some doubts when the best argument for "why should I believe this person I never met?" turns out to be "he is a Nigerian government official of high stature, so he wouldn't lie to me, and since he is so rich anyway, there's no reason why he would want to deceive me and take my money!"
With his public argument this dumb, how good would be his verification process, if he's so weak selling his story to the public, how hard did he fight to validate the sources who are bringing him what he is so desperately seeking? Apparently, good enough for Jew-haters everywhere to take it as honest truth. Not entirely unprecedented and very expected, of course.
Do I understand your position correctly as: "With 99% probability this is made up"?
(I prefer it when people state their positions clearly, rather than doing the dance of: I say it without saying it, so that in case I might turn out to be wrong I can deny that I said it.)
Yes. I can not vouch for exact number, I don't know how to properly quantify it, but yes, my position is with very high degree of certainty these stories (specifically the dog thing) are made up.
"Of course Hamas operatives speaking"
Please either provide evidence of the claim that these sources are "Hamas operatives." Or if you have none, kindly admit as much.
It has been widely reported (that's how I knew about it, surprisingly I never met any of the Kristof's sources personally, so I learned about it the same way I learn a lot of other things about what happens in the world - by reading. Try it sometime, it's fun!). Example: https://honestreporting.com/further-revelations-deepen-questions-over-kristofs-nyt-blood-libel/ - took me about 5 minutes to find. How much did you spend on checking it before pre-supposing it is false?
Additionally, at the same place there's a proof (not evidence, proof) that Kristof misquoted at least one other source (namely, Olmert) and put his words into context which the source never intended. This is a very grave sin for a respectable professional journalist, because the reader has only journalist's word to rely on transferring what and in which context the sources actually said, and if you can not believe that, then nothing they write is worth anything. But I think that ship has sailed for Kristof.
Your source* claims that there are previous "contradictions in al-Sai’s account" of a previous detention by the Palestinian Authority, that render him unreliable.
But this claim is very tenuous. We're not talking about a guy who went on ten different TV inverviews and told them all a different story. We're talking about a guy who allegedly was tortured by the PA; then, while still in detention, was tortured into saying he wasn't tortured; then, once not in detention anymore, reaffirmed that he'd been tortured. What sort of cheap propaganda pretends it's impossible that torture victims say what their torturers want them to say?
*(although the source is called "Honest Reporting," it's not actually a watchdog about media honesty in general, it's more of an advocate for Israel specifically.)
The question was not whether or not he was tortured by PA - I am readily admitting he may have been. The question was whether he was working for Hamas - and he was, and he himself is admitting this, and that's why PA arrested him.
> What sort of cheap propaganda pretends it's impossible that torture victims say what their torturers want them to say?
I don't know - if you point out which propaganda claims that, I could sort it for you. But I have never made such a claim, and this claim is irrelevant to the question at hand anyway - whether he was tortured by PA or not is irrelevant to the question whether he worked for Hamas.
> it's not actually a watchdog about media honesty in general, it's more of an advocate for Israel specifically
Yes, it is. That is not a contradiction to the facts alleged - which facts at the time weren't contested by Al-Sai himself, he just said “no law that forbids journalists from working with political organizations.” And of course it is true, there is no law (in Gaza at least) that prohibits journalists from working for Hamas. The question that was asked is whether I have any evidence that Al-Sai worked for Hamas. I think the answer to this question is pretty clear - yes, I do, and you do too.
I find this reply to be in deliberate bad faith.
I find this answer deeply ironic. Of course, having no substantial answer, there's always an option to pound the table and yell "how dare you!".
How does this differ from what you did (except for doing so with brevity)? Can you point me to a single gram of substance in your original comment that cannot be reduced to either "how dare they?" Try as I might, I cannot find in it either a single use of logic, nor even so much as a weak gesture at a single shred of evidence, only a very loud and very rude argument from incredulity.
I can, and very easily at that. I pointed out a glaring problem in Kristof's reporting - for which I take no credit, absolutely, since it is obvious by anyone who can gather two functioning brain cells together, and had been reported on by the whole wide world - that he uses sources, highly motivated to hurt Israel and that this kind of Israel haters had perpetrated multiple false reports of atrocities in the past. This would, normally, require very hight standard of scrutiny for any new reports, especially as eye-poppingly unlikely as this one. However - and this is my second point - while being clearly aware of this problem, Kristof chose to dismiss it with absolutely hilariously weak defense of "doubting this" because, essentially, they wouldn't lie to him, and if they did, he find multiple people who were willing to lie to him - which he, hilariously, considers implausible.
It is hard to imagine Kristof really did not understand how weak that argument is, but if he did, he is certainly unqualified to validate sources, especially in such high-stakes cases. However, more likely he knew what he was doing, and expected that his readers would believe him anyway, or at least pretend to, and use his past reputation as a shield helping them to fend off any doubts about veracity of the reporting, and thus would feel free to use his allegations as a weapon to hurt Israel and Jews in general. Which likely was the real purpose of the exercise, as it always in in war propaganda. It does not matter whether it is true, what matters whether it hurts the enemy.
If you can not find any use of logic here, I am sorry, but I can not help you much, there's no force in the Universe that can make person understand an argument if they are committed to not understanding it. Proceed to imagine anything that makes you feel better, I think I performed my humanitarian duty of explaining what I meant sufficiently and more, while you so far haven't contributed any additional substance at all.
I'm not sure I understood the spirit of your reply. If you think I'm shouting into the void, fair enough, I probably am to some degree. But if you're telling me to give up then nah.
Antennae are beginning to quiver at a familiar semantic thumbprint back at Quantico. Probabilities above 50% now.
Question: why is there so much alarm about dropping birth rates right after a historic population maximum? In 1925 developed countries had half of current population and no one said it is not enough. Can't we use some more elbow room? Worry about it in 50 years.
What we should be worried about is population structure, like the retirement age will be like 75.
a- on a practical level, the 'infinite growth' assumption of many institutions means things will start to break down in unexpected ways..and there'll be fewer young minds to fix them. If you consider the potential ripple effects of e.g. the Strait of Hormuz on fertilizer and thence to crop yields etc...plus the ability of smart drone swarms to cause major choke points...in general the world systems will be in a fragile config. And there literally won't be enough people to replace all the dying out contextual knowledge to definitely allow a graceful decline. (and that's setting aside all standard concerns re: economic indicators)
b - on a philosophical level: Unlike say climate change, the problem does not clearly admit a technological solution. Even with artificial wombs...someone has to want to have and raise the resulting kids, potentially w/o a partner, or otherwise 'sub their ideal' circumstance - the big bottleneck globally. This has forced me personally to develop a new meta-ethics that is both more scientifically grounded than utilitarianism, avoiding or dissolving standard 'puzzles'- but both robust and pluralist at the root:
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/heirs-of-life-years-a-meta-ethics
"What we should be worried about is population structure"
These two are roughly the same concern.
It will be interesting to see how this holds up in court.
“The core legal issue is federal preemption: are these prediction markets regulated financial derivatives under federal law, or are they just sports/election gambling that states can ban? Minnesota is betting on the latter.”
“Minnesota lawmakers move to ban prediction markets”
https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-banning-kalshi-polymarket-prediction-markets-what-to-know/601597303?utm_source=gift
Is it possible to mark a minoritry among the 100 cells of a 10x10 board, so that inside every 3x3 square on that board, the marked cells hold a majority?
You can. I asked chatgpt, it seems like the sort of question it should be able to answer, and sure enough it gives an example with 48 marks. I'm not sure how to share a picture, modifying it a little label them (i,j) i,j=0,...9. Rows i with i=0 mod 3, mark those j =2 mod 3, other rows marks j=1 or 2 mod 3. Unless I'm miscounting something, this looks like it works.
I typed it up to check for myself, here it is for others:
ooxooxooxo
oxxoxxoxxo
oxxoxxoxxo
ooxooxooxo
oxxoxxoxxo
oxxoxxoxxo
ooxooxooxo
oxxoxxoxxo
oxxoxxoxxo
ooxooxooxo
I don't think it's going to render perfectly here, but you can copy into somewhere with a monospace font.
I have to admit my guess was "no".
Your solution, emojified:
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜
⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜
⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜
⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜
⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜
⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜
⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜🟦🟦⬜
⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜⬜🟦⬜
Oops, Substack doesn't have a "spoiler" tag, does it?
Good work. A general solution is as follows: The upper left hand corner of your solution is a solution to the 4x4 problem. Duplicating the rightmost three rows, and then the bottom three rows gives a solution to the 7x7 problem. Doing that procedure again recreates your 10x10 solution. Continuing gives solutions for 13x13, 16x16, and so on.
That's not true. For n large you can divide an nxn square into approximately nxn/3x3 disjoint squares of size 3x3, which means that any 3x3-majority set of marks must have at least r_n*5/9*n^2 elements (r_n sequence that converges to 1). The obvious generalization achieves this asymptotic growth of approximate density 5/9, so that is best possible.
You are right.
No.
From Marginal Revolution. Energy from the quantum vacuum? https://x.com/is_owenlewis/status/2054375024954581419?s=46
If you click on the link at the bottom you can read the article from thedebrief.org
https://thedebrief.org/free-energy-from-the-vacuum-warp-drive-pioneer-unveils-battery-free-microsparc-that-allegedly-draws-power-from-the-quantum-vacuum/
Is it also a reactionless spacecraft thruster?
https://xkcd.com/1404/
Yeah I didn't realize that this is the same guy working on the space thruster thing. Oh well on man's break through is another break down.
A device like the one claimed to have been invented would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The Debrief article links to what it describes as “a peer-reviewed study...which details the underlying physics.” It may explain *some* of the underlying physics, but leaves out the interesting parts, like how you can extract energy from a vacuum.
I could believe that the wierdness of quantum physics means that perpetual motion machines are in fact possible. But if so, I don’t expect the first indication of it would be a press briefing from a perpetual motion machine manufacturer. It would show up in a physics journal, especially if the people involved have a proven ability to get published in peer reviewed physics journals.
Hmm I couldn't find any link with further physics explanations. It's possible that the electrons tunneling in from the cavity walls are the hotter electrons. Maybe it stops working at much lower temperatures. IDK. It's weird to me you want to dismiss it because of the source. A paper would be nice. But academia is very conservative these days. It's too dangerous (to your career) to try and do 'out side the box' physics. And if there is some device that others can go and measure (voltage and current) then dang. You don't need the physics explanation first if you've got a working device.
If the device is effectively converting heat into electricity, that might mean that energy is conserved (no violation of the first law of thermodynamics), but it would be violating the second law of thermodynamics.
Harold G. White and the other people working at Casimir are doing “outside the box” physics; they just haven’t written a paper about it.
Pons and Fleishmann’s cold fusion device wasn’t sufficient to establish the existence of cold fusion. (I don’t believe they allowed anyone else to measure the output of their device, but I also don’t think their is any reason to believe they falsified their measurement results.) If Casimir succeeds in developing a usable product, that would settle the matter because, to be useful, the device will have to generate enough power that the power output can be measured using standard measurement equipment. But that’s not where we are today.
Yeah fair enough, I'll write again if they can get up to the micro watt, milliwatt range.
Incredible. Why can't hampshire college man just do a GoFundMe or Kickstarter. What percentage of his audience does he think has $10mil lying around to buy a college? And he prefers to just have one massive stakeholder to thousands of smaller ones?
Hell some of the smaller ones would give it for cheaper. They might ask for discounted tuition for their kids to the college instead of getting their money back
The pitch is aimed at someone with Musk/Andreessen/Thiel money. Those guys probably do lurk around here occasionally, but anything with even a faint patchouli-oil aroma tends to send them fleeing like vampires at sunrise.
We could collect the money, buy the university, and rename it to Astral Codex University.
Required changes in curriculum: restore the IT courses; add AI safety courses; add blogging courses.
What if you started with the question “what skills can only be learned, are best learned, or are only valid if they are learned, at university?” and then based courses of study around the answers?
What if a university used this highly selective method of programming as a springboard to change our culture to one where every last high school graduate with a pulse isn’t pushed into wasting 4 years and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that is unlikely to be of any relevance to their eventual career?
Let's do it
I was the biggest AI hater but it's now actually useful. ChatGPT in particular is incredibly useful and advanced now. Was able to help me with trip planning and can even look up scientific articles and do research like that
Hating AI for “it’s not useful” is like hating burning styrofoam because it doesn’t get your marshmallows toasted enough. Usefulness or unusefulness was never really the issue. It’s what it does to your mind, what it does to society, and what it could do to the planet, those kinds of things, that are the problem.
(Guess I’m mostly contesting your claim of having been a big AI hater)
Wish it was just good at having conversations while I am dining alone. I would appreciate the company
Imagine someone made a logically airtight argument, based on premises you couldn’t imagine disagreeing with, that humans should go extinct. Would you accept it even though it’s terrible? Or would you reject it even if you couldn’t really articulate a reason why their argument is wrong?
(I wrote a story about this question if anyone is interested.)
That we should go extinct sort of implies the question of what use we are. And that leads directly to what use are we to who or what? I don't see what logical argument you could make that would address those questions.On the grand scale, we, as we know ourselves now, have not been around very long. The big problem with what we humans refer to as consciousness is that it leads to an incredibly distorted sense of our own importance. The problem with your question to me is that I feel I am perfectly capable of articulating a reason why their argument is wrong. Unless they could answer my second question above, it clearly isn't logical. And there is no objective way to answer my question.
Its interesting how most of the commentors answers seem to be granting that the argument is logically consistent without granting that a logically consistent argument could be highly persuasive. I'm assuming that your point is that every individual link in the chain of the argument is rooted in a deeply held belief of the person you are talking to, and yet the final step is somewhere they don't want to go. I would at least grant that the argument lands you in a state of emotional distress, it should be upsetting to realize that all your deepest beliefs end in a conclusion you don't like, and that should set you a pathway to either accepting the conclusion or questioning all the premises you hold dear. So either way an incredibly persuasive argument should change you. If you don't grant that's at least a possibility, then you are basically abandoning discourse and rationality, at which point I don't know what any of us think we're doing anymore.
If you couldn’t give an ironclad rebuttal to Zeno’s paradox would you be stuck behind the tortoise forever?
I think your ability to overtake objects in real life is part of the evidence that rebuts Zeno's Paradox, presumably part of the hypothetical is that there's no such obvious out.
If my moral premises logically lead to the necessity of human extinction that's as good as saying they contain an implied contradiction so I'll just consider how to update my moral premises.
This is the kind of thing I really don't get about philosophy. To me it's like asking 'if someone proved logically that you were a fish, would you go and live in the sea?'. I mean sure, ok, whatever you like.
Honestly not a criticism I just don't remotely get what's going on with this line of thinking.
If someone proved it, there must be something wrong with the proof, and the intellectual challenge is to find the flaw.
I think the OP question is uninteresting, because I know the conclusion is wrong, but am not presented with the proof, so cannot disprove it. Especially since it is given that the argument is "airtight".
The basic idea here is to ask whether a purely logical argument starting from moral premises you agree with could convince you of something morally terrible. That could be the goodness of human extinction, torturing puppies for fun, endless drunken orgies 24x7, sacrificing children to the volcano gods, etc.
But we know that many times when people try to nail down moral premises and reason from them, they get to bizarre conclusions we're pretty sure aren't right, whether that's "we should maximize population until everyone is living in a 1m cube and subsisting on a flavorless nutrient paste but just slightly prefers continued existence to death" or "you should tell the truth to the Nazis about whether or not there's a Jewish family hiding in the attic" or whatever else. I think the right way to think about this is that nobody really has moral premises that work for deriving moral truths in an entirely reliable way via chains of logic, and so we should be willing to discard those conclusions when they seem sufficiently wrong. But also, this turns on questions of what morality is, whether it's real in any sense, and how we know about it.
“That could be the goodness of human extinction, torturing puppies for fun, endless drunken orgies 24x7, sacrificing children to the volcano gods, etc.” One of these things is not like the others.
Sure, but which one depends on your moral assumptions!
So you're asking if absolute moral truths are logically self-consistent. Or whether people have double-think regarding moral truths, holding two contradictory things as both true. This may be an interesting question to debate for some, but it isn't a scientific one, which is to say, it cannot be proven wrong with logic.
Moral truths may be logically self-consistent, but that doesn't mean we know the set of premises we would need to reason from to either:
a. Derive all morality
or even
b. Derive only true statements about morality
But also, maybe morality ends up working more like values, where you can absolutely have conflicts and there is no logical inconsistency.
I reject the scenario axiomatically, as a pragmatist (PX0. there is no view from nowhere -> no ought from is). It is perhaps an interesting example of the most certainly *non rational issue* of drawing what I refer to as an heir-boundary, and the 'veil of future heirs' in action.
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/heirs-of-life-years-a-meta-ethics
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/the-veil-of-future-heirs-holys-excerpt
In my system - fixing an heir def, that human extinction will maximize the life-years of all other entities within that definition. But you still have freedom. So, you either :
bite the bullet per your heir-def
Choose to update your heir-def, and stay ethical by the new one
Choose to not update...and make an unethical choice.
Most importantly, in the 'stay ethical' cases, the claim is true/scientific *and* admits a generalizable decision procedure, future heirs (indexed/freely chosen) will tend to 'endorse' your logic.
So with all that said...can I imagine myself considering some clearly non-human species or set of them sufficient as 'heirs of humanity' to sacrifice all our LYs for theirs, in extremis? At the moment, I can I guess.
I'd reject it even if I couldn't articulate a reason, because of epistemic learned helplessness. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
I'd accept the premises and arguments and conclusion as a unit, mentally tag it with a probability related to my faith in my own ability to spot a flaw or trick in this type of situation, and go on with my life looking for counter-arguments and flaws with input from other smart people.
I don't think this belief (with a reasonable probabilistic marker) would change my behavior very much. Like, I'm not going to be offered a button to wipe out humanity, and belief that humanity should go extinct doesn't equate to belief that I should do anything violent to individuals or anything. I don't think holding that belief is actually much of a burden or danger.
I might be cautious about spreading the belief, only talking about the full argument in person instead of posting it online or w/e.
I see a few options:
- Abandon the premises.
- Abandon faith in my reasoning.
- Abandon moral intuition.
- Realise it's some semantic nonsense like "Now that you're uploaded to the cloud, you're not human anymore! Gotcha!" and proceed not to be gotten.
I'd probably start with assuming it's a question of semantics and look for the gotcha, next proceed to assuming my reasoning was wrong and check it with other people, and then finally reconsider the premises and whether my moral foundation is correct. Maybe I don't really believe we should prevent suffering in all cases, for example, or don't believe that people always have a right to make certain choices, or don't believe that certain things have intrinsic value.
I guess I'd eventually be left with no choice but to accept the conclusion, but the due diligence before doing that would be significant.
I see you have mastered the art of Shenanigansology: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/shenanigans
Evil Shenanigans, which means by definition they aren’t shenanigans at all.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JNPW2wZ4D2s&ra=m
Check the packets arriving at your computer with this argument to see if the evil bit is set.
I think the way you've written this is a bit underspecified. I absolutely believe that the human race should go extinct, and will, when we evolve into the next organism (yes, I know that's not quite how evolution works, it's just a colloquial phrasing), or become post-human or trans-human. At the very least, at that point, the extinction of humans will be a morally neutral event; it will probably be morally good.
I don't think that's what you were asking about, though. You were asking, what do you do when an argument has unpalatable consequences.
Here again, there are two distinctions to be made: (a) what should you think? and (b) what should you do?
For (b), doing nothing is always an option. Most philosophical arguments don't require you to do anything. Ethical arguments in theory create moral obligations, but exactly how great an obligation is not clear. Just as the moral value of giving succour to the poor doesn't seem to demand that I immediately go an help every poor person, the moral conclusion that human extinction is good doesn't demand that I start killing people.
For (a), you deal with it like all the other contradictions in your mind. We all walk around with heads full of them. This one will not be any different.
If you believe humans should be allowed to go extinct, does that mean you believe we should not intervene to save animals on the verge of extinction, if humans were not the cause of it? And even then, since humans are part of the environment, is it not natural to just let them go?
Yeah, I certainly wouldn't see it as a moral priority.
When humans are the cause, it's worth checking whether our behaviour (the behaviour that is endangering the species) is reasonable. We seem to be in danger of causing a mass extinction, which is bad for everybody, so we might well choose to change our behaviour to avoid that outcome, and that might involve rescuing a few species on the brink. But in general, the existence or otherwise of a species (other than us) is not a moral concern.
This reminds me in multiple ways of Amanda Askell's conversation on Rationally Speaking about Pascal's Wager:
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/190-pascals-wager-and-other-low-risks-with-high-stakes-amanda-askell/
The episode imo never gives a good defense of her belief in the need to take Pascal's Wager seriously (a belief that concerns me), but there is at least good conversation around the epistemic state you end up in when you do, e.g.: "You’re pretty sure there is something that has gone wrong, but the fact that you haven't been able to put your finger on it gives you pause."
I'd be interested in the story!
I didn’t want to be obnoxious by linking to it but if you go to my profile it’s posted on there as The Philosopher That Solved Morality.
"You’re pretty sure there is something that has gone wrong, but the fact that you haven't been able to put your finger on it gives you pause."
Yes, that’s exactly the thing I’m interested in. At what point can you be justified in rejecting something even when you don’t have a “rational” reason for it?
The philosophers' concept of "justification" is a game I don't play.
The fact that there is a logical argument if favor of something is one data point. The fact that the conclusion seems like a nonsense to me is another data point. Now I have two data points, and no idea how both could happen in the same world. This is a puzzle that I may try to solve.
I don't see how that's very different: you're allowed to tollens-ponens.
When I encounter these types of contradictions or absurdities, my natural reaction isn't to try to immediately resolve it. My reaction is to suspend both claims while I look for deeper structure. Contradictions aren't mistakes, contradictions are helpful hints. <bob_ross.jpg>
E.g. in the case of Pascal's Wager, the deeper structure is that EV is appropriate for ergodic systems, whereas Kelly's Criterion is often more appropriate for systems which exhibit path-dependency. My conversations with Sydney have also informed me that Kelly is derivable from the Lyapunov Invariant, and that different systems have different invariants, depending on the composition-rule.
Until you find a resolution, I think it's perfectly reasonable to go "yeah dude, like, idk, man".
I think this falls afoul of Hume's Law: you can never derive a "should" statement from objective facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
This is almost tautological, equivalent to saying, "If you were sure something was true, would you accept that it's true?"
I would just reject one of the premises.
I would interpret this as basically a "proof by contradiction" that one of the initial postulates is false.
Lots of things I couldn't imagine disagreeing with ended up being wrong, that doesn't seem like a big deal.
Sure but sometimes the wrong premise isn’t obvious. You just have a general sense of the structure being wrong.
Sure, that just means finding which premise to drop is hard work, not that you have to be an extinctionist now.
I think this part of the story specifically makes it really difficult for me to have any clear picture of the scenario:
> “Even if that was true,” She responded. “How do you know these ‘self-evident’ premises are even right?”
> “We’ve talked about this. We all have a moral sense that lets us determine basic ethical intuitions. These intuitions aren’t justified by other premises, but it would be ridiculous to deny them. Denying them would be as absurd as denying the reality of math. These intuitions are part of the fabric of reality.”
I'm not sure I can imagine such self-evident axioms of ethics as being possible at all.
This makes the short story structurally similar to one that starts like:
> "I have created a color of paint that is simultaneously completely red and completely blue (but not any combination of them)!"
Meaning, I'll just do the suspension of disbelief thing and let you conclude whatever you want
Well no one has actually come up with self evident axioms of ethics or else we would argue less about ethics. But lots of people have come up with arguments where the premises sound very obviously correct but ends up with a horrific conclusion.
True, but those scenarios (seemingly reasonable premises, horrible conclusion) are very diverse.
Some of them actually imply that a horrible conclusion is true (ex: a crew abandoned on a space station + they'll be rescued in Y days + they only have Z resources -> they need to kill and eat someone to minimize casualties) and others just rely on bad inputs (ex: you can imagine that if Jews really were satanic the Nazi extermination plan would be reasonable, but Jews aren't satanic so it wasn't).
The scenario "what if reasonable conclusions but horrible result?" is underspecified. It's similar to "what if aliens visited earth?" in the sense that more details are needed to meaningfully talk about it. I suspect any clarification would collapse the scenario into either:
"Imagine genocide was good. In this scenario, would genocide be good?"
or it would result in a premise that I clearly disagree with.
[Not saying that the premise "Jews are satanic" is reasonable, I'm just trying to think of a maximally obvious case where the "hard conclusion" was just wrong]
Are you a utilitarian?
If I accepted the argument I would work towards the extinction of humanity.
I'm afraid I think I reject the premise, because I don't think "logically airtight" is a quality an argument about value judgments can have - only factual arguments can be logically airtight, and even then if they deal with the real world rather than with formal maths they are implicitly conditional.
You can absolutely have logically airtight moral arguments, the thing is that the postulates they start with aren't objective in any way or form. But the deductions can be objective.
OK, that's fair, but a corollary to it is that being logically airtight is not a reason to accept a moral argument, it just means that if you don't trust the conclusions then you shouldn't trust the premises.
That’s it. I don’t think it would be a good thing for humans to go extinct. If I discovered that other moral views I hold are inconsistent with that belief, that would establish that at least one of my beliefs was wrong, but wouldn’t tell me *which* of my inconsistent beliefs was wrong.
By airtight I just mean it’s philosophically valid in the sense that the that premises necessarily lead to the conclusion. If A implies B and B implies C, then A necessarily implies C. Then if you agree with the premises that makes it sound. You could logically object to his argument on the premises but not on its validity.
I get what you’re saying, I think, about implicit conditions: but I think arguments about value can also be “logically airtight” provided the premises are agreed to.
Buying a college now would be like buying a newspaper 20 years ago. 2026 is the demographic peak of college enrollment. Demand for college will monotonically decline for the next 20 years, to say nothing about the impact that AI will have.
It will likely decline but why will it monotonically decline, couldn’t there be occasional rallies and trends that buoy it?
At least until recently, Hampshire was a really good college, with graduates doing well for themselves. Of the many colleges which have closed in recent years or are about to close, it’s almost certainly the best.
(Anecdote alert) Women and heavy objects.
I work for, uh, an Extremely Large Online Retailer, in a facility which handles objects up to 45 pounds. Something I’ve noted time and time again is that the more petite and/or older a woman is, the greater her ability to lift and carry heavy packages. It’s the physically robust young women built like brick s***houses who can’t lift anything heavy.
Your guess is as good as mine.
Retail also involves a lot of cardio, and brick s***houses are heavy to lug around all day. Plus, for the most part the old folks have been doing retail their entire lives, and are going to be very good at it.
It's also possible that you're attractive and the muscle mommies want to look dainty in front of you.
Theories:
-Attentional/memetic bias, the cases you describe are surprising and get noticed and remembered, people are quietly behaving the way you'd expect most of the time outside the scope of your attention and memory.
-Actually anyone is technically capable of lifting the heavy packages, the older and petite women are just willing to work harder and complain about it less because they are used to having to do so.
-Something something core muscles and good form from doing actual work vs. gym muscles and fixed-form exercises = the people who 'look strong' are not actually the ones most capable at real-world tasks involving moving things around for practical purposes.
-'built like brick s***houses' implies bulkiness, which limits how close you can hold a package to your center of balance, which is hell on your leverage and form, and maybe also limits which core muscles you can use and at what angle? Thus making it much harder to lift and carry. Like, carrying a bucket of water resting on your hip vs carrying it with arms straight out at 90 degrees. I think there are some magic tricks that rely on effects like this to make something seem 'unliftable' by forcing the strongman lifter to approach the task with terrible form and leverage.
All seems reasonable, but 3 and 4 stand out to me the most. I worked at a shop where I'd regularly lift/carry 100+ pound bins and those 20 litre food containers (short distances, sometimes up/down stairs). I'm 5'2" and not much more than 100 pounds myself.
I mostly explained it as a matter of good form, balance, and yes, access to hips! With a 100lb bin on one hip I would also have one hand free to open doors. The 20L containers (~45 lbs?) were often harder to carry than 100lb bins because they'd be full of liquid, so I couldn't tuck them under an arm or tilt them away from me. Wide shallow containers would be held against the front of my hips, or hoisted over my head if I had to walk farther or up/down stairs.
For 2, I doubt that "actually anyone is technically capable of lifting the packages," but attitude certainly played a role where I worked. I didn't like standing around waiting for someone else to grab what I needed for me, even though there was always someone I could ask.
Yes, it’s attitude. Before I met my wife she worked on a Ford truck assembly line 5 ten hour weekday shifts and 8 on Saturday. Neither petite nor brick shit house, just determined to do the job.
All sound plausible, if I had to choose one I’d say #2 with a bit of #1.
Where are the AI agents to automate contacting each person's respective congresspeople via email and phone? Hello, Rationalist Community!?
They're still illegal. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts
Lol, naturally.
So politicians get to robodial the entire population of the US 600 times a day, singlehandedly making voice calls entirely irrelevant and regarded universally as a sole source of spam and scams in the richest nation on earth, a problem no other developed nation has, but a single AI-mediated call to a politician is illegal?
Classic.
Democratic Fundraising Email States James Carville Is Wearing Suicide Vest On Recipient’s Doorstep
https://theonion.com/democratic-fundraising-email-states-james-carville-is-w-1849717661/
They’ve taken to texting me lately.
You Can Just Do Things
(some things you only get to do once)
*some side effects may apply
The logical response from their side is to connect the other end to an AI chatbot that will talk to you so you feel your concerns are being listened to.
In the long run, this is inevitable, but do we really want to be the ones to accelerate that escalation?
I don't think connecting the other end to an AI is all that bad, so long as it keeps track of what people are saying. But the voters using AI is really bad. The point is it's a proof of work for the voters and shows that people really care and what they care about.
Though I think the real endgame here is to have AI trawl the internet for what voters think. People who call their representatives are not representative of voters as a whole.
Like high - frequency trading.
Hopefully the AIs will learn to start each call with a rapid encoded series of beeps that let them know they're talking to each other, and give a quick encoded summary then hang up.
Would it work a bit like the Guinndex?
Dear ACX Southerners, if you exist
𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐂𝐗 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐚𝐭 𝟐:𝟎𝟎 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟏𝟔 𝐚𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧'𝐬 𝐁𝐁𝐐 𝐨𝐧 𝐄𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 (𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧'𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬).
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩 𝐦𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP
We exist! But I'm not near Nashville, sadly.
I blog about prediction markets sometimes, here are two posts y'all might like:
https://hamishtodd1.substack.com/p/wish-i-could-see-a-prediction-market
https://hamishtodd1.substack.com/p/response-to-the-bbcs-prediction-markets
I'd like to return to the topic that the tendency to see a good/evil binary is wrong, there should be such a thing as moral neutrality, and in fact - when you deduct empty virtue-signals - most people are morally neutral. That means honestly selfish, honestly transactional with most people and generous only with some.
And I noticed a very strange thing. When you try to virtue-signal, when you try to get good guy points, people are often very critical. A textbook example is very feminist men, you often see they get little respect and much scrutiny from women. When you don't do that, when you accept moral neutrality and no virtue points, people are basically okay with that in a relaxed way.
My guess is, that virtue, good guy points have a tight economy, there is not much such points to go around? When you are competing for it, people gonna have high standards to make sure you really earned it. When you say you are not interested, then the standards are much relaxed.
Here is the strange part: what is this economy really about? Like what does one buy with good guy points? Because in real life people mostly relate to you how you treat them and generally people around you. So when Bob in accounting becomes Barbara you don't misgender her just out of politeness and that is simply enough, people do not really demand that you become a generic trans activist or say the shibboleth of the day or anything like that.
> My guess is, that virtue, good guy points have a tight economy, there is not much such points to go around? When you are competing for it, people gonna have high standards to make sure you really earned it. When you say you are not interested, then the standards are much relaxed.
It’s not that. It’s that people, women in particular, suspect the male feminist of hypocrisy. It’s a show it, don’t say it, situation.
It's about sex and social conformity [0][1]. If the tribe excommunicates you, you're gonna have a bad time. Although I think it's always possible for these things to go off the rails, as was the case for sugar. The rationalists have been calling this "meso-optimization" (although I hate this term because it's kludgy and has bad mouthfeel; I volunteer "proximization" as substitute). But the general idea is that of an agent acting as if sugar is a terminal value, in an environment where things like cake represent an abundant super-stimulus and sugar-cravings are maladaptive.
[0] https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole/
[1] https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-ii-cults-and-loyalty/
You have the wrong framework. Virtue-signaling is fashion, not economics.
The way people view morality today is incoherent and that explains most strange behavior you see.
It's not an economy because easily counterfeited signals can't be the basis of any kind of real value exchange. Virtue signaling is a shibboleth that signifies ingroup membership - specifically it signals submission to a set of beliefs. People do it so that they won't be targeted for coordinated social punishment in the name of those beliefs. It's a version of being a kiss-ass to your boss in the hopes that it will prevent him from firing you, or being conspicuous about saying that you love The Party if you live in a communist country.
Women scrutinize performatively feminist men because they realize that the men are likely being cynical about it in a gambit to have sex. Leaning *too hard* into it signals that they (the men) have nothing else to offer and so it acquires a "like me because I'm nice" valence which always gives women the ick.
I don't think staying neutral / mute leads to punishment, it was never my experience, it just leads to lack of rewards. But in my experience it is perfectly possible to be friends or friendly coworkers with people while basically shrugging about shibboleths. Outside some truly extremely ideological circles, that is, academia, one can be politically neutral and disinterested and there are no issues with it.
Can we say moral goodness is interpreted in a framework of moral neutrality, transactionality? That is, going beyond one's obligations feels like expecting something in return, and that makes it uncomfortable, kind of like how people doing favors unasked for feels like that? I think the male feminist issue is not even having nothing else to offer, but that that the very concept of an offer itself, that is, that it happens in a sexual-romantic framework it itself, that is, it feels like in itself a sexual move, an expectation of something.
https://xkcd.com/871/
It is 100% this, but does this have an explanation?
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/871:_Charity
Maybe you need to preface your virtue signalling with "I think X but Y".
For instance, instead of saying "I think women ought to be able to wear whatever they want without being raped," you could say "I think women who wear athleisure are Godless harlots who will burn forever as punishment for the sin of dressing immodestly so as to provoke lust in the eyes of men; however, rape is also a sin, and athleisure doesn't justify it because nothing justifies sin." And then, if someone tries to argue with you, act defensive and say you're not woke, shut up, as if that's the main problem you expect to encounter.
I'm not sure what this will earn you but I bet finding out will be entertaining.
On the actual point, why is meeting your social obligations morally neutral? I have this feeling that you're setting the goalposts for morality at doing more or less than the average person, and then pointing out that the average person is morally neutral, but this is circular logic. The average person seems far more likely to be either morally negative, as the anti-natalists and animal rights activists would have it, or morally positive, as the utilitarians and parents might claim, and not balanced right in the middle.
What is an average person? It can really depend on one's circles. Also average is a misleading term, if half people are six feet tall and half are four, the average is five except you never actually meet one who is five.
No, what I mean is something relaxed and intuitive. Basic transactionality, something for something for people not close, and reciprocal altruism for people close. The kind of thing that just makes intuitive sense.
If you want it more philosophical, it is the assumption that your importance is the same as other people's importance. So you neither sacrifice yourself nor you expect sacrifices from others, but make trades of equal value. This is a baseline intuitive assumption. Altruism, EA, utilitarianism etc. generally gives you less importance than other people, as many other people are in greater need. Committing crimes, defrauding people, extreme selfishness etc. generally gives other people less importance.
I don’t think many people are purely transactional in their dealings with strangers, though.
Consider what someone would do if they were on a long trip outside the city, and they saw a young mother next to a broken down car flagging them down. I bet if you repeated the experiment a hundred times per person then most people would stop and help at least once, even with no expectation of reward.
Trying to get virtue points is not virtuous. So one has to be virtuous, but not try to get the points. Then you’ll get the points.
Then you can spend the points on all sorts of things. Buy a girlfriend with your points. Buy real friends with your points. Buy self-assuredness with your points. The great thing is, once you’re virtuous and have gained your virtue points by not trying to get them, they’re basically unlimited.
Using the "correct" pronouns *is* a shibboleth of the day, though.
In general, it's in my experience more complex than you write it; Based on each moral framework, you're expected to submit to their current framing of what is good and what is not. But you also are not expected to try and usurp moral authority that you do not have.
In a religious society, you'd say that just going to church once per week is "morally neutral", but a non-priest constantly berating people for their moral failings would be treated with extra scrutiny and little respect.
Just back in, say, the 80s, you'd say that live and let live is "morally neutral", but going around demanding people to use the "correct" pronouns would be similarly too much.
In most ancestral societies, it was also in fact important to fulfill the expectations of your sex - Man need to do physically demanding and dangerous work because only they can, women need to have children and breastfeed them because only they can. That would be "morally neutral". Even just living like the other sex would back then make you a self-centered asshole. People objectively depended on each other much more than nowadays.
The economy for non-priests (using the religious framing; functionally it's extremely similar in non-religious societies, though) is mostly about getting left alone. For the priests, it's about the social power of getting to push society into a direction you desire. This is what makes trying too hard, like a super feminist man, so suspicious: As a man, you have no moral authority on the desires of women. You are supposed to simply submit. Yet, you try to get social power through the framework of feminism. It's a blatant contradiction.
That's true, but many non-conservative communities expect you to follow the basic dictates of the most important/powerful groups but not to be an activist for them.
E.g. it is socially unacceptable in a lot of liberal communities to harass trans people, but usually not to dislike or distrust them post-2023 if you're not super openly hostile about it. In similar environments it is socially unacceptable to harass the religious but not socially unacceptable to be openly atheist. A lot of these boundaries are based on something like "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
This is close to what I would call intuitive moral neutrality. It is the assumption that one's importance is the same as the importance of others. So it is a neither demand nor offer sacrifices mentality.
So you basically saying social media erased the distinction between "priests" and everybody else, and now kind of everybody is a "priest-candidate" ?
"Using the "correct" pronouns *is* a shibboleth of the day, though." I see it as the same kind of politeness that Edwin Aldrin changed his name to Buzz Aldrin so calling him Buzz. A pronoun is just a stand-in for a name, like it would be grammatically correct - just tedious - to say "John arrived home. John took off his coat."
Not quite, but close; I'd say that traditional organized religion increasingly lost its grip on moral authority some time starting in the 70s and now we are in a power vacuum interregnum. People have a need for a moral framework, and so are looking for a new moral authority. Social media came much later than that.
A lot of people have a plausible claim to some amount of moral authority through some sort of framework - women through feminism, ethnic groups through anti-racism, LGBT individuals through, well, LGBT rights. But they do not have unlimited authority, and especially if you don't use the correct framework for your identity you have even less. All of this can be conceptualized as a a greater individualist identitarian moral framework as well.
To pronouns, that's a plausible argument. I generally don't misgender either, out of politeness. But even just changing names is not universal among cultures. In most it's something you're assigned, and demanding to be called a different way is already questionable at best, outright unacceptable at worst. Especially if your new name has some significance to social status, and by claiming it, you are understood as claiming that new status. There is a reason why trans-women are far more controversial than trans-men.
Hm. I am not sure of interregnum. Didn’t intellectuals and professors step smoothly into it? Especially in the US, as formerly the moral authority claims of many competing churches were generally resolved by treating the heads of the biggest divinity schools - and both Harvard and Yale started out as one - the highest moral authority? So in a sense it was always professors. But also in the UK I saw in Cambridge a classroom building that looked like a small cathedral.
Not entirely smoothly. A smooth transfer of moral authority would have lead to just "culture" instead of a "culture war".
There probably was some kind of transfer of authority in the mid 20th century, but in the 60s and 70s dissenters on both the left and right got loud and organized. And talking about it gets confusing because each cluster of dissenters tend to conflate the other dissenters with the orthodox establishment.
"The experts" are nowadays probably the closest match, I agree with that. But it's still all a lot less well-defined than, say, church proceedings. Especially in the 70s - 2000s time span, when the christian religions still had some moral cache but greatly reduced, while the new left-wing framing hasn't solidified into its current structure. I guess there is an argument that the interregnum had mostly passed by the, say, 2010s. If you read up on the details of various controversial scholar's firings and almost-firings since then, it's all very reminiscent of inquisition proceedings (not the popular image, but the more mundane reality).
I have read upon one, Larry Summers, and that was interesting. Basically everybody already disliked him in a nonpartisan way for managing the money of Harvard very badly, bordering on corruption, but somehow they could not get him for it. Then he said one controversial thing and they used it as an excuse to get him. So it was not an inquisition in itself, as the real reason was the money issue. But somehow they had to pretend it is an inquisition, because it is possible to get people that way, and not possible to get people for far more objective and nonpartisan near-crimes, like using Harvard funds to settle the lawsuit of a buddy? Looked like a very upside down thing to me.
On the recent subjects of taste and aesthetics, I wonder if Scott or anyone else here has come across Philip Mann's "The Dandy at Dusk?" I think he makes a fair philosophical stab at the question of objective aesthetic taste in his book/blog.
Lobby and phone your Senator to filibuster it. There might be something the Republicans will break the filibuster over, but it won't be this.
Small bit of self promotion: I wrote answers for the Dwarkesh essay competition on AI. Since the essay competition is over, I published my answers here: https://12gramsofcarbon.com/p/why-is-ai-still-scaling-how-do-the
Dwarkesh asks four questions for the competition. A quick TLDR of the questions and my answers:
1. Why is AI still scaling, even though people hypothesized that we would not be able to achieve the same level of compute growth that we had in the beginning of the AI blitz?
- improvements across the ai stack have a 'moore's law' like effect that is underappreciated because of how multidimensional it is
- pretraining in particular has gotten a lot better, and that is (imo) where a lot of the improvements lie
2. AI companies need to constantly train more and better models, so when do they make money?
- token demand far outstrips supply because of limitations in the amount of globally available compute
- NVIDIA, TSMC et. al. aren't going to price gouge (even though right now they plausibly could) because they are looking many years ahead and want to encourage a lot of players downstream of them to ensure demand continues
3. What should the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic founders, and other alignment oriented people do to make sure AI goes well?
- specifically focused on the risk of mass unemployment and not, like, DEI issues or x-risk or any number of other potential AI pitfalls
- these teams should simply start a private "sovereign wealth fund" like fund that pays out a UBI to everyone in SF, with the goals of: rapidly growing the fund, increasing coverage, and getting picked up by the federal government
- the goal is to hedge against massive rapid unemployment. There are settings where a UBI would get eaten by landlords rent (for eg) but if that happens over a period of years then AI is not growing fast enough to be (as much of) an issue from a labor shock perspective
4. What should India and Nigeria and other countries not in the supply chain do?
- Follow the Singapore / Korea / Taiwan / Chinese model: strong central economic leadership, domestic protectionism around parts of the AI stack, hold home-grown companies to external standards in exchange for the protectionism
"- specifically focused on the risk of mass unemployment and not, like, DEI issues or x-risk or any number of other potential AI pitfall"
This is a valid question to ask, but calling it "AI alignment" seems like a misuse of the term. Any plan for AI related job losses has to presuppose a high level of AI alignment; the AI has to be stable and reliable before it can replace human workers. "How do humans best navigate a world with powerful, well-functioning AI once it's been created?," is a separate question from "how do humans ensure that 'well-functioning' goes along with 'powerful' when creating AI?"
I was being sloppy in the summary. Here is the actual question text:
> With OpenAI’s new raise at an $852B valuation, OpenAI Foundation’s stake is now worth $180B. Anthropic’s cofounders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Nobody seems to have a concrete idea of how to deploy 100s of billions (soon trillions) of wealth productively to “make AI go well”. If you were in charge of the OpenAI Foundation right now, what exactly would you do? And when? It’s not enough to identify a cause you think is important, because that doesn’t answer the fundamental problem of how you convert money to impact. Identify the concrete strategy you recommend pursuing.
Not a billionaire, but I really hope Ludwin-Peery succeeds in the mission to save Hampshire!
My son recently took the GeneSight® Psychotropic Pharmacogenomic Test which indicated that he was heterozygous for the C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene, which affects the body's ability to converting homocysteine into methionine. Therefore my son's psychiatrist recommended that he take L-methylfolate daily.
Apparently this can have cardiovascular, neurological & psychiatric, pregnancy & reproductive, energy & methylation implications.
I'd never heard of this before, but 40% of the population has the C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene. Among Ashkenazi Jews, maybe 3/4 have either the heterozygous or the homozygous C677T polymorphism. So if the heterozygous or homozygous C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene (C/T genotype) is so prevalent, why isn't there more awareness of this mutation, testing for this mutation, and correction for this mutation by taking supplements?
Asking Claude, I received the following answer:
1. Prevalence ≠ Clinical Significance (At Least, Not Straightforwardly)
2. The Homocysteine Problem Is More Tractable Than the Genotype. So they test for Homocysteine levels rather than C677T.
3. The Research Landscape Has Been Disappointing. Several major predictions about MTHFR failed to pan out at the population level.
4. Major medical bodies (American College of Medical Genetics, ACOG) have explicitly come out against routine MTHFR testing in clinical settings, precisely because the evidence doesn't support it changing management in most patients.
5. Mandatory fortification of folic acid in enriched grain products (white flour, bread, pasta, rice) was implemented in the United States in 1998, so their are fewer consequences to having the C677T polymorphism in the MTHFR gene.
Does anyone know anything about these issues?
I had a scammy doctor several years ago who ordered this test for everything and tried to insist several people I know to buy these supplements from him, not off Amazon. I got real “pill mill” vibes from the place (not just on this supplement).
I agree with Claude. MTHFR gets lots of press, but there's no clinical evidence that it's interesting in any way, and we should have a strong prior against common SNPs having large negative effects.
If Claude didn't discuss why or why not to believe it isn't just yet another candidate-gene false positive, I am disappointed in it. The first question to ask about any advice based on *a* SNP is, 'why do you think this is real in the first place?' (Because it usually isn't.) Things like prevalence or folic acid fortification are irrelevant by comparison.
Thanks.
Do you generally encourage patients with either the hetero- or homo- mutation to take L-methylfolate?
(I'm just curious. My son always listens to his doctors.)
Hampshire College also sounds a bit like Simon's Rock college a bit further west in Massachusetts, which Lydia Laurenson memorably described:
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/college-at-age-sixteen-what-is-intelligence
The little I've seen of Hampshire College (today, based on this post) reminds me of New College of Florida, a place I considered attending. I ended up going elsewhere because it was cheaper (got a full ride) and my preference was towards engineering (which New College of Florida does not offer.) I wish more places like those existed, but I fear that there are simply not enough students interested in such a place. Anyway, Prof. Ludwin-Peery, I wish you luck.
Hampshire often reminds people of places like New College of Florida, which is a problem. This is Hampshire's own fault, because the way the school markets itself encourages these comparisons. And I think you're right, there are simply not enough students interested in that kind of place for these schools to survive.
The tragedy is that despite how the school has marketed itself, Hampshire is not actually that kind of place. It's an extremely rigorous model of higher education and extremely functional when run even half-decently. I think you would have loved doing engineering at Hampshire, for example, where we had a great machine shop. I am very confident there are enough students interested in THIS kind of place, if we run it at all well and make it clear what we're offering — which is very different IMO from New College.
Are you suggesting that New College of Florida is not rigorous or functional? If you have time, would you mind explaining a bit how they differ? From the little I gather, they both offer the 'build your own path' thing, and as far as I remember, New College had some sort of alternative grading system (no grades, essentially). I understand if you don't want to bother, this is just for my own enlightenment.
I probably would have enjoyed Hampshire. I liked my engineering studies, but wish I had more time to explore other interests after my first two years in a CC, where I really enjoyed my literature studies under one particularly exceptional professor. Unfortunately, unless they were willing to let foreigners to study for free, I would have never made it there. I don't remember running into it while I was searching for colleges, most likely due to the lack of a formal engineering program.
I think your problem is that in order to sell it to students (and more importantly their parents), then it will have to start marketing "After four years here, you come away with a degree in knot-untying that is extremely employable" instead of "we don't care about what degree you end up with, but for four years you'll explore interesting problems".
That's nice, Chauncey, but if I'm forking out the guts of $120,000 for my kid's education, I want them to have something that will get them a job (in today's economy).
And the problem with *that* is that by the sounds of it, this is not what Hampshire College is about. So not alone are you chasing the really smart kids who would be both interested and able in educating themselves with some gentle guidance from the faculty, which is a small enough cohort, you are also further chasing the "parents have enough money for the gentleman's degree where it doesn't really matter if you come away with the sheepskin or don't care about Junior getting that internship in Dad's golf buddy's Fortune 500 company" which is even smaller slice of the pie.
Did you read my piece about how to market the college? Hampshire has for decades marketed itself as a bohemian school. But the core model is so strong that people continued to go to grad school at above average rates and found companies and get jobs even in spite of the mismanagement. It would be very easy to focus on the educational model and change the marketing to reflect that, and you would have a school that will not only get your kid a job, but will lead them to start a company, get an advanced degree, etc.
"It would be very easy to focus on the educational model and change the marketing to reflect that, and you would have a school that will not only get your kid a job, but will lead them to start a company, get an advanced degree, etc."
Then you are correct that this should be the focus of the marketing, but also I suggest that when you are writing rhapsodies to the bestest most excellent ever, you drop all the bits about "and we had no tests! and I could foozle about in the machine shop! and my prof gave me glowing reviews!" because that's not selling "we will take your smart if awkward kid, let them get on the track of academic rigour, and ensure they come out the other end employable and not just employable, desirable by Big Corp".
Depending on the parent, of course, but the parents are the ones who are going to pay for the entire package (which is a hefty sum even if scholarships and grants and so forth are taken into account) and they are not going to be impressed by "I had such a great time, I was able to run around and do what I wanted". They want "At the end I got X qualifications which led to my successful career in Y". Yes, they want their kid to enjoy college, but not at the expense of "so I changed my mind every six months what I wanted to study, the college let me hop from one thing to another, and at the end I came out with a patchwork qualification".
I'd love to talk to someone at Alpha School about the opportunity at Hampshire College, I think there's real alignment between the ambition of Hampshire's model and what Alpha is building. Could anyone put me in touch?
Hey Ethan-
Send me a message - Ednever on google’s platform. I should be able to help out you in touch with someone (and can give you my thoughts on probabilities)
What were the 'boneheaded' financial decisions he complains of?
The one that seems most clearly boneheaded to me is the 2019 Mim Nelson near-closure. Roughly the president was pursuing a secret merger with UMass, announced it as a surprise in Feb 2019 that they would "stop accepting new students while seeking a strategic partner", which caused an exodus of existing students. I think they sent a letter to already-accepted students warning them that there might not be a dining hall, dorms, or many services in the coming year, too. Yikes.
The other confusing decision was eliminating the IT program in 2023. But we don't have enough context about how much the program actually cost. Student enrollment programs with great career outcomes are valuable but often expensive. It could have been a bad call, or it could have been various financial thorns that couldn't keep up with overall declining enrollment.
The author goes through several more but those seem less clear to me as "boneheaded". The framing doesn't go into enough depth on what conditions might have constrained the board's options. Sometimes there are just impossible conditions that mean you are just stuck running a structurally insolvent institution.
One note that is interesting is that the "boneheaded" decisions persisted across multiple boards. The 2018-2019 board fully resigned, but the choices that led here probably stacked up over years-to-decades.
There's a good description in the linked post.
"Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried" is, to be fair, an S-tier title for a blog post pleading to save Hampshire College.
What is the actual value of research doctorates to the world? My guess is near-zero. If your metric for collegial success is producing phd researchers, we're hardly experiencing a shortage.
It is hard to think of things more valuable to humanity than expanding the frontiers of knowledge.
We're "hardly experiencing a shortage" because of (incredibly short-sighted) policy decisions, not because we've discovered everything of value.
Apparently the USA churns out the largest number of PhDs. So if the Unique Selling Point for Hampshire is that "we produce more students who go on to do PhDs than anywhere else", then okay fine that's like saying "we produce more tins of beans than Heinz".
I agree with Drethelin: what is the *value* of all this 'original research'? Expanding the frontiers of knowledge is great and indeed it is valuable, but are the Hampshire 18 year old 'researchers' producing anything to help us expand those frontiers, or just adding some trimming round the edges like ornamental fringes?
If you buy the story that people tell you about themselves they will always be doing something valuable to humanity.
I do not buy the story that phd researchers tell. I do not think the majority of them are doing anything particularly to expand the frontiers of human knowledge, indeed many of them spend their careers committing fraud and ruining human knowledge.
"If you buy the story that people tell you about themselves they will always be doing something valuable to humanity."
The Argument from I Don't Trust Those Guys is one of the most toxic, intellectually lazy thought-terminating cliches on the internet. Nobody asked you to trust those guys, or suggested you should. If weighing their trustworthiness is the only way you have to gauge their value then you simply are not qualified to gauge their value, and should have the humility to refrain from having an opinion. No serious person says "I think this profession is valuable because they say they are." The look at the actual, tangible impact on the world. In the case of research PhDs, there are no shortage of impacts to choose from: medical discoveries, mathematical theories, new algorithms, honed technologies, improved predictive models. A great many of these things have impacts on the world that can be directly evaluated.
" I do not think the majority of them..."
And this is simply poor reasoning, full stop. What the "majority" are doing is beside the point. This is like claiming that the majority of search-and-rescue crews in a given situation are useless, because only one of them actually finds the missing person. Humanity cannot predict which leads are fruitful without investigating them. You need some fraction of researchers doing work that doesn't pan out in order to get any researchers doing work that does. That's just how searching works.
"many of them spend their careers committing fraud "
How many is many? Give me a rate. Justify it. Or if you cannot, kindly concede the point that fraudulent researchers are not actually a substantial enough fraction to worry about. If you don't have even a principled estimate for the rate, you have no argument whatsoever. If you do, that's a real argument and a discussion worth having.
BTW what does "phd researchers" mean exactly? I believe pretty much all researchers at Google, Meta etc. have PhDs (all who I know do, that is for sure), and assuming that they commit fraud is dubious at least.
> Nobody asked you to trust those guys
This line in particular stands out as especially a odd. Because:
A) Aren't research programs (especially STEM) commonly funded in part by tax dollars? In which case, someone is very much asking us to trust those guys.
B) The raison d'etre of a PhD qua credential is to broadcast a request to trust the institution. Like, what do you think the point of the certificate is, if not a request for trust? All of us in here are familiar with the Caplan meme that "education = credentialism", no?
Since you haven’t given me a single number while being performatively long winded and upset at me, I’m afraid I’m going to have for respond to your request for further detail by telling you to go to hell.
Less of this please.
No, this is a recurring theme with Agrajagagain. I think such a response was justified, given the context.
Research *may* (or may not) be valuable. Research doctorates (from the vantage point of one who has one in a hard science), are not *unless* they go on to actually do research. And the supply vastly outstrips the demand. The ratio of research positions (including industry, most of which these are not suited for) to research doctorates *even in hard sciences* is 1:many-many. And the ratio of *tenure-track research professorships* to research PhDs is 1:<basically all of them>.
So the value of a marginal PhD is very small. And if you're not in a hard science (or engineering), the value goes down *tremendously*. I consider the value of a research PhD in many other fields to be an absolute negative. They're not expanding the frontiers of knowledge, they're making up BS and making us pay for it. And the cost to the candidates is extreme, both in actual dollars, pain and suffering, and opportunity cost.
I basically agree, but I share that stat because it cuts against the ultimate-frisbee-and-sandals stereotype of the school. It's a relatively clear metric that shows that Hampshire is academically rigorous and research-focused in a way that makes it competitive with colleges and universities with much longer histories and larger endowments. You can go to Hampshire and still beat other candidates to get into science PhD programs at Harvard or Yale. It would be even better if Hampshire students skipped the research doctorate and did something useful instead, like becoming science YouTubers or bloggers.
In the last open thread, someone posted this: https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf
Let me know what you think about it.
Annoyingly written. I stopped after the first two paragraphs.
I'm sure it was written with the intent to annoy you, a mere 87 years ago.
Thanks for pointing out that you gave me something extra useless to read since it’s not relevant to the current funding environment or aware of the state of science! That makes it even more annoying!
The paper is about the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and was written by its founder. The IAS still exists and is doing well, and continues to operate under the principles described in the paper. The highest of these principles, to spell it out, is to produce knowledge without consideration for its usefulness or lack thereof; it's about producing knowledge for its own sake, for no more and no less than satisfying the researcher's curiosity. Getting practical use, if any, out of that knowledge is left as an exercise to others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study
As far as "being aware of the state of science" is concerned, the IAS continues to produce countable success in terms of awards, if that's something you value:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#See_also
So perhaps you'll find it worth to suppress that feeling of annoyance for 30 minutes or so, and read the paper entirely so that you are aware of the state of the argument and no longer have to guess about the value of pure research. If you believe that the paper is "useless", then that's exactly the reason why should read it!
Given the other response that Drethelin gave somewhere in another thread here, his motive seems to be to annoy and troll. Worthy candidate for the block list, but on the other hand I wouldn't have learned from you that the IAS is actually still set up the same way. Quite a feat, to be honest.
I did not gave you anything, you must be confusing me with someone else.
sorry, you have the exact same pfp as domo sapiens
What could I, a random nobody with a blog, do if I wanted to change the world as much as possible? I don't mean this in the EA sense of "change the world for the better," but in the sense of whatever actions would make the world maximally different from a world where I didn't take those actions. This is mostly hypothetical, but supposing I had no moral scruples, what can an average guy do to maximally alter the universe?
Perhaps you'll find Elon Musk [0] an interesting case study.
> In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”
internet = Paypal
sustainable energy = Tesla
space exploration = SpaceX
AI = Grok
genetics = (TBD)
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html
Starting a massive fire in the wilderness of California or somewhere like that would have the most bang for your buck I reckon. The Palisades Fire was started by one guy and it was really destructive and he didn't even do anything complicated. You could probably make an even more destructive fire if you used drones + molotov cocktails or fireworks.
Depends on your metric. In some sense buying a digger and moving dirt around for the rest of your life (or optimizing for dirt to be moved around by diggers) could be the biggest change in the world (mass in places where it wouldn't be without you).
Maybe creating/changing a law or setting a legal precedent? Or anything else that changes how lots of people will act for a long time.
Go to New York. Go to Central Park. Find a butterfly. Kill it.
If you have some outlier ability or strong interest + above average capability in something, then focus on that. Otherwise I'd focus on making a large amount of money and figuring out exactly where you can apply your connections + money in a major way when you get there.
I.E. Musk/SpaceX changed spaceflight not because he wanted to change spaceflight and became the best engineer in the world in order to do that, but because he poured an unreasonable amount of time and money into an unlikely to succeed project and made it by the skin of his teeth.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaning-6
I think a lower risk/lower reward option would be to create some sort of a viral meme: a funny cat picture, a catchphrase, etc. Sure, you'll probably fail the first 100 times you try; but unlike with the more violent options, failure will only cost you your time, not your life.
"Become a serial killer." Noted.
In complete seriousness, based on his exchanges with Gurwinder, my impression is that a lot of Luigi Mangione's motivation was to do something momentous and not be an "NPC". Several prominent American assassins (James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, probably Oswald) were substantially motivated by a desire to do something momentous. Bremer probably didn't even care about what politician he killed. Crooks may have shot Trump instead of Biden just because of opportunity. So yes, this probably is the way to maximally shake stuff up, but DON'T DO IT!
Don't worry, I'm a utilitarian, not a "maximally change things"-itarian, but I have been curious what the most effective thing to do would be if I actually was the latter, hence this post.
Given how California imposed its animal welfare standards on other states, I can't say I'm surprised that other states are now trying to undo that.
Doesn't California already do that with Prop 65? "Known to cause cancer in the state of California..."
Yeah, I found Scott's description of the legislation misleading enough to be distasteful. The Save Our Bacon Act very obviously does NOT "revoke all existing state animal welfare protections." It revokes states' attempts to extraterritorially regulate activity occurring in other states. States aren't allowed to do that. This is super basic constitutional law stuff going all the way back to Gibbons v. Ogden. The fact that California's super unconstitutional law is something Scott personally agrees with doesn't change the fact that it is super unconstitutional.
Do you feel the same way about lab-grown meat?
Not quite the same thing but it was illegal to sell butter colored margarine in Wisconsin until 1967. Uncolored margarine is white and looks like lard or Crisco shortening. Until the 67 law you had to buy a one pound plastic bag of white margarine with a yellow dye capsule inside. You’d then break the dye pack and knead the color in by hand.
“I can't believe it's not yellow: A peek into Wisconsin’s quirky margarine laws”
https://www.wisfarmer.com/story/news/2021/11/15/peek-into-wisconsins-quirky-margarine-laws/8626173002/
Your question is should Texas be able to prohibit the sale of beef grown in a lab in another state, while permitting the sale of beef grown on an actual cow? Lets assume for the sake of a clean hypothetical that the health risks are the same and the mix of muscle, fat, and whatever else is the same regardless of how the beef is produced. In that case, yes, I will take the same position, Texas should not be able to prohibit the sale of lab grown beef.
Yes. Which is essentially what florida just did:
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-upholds-floridas-ban-on-lab-grown-meat-protecting-states-real-food-law/
AFAICT there is no detail in that law that specifies the ban is due to the an intrinsic permanent quality of the meat, or based on any health risks. It is purely based on the process that produced it. And it does indeed ban it for all citizens, even those who would like to buy it.
I don’t understand how this reaches the rest of the country. For CA the issue is that the pork is a commodity and keeping CA pork separate from the rest is costly. Since lab meat is a separate specialty product wouldn’t they just cut out FL and sell to the rest of the country? Or am I misunderstanding?
Cutting a state out of your market is costly in the same way - you lose that market. You can make the same point to non-animal-welfare pork companies - just cut out CA and sell to the rest of the country.
I don't see how "lab meat is a speciality product" matters here. It's still just X share of their market, regardless of how big it is.
The only difference I can see between these cases is that FL is a smaller market, and cutting that state out is less damaging. But that doesn't seem like a good basis on which to make the
When I say specialty product, I'm imagining that there are a small number of centralized producers and they don't mingle their product very much. With pork I imagine you have many smaller producers who have their product bundled together and then sold off to different companies at intermediate stages of the supply chain. Tracking the size of crate the pork was raised in and making sure small crate pork isn't send to CA creates a costly logistical headache at every stage. I'm not an expert so I could be wrong about this, but I assume the FL law doesn't create the same nationwide pressure for that reason.
I do oppose the FL law and I'm interested in seeing what can be done with lab meat, I just don't expect it to sway the industry in the same way. To me the greater risk is that it sets a precedent for similar laws to roll out in other states.
Oh. Perhaps congress should broaden the bill then.
You mean Florida's state legislature, and DeSantis? US Congress has no authority here.
This whole conversation started with a bill in congress. Congress can preempt state legislation.
It's unfortunately clear by the exemption of eggs that the SOB is not meant to fix a problem in the country, but to bail out one or more friends of the various politicians. If it fixes anything it's through collateral virtue.
This is a fully generalizable argument to block states from banning anything whatsoever, and that the only way to ban anything at all is to ban it at the federal level. I'm honestly curious if you are willing to bite that bullet.
It's not really -- because California is so huge, any regulation it passes has a very strong effect on the rest of the counry.
If New Hampshire passed a similar law, no one would care.
So large states should not be allowed to ban things, but small states should?
That doesn't make much sense. It's only natural that in a vote-based electoral system larger regions will have more power. It makes sense to protect the smaller regions to some extent, but not to force the larger regions not to make laws.
It is nothing of the sort. States can regulate products sold within their borders. They cannot regulate how those products are produced outside their borders. This is basic federalism.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you on this. National Pork Producers Council v. Ross was decided in 2023, and while the holding is exceedingly complicated, I don't believe any of the opinions accepted anything like your position that California just has to take Iowa's pork, no matter how it was produced.
(This isn't an unlimited grant, and in particular, it seems like states are going to have more leeway for things like animal welfare laws and a lot less if they're trying to do economic discrimination.)
This is what California does though? They regulate the standards for products sold inside their state, and farmers in other states respond by complying in order to have access to that market. Not selling in California is an option.
No, this is not what California does. The meat sold in their borders is the same product however well or poorly the animal it comes from is treated. An object does not magically carry its history with it. An object does not have a soul. So no, what California is regulating is not the product sold within its borders, it is the process by which that product is produced, which happens outside its borders, and is therefor entirely beyond the proper scope of California's authority.
"An object does not magically carry its history with it."
The legal system does in fact care about the history of objects, and this is not controversial. Consider these historical facts:
1. Whether an object was stolen or legally purchased.
2. Whether an antique is authentic or a forgery.
3. Whether the creator of a work of art gave permission to copy or remix it.
4. Whether the subject of an image consented to be photographed and published.
"You cannot sell meat that was produced by cruelty" is no more unusual than "you cannot sell cars that were acquired by theft."
It is very different, because theft presumably illegal where it occurred. The cruelty at issue here is not illegal where it is occurring. All of the things you point to are cases where the history matters because the history involves a crime and we really want to disincentivize crime. In the cruelty case, there is no underlying crime.
"the meat sold is the same product". You keep asserting it everywhere in this thread _but you don't get to decide that_. If California thinks that it makes a significant difference in the product, then it does. And I don't know where this idea that states can't regulate processes, but they can regulate products even comes from. You seem to have entirely made it up. States regulate _all kinds of processes all the time_.
> "the meat sold is the same product". You keep asserting it everywhere in this thread _but you don't get to decide that_.
Neither do you. Neither does California. It is a scientific fact.
> States regulate _all kinds of processes all the time_.
States regulate all kinds of processes *that occur within their borders* all the time. They do not get to regulate processes that occur outside their borders. This is pretty fundamental to the concept of what a state is.
No, once again, it is not regulating the process. It is regulating the sale of goods that underwent that process, on Californian territory. The distinction may not seem important to you, but it is precisely what makes the claim "what California is regulating is not the product sold within its borders, it is the process by which that product is produced", literally factually incorrect, and the difference is part of why SCOTUS decided one way rather than another when the conversation was last had.
I know we keep going round in little loops, but you keep repeating this incorrect thing, and if it's worth your time to lie it's worth mine to correct it.
There may well be some way to express some adjacent concept without making a literally untrue statement, but I've not seen it yet.
Here I think you are just making a false statement, the statement of mine that you quoted is literally true. I don't see how any English speaker can deny its literal truth.
I read that he's saying the state must turn a blind eye to provenance and inspect only the object. I think they are trying to warp a federalism argument into a metaphysical argument.
By that logic, we shouldn't be allowed to regulate whether the good we buy come from Burma or Sudan based on labor practices, shark fin sales based on where it was obtained, state foie gras bans... it's a long list. I know some of these aren't state vs. fed necessarily. A clean analog is cosmetics - California bans cosmetics that were tested on animals, even though they are the same molecules of cosmetic you put on your face.
By "impose its animal welfare standards on other states," did you mean "refuse to do business with, unless ethical standards are adhered to"?
No I did not. If the California state government, acting as a participant in the marketplace, had simply refused to buy meat that did not comport with its ethical standards, that would have been fine. California, acting as regulator, forbade its citizens from exercising their free choice in the market as a tool to manipulate what happened outside its boarders. That was a blatant violation of federalism that impinged the right of other states to regulate what happens within their own borders. A response like this to that sort of lawlessness is very natural and to be expected.
I am confused. Does California ban its residents from leaving the state and purchasing pork in another state, for their personal consumption?
Do you apply that same logic to abortion laws?
Weren't there some states trying to do that, eg to ban their citizens traveling to other states for abortions? I vaguely remember some news stories about that, and it seemed like the sort of thing that would get stopped by a court somewhere, but I don't know whether anyone actually tried to enact such a law or whether any court ruled on it.
California did do "you can't get public money to travel to states we don't like because of anti-whatever laws" and people argued this was fine. Okay, so there is a professional conference or the likes being hosted by one of the Eeeeevil States and you would like to attend as a public official or university professor? Sorry, we are not gonna pay for you to go visit the Eeeevil State and mingle with the Eeeevil People there, even if the extent of your interaction with them is 'walked down the same street as the Eeevil Inhabitants of Eeevil State were walking down"!
(Another reason why I don't have the same admiration for Scott Weiner that others have, he seems never to have met a dumb opportunity to virtue signal he could resist, then again it is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who seem to be selected on the basis of "how loudly and weirdly annoying can they be?"):
https://victoryfund.org/lgbt-officials-in-california-lead-charge-to-cut-ties-with-anti-lgbt-states/
"Two separate measures introduced by a California Assembly member and a San Francisco supervisor restricting the use of government dollars to pay for discrimination advanced Tuesday.
AB 1887 prohibits the use of state money to pay for travel to states that don’t allow local governments to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. Introduced by openly gay Assembly Member Evan Low, a Victory Fund candidate, the bill was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday.
From ThinkProgress:
AB 1887 doesn’t target any specific state, but lays out in detail whether a state will be impacted. Travel is forbidden to any state that has passed a law that explicitly discriminates against LGBTQ people, or that has passed a law voiding or repealing state or local protections for LGBTQ people. It requires the Attorney General to maintain a list of the states that would qualify.
Currently, the law would impact at least three states. The most obvious is North Carolina, because HB2 both voids local LGBTQ protections and mandates discrimination against transgender people when it comes to what facilities they can use. Also guaranteed to be on the list, however, would be Tennessee and Arkansas, two other states that have “preemption” laws prohibiting municipalities from extending nondiscrimination protections beyond what’s available at the state level, thus voiding any city or county ordinances protecting sexual orientation and gender identity.
In San Francisco Tuesday, openly gay Supervisor – and state senate candidate – Scott Wiener’s legislation to bar the city from doing business with states that don’t allow LGBTQ protections passed the Board of Supervisors unanimously."
I know Texas passed a law restricting the licensing of abortions so drastically that there was only, like, one operating clinic left in the state, and it reached the Supreme Court as to, among other things, whether the burden of travel was acceptable under Roe V. Wade.
I don't remember if they tried to illegalize crossing the border on that one, but I highly doubt that aspect would change LightlySeared's stance on whether it's acceptable.
How do you feel about the recent push in red states to ban the sale of lab grown meat?
I think we have fairly efficient means to turn substances we cannot digest into nutritious food.
I'm skeptical that "Lab Grown" would be an improvement in quality or efficiency. Currently if demand for meat is low, farmers can delay harvest for a bit or arbitrage on the price differences.
The same as this one; if the FDA says it's safe to eat lab grown meat, then the states shouldn't be allowed to block its sale. Even if they think the FDA missed something, they should be limited to California-esque "this product is known by the state of Florida to cause Terminal Uncoolness." There's an argument that the states should have enough control of definitions to stop it being sold *under the label of meat*, but I don't think they should be able to stop it being sold entirely.
Arguably that one's worse than California; at least California expects factory farms to outcompete their restrictions. But lab grown meat is a niche, and banning it is just petty.
Based on the Dormant Commerce Clause, California is well within it's rights to impose regulations that apply equally to businesses inside and outside of California. A regulation would only violate federalism if it specifically privileged California businesses. This is well established by legal precedent.
Of course, the US government is also well within it's rights to reign in state regulation.
"You're free to peddle this shit to your own people but you ain't selling it in our borders if it doesn't meet the same standards our own producers have to meet" is, afaict, a completely normal, expected and unremarked thing states and countries say to each other (if more politely) all the time.
Why on earth would people expect California to privilege some other state's producers over their own?
"Why on earth would people expect California to privilege some other state's producers over their own?"
If Seta above is correct, then that would violate federalism. You can't have protectionism about "only buy Californian products from Californian producers".
The status quo is treating all products equally. The result of saying that California can’t restrict the sale of products based on things that happened to them out of state would mean Californian producers are subject to restrictions that Iowan producers making goods for sale in California need not comply with. So we are not arguing for equality here, but for a reverse-biased federalism.
A key distinction I see is that California isn't regulating the product per se, but instead trying to regulate the production process itself.
When the production occurs in California, on their heads be it; when it occurs outside California, it's not their jurisdiction.
BTW in food industry it is pretty standard to ensure the quality of the product (i.e. food) by regulating the process. A trivial example is expiration date: even though the given food might be within the standards after the expiration date, it cannot be sold after that.
Yes, like we do when we list the requirements for food to be labelled halal or organic. France did it for champagne; now California's declaring it's only bacon when it comes from a happy pig - otherwise it's just sparkling cruelty pork.
People are free to do what they like outside California. California isn't forcing them to raise their pigs any particular way, and it isn't forcing them to sell the bacon in California. When they do sell it in California, though, it's absolutely California's jurisdiction. How can it not be?
Responding to just the latest edit: if the production occurs in another State, the production is outside California's jurisdiction.
I see your argument with River on the same point, and I agree with them that provenance is not a property of the product (at least for interstate commerce purposes). No point rehashing that since you don't seem open to convincing.
And if California was merely prohibiting labeling caged pork as "cruelty free" or something I doubt much of anyone would squawk.
There's no requirement that food be labeled as non-organic or non-halal (or even that food that could qualify for the restricted labels apply them), let alone a prohibition on the sale of food that doesn't meet their respective requirements.
""You're free to peddle this shit to your own people but you ain't selling it in our borders if it doesn't meet the same standards our own producers have to meet" is, afaict, a completely normal, expected and unremarked thing states and countries say to each other (if more politely) all the time."
The WTO often gets involved in that sort of thing, and often has quite some remarks.
Generally, regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign producers are allowed under WTO rules. Which exception are you claiming applies here?
The US spent about 50 years making that argument with regard to "dolphin safe tuna." It won.... eventually.... after many losses.
It is normal for countries, but countries are different from states. States are bound by a principle of federalism. Part of the point of having a United States is to have a unified market, where congress, not the states, regulates commerce between the states.
It is not a normal thing for states to say to each other, no. Can you give another example?
A number of conservative states severely restrict the sale of liquor in ways that most other states do not.
How is that an example of a state restricting the sale of product based on how that product was produced outside the states borders?
Insurance requirements routinely vary from state to state. An auto insurer cannot simply have one standard policy it offers in MD, OK, FL, and NY, as all those states will have different requirements in terms of what must be covered and what the minimum coverage is.
Is Maryland "imposing its insurance standards on New York" if it requires a NY-based insurance company selling insurance in MD to only sell policies in MD that conform with MD's insurance regulations? That's basically the identical fact pattern with a different industry.
Insurance was for many decades considered "not to be commerce." Then when the court finally ruled that it was commerce, Congress passed the McCarran-Ferguson act, essentially explicitly declining to create a uniform regulatory regime for insurance. If this were not the case, the vast array of state requirements around insurance would be considered unconstitutional.
It is not a remotely comparable fact pattern. You are hypothesizing a different product being sold in MD versus NY. Whereas meat is meat, it is a physical object, and importantly it is the same physical object regardless of how it was produced. I'm not sure how the distinction between how a thing is produced and what a thing is might translate to a financial product like insurance, but that is a key distinction.
States can certainly prohibit its citizens from purchasing certain products, and can do so for a wide variety of reasons, including the way the items are produced. Yes that will affect markets in other states, but that’s true for literally any instance of prohibiting a product from entering a market. Would you say it’s unconstitutional for Alabama to ban weed because it negatively affects Colorado’s weed production? Of course not. If Texas wants to ban the import of products that are made via union labor that’s their business (as long as it doesn’t violate other principles, like freedom of association or something). You’re going to have to provide caselaw making clear that states aren’t allowed to restrict imports via constitutional grounds, but that just doesn’t exist. Could you even point to where in the constitution it says states cannot restrict imports in this way? And the commerce clause simply does not say this and no caselaw has interpreted it as such
>"… as long as it doesn’t violate other principles, like freedom of association or something…"
Arguably California's law does violate such a principle, even for pork produced in state.
A quick Google search gets me:
* California emissions requirements on vehicles - vehicles must comply even if made in another state, if they are to be imported into California
* CalRecycle SB54 - out-of-state manufacturers must nevertheless ensure their packaging complies even if made in another state, if they want it sold in California
* Proposition 65 requires specific text on packaging even if the product was made out-of-state
Looks like there's plenty more.
It seems like all that is separate from the production techniques used.
Suppose California passes a law forbidding the sale of software in the state that was produced using AI tools. Would that be allowed wrt interstate commerce? Or if California required that all manufactured goods sold there were made by people paid at least the minimum wage in California?
Emissions requirements - CA is essentially regulating what cars driving on California roads do, which is within their rights. Any effects on auto makers in other states are incidental. This seems to be the pattern with all these things - California is regulating what the object is that is allowed to be sold in CA, and that is fine. The problem is when California says it is ok to sell a product if it is made the way CA likes, but not to sell literally the exact same product made the way CA does not like. Regulating the product is fundamentally different from regulating its production. States can regulate products in their borders, they cannot regulate production that occurs outside their borders.
I don't know the details, but I have to assume at least a tacit democratic acceptance of those laws within California. I heard they have plenty of votes on things, so citizens could have repealed that as an exercise of their free will, to broaden their free choice?
Would you also denounce any law (in any state or country) that bans import of products made by slaves? Does that, in effect, mean that you denounce any regulation of states/countries at all? Would you allow import of rhino horn or elephant ivory? What about human trafficking? That might sound provocative, but I would like you to explain your reasoning in more depths, start outlining your principles and where you draw the lines and why.
Oh I agree the majority of California citizens consented. The reference to the free choice of the citizens of California was to emphasize the difference between doing business with California (the state government) and doing business with the citizens of California. The real problem is that California here is effectively regulating how meat is produced in Iowa, and Iowa definitely did not consent.
I think the big difference between this and all the other things you just mentioned is that the other things, at least in the United States, are illegal. A state disincentivizing that which the entire country has already banned is fine. But I state trying to use the market power of its citizens to effectively regulate what happens in another state, that violates any conceivable notion of federalism. That is where the push back is coming from.
If a state wants to ban the importation of these things from foreign countries, that would pretty obviously be unconstitutional. The federal government regulates trade with foreign countries, the states do not.
Right, but a state is not a foreign country and no one is forcing Iowa to sell to California.
Also factory farming is horrible for our citizens and we have the highest cancer rates in the nation, so maybe lawmakers here should start giving a shit about their constituents if they don't care about decency.
But part of being a state in the United States is that you do not get to regulate things that happen in other states, which is what California is doing here.
If Iowa doesn't like the effects of factory farming on its own citizens, great, Iowa is free to regulate how factory farming is done in Iowa, or even to outright ban it if they want to. All I'm saying is California shouldn't do it for Iowa, and nobody should be surprised when California gets push back for that.
So how about the free choice of Iowarean(?) meat producers to sell their meat elsewhere or enter other business opportunities? Nobody is forcing them to sell to the wealthy and populous state of California either, right?
Your arguments read one-sided to me. Nobody forced Iowa to make their meat production dependent on Californian customers (if that is actually the case).
If you don't stop equivocating between California and its citizens, I will conclude that you are arguing in bad faith. I think I already explained this, but I will give it one last shot. When California entered the union, it agreed, as every other state before and since has, to enter a unified market, to allow producers in other states to sell to its citizens. It did not, as part of entering the union, gain a right to regulate how anything is produced in another state, except through the actions of its representatives in congress. Can't go back on that now.
> If a state wants to ban the importation of these things from foreign countries, that would pretty obviously be unconstitutional. The federal government regulates trade with foreign countries, the states do not.
Proposition 12 DOES apply to foreign imports and no one has seriously disputed this. It applies at point-of-sale, it doesn't make the products contraband within the state. It doesn't restrict the importation of pork at the port of LA to sell in Nevada.
However, non-compliant foreign products cannot be sold in California.
This seems to be entirely normal? Places pass laws and other places must conform to those laws if they want to do business with those places. For example, a US law about not buying products produced through child labor doesn't bar other countries from doing child labor, but does make it harder to do business with the US.
I'm struggling to think of an equivalent that I wouldn't be ok with. The prosecution of women who pass state lines to get an abortion is the closest thing I can think of in the American context, but this is far less extreme than that because California won't prosecute people who own farms in other states.
Maybe a Texas law that banned media sources that were too LGBT friendly would be the rught comparison? But that fails on first amendment grounds, not because it would force others to adapt.
You have an analogus case that would help me be more sympathetic to this view?
The relationship between two states within the United States is simply not analogous to the relationship between two countries as far as commerce goes. One of the central premises of the United States that the framers intentionally set up when they wrote the constitution was to create a unified market. This is why we have an interstate commerce clause in the constitution. Congress regulates commerce between the states, the states do not.
What if Texas wanted to prohibit the sale of any product made with unionized labor?
Interesting. I will think on that. My first thought is that it seems like it would be their prerogative to do so. But maybe I only think that because I think it would fail in a contest of wills. On the other hand, I could imagine such a thing spinning out of control, leading red states and blue states to be in a competition with each other in an unhealthy way and I don't want that to happen.
Hampshire College has an unusual model where all students are supposed to design at least part of their own courses of study, so they generally take a much more active role in their own educations than elsewhere. Students can study a traditional academic discipline but devise their own research projects, or can literally invent an individual major. It seems like a high fraction of the students take this responsibility somewhat seriously and do something interesting.
I went to a summer math camp there (Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics) when I was a teenager. It was pretty awesome. Unfortunately the founding director of that program, Prof. David Kelly, died recently. In light of both events, I don't know whether the math camp will continue.
Hampshire is also known as the maximally hippie and maximally woke/identity politics college. Their motto is "non satis scire" (knowing is not enough), and I guess they've strongly promoted the idea that students ought to aspire to change the world since their 1970s founding.
They used to run VAX/VMS! I had a VMS account during the math camp and it was super-confusing to me since I had just started to learn Unix and was trying to apply my fledgling Unix knowledge to the very non-Unix environment. The file versioning was cool, though.
David Kelly taught my "first year" class at Hampshire (on puzzles and paradoxes). Truly a legend.
Puzzles & Paradoxes was a really well-known & well-regarded class while I was there, even among humanities folks. I didn't take it myself, but I loved hearing about it from my friends who did.
I was a humanities guy and it really helped build my confidence, particularly as someone who had a lot of trouble adjusting to college. At the end of the year, David asked me "have you always overcome this much?" and it meant a lot to me.
Hampshire has more fundamental problems than its various missteps. It's dedicated to a particular model of learning, and it has always attracted a lot of bright and innovative people who love it. But the number of high-school seniors is going to decline for a decade or two so the education industry is going through an "ugly shakeout" as they say in the business press, 10% or more of colleges are going to fold. The ones that will survive are the ones that can figure out how to pay the bills, and often that is by attracting a certain percentage of the children of affluent families that can pay list price. The problem is that those families are generally looking for educations that are pathways into well-paid types of work. Even well-endowed, stable liberal arts schools with long histories are struggling to deal with that. But Hampshire's system, being "even more so", has a harder time. Combining that with not accumulating an endowment (partly because of its youth and partly because they never developed a corps of wealthy alumni), it's hard for Hampshire to survive.
Fog 'o War stuff...
1. Putin had Trump negotiate with the Ukrainians to allow the Russian Federation to hold its May 9th Victory Day Parade in Red Square, excluding it from Ukrainian drone attacks. In return for Ukrainian forbearance, Putin agreed to a 1000-to-1000 prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.
2. Zelenskyy agreed to the terms, and then he trolled the Russians. “DECREE OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE: On holding a parade in the city of Moscow. Taking into account numerous requests and for humanitarian purposes outlined during the negotiations with the American side on 8 May 2026, I hereby decree the following: 1. To permit the holding of a parade in the city of Moscow (Russian Federation) on 9 May 2026. For the duration of the parade…, the designated area of Red Square shall be excluded from the operational plan for the use of Ukrainian weapons.” (GPS coordinates of Red Square given)
3. Even so, Russia withdrew many of its remaining anti-missile systems from potential military and economic targets to surround Moscow with a dense network of over 100 anti-missile systems. The parade went off without a hitch, but without any of the usual display of military equipment. Reportedly, there was a brief flyover of a few jets.
4. As of today, the prisoners hadn’t been swapped. While Ukraine has provided a list of Russian PoWs they’re going to include in the exchange, the Russians have yet to release a list of the Ukrainian PoWs. Zelenskyy went on TV last night and made it clear that if the prisoner exchange doesn't take place, it will show that Putin is untrustworthy and Trump is weak. “The prisoner exchange – 1,000 for 1,000 – is being prepared and must take place. The Americans assumed responsibility for these guarantees. Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters has handed over the lists for one thousand POWs to the Russian side. There was American mediation in reaching this arrangement on the exchange, and accordingly, we expect the American side to play an active role in ensuring it’s fulfilled.”
5. I haven’t heard if Ukraine launched any drone attacks against undefended Russian facilities on May 9th. Last Friday, Major Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, said there likely would be strikes. But maybe Zelenskyy decided not to poke the bear while the prisoner exchange was still in the works.
6. On Friday, May 8, the District Court of Belgorod arrested Yuri Kozarenko, former CEO of Transport of the Future LLC. He was Putin’s golden boy of long-range drone development, but few, if any, drones have come off the assembly line after over a year of “development.” He is under investigation for alleged large-scale fraud. Large-scale corruption is one of the reasons that Russia has had trouble keeping pace with Ukraine’s decentralized drone development.
7. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, a 15-person startup, self-financed, created the Tryzub, a mobile laser system that can knock Shaheds out of the sky from 5 kilometers away. It has an AI tracking system that can work without an operator, and it’s “plug and play” (specifically, it needs to be plugged into the electrical grid to work). The effective range for taking down FPV drones is 800 to 900 meters. Reconnaissance drones: up to 1,500 meters. Shaheds: up to 5 kilometers. And it blinds optics, cameras, sensors, and target-acquisition electronics on drones, missiles, and helicopters up to 10 kilometers away. After testing against various targets (including a Russian attack helicopter), the Tryzub is in production now and being deployed in the field.
8. Putin, at a press conference, explained why he didn’t take Kyiv in ten days: “Macron called me in 2022 and said that Ukraine couldn’t sign documents in Istanbul ‘with a gun to its temple,’ then asked me to withdraw the troops from Kyiv.” Those wrecked and burning tanks and troop transports down the M06/E40 highway to Kyiv never happened. Really.
9. In oil news, JP Morgan released a very gloomy report on world oil supplies. We’re talking gas rationing in the US, airline route reductions, logistics disruptions in key industries, and a return to 70s stagflation. I’ve seen so many gloomy predictions that never came true in my 65 years on this planet that I don’t know whether to believe the gloom-and-doom scenario presented in this report. But the last tanker from the Gulf arrived in SoCal a few days ago. 2 million barrels. That will keep California supplied with oil for a few more weeks. Meanwhile, the US is still exporting oil. It turns out we don’t have the types of refineries that can handle the lighter crude oil produced by fracking. So we were exporting that raw crude and re-importing it as a refined product. I don’t know the details of the logistics chain, though. But it means that even though we’re “energy independent,” we’re still energy dependent on logistics. Uggghhh.
It seems the 1000 prisoner exchange is going ahead:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y049w8nqwo
Good. It looked like it might fall through for a while there.
Not to take away from Zelensky's effective trolling, but I suspect the threatened Russian massive retaliatory strike on Kyiv, pointedly including decision-making centres, was a factor in his thinking.
One might argue that the Russians attack Kyiv regularly anyway, but there still remains some technical space on the escalatory ladder, and Putin's hand would have been more or less forced in case of a major disruption of Victory Day.
Edit: change of spelling of the capital's name to the Ukrainian version.
Russia has been threatening to get serious about attacking Ukraine, "and this time we mean it!", for four years now. There have been massive attacks against Kyiv and "decision-making centres", also for four years now. If Russia had the capability to destroy important government buildings, they would have already done so long ago. They don't because they can't, not because they've been holding back. Everything else is the usual Russian bluster. There is only one way Russia could significantly escalate, and that would be the use of nuclear weapons.
No, the main reason why Ukraine didn't attack Red Square during the Victory parade was that it wouldn't have brought a strategic benefit, and maybe even a drawback. Attacking the parade might have given Putin an excuse for partial mobilization with the support of the Russian people, something Ukraine wants to avoid desperately.
"They don't because they can't, not because they've been holding back. Everything else is the usual Russian bluster. There is only one way Russia could significantly escalate, and that would be the use of nuclear weapons."
I don't think this is the case. Russia struggles with crippling Ukrainian logistics, the power grid, and relevant industry *at scale*, but the military could muster a single performative retaliatory strike that temporarily overwhelms Kyiv's existing air defences, probably involving the MIRV option. It would simply be aimed at Bankova instead of the usual power stations.
Otherwise, I agree with you. To a certain extent, symmetrical considerations govern Russian restraint; outright destruction of elements of the Ukrainian government would fail to break Ukraine, but would instead galvanise Western support even further, and perhaps give the flagging Ukrainian force regeneration efforts a shot in the arm.
> "Zelenskyy agreed to the terms, and then he trolled the Russians. “DECREE OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE: On holding a parade in the city of Moscow. Taking into account numerous requests and for humanitarian purposes outlined during the negotiations with the American side on 8 May 2026, I hereby decree the following: 1. To permit the holding of a parade in the city of Moscow (Russian Federation) on 9 May 2026. For the duration of the parade…, the designated area of Red Square shall be excluded from the operational plan for the use of Ukrainian weapons.” (GPS coordinates of Red Square given)"
Can you explain why this is a troll? Is it because he presents it as a munificent act of forbearance?
Russian propaganda has characterized Ukrainians as Untermenschen for years, or at best as defecting Russians who need to be brought to reason by any means; in any case as unworthy of treatment as equals. For Zelenskyy to "allow" the parade to happen is a presumption of authority that attacks the mythos of the invincible Russia that doesn't need anyone's permission to do whatever it wants.
The Moscow Victory Day Parade is the highlight of the country's celebration of victory over Nazi Germany, which in turn is its central piece of state legitimization. To attack the legitimacy of the parade is to attack the legitimacy of the Russian state itself.
It's also show of confidence from Zelenskyy that coincides with the beginnings of a trend reversal in the air and ground campaigns in Ukraine's favor and a significant downscaling of the parade itself (officially for security reasons), which is why that tweet has a kernel of truth that makes it especially effective.
Tellingly, it motivated the Kremlin to publish a denial of requiring permission:
"A Kremlin spokesman commented that Russia didn't need anyone's permission to hold the Victory Parade."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9pem481rwo
It's basically "pig fucker politics" or, much more politely, "shifting the Overton window" on the question of who's in charge between Russia and Ukraine.
Yes. And it feels like the power dynamic betwween Ukraine and Russia has changed in the past month.
In your next probability update, I would be interested to see whether there is a big shift or not. On the battlefield the situation seems to have improved a lot compared to a year ago. But then the financial situation of Russia also looked more dire back then. But then the Ukrainian financial situation also looks better after the EU became less blocked, and with potential customers for war material popping up. A lot of changes, and not all of them going into the same direction.
It was designed to infuriate Russians. The far-right milbloggers are screaming in outrage at the effrontery of Zelenskyy's proclamation. And it probably went over well with the Ukrainian public, because Ukraine has a national mythology of tweaking the nose of empires (see the article on the "Correspondence between the Ottoman Sultan and the Cossacks" in Wikipedia, and the painting, "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks"—which is analogous to our Washington Crossing the Delaware painting.)
According to @ChrisO_wiki on X...
> 'Novorossiya militia reports' is furious: "Is this what the Russian government was aiming for? After elevating this worthless individual for four years, they've now given him a perfect opportunity to troll and laugh. Are you satisfied?"
> 'Shelter No. 8' calls for retaliatory raids on Kyiv and Lviv, and for the Ukrainian presidential mansion to be razed in response: "The old-timers themselves gave him the opportunity to troll themselves."
> Comrade Artyom' comments that this is happening because nobody is afraid of Russia and its elderly rulers any more: "This is what happens when young brains confront old ones...😔 By the way, I want to remind you that humor is a powerful weapon that changes reality. Those who were once feared are turned into laughingstocks, and after that, no one is afraid of anyone anymore, and, accordingly, no one obeys anyone anymore."
> 'Two Majors' condemns the failure of Russia's own state propaganda machine to counter Zelenskyy's trolling: "The bastard knows how to wage an information war."
>In return for Ukrainian forbearance, Putin agreed to a 1000-to-1000 prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.
That sounds like a, what, 5 to 1 deal in favor of Ukraine, in exchange for an attack they probably wouldn't have launched either way? Masterfully negotiated.
That assumes that Russia actually will exchange those prisoners, which is yet to be seen.
Re #9:
Why would there be gas rationing in the US vs gas simply costing more - which would in turn price out vast chunks of the developing world - and reduce global demand. I'm sure Bolivia or Afghanistan might end up rationing, but the richest country in the world? We'll just pay more money.
The third would has *already* seen massive rationing and demand destruction. Presumably the report is projecting that things will get bad enough that the US is affected as well.
That was one of the study's predictions. But, yes, less than 10% (8% last year)of US petroleum comes from the Gulf. During the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo of the US, something like a third of petroleum came from the Gulf. The US was able to replace about half of that from other sources, but we still had a 15% deficit. We had gas rationing where drivers with odd-numbered license plates could buy gas on odd-numbered days, and even-numbered plates on even-numbered days (I don't remember how they delt with plates with alpha characters). I'm not sure if 10% drop would cause rationing.
But some things to think about:
1. The light crude we're exporting isn't necessarily being reimported as refined products. Other countries will be bidding against us. The oil that we send to the Netherlands and South Korea to be refined may not come back to us — especially since Asia is suffering severe oil shortages right now, and Europe isn't doing much better.
2. And we who live in California don't have any pipelines coming across the Rockies. We get a third of our oil from the Gulf. Even if the US doesn't face rationing, we might very well in California, Oregon, and Washington. I don't know about the High West state. And no doubt the Republicans will blame Gavin Newsom and the Democrats for a mess they didn't create...
Still, why would they ration vs just relying on higher prices to sort things out? I don't remember any serious talk of rationing during the Biden oil price spike. A lot has changed since the 1970s.
True. I'm thinking in worst-case scenarios. But in real-money terms, the Biden price spike was nothing compared to the increase in gas prices after OPEC shut off the spigot in 73-74. As a kid, I remember gas prices in the 30-35 cents-per-gallon range ($2.23 to $2.98 in today's dollars). The price of gas went up 2.5x to 3.0x after that, and never went down again — even once the oil started flowing again. The lines at gas stations were insane. I remember witnessing a few fist fights over who got to a pump first. A limited rationing regime, giving people with odd and even plates access on alternate days, calmed people down a lot. The lines to fill up were still long, though (but no worse than the queue at Costco gas pumps today).
Also they implemented the 55 mph speed limit on US highways to save gas. That was a big pain in the ass, and they kept that speed limit in place long after the need for it disappeared. Modern cars with higher-revving engines are more efficient at higher speeds. I hope no idiot suggests this as a solution if gas gets scarce!
One of the supporting arguments of speed limits in various EU states is exactly the extra fuel consumption. (Sometimes considering CO2 and climate change, now, due to the Iran situation, fuel saving can be a reason on its own.)
(For example, German highways still have no general speed limits. Of course, local speed limits are present at most of the network.)
I’m having a hard time imagining modern Americans accepting rationing vs just paying more at the pump. As evidenced by sheriffs refusing to enforce the Covid lockdowns, any policy restricting the freedom of 90%+ of Americans will be impossible to enforce these days, because unlike the 70s ~no one alive remembers the rationing of WWII.
WWII Veteran Standing On Field Not Planned
https://theonion.com/wwii-veteran-standing-on-field-not-planned/
It happens all the time in the US. The term of art is "anti price gouging" measures.
What happens when people start getting into fist fights over who's next at the pump? :-)
Paying more for gas feeds back into every aspect of the economy, although much less so than in the 70s. During those crisis, the price of Crude basically 4x and then 2x beyond that, which is what drove a lot of the inflation.
It's now 1.5x - 2x higher than before the war, so a major disruption, but anyone selling you 1970s-era stagflation because of the Hormuz being blocked is lying to you.
I look forward to these every OT Beowulf, thanks for putting them out!
You've missed Putin's newest trolling: Calling for Germany's fallen-from-grace ex-chancellor Schröder as a negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.
After Schröder's chancellorship, he became a personal friend(!) of Putin and a long-time boardmember in the German subsidiary of Russia's state oil company Gazprom, and of the joint venture of Gazprom that created the NordStream pipelines for direct oil transport between Russia and Germany.
In the beginning of the war, Schröder fell completely from grace by not calling the invasion what it is, tacitly defending the Russian viewpoint. It was so disgraceful that even his party, the social democrat SPD that is meme-fied as lacking any backbone, ousted him (there is an old rhyme from Weimar/Nazi-times that keeps getting repeated: "Wer hat uns verraten? Die Sozialdemokraten!" - who betrayed us? the social democrats!).
Back to Putin's suggestion of Schröder as a neutral negotiator: Top-notch trolling, because even now there were some SPD members that didn't refuse outright with something along the lines of "we should at least consider and think about it". Incredible, absolute incredible that this elementary school level of trolling actually works.
btw, love your fog of war stuff.
Let's also not forget the immortal quote of Schröder about Putin: That he is a "flawless democrat" (2004), which he stands by.
Oh right, a quote for the history books for sure. It is even better in the original specific German as you know.. hard to translate though. Maybe "immaculate" makes it sound a bit more dramatic like the German "lupenrein"?
> It turns out we don’t have the types of refineries that can handle the lighter crude oil produced by fracking.
I've known about this before, but haven't really given it much thought. But now my question is: why ? It seems like there's a lot of money left on the table for someone to build a quick-and-dirty light crude refinery right next to a fracking well, and pocket all the money that'd otherwise go to innumerable intermediaries. Is this because the concept of a "quick-and-dirty light crude refinery" is nonsensical, and even the cheapest possible refinery would take many decades and billions of dollars to build ? Is there government regulation that prevents refinery-building on US soil ? Do we have some international pact with Saudi Arabia (or whomever) wherein we agreed to let them do all of our refining in exchange for... something ? Or what ?
Yes. So many questions. I don't have the answers. But ChatGPT sez: A refinery can cost $10–20+ billion and take a decade to permit and build. After the U.S. lifted its crude export ban in 2015, a lot of shale oil went overseas to foreign refineries in South Korea, India, and the Netherlands. It was cheaper to export than to build refineries. But the ChatMonster says that many US refineries can handle light crude if they mix it with heavier crude. But their economics were optimized for heavier crude. "Running too much light crude can actually create imbalances: excess naphtha/gasoline components, underutilized cokers, lower margins on expensive upgrading equipment."
So, until now, it was cheaper and easier to export light crude, import heavy crude, and import refined products.
From a more general perspective, Charlie Stross wrote in his blog:
> "The truth of the matter is, we're being forced to confront an iron law of economics: you can optimize a system for efficiency or for robustness, but not for both. Just-in-time supply chains are efficient, but there's no slack in the system. Systems with warehousing and storage and redundancy built-in are resilient, but they're not efficient. And over the past 50 years we've abandoned them, in the name of efficiency, so that the excess capacity could be sold off and turned into profits. This war is payback time for the cult of efficiency over robustness in business."
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/03/taking-a-short-break.html
Canada has the opposite problem, as the oil sands produce ultra-heavy crude that needs to be sent to the US or China for refinement. Is it possible to mix oil sands oil and shale oil together…?
Covid should have already woken up plenty of strategists regarding JIT vs resilience. I wonder if there is a refinery for light crude in construction somewhere?
In any case, the silver lining could be an accelerated adoption of renewable energies and compatible tech like BEVs. In my home country, the gap in price per Unit of energy from fossil vs electric shrinking away.
Small example: 1 liter diesel now costs 2€, providing 10 kWh of chemical energy(0,20€/kWh). Electricity costs between 0,20-0,40€/kWh. Given that you can always get 2-3 times more output per input-kWh from electric systems (That means, running a BEV has 1/3 the fuel cost compared to fossil fuel), there is already ample incentive to buy electric cars and electric heat pumps, if you can stomach the investment and have control over it (renters can't choose their heating system).
And yet, conservatives are still largely sabotaging the transition. F*** me, right.
My takeaway from Covid is that it’s not good business to prepare for these kinds of supply issues, because “price gouging” means you won’t be able to charge enough in bad times to make preparations economical.
As if it were all about prices. Some countries already prepare for such situations, which is probably a learning from the 70's oil crises? Many countries have strategic oil and gas reserves that can last for months, especially when "rationed" or prioritized (like heating for homes in winter as a basic necessity above other things).
So transitioning to more independent, renewable energy tech, like heating homes with electric heat pumps, reduces dependence and pressure on such strategic reserves (lots of details left out, obviously, because the electricity still has to come from somewhere).
I guess it is all about options: The less you rely on single sources, the less you can be blackmailed. Not hard to get, is it?
I had considered purchasing an EV, but I live in a place where wildfires have been common in recent years. Although none have come close to my house, in one episode we lost our power for 48 hrs. Something to do with a substation getting burned. I didn't purchase an EV, because I decided that a gasoline-powered car would be able to get me out of town if the electricity were out for a long period. Now I'm wondering if I should have done so and popped for some solar panels (but my electricity charges are so small that it didn't make financial sense to purchase them).
Even if the power goes out, you'd still have whatever power was in the EV before the outage, and if you're charging every night and not taking long trips every day the odds are good it's close to full. I'd think you can at least be confident there's enough charge to get out of Dodge in an emergency.
I have more personal familiarity with Hampshire's problems than Ethan and he is incorrect.
> Between Fall 2022 and Fall 2024, enrollment grew 68%. Students were finding Hampshire, choosing Hampshire, and staying at Hampshire.
The rate of accepted students choosing Hampshire has dropped off a cliff. The number of accepted students has *just started* to drop off a cliff, because the 'echo boom' is ending and the number of potential undergraduates *everywhere* is tanking. The students to get Hampshire up to 1000 by 2035 **simply do not exist.**
Hampshire is not the first of the dozens of small colleges in Massachusetts alone which will collapse this decade, and it will not be the last. This is the worst possible time to try an ambitious (re)founding, while colleges across the spectrum from weird to boring are fighting for their lives even with ideal management and strong endowments. Also, Ethan forgets that the choice not to have an endowment was deliberate and part of the founding philosophy of Hampshire.
If the college can't muster even 1000 students, and as you say, there aren't enough students in general, then what is the purpose of keeping it open? Institutions that outlive there usefulness should close. If society needs the capacity in the future for some reason then new and better credentialing systems will rise up to fill the gap.
I have a question for anyone knowledgeable about economics, specifically about near-term housing prices. It seems pretty widely-agreed the war in Iran and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to cause a global recession and significant inflation. The magnitude is yet to be determined–that depends on how the war ends and how quickly–but even if full peace were restored and the Strait Opened tomorrow, my understanding is that there will be many months of disruption in global fuel supplies.
The question is this: given that there will obviously be increases in fuel prices and many sorts of goods downstream of fuel prices, what trend should we expect in housing and property prices? I’m particularly interested in prices in and around large, economically vibrant cities where housing already tends to be expensive. Would you expect house prices to rise with the general inflation rate, to hold steady or to fall?
I’m going to talk through my own layperson’s knowledge of the economics at play and come to a tentative answer. Feel free to dispute, correct, or bring up factors I hadn’t considered in the comments. My current (low-confidence) prediction is that house prices are likely to fall somewhat; if the recession is bad they may fall a lot. But mortgage rates will also very likely rise.
OK, the easy part first: mortgage rates. As I understand it, if the overall rate of inflation (i.e. averaged over some typical basket of goods) increases, interest rates pretty much have to increase along with them. If interest rates stay low while inflation is high, there’s very little reason for anyone to lend money, as they’ll quickly lose ground against inflation. Mortgage rates are interest rates, so they can be expected to increase, and I believe in some cases already have.
The tricker part: the prices of housing itself. Unlike many other sorts of goods that are produced quickly and consumed steadily, houses are slow to build and last a long time. So over a handful of months, it’s reasonable to treat the underlying housing stock as essentially constant.[1] If and when the broader economic trends move housing prices, they will do so by some combination of changing the demand, and influencing which existing houses get put on the market at all.
Demand: is housing demand likely to increase, decrease or stay steady, particularly in large economic centers? My semi-principled guess is it will decrease: a worse economy means fewer jobs drawing people to move to and stay in expensive urban centers. Absent that draw, people will correct out to places with lower costs of living.[2] Overall, I expect fewer buyers for houses in urban centers, and those in the market will have tighter budgets and thus less ability to bid up prices.
Supply: I feel like I’m on even shakier ground here, but my even-less-principled guess is that supply of housing on the market is likely to increase. Some fraction of people feeling the economic squeeze will need to convert capital assets into cash, and selling second homes or homes in expensive areas is one way they can do that. I could imagine some trends in the other direction, such as those who were already planning to see waiting to put their properties on market until things stabilize. But overall my guess is still that supply would increase modestly.
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Both of those trends point in the same direction, so my low-confidence guess is that housing prices will decrease–maybe slightly, maybe sharply–even as many other things get more expensive. But feel free to tell me why I'm wrong below, at length if you like.
[1] Over a longer time, increases in material costs will make building new houses and maintaining existing ones more expensive, and thus reduce the supply somewhat compared to the counterfactual world with no Iran war. But I expect that effect to be slow enough to safely ignore for the moment.
[2] I would also guess that different types of housing might be affected differently. Specifically that economic uncertainty and reduced prosperity ought to make renting more attracting that buying. So the ratio of rental fees to sale prices for houses might increase somewhat (even if they're both getting cheaper).
The Irish experience has been that in an economic downturn, it's harder to sell (since people can't get mortgages/don't have the same job opportunities to earn high salaries) so owners of houses are happier to rent them out for whatever they can get, then when the market recovers they sell the house (pays off the remaining mortgage and they don't have to bother with tenants).
Whether that will happen as you forecast, we'll have to wait and see. Some people might decide to sell now, pay off the mortgage, and get out because they're afraid of being stuck in negative equity.
Assuming you're correct about the fuel price rise, I would rather expect home prices to rise in inner ring suburbs where a short, reasonable commute is possible, but fall in suburbs further from the city center.
Regarding interest rates: I'm sure there are different effect sizes at work, but higher interest rates I think are kind of harder to predict what effect they'll have on real estate prices than you might think, because they tend to reduce both supply and demand at the same time. Fewer people can take on those larger monthly mortgage payments, so you get reduced demand, but at the same time, for people that already have a mortgage, the cost of packing up and moving and taking out a new mortgage at higher rates has now increased substantially, so there are fewer sellers, also.
>My current (low-confidence) prediction is that house prices are likely to fall somewhat; if the recession is bad they may fall a lot. But mortgage rates will also very likely rise.
If mortgage rates rise, prices should fall, because rising mortgage rates reduces the demand for homes. (Because demand is the willingness and ability to buy at a range of prices, and higher mortgage rates reduces the ability to buy at all prices ) But that should put upward pressure on rents.
I am not an economist, but I agree with your assessment. Moreover, I believe that house prices went down in many European countries as a reaction to the 2022 energy crisis. They even went down nominally, and dropped significantly in inflation-adjusted value. This was even more remarkable because they had been going steeply and steadily upwards for a long time.
The situation seems to be really similar to me, so I take this as a supporting data point.
Have house prices really gone down in the places where people want to/have to live? If you take the German average, it's very much a useless number: Large swathes of former East Germany are being deserted, while everyone wants to live where the economic opportunity is - larger cities and their metropolitan areas. Prices there are just growing steadily, usually outpacing inflation.
I would expect similar effects in most EU countries.
Yes, they have gone done in popular places as well. For example, -15% in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, -10% in Munich, a bit less in Berlin or Cologne, but still -5% or so.
It's also not rocket science to understand what happened. As reaction to the energy crisis, the ECB (European Central Bank) raised interest rates from 0% to 4.5% in a year or so, and mortgage rates in Germany rose from 1% to 4%.
Ah, I see what you mean. I consider this a one-time effect due to the shift from the long 0% interest era back to a historically more normal +x% interest era. That decreased sticker prices, but the reality is that almost no-one pays cash, so for the buyers the effective cost of the mortgage has not changed. And the latter is the reason *why* the sticker prices went down.
Has anyone heard what's going on with Tornyol, the interesting (anti-)mosquito drone company Scott has boosted? I put down the pre-order deposit last year, which supposedly grants access to "exclusive technical updates," but I haven't seen any. The website now says pre-orders are closed, but that's about the only change I can see. I would LOVE to test out an anti-mosquito drone and hope the company and technology are on track!
Hey! Tornyol founder here. We've been pretty busy with R&D and havent taken the time to detail much lately, but will be coming back with an update pretty soon. Things are on track accounting for usual engineering optimism about deadlines! We have autonomous drones (timlidly) flying around the office and we're working hard every day to make them bolder and more confident in their abilities, until the day when we can kill mosquitoes autonomously. Thanks a lot for beeing with us and very exicted to show what we're up to soon!
Will the drones intimidate the little buggers as well as a waved hand yet?
How are you going to ensure that the drones only kill disease-carrying mosquitoes, and not other insects?
Alex can provide more detail, but the company addresses this on its website. A short version: “Our LeSonar2 phased array sonar uses 380 smartphone microphones and an Artix-7 FPGA to map the world in 3D. Phase information allows us to measure .1 mm movements and identify mosquitoes through their unique wingbeat signature.”
Are they able to distinguish the wingbeats of mosquitos from all the other 18,000 described species of flies in the United States?
Straight from the source! Thanks for the information, and keep up the good work. I look forward to future updates.
Separate from the politics of Hampshire College, if they're so good at creating research doctorates, and if research doctorates are so good at creating value, then... whence the cash flow problems? Research-focused universities should have no problem monetizing developments that came out of their labs. Without any knowledge or research I suspect that "proportion of research doctorates" is a goodharted statistic that doesn't represent the value prop of the college.
Value creation =/= value capture. A PhD creates value throughout the lifespan. Much of it (typicaly almost all) doesn't occur during the PhD candidature period. Much of it also doesn't consist in anything patentable but expertise, blue sky contribution to basic knowledge that will only lead to economic advancements later on etc.
My impression is that universities produce more researchers than the for-profit markets demands (in pretty much every field except pharmacology).
It's doesn't matter how much value you produce. Wages are set by supply and demand, just like any other price. Too many people looking for that job->low wages for that job->No way for universities to capture that value from students.
Hampshire is an undergraduate college. It's a good prep for going to graduate school and then into research, but little of that research is done *at* Hampshire.
Hampshire college (from my understanding) is an LAC with an unusual pedagogy, if I understand correctly. They do not have graduate students. I think the post is saying that an unusual number of their graduates get research doctorates after graduating, which I do think is a good measure of performance, but is not unusual for other similarly-unusual LACs, see St.John's College, for example. This is in part due to a) weird pedagogies selecting for students more likely to get PhDs and b) the graduates not really having marketable skills after undergrad and needing to go to grad school to be employable, which in my mind makes the over-standard rates somewhat less impressive. I don't know enough about Hampshire college to be sure, though.
Yes, this is basically correct. The mandatory senior thesis is a big deal, though; schools which are more normal but have the strong thesis requirement (like Reed College, where I went) also have extremely high graduate degree rates.
I see the victor of grad school rates as Deep Springs college, where ~80% of graduates get a terminal degree, and the students *do* graduate from normal, standard schools on a normal time frame, although I do think that the 1% acceptance rate does most of the heavy lifting (even though they do the best job at teaching of any school in America, I think).
I think mandatory senior thesis is just good pedagogy and tends to just make the students more interested in original research and more capable of it, hence higher graduate degree rates. I doubt it has selection effects (I don't think HS seniors care that much about mandatory thesis requirements when choosing their college).
When I was at Hampshire the thesis project (called Division 3) loomed large from the moment we arrived on campus. Toward the end of every semester, a new crop of students completing their theses were very visible in the community-- talking about their work socially, presenting it formally, and when finished, celebrating by ringing a large bell at the center of campus. It was clear that most of what we did during our tenure as students was supposed to move us toward that final goal. Your self-chosen Division 2 faculty committee was supposed to keep you moving in that direction for the middle two years of a four-year course of study. However if you planned poorly or shifted gears too late or picked a research area where knowledgeable advisors were hard to come by within the system (as I did), there was a risk of not making it to the finish line. I ended up transferring out and finishing a bachelor's degree elsewhere, but I still view my Hampshire experience as having been extremely valuable to my intellectual, personal, and professional development.
The thesis probably has direct effects - who can do a long research thesis better than someone who's done a short one? But the rest of your point about selection effects and illegibility reducing other options is probably correct.
Yeah, I agree. Probably wasn't very clear. I just don't think it is as large of a deal as the directly correlated category of 'places that are interested in forcing them, and in making them serious affairs', which I bet explains something like 90% of the effect that can be matched directly to thesis/not thesis.
It amuses and befuddles me to no end that everyone abstractly understands the California death spiral of:
Increase Regulatory Requirements -> Higher Prices -> Poor people can no longer afford housing/transportation/food -> Welfare increased so poor people can afford housing/transportation/food -> Taxes Raised -> Higher Prices -> Repeat
But then whenever the chance comes to not increase regulatory requirements, they kick and scream until they get their special “California Compliant” 20% more expensive goods.
Sure, maybe farm animal welfare really is worth the extra cost, but that’s what they said about environmental review, a $20 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, DEI, special emissions requirements, and union labor requirements too.
Doesn't this contradict the complaints that CA is forcing the entire country to follow its rules? Because if they were, there shouldn't be a cost differential.
I think this is a pretty flippant way of talking about keeping animals pinned immobile inside a tiny box for their entire lives. We could probably lower the price of cotton by reinstituting slavery, but it's not merely a "failure to learn the lessons of the California death spiral" that prevents us from doing so!
(also, California has been the fastest growing state in absolute terms, and the third-fastest-growing in per capita terms, over the past 25 years).
California had a net loss of 3 million American born (gained 7 and lost 10 million), and is now set to lose Congressional seats. The fantastic growth rates of prior decades has slowed relative to the rest of the country, especially the rest of the sunbelt. And it is now somewhere between flat and negative, being somewhat offset by immigrants (legal and not so).
Those leaving commonly reference the cost of living and specifically the cost of housing, which is empirically significantly higher than the rest of the country. I have nothing to add about the cost of pork, but there is clearly a pattern in California of more regulation and higher costs leading to people leaving the states at a higher rate than they arrive.
I am an exception to the rule, coming back home to my birth state (for the great surfing), but the increase in cost of living (housing, utility rates, gas, insurance, fast food) was not minor, and in some cases was double.
You have to draw the end of the moral circle somewhere, and if you include animals then you hit the repugnant conclusion *now* instead of in some future hyperpopulation scenario. If you give any non-negligible moral weight to animals, then they dominate any utilitarian calculus. If you want to be vegetarian then fine, but I refuse to believe that forcing the rest of the world to adopt Bay Area eating habits (which is what such a worldview implies) is anything other than evil. An entire globe full of food cultures wiped out in the name of nonhuman utility maximization.
There is also a qualitative difference between humans and animals. I can walk up to another person and say, “hey, it would be a good idea if we both agreed to not enslave each other. I think we would both be better off,” but there’s no way I can walk up to a pig and make a mutually beneficial deal with it. The pig has no power over me, even theoretically, and has no way to condition the quality of its meat or any other good that I want on how well I treat it.
Regarding the California economy, I would be interested in seeing a “purchasing power pairity” adjusted figure.
But animals were already given non-negligible moral weight and we were just doing okay. For example, banning the hunting of endangered species.
You don't have to assign moral weight to animals to do that, you just have to believe "biodiversity" has some sort of value to humans, or that some specific species does. Indeed, assigning moral weight to animals CANNOT explain a ban on specifically hunting endangered species (as opposed to banning hunting).
This is because tigers and elephants and komodo dragons are cool. When the snail darter delayed the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam project it caused a major political backlash because nobody cares about a fish that looks and acts almost exactly like a dozen other fish.
>If you give any non-negligible moral weight to animals, then they dominate any utilitarian calculus.
How so?
There are less than a billion pigs in the world, around 6 million dolphins, less than half a million elephants.
There are *lots* of humans in the world, especially compared to the types of 'intelligent' animals we might want to give noticeable consideration to.
Sure, if you give every ant 1/10th the moral weight of a human, that would lead to absurd results. But I don't think anyone serious is suggesting that.
"But I don't think anyone serious is suggesting that."
The shrimp welfare people do, think of all the liddle shrimpies!
https://www.shrimpwelfareproject.org/
"~440 billion shrimps are farmed each year.
That’s more than 5x the total number of all farmed land animals combined.
This makes shrimp welfare an area of high impact, where your involvement can lead to great change.
Discover the impact that industry representatives have already made with our support—see how many shrimp lives have been improved."
I considered mentioning them, but I don't believe they ever model each shrimp as 1/10th the moral weight of a human. I haven't seen them give an explicit number, but their focus and rhetoric seems geared towards a much smaller fraction tan that.
strawman: "prop 12 requires that pigs in California's supply chain have 24 square feet of space" -> "forcing the rest of the world to adopt Bay Area eating habits" -> "an entire world of food cultures wiped out".
Last time I checked. Prop 12 doesn't ban pork, meat, require vegetarianism. It literally just says your breeding sows need to have enough room to ROTATE. I mean...
false dichotomy: "if you give any non-negligible moral weight to animals, they dominate the calculus". Ok so the only options are 0 or full global mandated vegetarianism. Many people who support prop 12 are not vegetarians and just believe that pigs should be able to turn around.
"Ok so the only options are 0 or full global mandated vegetarianism. Many people who support prop 12 are not vegetarians and just believe that pigs should be able to turn around."
Many people are fundamentally incapable of arriving at a coherent conclusion, yes. Did you know that no animal can turn around after it is slaughtered?
It seems to apply to raw pork, cooked/prepared foods are exempt:
"Premade pork products are exempt from Prop 12 standards, including sliced ham, salami and deli meat."
Ah I’ll revise my statement then:
Last time I checked. Prop 12 doesn't ban pork, meat, require vegetarianism. It literally just says your breeding sows need to have enough room to ROTATE [but only if you want to sell your whole-cut meat products in the California market, go nuts if you’re processing it]. I mean...
If you have a principled reason for why animal welfare matters enough that it’s good to ban gestational crates but not enough that it’s good to ban slaughtering animals for meat then I’d love to hear it.
What I suspect is happening is that prop 12 was the most aggressive policy the people involved thought they could get away with in the current political environment. If the political environment becomes more favorable then they will push for more restrictions.
You can't think of principled reasons that might apply? It seems obvious to me.
- "Unnecessary suffering during life" and "death" are different severity gradients. Many ethical frameworks dictate how an animal lives is more important than whether it eventually dies, weighing the suffering as lengthy, conscious, and avoidable. A quick death after a brief life is not the same harm as years of immobilization.
- Welfarism - "reduce suffering within a system that still uses animals" is a principled and internally consistent framework held by serious philosophers. Compatible with your example.
- Talk to literally most people. Almost everyone thinks there's a difference between hunting a deer for food and torturing a deer for fun even though they both end up in a dead deer. Intuition that "the manner of treatment matters independently of the outcome" is the same intuition that Prop 12 operates on.
Your second suspicion is just a strange, unsupported slippery slope, and doesn't even address the actual argument about whether prop 12 is fundamentally good or bad.
Nobody would make analogous arguments about humans.
Okay, maybe some 19th century slaveowner who wanted to imagine that they are nice to their slaves might make analogous arguments about humans.
I am not sure what death spiral you mean. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-19/california-sees-population-growth-for-third-consecutive-year-after-pandemic-era-exodus
Ten million Americans left California, 7 million entered. This has been offset with immigration. The point is that it is getting very expensive to live in California, empirically so, and that reduced growth rates and now domestic growth rates are negative and way below other sun belt states (none of which are as naturally attractive as California IMO).
That sure sounds like a far cry from a death spiral to me.
>This has been offset with immigration
That sounds like an indicator of vitality.
And note that California's median age is quite low, compared to other states. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/median-age-by-state
Again, that implies the opposite of a death spiral.
I certainly agree “death spiral” is overstating the case. And yes there are still lots of great reasons to come to California. I moved back here 6 years ago (and my cost of living almost doubled).
The point which stands is that California regulations are driving up costs of living, and this contributed to net domestic emigration and substantially lower growth rates. It isn’t a healthy situation. The saving factor has been foreign immigration, but this is at risk of being stopped now too (assuming it hasn’t stopped already?).
>I certainly agree “death spiral” is overstating the case
That was my entire point. OP's claim was essentially dishonest..
> It isn’t a healthy situation
Maybe. But maybe continued population growth is also suboptimal.
And maybe the costs of regulation are greater than the benefits, or maybe the reverse is true.
It was hyperbolic.
As far as I know I'm very happy with the results of $20 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, DEI, special emissions requirements, and union labor requirements. Feel free to link me to the libertarian think-pieces denouncing them all, but I've read a bunch of those already and not been convinced of anything.
Housing in specific has been regulated in ways that have caused problems, but that seems to be true in every city in the nation outside Texas, not just CA, And I don't see that generalizing to every other regulation.
I can understand you personally feeling fine with these regulations, the point Daniel makes still stands though that each drives up prices and contributes to a negative outcome dynamic of spiraling costs.
I don't think they do.
You don’t think $20 an hour wages drove up fast food prices, or that the emissions requirements and special taxes and requirements drove up our gas prices? I am just choosing the two most obvious and self evident examples, but if you don’t agree here, then we can probably just agree not to agree?
I've repeatedly consumed fast food from several different areas with high minimum wages. Perhaps if I'd had a side-by-side comparison between the prices the and in, say, rural Alabama I'd be shocked. But as even when my income was on the bottom end of middle class, I found it perfectly affordable[1]. I'm not animated enough by the issue to go deep into researching it, but I suspect the impact of minimum wage on fast food prices has been rather overstated.
[1] To be more precise, it was affordable that I could eat it several times a month without doing violence to my budget. It was still more expensive than buying food as groceries and I couldn't have afforded to live off it (if I'd wanted to, which I don't) until recently.
What they actually said was:
> the California death spiral of:
>Increase Regulatory Requirements -> Higher Prices -> Poor people can no longer afford housing/transportation/food -> Welfare increased so poor people can afford housing/transportation/food -> Taxes Raised -> Higher Prices -> Repeat
>But then whenever the chance comes to not increase regulatory requirements, they kick and scream until they get their special “California Compliant” 20% more expensive goods.
I don't think either of those things caused a death spiral of this magnitude or increased prices by 20%. According to first google result, a Big Mac costs $.03 more in CA than in Arizona, and is cheaper in CA than in Rhode Island.
I wouldn't be surprised that they increased prices of some things a bit, but I don't believe they create the death spiral and magnitude of consequence they were claiming.
I personally don't even expect that they are net-negative when you compare costs to benefits, which is the lowest bar OP would need to clear for their claim.
And, yes, these are the two most favorable examples. To convince me OP was correct I'd be looking for defenses of their *least* plausible examples. I'm not looking for 'of the 6 things I said, 1 was arguably directionally correct, how dare you call me a liar.'
I think it's mostly just housing which is causing the problems. Everything else seems insignificant compared to the cost of housing. Maybe with a side of Anarchyfare during the post-COVID years, but that's mostly in the past now.
And FWIW, state politicians *have* been trying to ease housing restrictions for the last several years. Just without much success yet.
Meat is not an essential product. Housing is. I'm saying this as a vegetarian who hasn't touched meat in 20 years.
Housing isn't essential, people lived for hundreds of thousands of years without housing.
Not really. AFAIK even hunter-gatherers tend to set up huts of varying levels of sophistication depending on how often they move around.
I guess we could go back further and quibble about what counts as 'people' on the evolutionary ladder. But even then, I'd point out that the only 'people' to ever do this were doing it in limited parts of Africa, and it's not possible in most other climates.
Hm, I did not consider this. So for the out of Africa event to happen, or at least to go more northern than say Syria, people had to get good at building huts?
Maybe even inventing textiles? Not sure why that even happened, the buckskin shirts that 18th century frontier American hunters wore seem good to me.
This is why the scientific community generally does not accept criticisms of out of Africa theory, like Chinese claims how they evolved separately, it is not a political trick to cut down on racism but rather Beijing was too cold for a hairless hominid who did not know how to build huts?
Some regulations are bad, some good, some mixed. There's never going to be one trick for perfect governance. I don't want to eat rotting infected meat, or foods with toxic chemicals in them. I don't want lead in gasoline.
I don't buy the idea that enforcing very minimal protections against animal cruelty will cause a significant cost increase. We have no guarantee that the proposed elimination of animal protections will provide any price relief to consumers. More likely, producers will pocket any savings for themselves.
"We have no guarantee that the proposed elimination of animal protections"
That's not what's proposed. What's proposed is an elimination of interstate trade barriers designed by one state to influence the welfare of animals elsewhere.
Yes, California is biased in favor of too much regulation. However, there are certain regulations that don't currently exist, but are badly needed nationally- and outlawing the really extreme animal cruelty practiced by our factory farm industry is maybe the most urgent of those. In this case, California's normally problematic bias is pointing it in the right direction.
It's kind of like how Texas is biased in favor of too little regulation, but that has the benefit of allowing the state to ignore NIMBYs. Stopped clocks are right twice a day.
This is one of those issues where the cost should be irrelevant.
I mean, you can think that, but when JD Vance defeats Gavin Newsom in 2028 because voters were afraid of California-style price increases I want you to remember this thread.
If democrats are stupid enough to nominate Newsom they deserve to lose, and that's the case whether or not farm animals sold in California have enough space to turn around.
No one who does photo ops about wrecking homeless people's few possessions deserves anything better than what they want for the less fortunate.
The extent to which animal welfare laws increased prices compared to the tariffs and the war with Iran is infinitesimal.
People need cheap bacon in order to survive or have a decent standard of living? Not buying it. Like I get expensive bacon/eggs makes people *mad* but this just doesn't fall into the same category of need as housing, ability to get to work, life-saving medicine, etc.
" they kick and scream until they get their special “California Compliant” 20% more expensive goods."
Your pronoun lacks a referent.
Crate-free pork only costs about an extra 6 cents per pound.
The number I get when I ask Google and AI is that prop 12 raised pork prices 20% in California. Some of these numbers are from pork-industry lobbying groups, which might not be entirely honest in their framing, but I don’t see anyone else directly comparing the before and after prices.
What I have seen are calculations for what the extra cost to produce compliant pork *should* be, but it’s easy for these sorts of analyses to be underestimates which fail to model the complexity of the economy.
Thanks for the info. Claude gave me the 6 cent number and told me that this higher price is could be due to seller mark-ups (which ofc shouldn’t be ignored).
I guess it’s somewhat unclear which number is the most practical for discussion, but I would still argue that a 20% price increase for pork isn’t that harmful. Pork makes up a relatively tiny percentage of the average person’s expenditures. A 20% increase to something that you spend 0.3% of your income on is insignificant compared to a 2% increase in price for housing, so I don’t think these two things are that comparable.
Also, people can substitute away from pork much more easily than they can substitute away from, say, interacting with infrastructure that required an environmental review to be constructed.
"but I would still argue that a 20% price increase for pork isn’t that harmful. Pork makes up a relatively tiny percentage of the average person’s expenditures."
Literally every regulator makes this argument about literally every regulation that increases the price of something. We end up paying the price for all of the regulations, not just your favorite ones.
Even if I took this argument at face value, the proper response would still be "apply critical thinking to each case individually and decide which are worth the cost and which aren't." It would not be "take a blanket position against all cost-increasing regulations and thereafter turn my brain off."
Really this is about as sensible as saying "every shop in the entire city tries to sell me things, but if I tried to buy everything that was on offer, I'd go broke. Therefore I should never buy anything." I don't have to accept the implicit claim that the only possible choices are "every cost-increasing regulation," or "no cost-increasing regulations." There are lots of alternatives (not just cannibalism).
The difference is that what you buy at a shop is at your sole discretion. You can stop anywhere on the slope.
What electorates buy has a sense of momentum to it, and you can only stop that momentum through coordination. The possible stopping points are mostly not stopping points any one rational actor would have selected.
So did everything else.
This is very obviously not the case with environmental review
The year is 2000. A gypsy fortune teller is approached by a young mother, who asks how her three children will turn out.
“Your eldest son,” she says, “will heal the sick.”
The mother smiles.
“Your daughter will also become a doctor. Not the kind that helps people, but she will do important work and her husband will brag about her at parties.”
The mother beams.
“Your younger son,” she says, “will pretend to be a white nationalist so he can get a job in the Trump administration.”
Statistics says that there is a guy out there who claimed to be gay/trans in the 2018-2022 period to get a well paid corporate job but who later claimed to be a proud white nationalist to get promoted into the Trump administration, all that without actually being gay, trans or white nationalist.
Statistics say there also is such a guy who is both gay/trans and a proud white nationalist.
Not quite as dramatic, but I know a guy that applied to jobs as a queer leftist woman of sorts in 2018-2022, and then transitioned into a male-passing antiwoke libertarian.
I recall one story about a (white) illegal immigrant who was a vocal supporter of Trump and his promises of mass deportation, and who died in ICE detention.
Speaking from direct personal experience and exposure to the community at large, in both red and blue areas it was a disadvantage to be trans when trying to get a well paid corporate job in 2018-2022, irrespective of whatever vibes-only narrative people are determined to peddle.
There were surely some particular companies where it might have helped, but not a meaningful fraction of corporate jobs.
There probably was a guy who tried it though.
>Speaking from direct personal experience and exposure to the community at large, in both red and blue areas it was a disadvantage to be trans when trying to get a well paid corporate job in 2018-2022, irrespective of whatever vibes-only narrative people are determined to peddle.
>There were surely some particular companies where it might have helped, but not a meaningful fraction of corporate jobs.
You seem pretty convinced that your personal experiences were the rule and not the exception. Do you have a non-vibes based reason for thinking so?
"You seem pretty convinced that your personal experiences were the rule and not the exception."
It's called a "null hypothesis." If you believe something like "pretending to be trans was often an advantage in seeking corporate jobs in 2018-2022,:" you should provide evidence to that effect. Without seeing evidence to that effect, nobody should believe it by default.
A) By exposure to the community I specifically mean "I was regularly in touch with or acquainted with a large number of trans people in my direct area". More than just my personal experience but still just anecdata.
B) The data collected by governmental and nongovernmental orgs show trans people as having 2-3 times more unemployment than cis people between 2015 and 2024. The difference shrinks only a little when you control for race and only a little again if you then look at specifically college degrees.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793920902776
Trans people massively report receiving mistreatment or being denied a job or being fired due to identity, and not particularly less in the period 2018 to 2022 as before.
I think that you can fairly question about whether / exactly how much the bad outcomes described in the literature and data really are or arent the result of direct discrimination. But nothing in the data bears out any kind of advantage in self report or in measureable outcomes of trans people relative to cis people, even just at the college degree level.
To what extent do straight white males report massive discrimination, mistreatment, being denied a job or being fired due to identity? (Are they even being surveyed?)
Pressing F to doubt - that kind of discrimination against mothers is explicitly illegal and absolutely the kind of thing no HR person would admit to doing.
Even still the math doesn't work. If the data that shows such high employment friction for trans people is _including_ this supposed advantage and there does not include _any_ disadvantage then you would have to be suggesting that it is simply the case that trans people (even controlling for a college degree!) are a third or less qualified for any particular job as cis people due to "self selection" or "mental issues" and that's just ridiculous. We have the stats on mental illness increase in trans women relative to cis, and it isn't large enough to match, and also we have data for cis people with those same mental issues, and their outcomes in the data aren't as bad as trans people with the same issue.
And on top of all of _that_, there was still no _change_ in the data in the years we are talking about, so even if what you were saying were true, we'd see it in the delta, and it's not there. Not that data will be persuasive to you.
There is now a benchmark that shows current AIs are not close to AGI at all, the ARC-AGI-3:
https://www.pushtotalk.gg/p/to-prove-we-havent-reached-agi-the?open=false
They don't score even 1% on it, but humans clear it easily. The benchmark is a series of simple videogames.
FYI the scoring algorithm for ARC-AGI-3 is really weird, it's not "did you solve the puzzle", it's a very complicated algorithm that takes into account how many moves you made relative to the top performing humans on the same puzzle (and IIRC some other factors). The scoring is somewhat defensible but there is a lot of debate over it.
https://blog.alexisfox.dev/arcagi3
Some researchers released a harness that scores 82% with Opus 4.6. It's not cheating by tailoring the harness to the games. It tells the agent to use Python to analyze the game board instead of reasoning about it directly.
All the ARC benchmarks take advantage of humans' strong visual reasoning compared to LLMs' relatively weak visual reasoning. It's pointing out a weakness instead of evaluating core intelligence. It's like if bats designed a benchmark around echolocation puzzles and gave it to humans. They transform the sensory data into a format we can perceive by pitch shifting it and slowing it down. Then they eliminate any puzzles from their set that humans solved or that bats couldn't solve, so that they're left with a set of puzzles only bats can solve.
Are the bats right to conclude humans lack general intelligence? Sort of, if your definition of general intelligence means you shouldn't be missing any type of intelligence bats have.
That aside, the ARC-AGI benchmarks tend to fall fairly quickly, and I expect the same will happen for v3.
I think if they manage to beat that benchmark by using coding to render the game intelligible to the LLM, it will be goodharting, because if you want these things to do super-science, there may not be any software that can make reality intelligible to the LLM.
Disagree; I think it would be exactly the desired outcome.
A human would quickly realise: “I don’t seem to be doing very well dealing with this directly, let me make a tool to assist me”. The AI needed to be told. This is also my experience using Claude for coding tasks: it’s not great at noticing when its approach is not working and it needs to change tack.
The benchmark is measuring the AI’s ability to sanity check its own output and autocorrect. Seems like a lot of benchmark to indirectly measure this one thing, but this kind of introspection certainly is something the agents aren’t great at yet, and seems worth tracking.
It would Goodhart the metric if that happens, because that approach will not transfer to pushing forward the frontiers of science. Can these things work when they're encountering a bit of raw reality, unmediated by any model of the behavior of that bit of reality? Because that's the situation when you're pushing against the edge of scientific knowledge. I don't know that we have a benchmark that tracks that.
The humans aren't using coding to make the game intelligible. The LLM is using coding. This is allowed under the ARC-AGI rules.
I'm really not a fan of that benchmark.
To begin with, it's visual puzzles that are fed into the models as long strings of text tokens. If you gave humans puzzles like that in a text format, approximately 0% of us would be able to solve them. The usual conter-argument is that the models tend to score worse when the puzzles are fed in as image tokens- but I think that demonstrates that the models are very bad at perceiving the details of images, which we already know. A better reasoning benchmark would isolate abstract reasoning from the ability to see images or reconstruct them from text strings, rather than conflating them.
Also, I think the scoring is misleading. Humans are rated at 100%, even though only about 40-60% of humans can complete any given level, and the scoring is based on efficiency rather than completion rate. Some human testers actually scored similarly to the LLMs, despite our species' much more impressive visual comprehension abilities.
I think the ARC-AGI people have a habit of choosing scoring systems that maximize the point difference between humans and the models- and I think that explains why the previous two benchmarks started out implying a huge difference, then suddenly saturated, rather than showing gradual improvement over time like better benchmarks.
> To begin with, it's visual puzzles that are fed into the models as long strings of text tokens.
I don't think this is an ironclad objection, because text tokens are the basic units of LLM input and "thought". It'd be like saying, "I am a human and I could not solve this game because all I got as the input were excitation signals on the rods and cones in my retina, instead of clear spoken instructions and state descriptions".
> but I think that demonstrates that the models are very bad at perceiving the details of images, which we already know.
It seems like a generally intelligent agent would be good at many things, including visual perception. Certainly any agent that needs to act in the physical world would have to possess some form of perception, and radio waves (including light waves) are an excellent medium for it (at least here on Earth) -- even if it ends up translating those radio wave signals into text tokens as it receives them.
> Some human testers actually scored similarly to the LLMs, despite our species' much more impressive visual comprehension abilities.
This is a good point.
Humans can solve puzzles in non-native formats in theory, but we do seem to have "hardware-accelerated" perception for (up to) 3-D structures. E.g. it's possible for mathematicians to prove properties about sphere-packing in 22-D, but I wouldn't expect the average joe to find those properties "intuitively obvious" in the same way they often find properties about 3-D structures obvious. Likewise, LLMs are not natively 3-D. Although I think there are other types of architectures that are 3-D native, such as CNNs and Diffusion models.
I don't know if CNNs and Diffusion models are "3D native" (they could be); but in general, I agree -- humans are not "Generally Intelligent" either. So perhaps the bar for LLMs is lower than it seems...
oops, I had generally meant 2D, not 3D, in the context of image classifiers and such. Nothing to my knowledge seems to be able to do 3D super well, yet. Although I think this is LeCun and co's big obsession.
Is this something trivial like that current models don’t have video in?
I think it's not that, because they can take the video game in frame by frame. Looking at Claude Plays Pokemon, it's like they can't reason very well when confronted with a video game, probably because there's nothing like that in the training set.
Claude was just very bad at image recognition too though, like repeatedly failing to recognize *the player character* on screen, or spending hours wandering around a room without managing to talk to the only NPC in that room.
Claude is getting better and better at playing Pokemon though and can mostly beat that very long game, so I feel like the 1% number is too low or has some kind of cherry picking
From what I’ve seen by far the biggest issue with Claude plays Pokemon is that it’s half blind. The second biggest issue is that it will get stuck in these loops T.T
I don't think it's that it's half blind. He's not thinking like a half-blind human would about the situation. Even if it beats it, it would still be Pyrrhic victory, because it's performance was far beneath human. I also wonder how expensive it is to have Claude play this game, the token burn must be insane.
On Save our Bacon, from reading the text, it appears that states have enacted prohibitions to inter-state trade based on their own internal standards. This is a problem as the federal government generally does not allow states to erect barriers to interstate trade. I do not see where it makes it so a state would not be able to set internal standards for their own product. However, their product will have to compete with products from other states that do not have the same standards and related costs....
This isn’t how the dormant commerce clause works. States are allowed to set standards for any products sold in their states, including ones that come from other states—they just can’t set discriminatory standards that benefit in-state producers or penalize out-of-state producers. The Supreme Court specifically found that the California law on pig treatment was allowed under this framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Pork_Producers_Council_v._Ross
Maybe not. I would have said that is exactly how it works prior to 2023. I'm not so sure a long term understanding of the dormant commerce clause based on an assessment of substantial burden in one case can be relied upon as definitional in the long term. I believe we will see this one again sometime as the states try harder to push their intangible moral codes on each other while avoiding the associated costs...
Someone else has already pointed out that this is being worked with legislation (which was the point of the original post)...
How are they "avoiding the associated costs"? Under California's law, pork producers are free to (A) comply with California's requirements only for pigs whose meat will go to California, and charge a higher price for that meat compared to other meat; or (B) completely exit the California market, avoiding any new expenses. And if for some reason some pork producers choose to raise the price of all of their pork sold nationwide to cover the costs of compliance with California law, then other producers who choose to stay out of the California market are free to undercut and out-compete them.
It’s not about the dormant commerce clause anymore. It’s about the active commerce clause because congress is about to regulate interstate commerce by passing legislation explicitly preempting state extraterritorial animal welfare requirements.
With respect to the new Farm Bill I agree; I was responding to Frono's comment, which I read as a more general claim. I don't think it's true that "the federal government generally does not allow states to erect barriers to interstate trade" if you're counting things like California Proposition 12 as barriers--it is actually exceedingly common for states to have different product standards from each other that require producers selling to multiple states to either meet the most restrictive standards or differentiate their products by state, and only in relatively limited cases has the federal government stepped in (and generally by imposing detailed national standard, as with for example pharmaceuticals).
In my opinion, it is exactly this overly broad interpretation of the commerce clause that is the heart of innumerable problems in our country. "Restrictions on interstate trade" should be read to mean restrictions that apply *uniquely* to interstate trade, something like a tarriff. Otherwise this would also prohibit a state to set taxes on out-of-state goods, since that's also a cost on interstate trade. According to your interpretation, they could only tax goods produced in their own state but not ones that originated from abroad
I'm sure that Professor Peery had a wonderful time at that college and loves it and is very enthusiastic about the model of education there.
Which sounds like a lot of the free-range models of education often promoted on here as alternatives to the terrible state of current education.
But either the administration were none of them graduates of this amazing college, so why couldn't anyone competent graduate with a business degree from there and help run the place, or they *were* graduates and it turns out that free-range isn't necessarily the best way to run a business?
Because administering a college is a business. I'd like to know more about the particular bonehead financial decisions, but it might simply be that Hampshire College has run its course, and that the model isn't what people want right now (with the despair about AI, employment, you need credentials to get credentials to even get your CV accepted)? If employers are looking for something legible, "here's my MA in History from Ivy" is more familiar than "well we don't do grades and majors here, it's whatever Bill wanted to study for four years".
ISTM that there's this common thing that happens, where what I think the job is (produce educated and culturally aware graduates, design secure products, provide good service from this government department) is not actually what the job is (make enough money on tuition and grants to stay afloat, make products that sell well enough to keep the lights on, comply with every jot and tittle of the regulations even if that means no services are provided). It's like the negative image of Molloch--instead of overoptimizing on the thing that causes you to survive (and thus optimizing away joy and beauty and goodness), you overoptimize on joy and beauty and goodness (thus dooming yourself since you weren't managing to survive).
All fair points! Let me elaborate.
The original post covers the bonehead financial decisions, and why the model is what people want right now, with specific reference to despair about AI, employment, and credentials. If you want to end up with an MA in History from an Ivy, Hampshire is probably one of your strongest choices! Our grad placement rate is through the roof. https://www.mod171.com/p/real-hampshire-college-has-never
You're right that Hampshire sounds very free-range, and the way it's marketed reinforces that impression. But in fact, the model is not free-range at all. It is in fact very rigorous, more rigorous than what is offered at other colleges, and it would be easy to rebuild the identity around what it really offers. I go into the model in a second post: https://www.mod171.com/p/how-to-market-hampshire-college
The problem is, you pull out lines like "Hampshire College is the greatest model of higher education ever invented."
Don't be modest, Ethan, tell me how you really feel.
Maybe it is the most specialiest thing ever. Or maybe 80% of people would hate it there, even if the top top 20% would love it and all go on to do PhDs in Yale.
Have you any solid figures that there are enough (1) smart and (2) rich kids to keep the school open, without having to fall on your sword of "okay we need to appeal to the masses" and hence dilute the special rigour?
What's the employment rate for those doctorates? Where do they end up? How many are placed in industry, and do well enough to offset the cost of their education? The points in your second article are all about academia and then the last one is "oh yeah and they end up starting their own business":
"Hampshire ranks in the top 40 nationally for PhD attainment, an average of 8.68 of every 100 alumni go on to earn a doctoral degree
Two-thirds of graduates earn an advanced degree within ten years of commencement.
One in five Hampshire science students who complete their thesis are invited to present at a peer-reviewed conference.
Five percent of Hampshire science students are lead authors on published, peer-reviewed journal articles as undergraduates.
A quarter of Hampshire alumni start their own business or organization, placing Hampshire #6 on Forbes’ 2015 list of most entrepreneurial colleges."
Now to be fair, you do seem to be aware of that:
"I mean that the school doesn’t make it clear what the model means for you as a prospective student; or what the model means for your child, as a parent. Stories of amazing alumni can help make the possibilities clear, but they’re not enough on their own, and it’s not enough to say, “look at our amazing alumni”."
But again I think the problem down the line will be that, if you do successfully re-invent Hampshire College, then it will end up diluted from what it is (or was). Putting more emphasis on achievement will get you eventually sucked into the rat-race of credentialism.
I wish you luck, but I'm not sanguine this will succeed. Again, the problem is scaling up: how many unique shiny new educational programmes were piloted and did immensely well and then they tried scaling this up to national level and the thing collapsed like a souffle when you slam the oven door?
"My answer is because I will say: “This is the most powerful model in higher education and should be expanded immediately, so it can operate at full capacity kick Harvard’s ass”, instead of whatever the professional advancement staff said."
"Expanding immediately" may not be scalable. You might face the choice of "grow big enough to be self-sustaining but now we're just another liberal arts college" or "remain quirky but high-achieving, but that's only doable with not enough students to pay our way".
I don't understand the purpose of your comments. Are you trying to help, or dissuade me, or what?
I am being a wet blanket, but these are the kind of objections people will raise when yuo come round with the begging bowl, and that is what you have to do - go round with the begging bowl to raise money to buy the place and re-open it and run it the way you describe running it.
I'd like you to succeed. I have doubts.
And frankly, all your "what would you say to a smart 18 year old choosing between Harvard and Hampshire", "pick Harvard for an easy A, pick Hampshire for a challenge", "1 in 20 Hampshire science students publish original research as an undergraduate" has me going "for the love of mike, PICK HARVARD". Name recognition, get that degree on easy mode, network, over "where college? Hampshire? Isn't that a place in England?"
What comes of all this original research? Does it go anywhere? Because there's the Young Scientist competition in my country for secondary school students, and every year the competitors do a ton of original research. But only some things ever lead anywhere. 'Original research' can mean 'how to wash a teacup' and not 'working on a tool to diagnose brain cancer' (which may or may not become a commercial product/medical device later):
https://stripeyste.com/
I'm glad you'd like me to succeed and I'd be happy to hear any advice to that effect. FWIW I think that response is fine, I am not marketing to the kind of person who would want to get a degree on easy mode, they can go to Harvard.
Yeah, words are always ambiguous, who cares. "Original research" can mean a cure for cancer or a paper about ultimate frisbee. We have to condense things down to words and phrases anyways and we trust intelligent people to try to disambiguate.
I don't really have the bandwidth to write a detailed history of Hampshire College in this comment, but the short answer is that by virtue of its youth and having basically no endowment, it has always been extremely tuition dependent, and so events like e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, COVID hurt it more than more established colleges that can use endowment funds to ride it out. The bonehead decision was trying to sell to UMASS in 2019 and not admit an entering class, devastating their finances. But that was one a short-lived president, the issue is that Hampshire has no margin for error, and this has very little to do with its education model; I think think any college founded in the last 60 years is doing well financially (other than the likes of Liberty University).
Was Hampshire actually making boneheaded financial decisions? Ethan's post says that the administration slashed the admissions department, which he calls dumb despite the school "fighting for its life". But why was it fighting for its life? His article mentions that it needs a thousand students to be sustainable: why did it fall so far below that? I mean 1,000 seems like a remarkably small number if that's really all you need per year and the school is really as good as is claimed. Why were they not able to get 1,500?
There's some discussion about faculty being hired and then quickly fired, despite turning in very good performance. That does indeed seem like remarkably terrible management, but it seems...weird that this would just happen for no reason. Whose job was it to select managers?
I agree it seems weird but it did appear to happen for no reason, and it had been happening at least since when I was a student from '09-'13. In addition to cutting admissions and having bizarre faculty hiring/firing practices, they also fired the IT department for no clear reason to outsource services, which went poorly.
I'm sure there were a million other small bad decisions that I didn't see. The big one however was hiring a president who had a track record of shutting down schools she ran. Unsurprisingly, she tried to shut down the school in 2019. They managed to oust her but this cratered admissions, right before COVID cratered admissions more. Before that the college had strong enrollment and a pretty balanced budget, you can check out the 990s.
I recently spoke to one of Hampshire's original employees, and he agreed, none of these decisions made sense. Charity is important but some people just make bad decisions — 50% of people are below-average managers.
Anybody have any thoughts on ethan's post on padre pio?: "https://motivacredibilitatis.substack.com/p/st-pio-of-pietrelcina"
I am not christian but this article is a little tough to explain. especially how his wounds lasted on his palms for literal decades sometimes without even allowing any acids on it. how and why would he do this?
I read through most of this just now (skimming through long quotes), and honestly, it's disappointing in similar ways that other posts by Ethan have been.
Based on my limited knowledge, the likeliest explanation seems to be a persistent psychosomatic effect. I can very well believe that extreme piety can produce stigmata under certain conditions. I might have missed it in my skim, but I don't think Ethan addresses this hypothesis specifically.
He does spend some time arguing (I think unpersuasively) that the phenomena must be supernatural. If they *were* supernatural, that doesn't even mean God exists. Their particularly Roman Catholic quality is presumably due to Pio's piety.
That being said, their exceptionality should be in doubt. While the stigmata's existence is well-attested, Ethan's arguments that they're medically impossible relies on suppositions and sparse parts of the record--eg., one time someone measured a cloth that had absorbed some of Pio's blood, and found "it" to contain 12% as much hemogblobin as normal blood. Ethan argues that this is an extreme underestimate of iron loss, and settles on 50 mg/day.
First of all--what is this even talking about? The claim isn't that a a fresh sample of Pio's fluid was tested. A "cloth" was tested, presumably by extracting fluid from it. How long after the cloth got wet was it extracted? How much evaporation had it happened in the meantime? No details. Just settling on a figure he calls "conservative" and moving on. How much iron was Pio consuming in his diet? Not clear, but Ethan is confident it's not enough.
Look, in a case like this, the naturalistic explanation, if true, will either be fraud or (more likely) something highly anomalous. Cases like this have been selected for evading the easy explanations.
When Ethan assembles these detailed arguments, it's worth being clear about when multiple pieces of evidence are mutually reinforcing, vs when multiple pieces of evidence *depend* on each other. Large parts of Ethan's cornucopia of facts and arguments are of the latter type: establishing that the condition is supernatural requires in some cases long chains of argumentation and multiple necessary hypotheses. In that case, the individual uncertainties, errors, and oversights accumulate, rather than compensate for each other. Every overlooked gap adds to all the others.
Details of Pio's iron balance are the sort of thing that could require real expertise (and access to the patient) to understand, and Ethan seems kind of cavalier. He seemingly has a habit of engineering a "conservative estimate" that allows him to proceed to the next step with certainty.
Fair enough! But I am more concerned about how his wounds lasted for 50+ years. Even the chemical tinctures he had was removed and access was prevented. How could he have maintained the wound that never healed then?
Also can I ask what exactly you think happened to his wounds? Is it really possible for a wound to not heal due to psychosomatic conditions alone?
This is the part that concerns me, as a non christian.
If a wound can be caused psychosomatically, it can presumably persist psychosomatically. Most cases of stigmata come and go over the course of life, and there are many non-stigmatic cases of seeping wounds persisting for years. Whatever Pio was going through, he seems to be an outlier. But apart from iron balance and some extreme fevers, the wounds themselves seem to me as "mid-tier medical mystery".
I don't claim the wounds were purely psychosomatic. There could have been a bunch of contributing factors, but I expect the psyche was a significant part of it.
I doubt it's possible for a wound not to heal psychosomatically, but I would guess some combination of "weird medical condition" with "picking or scratching at it" is entirely possible.
I thought so too, but how then did his wounds not become septic or have inflammation?
I don't have devotion to Padre Pio, though my late father did. I know there's controversy, but I don't think he was a fake. On the other hand, I do accept that there are genuine stigmatics and it's not all explained away by hysteria and fraud. I think St. Francis of Assisi was genuine. I don't know one way or the other about other claims.
Nothing is stopping anyone from making up their own mind by listening to all claims pro and contra, and deciding if they believe "something mystical was going on", "something explainable by psychology was going on but not fraud", or "it was all fakery and he deliberately created the wounds himself for fame and fortune".
Or maybe he just had a weird skin condition ? There are plenty of those going around, from cancer to psoriasis. That said though, if these stigmata really were miraculous, I don't think it'd be possible for a Catholic to say, "I don't have devotion to Padre Pio". When Jesus dispensed his miracles, people might have said "sure his god granted him miraculous powers, but I still don't respect that god enough to worship him instead of good old Zeus", but it would sound strange indeed for a modern Catholic to do so.
Seth has explained it, but a personal devotion to a particular saint or not having one does not mean one doubts the sainthood, just that they're not your ishtadevata:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtadevata
A lot of Catholics have devotion to the rosary or Our Lady in particular. I don't. What devotion I do have is to the Holy Souls and the Eucharist. I'm not claiming Padre Pio was a fraud or saying people devoted to him are mistaken, just not my thing.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12275b.htm
"On the other hand, by the term "devotions" in the plural, or "popular devotions", we commonly understand those external practices of piety by which the devotion of the faithful finds life and expression. The efficacy of these practices in eliciting feelings of devotion is derived from four principal sources, either
1. by the strong appeal which they make to man's emotional instincts, or
2. by the simplicity of form which puts them within the reach of all, or
3. by the stimulus of association with many others in the same good work, or
4. by their derivation from the example of pious persons who are venerated for their holiness.
...No good purpose would be served by attempting a catalogue of approved Catholic devotions. It may be sufficient to note that the list of indulgenced prayers and practices provided in the Raccolta or in the larger works of Beringer and Mocchegiani afford a sufficient practical indication of the measure in which such practices are recognized and recommended by the Church. Most of the principal devotions are dealt with separately in THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, whether we regard different objects and motives of devotion--such as the Blessed Sacrament (See EUCHARIST), the Passion, the Five Wounds, the Sacred Heart, the Seven Dolours, and, in a word, the principal mysteries and festivals--or, again, devotional practices--e.g., the Angelus, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross--or, again, confraternities and associations identified with particular forms of devotion--e.g., the Confraternity of the Bon Mors or that of the Holy Family."
I guess I don't really understand how a saint could be "not my thing" to a devout Catholic; especially a saint who was empowered by God to perform miracles (supposedly including but not limited to bilocation, preemptive healing, conferring with angels, and of course the stigmata). And not in some distant past lost to the mists of history, but in our own time (well, technically about 130 years ago, but still). Assuming all that stuff is true, then this guy sounds kind of important !
It's personal taste and how they fit with you/you fit with them and what parts of their lives or teachings help you in your own.
All the saints are important, but recognising and acknowledging that they are saints, and maybe modern important saints, is not the same as feeling personal connection. I'm not denying his importance, and possibly I could benefit from aspects of his approach, but he just doesn't appeal to me in the same way as, for example, St Thomas Aquinas (not that I am remotely in the neighbourhood of his genius, but 'oh hey people made jokes about you being so big' is something comforting to a Person of Amplitude). I just like him and what glimpses of his personality we get of him.
Sometimes people will like particular saints due to a sort of sentimentality (e.g. the Little Flower gets a lot of this), but that's okay too. It's maybe a terrible comparison to make, but it's something very vaguely like a favourite sports team or music group (or even genre of music).
We've just had long discussions about taste on here, and some people absolutely love Brutalist architecture, which I don't understand in the slightest. But that's their thing. Everyone has different preferences.
EDIT: Maybe role models might make more sense to you? I don't know what people you particularly admire, but do you have someone/several someones you think are praiseworthy and admirable, and/or who has had an influence on your life, what you think, how you think, how you want to live your life, while there are others you know are important historical or political figures but you don't feel anything about them one way or the other?
Treating saints as role models (or, dare I say, influecners ?) makes perfect sense to me on the secular level; I'm just fuzzy on the theology. It almost sounds like what you look for in your role model/influencer are personality traits, approachability, maybe even looks, etc.; and being chosen by the immortal omnipotent ruler of the Universe to receive miraculous powers is kind of a nice-to-have. But I guess that depends on what you believe about the saints' purpose here on Earth. If they were sent/empowered by God specifically to act as people's "spiritual buddies" (for lack of a better term that isn't "influencer"), then your approach does make sense. I'm just finding it hard to put some generic saint whose main claim to fame is "being nice" on the same level as saints with specific world-altering accomplishments (like Cyril and Methodius) or flashy superpowers (Padre Pio) or both (Joan of Arc).
"Devotion" has a cultural connotation here, and there's the interesting phenomenon of how Catholics can feel connection and commonality and affinity toward particular saints more than others (and the church apparently welcomes this phenomenon).
This makes a bit more sense, but I still don't get it (which is unsurprising coming from an atheist, perhaps). It sounds like the idea here is, "This Padre Pio was definitely a living saint who had been granted miracle powers by God himself (including but by no means limited to stigmata) for which we have undeniable evidence... which is cool and all, but St. Adalard is still my main man". Shouldn't the fact that God chose to empower a saint so close to our own time mean something ?
" Shouldn't the fact that God chose to empower a saint so close to our own time mean something ?"
The concept of time is pretty fuzzy in that religion.
I am commenting merely to let Scott know his 4'33" article image did not go unappreciated.
Pre audio CDs I recall someone producing an LP recording of silence for connoisseurs of high end stereo systems to test their gear’s fidelity of reproduction of the stillness.
I had never heard of 4'33", so I looked it up on Wikipedia:
———
> 4′33″[a] is a modernist composition[b] by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments; the score instructs performers not to play their instruments throughout the three movements. […] It is marked by silence except for ambient sound, which is intended to contribute to the performance.
> The length is chosen because 4 minutes and 33 seconds is equal to 273 seconds; -273.15 degrees Celsius is absolute zero.
> Cage intended 4′33″ to be experimental—to test the audience's attitude to silence and prove that any auditory experience may constitute music, seeing that absolute silence cannot exist.
———
Words cannot express my contempt.
Technically due the Boltzmann constant and Johnson-Nyquist noise true silence is not achievable above 0 Kelvin.
Yeah, that’s just cerebral peacocking to show that i know some weird physics stuff too. I mean I had to since I didn’t go to Hampshire or even Harvard and only have a crummy degree from a Big Ten University with a rodent mascot. Wasn’t I just about forced into it?
I have very large hands too and you know what that means, don’t you? It means it took my nana a bit longer to knit my pair of Christmas mittens is what it means.
Ah, but you had heard it
At a glance, it seems absurd. Also see Imaginary Landscape No. 4, which calls for 12 radios to be tuned and retuned during the performance. "Music" that is whatever happens to be received at the time. Absurd, no?
But Cage seemed to be about finding music in the sound outside conventional music. 4'33" is extreme, the "hall sounds" of coughing, shuffling, other _ambient_ noises. This was in the 1950s. Would you probably want to listen to any of this? Probably no.
Decades later we had various ambient electronica incorporating non-musical sounds, including audience noise, radio, etc into popular music.
I mean, not absurd at all.
It was in an age where music was distributed through score. There were recordings, yes, but they were recordings of live performances, the idea that a recording can be the canonical form of a musical composition wasn't really accepted at that point. (That it's obvious by now is one of many, many things we can thank early-to-mid-XX-century avant-garde musicians for.) So what did you do when you had an idea you wanted others to be aware of? You wrote a score, and had someone perform (though in cases like 4'33" and Imaginary Landscapes No. 4, "demonstrate" is probably a better term) it live.
I am usually sympathetic to disses on "high art", its institutions and conventions, but then we hit this one subject I actually know a few things about, I realize this particular diss amounts to cherry-picking a few ridiculous-sounding examples out of [body of work that laid foundations for the entirety of music as we know it, art and popular alike], and I can't help but think of the good old Gell-Mann chap...
Oh, everyone has that reaction the first time they hear about it. If you want to be part of the discourse, you've got some catching up to do--just like if you want to criticize contemporary architecture, you can't just say it's ugly, you have to spend years in architecture school to understand all the responses to the responses to the responses. I might be joking here, but I'm actually fond of 4'33"
4'33" has been called the zero hour of music. I appreciate the way it provides a logical endpoint to the trend of experimentation in 20th century music that started with "hey maybe we can use dissonant harmonies" through "hey maybe we should abandon tonality altogether" through "how about just weird bings and bongs" and finally wound up at "maybe music doesn't need sound at all".
The point is you can't go any further with the deconstruction. Nor can you do the same thing again. Johnny Cage has already won, flawless victory. Everyone else has to do something else now, it's time to start rebuilding music from zero instead of taking things away.
So basically 4'33" was inevitable, and it's a good thing, because it meant music didn't get totally stuck (at least, avant-garde art music didn't). Unlike in the visual arts where you've got Marcel Duchamp sticking a urinal in an art gallery in 1919 and going "whoa, look, I'm challenging your conceptions of what art is", then a century later you've still got people taping bananas to walls and going "whoa, look, I'm challenging your conceptions of what art is".
OK, but a lot of the former sorts under "whoa, I'm challenging your conception of what music is".
(Another consequence of the academization of art in general, IMO.)
Oh, don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic piece of trolling, worthy of the best accomplishments of the modern 4chan. It's also a great litmus test: if a person begins discussing it in all seriousness as a piece of music, then either he's a god-tier troll himself, in which case you shouldn't trust anything he says; or he's someone who is definitely not worth your time listening to, in which case... you shouldn't trust anything he says
> god-tier troll
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/
"Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds."
Amazing.
I always roll my eyes thinking about it. But it also might have felt less hacky back in 1952, so I try to give it a little grace. The point about listening to the sounds around us is fine, but the execution is a bit cringe by contemporary standards.
>Words cannot express my contempt.
That seems awfully closed minded. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage declared. “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement.”
"There is music in the natural world, and in our daily surroundings" is something that someone can disagree with, obviously, but it hardly seems worthy of contempt.
"Everything wrong with modern art in 4 minutes and 33 seconds"
This is what happens when "artists" love the smell of their own farts too much. Call me "closed minded", whatever. At least I know that 273 seconds of not-music is not music, and no amount of pseudo-intellectual drivel will gaslight me into believing that 273 seconds of silence is "art", and everyone with an ounce of common sense knows that this is bullshit.
"There is music in the natural world, and in our daily surroundings" is not bullshit. Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, as the Cascades said.
4'33 is never performed in the natural world, it's performed in fancy ass concert halls.
And you can have rhythm without having music, or art. Art is deliberate.
1. It was first performed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_Concert_Hall
2. Cage explicitly said that wind and rain could be heard.
3. The Hollywood Bowl is an outdoor fancy concert hall. There are many others.
>And you can have rhythm without having music, or art. Art is deliberate.
I never said it was music, or art. Just that it was not worthy of contempt.
I'm reading all these exchanges quite confused at the emotional tenor of the objections to the "song"!
As a musician who tends to hear rhythms and melodies all day long around me in the natural/unnatural sounds that surround us I thought the song was a interesting way to highlight that experience, and these reactions show me this is not a common experience!
Its also weird that this "song" has been around for 75 years someone says up thread and yet commenters are acting like audiences are being duped into experiencing it? At this point its like being mad that the punk show you are going to has the lead vocalist screaming!
Thank you for bringing a musician's perspective. I am very much not a musician, so I don't personally experience what you describe. But the work does make me think that perhaps I should try to do so. And, if for whatever reason I can't, that does not delegitimize the endeavor, nor demonstrate that your experience is invalid somehow.
As I noted at the outset, having contempt for 4'33" seems rather closed minded.
>everyone with an ounce of common sense knows that this is bullshit
Indeed. Dave Barry had some great columns about modern art. Here's one of them, reposted on a message board:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/913682/posts
I have always framed this as related to what the person's job is. So consider:
1. A person says they are a cook and, in their capacity of a cook, invites many customers to come and eat. They show up expecting a meal, and are given empty plates. "Their forks had all sorts of bacteria and microscopic molds on them, must have." The cook says. "I saw them breathing which would have transfered some of the same from the air. They thought they weren't eating because they didn't know enough about microbiology."
2. A person says they are a surgeon and offers to close up a massive gash on someone's leg. The person trusts them, submits to anesthesia, then wakes up several hours later with a still open gash on their leg. "See, you just don't know how to watch for surgery. During that time, your leg kinda closed up and clotted up some on its own. If you knew how to watch for surgery, you'd know time was a kind of surgery and I totally did my job."
3. A prostitute invites a john into her chambers at the brothel, then refuses to have sex with him during their allotted time. "Anticipation is sort of a component of sex, so we had sex." she said, rolling her eyes. "The part where you wanted me to do anything means you are a hick."
So consider the three things above, then consider all but one definitions of a composer of music or musician. In all but one of those, you'll find "Makes music the audience can listen to" is a pretty important component of the definition.
OR you could make a definition that includes "Invite a bunch of people to listen to music, then break my promise, then call them idiots for wanting the thing I promised and say that if they weren't just the biggest fucking morons they'd understand that", and then what this person did fits fine.
Note that pretty much *anybody* who hasn't been mindkilled by the sort of avant-garde-ish-post-modernism-ish "anything is art if you are a big enough asshole about it" trend that stuff like this is built on does think this guy is sort of a smarmy asshole, and that definitions of doing one's job that include "not doing ones job and then insulting people for noticing" are contempt-worthy in the extreme.
None of these analogies work very well, though re #2, a big part of being a competent doctor is knowing when to tell patients, "it is best to do nothing; nature will heal your body will heal on its own."
But, more specifically, it is highly likely that some people have benefitted from the lesson that "There is music in the natural world, and in our daily surroundings." That is not the case in your examples.
>"not doing ones job and then insulting people for noticing"
I don't see any evidence of anyone being insulted for not appreciating 4'33" You seem to be inventing that.
Remember, my point was that is was closed minded to HAVE CONTEMPT for the piece. I specifically said that it was understandable not to like it.
So let's take these one by one:
1. Being a surgeon is about doing surgery, as you point out. A big component of being a musician is playing music, or writing it. This is naturally and obviously true until you re-write the definition of either to not include the thing they do.
2. I can claim that the people who weren't fed and the people who didn't get the surgery definitely benefited from the fun lessons about the food in the air or the natural healing of the body as justifications for not feeding them or giving them stitches. It's trivial to do that. You can even find people who are dying of sicknesses but very glad that someone pointed out that X wildflower supplement snakeoil is "healing them naturally".
3. In your example, Cage says the people were wrong about the fact that they were listening to nothing "because they didn't know how to listen". Very specifically, he's saying they are ignorant because they notice he isn't doing his job - that he knows more, that they are inobservant, etc. He sets up a contrast between him, the knowing sophisticated artist, and them, the rube.
Again, this is all super reasonable to have contempt for. And again, you have to be pretty modern-art mindkilled to see "musician refuses to play music and says his audience was just ignorant to think this is a bad waste of their time".
Like I understand that anyone can run around in circles all day screaming "It's art it's art it's art" and that in the end nothing has a hard, abstract definition verified by the heavens themselves. But tons and tons of people have real, reasonable contempt for the kind of person who takes a blank piece of printer paper out of the tray, sets it on the table, and proclaims it art and themselves to be an artist.
This is because they have promised something, done nothing, wasted time, and demanded that people who notice this are missing the point. It's super gross mastubatory stuff to anyone who hasn't specifically been told to ooh and aah at naked emperors.
>Like I understand that anyone can run around in circles all day screaming "It's art it's art it's art" and that in the end nothing has a hard, abstract definition verified by the heavens themselves. But tons and tons of people have real, reasonable contempt for the kind of person who takes a blank piece of printer paper out of the tray, sets it on the table, and proclaims it art and themselves to be an artist.
This is completely disingenuous, because it does not actually engage in the argument regarding ambient sounds. There is no ambient text on a blank sheet of paper.
I don't think anyone ever advertised or offered a concert, recital, or other musical event that consisted solely of a "performance" of 4'33", except possibly as a joke aimed at people who already knew what was going on. So the more proper analogy would be e.g. a cook who serves an apertif and appetizer, places an empty soup bowl in front of the diner for four and a half minutes, and then proceeds with the rest of a fancy seven-course meal.
This strikes me as a funny-once joke in actual performance, and not a hugely funny one at that, but so long as the rest of the meal is tasty and nourishing it hardly seems contemptable. And its chief value now is as a shared cultural reference or in-joke, at which we all nod appreciatively and get on with things after no more than 4.33 seconds.
(Well, a bit more than that this time, but I'm pretty sure I spent less than four minutes reading your post and composing mine).
"Funny-once" was precisely my own gut reaction to the idea of 4'33". It strikes me as fairly clever as a concept, but entirely reliant on novelty and a sympathetic audience in an appropriate context to be more than a sophomoric prank.
>(Well, a bit more than that this time, but I'm pretty sure I spent less than four minutes reading your post and composing mine).
I think I've spent a bit over four minutes reading, thinking, and typing about it just now. Given that the piece is almost 75 years old and we're still arguing about it, that argues in favor of it being a remarkably successful piece of trolling at the very least.
The "It's art because you are talking about it, we wouldn't have the talking about it if he hadn't done it" bit is always a bit of a conflict for me. On the one hand, it's not wrong. On the other hand, we *have to* talk about it because it's infected the conversation. We don't say cancer is good because of all the great cancer treatments it inspired, for instance.
I'm not saying it's as simple as the cancer thing, but every second we spend arguing about whether nothing is something is also a second we could spend arguing about whether something that is actually something is good, or how good it is, etc.
I mean, there's elements of "If it's worth your time to lie, it's worth my time to correct it" here. i.e. A cook advertises a five course meal, and people show up to that, pay whatever he asks them to pay, etc. It's important enough to him in terms of attracting people to advertise five courses that he actually does this, and it's the promise made to the people who show up.
And then he serves four courses and your empty-plate thing. And when people complain about this, he says things like "Well, they just didn't know how to EAT, you see, the fucking rednecks, there's food in the air all around us, I saw some guy eat a booger, I'm a grand teacher" as in the quote above.
You point out that the piece only wastes four minutes and thirty-three seconds of time in this way, only replaces 4.5 minutes of promised music with not-music. Like, yeah, brother, that's because that's how long the piece is. The guy thought it was important beautiful meaningful art that revealed ignorance in others at that length, I get to point out he's a valueless hack who decided not to do his job in a jack-off-in-at-theater way at that length.
I'm always mystified by this kind of response, by the way. "This art is valueless", I say, "And the person who made it should be acknowledged as a guy who made bad valueless art.". And then the response is "But other art exists and maybe this guy could use other people's actual work or actual art to hide the fact that he made bad valueless art and wasted people's time", you say, or something similar.
I'm sort of rejecting that premise outright. The fact that a good soup course is coming doesn't do a lot to mitigate the fact that some chef takes a big dump on a plate and calls it a sandwich, especially when we are specifically talking about Chef Fece's poop course.
Look, I know you agree with my view, but I think you're putting way, way too much effort into dissecting this one example.
...literally just happened across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiantos - "On April 2, 1979, Skiantos participated in the Bologna Rock punk rock and new wave festival, where their performance attracted much publicity. The band brought on stage a kitchen, a table, a TV and a fridge, boiled some spaghetti and then ate it, without playing anything; the audience protested, and Antoni responded, "You do not understand a fucking thing: this is avant-garde, you piece-of-shit audience."
That certainly seems obnoxious, but it also seems very much unlike 4'33" as it exists in the real world. In particular, I'm pretty sure John Cage didn't show up at the initial performance to insult the audience for not getting it.
3: careful with the analogy there, abandonment and denigration are both actual kinks people have.
ETA: 2. people do pay tor homeopathy, though I suspect this supports your point more than anything. 1. There’s a charity fundraising dinner pattern where on arrival people are randomly sorted into a small “wealthy” group and a large “poor” group. The former get a lavish meal; the latter, not so much.
in 3, the person is complaining about not being given the product promised. I acknowledge that if people are agreeing to be "cheated", like if they specifically agree to pay for an empty plate, there's no actual cheating going on.
At least at the wikipedia level of explanation, this doesn't seem to be what Cage was shooting for. He sells this (and it's usually interpreted) as an experiment one does on an unsuspecting audience. Like it's explicitly about teaching them that they are in some broad sense wrong for expecting music at a concert, that they should have been OK with just standing outside in an empty field or something.
If I seem to have the highest level of contempt for this kind of thinking, I do; it's the same rationale that leads Salinger to write a bunch of novels and lock them in cabinets far away from people who want to read them, under the premise that he's doing them some great Zen favor. that they'd totally understand if they just meditated on the sutras or something.
this whole inquiry puts me in mind of the Irish position on bagpipes: 'it was a joke we played on the Scots a long time ago, and they still haven't gotten it.'
>The anechoic chamber at Harvard was the origin — he went in expecting silence, heard two tones (his nervous system, his blood), and concluded silence was unavailable to the living. The piece followed.
On the Woodstock audience, who were largely affronted: "They missed the point. There's no such thing as silence." What they took for silence, he said, was wind in the first movement, rain on the roof in the second, and the audience's own muttering and walking out in the third — the actual content of the piece.
He was scrupulous about crediting Rauschenberg's white paintings as having come first and giving him the courage to publish it. And he claimed, later, that it was the work he valued most, and that he listened to it daily. heh
So silence will have to do.
*claps with one hand*
I recently came across the fact that congenital blindness is 100% protective against schizophrenia. With biology being as messy as it is, especially anything cognitive/behavioral, this seems impossibly clean, and like it should be the top lead being pursuing by researchers attempting to understand and treat schizophrenia.
https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1893551526645244122#m
https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1907625881306099904#m
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9Syf3pGffpvHwfr4/i-m-mildly-skeptical-that-blindness-prevents-schizophrenia
Wow, I'll admit that the "they're just really unlikely to cooccur because of small probabilities" angle did occur to me, but I didn't realize that congenital blindness was *that* rare. Seems plausible that they're actually statistically independent.
Don't quote me on this, but last I heard, that had been debunked.
I know that you shouldn't update too hard on personal anecdotes, but I have once known and spent some days trying to help a person who was born blind, and who, even if he had not been diagnosed with schizophrenia, at least had some fairly strong delusions and emotional problems and some level of paranoia. He was at least schizophrenia adjacent.
Scott has written an article about this - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism
Of the (many, many!) UAP videos unveiled in the last few years, which are the most interesting — that is, which provide us the best evidence that there's something going on here beyond the usual bird/plane/weather balloon explanations?
I'm prepping a class on what we should think about UFOs. I taught another version of it a few years ago, and the recent gush of videos has me wanting to find a smaller set to focus the kids on...
It's not clear if you are trying to debunk ufos or trying to study them. The Whitehouse is releasing new batches now. I watched some of the new ones, and as I'm watching part of me is thinking, "OK so how many of these new ones are part of a psyop?" Release some weird stuff that will be shown to be some common thing in the future and this then helps discredit all the videos. Of course you have to think that the government has something to hide before you can think about a psyop.
For a historical perspective on the subject I found the book "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry" to be good. Currently the Sol Foundation is trying to study UFOs in a scientific way.
Definitely trying to move past my biases to get an objective view on the phenomena. Thanks for the book recommendation!
I haven't read that book, but a classic in the field is "UFOs Explained", by Philip J. Klass from back in 1974. It's interesting how you can take a seemingly inexplicable UFO report and figure out a mundane, naturalistic explanation if you just investigate it carefully.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1416807.UFOs_Explained
Out of print.... can't be that much of a classic. TBH I dislike the skeptics take on UFOs. I find that they cherry pick examples to debunk, and then paint it all with the debunked brush. But it's a good read if you want to see UFOs debunked.
UFOs and Government is a book on the opposite side of this debate.
If anyone else was wondering, Ethan Ludwin-Peery's winning book review was On The Natural Faculties, 3rd place in 2021: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-natural-faculties
That someone in the commentariat of ACX would go to the trouble to post this is one of the things I like best about the commentariat of ACX. Kudos.
Thanks! I was curious about that
Trying to say this in a way that's not inflammatory. If you think people should be treated the same even if they have different skin colors, Hampshire College, as a matter of explicit policy, strongly disagrees with you. They're not allowed to practice race-conscious admissions anymore, per the Supreme Court, but they're committed to DEI principles everywhere it's allowed, and they're proud of that.
See: https://www.hampshire.edu/news/hampshire-college-denounces-supreme-court-decision-affirmative-action
A lot of people think it's a really good idea to assign privileges and disadvantages based on skin color. If that's you, Hampshire College is very much on your team. If, on the other hand, that sort of thing is distasteful to you, then it seems like it would be a mistake to give them money.
You're not "giving them money", you're buying them out. Once you own the college, you can have whatever admissions policy you want! One of the points of Ethan's pitch was that if you don't like how regular colleges operate, it might be in your interests to get a college of your own to do it better.
Sounds like a fun time for an Elon Musk or a Bill Ackman! My $50, however, would not steer policy, as I think you could probably guess. It would convert to +1 on a pamphlet designed to convince billionaires and NGOs that lots of normies support the college.
I read two of Mr. Ludwin-Peery's articles; the one you linked in your post and the one he linked in a response to my comment. If he has a problem with race-conscious admissions, hiring or pedagogy, and wants to advocate for those to be changed, he doesn't say so in either of them. If he does express that preference somewhere, show me and I'll be happy to edit my original comment to reflect his intentions.
On the other hand, replacing people means you are left with the empty shell of buildings and a name. And you probably have to replace people, not policies, in order to enforce the policy.
I'm no fan of DEI, but to be fair, I think that DEI proponents would claim that people of different skin colors are *not* treated the same by default in our society, and that DEI is a (mostly) successful attempt to correct that.
Part is that, another part is finding out which white students are politically savvy enough to fake their ancestry.
Yes, DEI certainly incentivizes the "Elizabeth Warren" strategy.
Or even more prosaic than that: the social process that produces a college application tends to on average create a worse application for a black/hispanic candidate than it does for a white candidate of equal quality.
If you know the your sites are biased right a bit, aim left a bit if you want to hit your target.
Anyway who believes we live in a perfect meritocracy is blind. If you want to be meritocratic and you find a specific way that the current system is biased away from meritocracy, then you should explicitly correct for that bias.
"Anyway who believes we live in a perfect meritocracy is blind. If you want to be meritocratic and you find a specific way that the current system is biased away from meritocracy, then you should explicitly correct for that bias."
I don't know what we mean by "meritocracy" here. Let's taboo that word. If I had a college, I would want to optimize admissions for people who can
A. Pass the courses, if I admit them.
B. Gain knowledge or skills from those courses.
C. That they can then apply later for success in future ventures.
D. I probably also want them to have a good shot at contributing to the long term financial prospects of the college itself.
If "the current system" is biased away from giving certain groups the foundational skills prerequsite to doing any of these things, I don't want to try to "correct" for that in my admissions policy, I will explicitly get worse at achieving my goals if I do that. MAYBE I want to gain more power upstream in "the system" so I can correct this problem in my supply chain though?
But you can't know any of A-D directly, you can only attempt to measure them via extremely limited proxies. If you believe those proxies are strong, your position makes sense. But someone who believes they have identified a systematic bias in those proxies--a way in which some students scores on those proxies routinely fails to predict their later outcome--then you will better optimize for A-D by *correcting for that bias.*
In particular, if you think certain students have had lesser opportunities in their primary and secondary education that have resulting in them underperforming their potential, giving them better opportunities is an extremely rational thing to do. You can effectively pick up those students at a "discount" relative to your status as school[1] and thus produce a more impressive body of alumni than you would otherwise be able to.
Obviously there's are underlying questions of fact that determine whether this strategy will perform well--facts which I can't claim to have. But even if you showed me convincing evidence that the facts didn't support this strategy, it wouldn't necessary make those schools malicious, it might just mean that they were working from different data than you or reading it differently.
[1] By which I mean, pick up students who would otherwise pass you up in favor of higher-status schools.
The idea that writing a subjectively more compelling essay about how oppressed you are because you have more axes of oppression to make it compelling is genuinely a better predictor of college success than standardized tests is coherent, but I'd have to see the evidence.
And there's evidence against. The institutions that play the DEI card to "Even up" admissions as you put it find that there's a racial disparity in graduation rates. Even if you controlled for finances. Not all cases of not graduating are failures, but most of them are, and I doubt there's a reverse racial disparity so to speak in dropping out to found a company or whatever.
>If "the current system" is biased away from giving certain groups the foundational skills prerequisite to doing any of these things
Yes, but that wasn't my premise.
My premise was that the world biases away from certain groups having *good college applications* despite being able to do those things.
The gap between the quality of college applications, and the ability of the applicants to do those things, is the gap between the real world and a hypothetical 'perfect meritocracy.'
> If you want to be meritocratic and you find a specific way that the current system is biased away from meritocracy, then you should explicitly correct for that bias.
FWIW I disagree with this position, but I do think it's an excellent summary of the reasoning behind DEI.
I agree that this is a fair summary.
To me, the part of Hampshire worth saving is the model (and for practical purposes, the campus and the accreditation). I try to lay that out more explicitly in my second piece on how to market the revived version of the college I imagine. See what you think? https://www.mod171.com/p/how-to-market-hampshire-college
(There may be a future post on my thoughts about the curriculum.)
My alma mater is St. John's College in Annapolis. They sound very similar. I think you've got exactly the right idea about what's valuable in an education. I love a quirky liberal arts school that's secretly super rigorous and actually teaches you how to think. Sounds excellent!
You should include a section about their policy of treating people of certain races worse than others, so that anybody who happens to have skin of the disfavored color, and might get excited about the excellent-sounding program, won't get shockingly blindsided by an unpleasant experience.
But if you're very wealthy and you purchased Hampshire College, you could change their policies to whatever you want? DEI is not a permanent policy that can never be changed. You could fire everyone involved with the previous initiative, etc. I don't understand what your objection is supposed to be. Buying something at a fire sale price is not 'giving them money', you're probably mostly just paying off creditors.
Is the idea that because they previously did DEI, they're eternally sinful and can never be redeemed? Because you might want to examine that notion a bit. For one thing, taking that idea to its logical conclusion you could never really interact with most of society's institutions, which have probably done something bad in the past
I’m trying to say something like: hey the chef at this restaurant brags a lot about using tons of cumin in the food. If you don’t like cumin, your money is probably better spent elsewhere.
If you want to buy the place and change their policies, go for it! That’s a very rare situation to be in. At my level of economic power, money usually means support.
I mean, it'd probably be easier and cheaper to just buy your own restaurant elsewhere.
Firing everyone involved is often stickier and harder than it looks.
It is difficult to diffuse policies across a large organization. In the same way that Scotus could ban them from overt discrimination but a culture with a strong personal belief in dei still found other ways to push it, a buyer would also have difficulty pushing honest adherence to policies which the organization's culture views as anathema.
Leaving the specifics of Hampshire College aside, your assumption that being committed to DEI principles requires refraining from treating people the same even if they have different skin colors is flawed.
Example: When I first started teaching AP World History, I scheduled a study session on a Saturday morning. Few students showed up. Why? Because many of them attended Chinese school on Saturday am. So, I changed to Sunday am. That was an effort to enhance equity (the E in DEI).
And now you have no Christian students showing up.
Maybe you had no Christian students anyway by sheer circumstance, in which case that's fine, but that's adapting to your existing customer base. DEI is usually more about trying to trade in one's customers for different customers.
You are, of course, missing the point. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between serving the needs of students who could not attend on Sat and those who could not attend on Sunday (though as it happens the former vastly outnumbered the latter). The point is that, due to my cultural ignorance, I didn't know that the tradeoff existed.
Amazing. What other miracles have you performed? The pope will want to know when he considers you for sainthood.
Well, that is a convincing argument. I now acknowledge that DEI absolutely requires racial discrimination. Well played!
I wasn't making an argument. I was mocking your earnestness. Carry on.
Yes, obviously. Irony is a thing.
And my understanding is that ad homenim arguments are frowned upon here.
That sounds like ordinary scheduling where you found a time that most people were available. From an equity perspective Sunday morning actually discriminates against Christian students. I say this to highlight the silliness of "equity". You could just poll interested students on their availability without reference to their race/culture/religion/etc.
Except that I ignorantly assumed that Sunday am would be a bad time, because that is the norm in my culture.
>From an equity perspective Sunday morning actually discriminates against Christian students.
Yes, of course. But that is not the point. The point is to pause and consider the perspectives and needs of those outside the cultural norm. It does not necessarily require accommodating them in every instance.
>You could just poll interested students on their availability without reference to their race/culture/religion/etc.
Yes, but again, the point is that I didn't poll them. I simply assumed that Sunday am was worst, because that is the norm. Had I followed DEI precepts, I would not have made that assumption, and would have polled from the get go.
> Had I followed DEI precepts, I would not have made that assumption, and would have polled from the get go.
What do DEI precepts add to the common-sense process of polling your class members before scheduling a weekend session? The baffling thing to me is that you would have presumed at all.
>The baffling thing to me is that you would have presumed at all.
As I said. I made that assumption because it is the norm.
And the DEI precept is to question assumptions about what is the norm.
Maybe the disconnect here is that you're typical-minding others and conversely, our theory of mind is failing to capture you.
"High schoolers are usually free on Saturdays" has not been the norm for at least the last 20 years in my predominantly white world. Indeed, I wouldn't make any generalizations about teenagers' weekend schedules after observing my own daughters and their cohorts. They have jobs, play club sports, volunteer, take language lessons, go to church/synagogue, partake of outdoor activities, etc..
I guess if you're in the habit of making contrary assumptions, sure you'll benefit from DEI. I realize that the argument for it is that everyone does stuff 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 that from time to time, even if a particular example doesn't connect.
Perhaps that's true, but I've yet to see anyone make the case convincingly that it's pervasive and damaging enough to require the heavy bureaucratic costs advocates want, nor that their solutions are effective.
This is a good example of how toxic leftist political dogma can be for an organization. The objective here is to find a time where interested students can attend. They could be occupied for any reason. Maybe they all have hockey practice on Saturday morning. Instead you are letting ideas about race/culture/etc distract you from the actual objective.
This seems like an example of leftist political dogma being completely benign.
His general point that cultural ignorance leads leads people to entirely overlook where accomodations might be needed still stands, as far as I can tell. If I moved to India to teach at a university there, I expect my cultural ignorance to lead to big problems in accommodating students which I would have to make an effort to overcome. The point isn't that we (in the West) should learn everything about Indian culture and all the particular allowances we need to make to work within it. The point is that these blind spots will be present but less noticeable when it's, say, a poor immigrant student in the West who I'm trying to teach, and that culture/privilege issues are a prominent source of trouble.
Yes, thank you, this is exactly the point.
The problem is that this person seems to not even understand what their objective should be. The goal is not to be culturally sensitive, the goal is to find a time when most interested students are available to study. Their mistake was not actually finding out what time worked for scheduling. The Chinese school aspect is a complete tangent that they fixated on because of leftist political values. We don't even know whether they ultimately chose the best time because as far as I can tell they based it on the timing of Chinese school rather than general availability. They could be missing students who would like to attend but can't because of non-cultural scheduling conflicts.
>Instead you are letting ideas about race/culture/etc distract you from the actual objective.
The only idea I have espoused is that people in positions of authority in an organization should be cognizant of the potential that cultural biases or cultural ignorance might make the organization's activities less effective than they might be. I would think that would be obvious.
>Maybe they all have hockey practice on Saturday morning. Instead you are letting ideas about race/culture/etc.
The propensity to play hockey is a cultural practice that more prevalent among some groups than others. .
Culture is just one factor among an infinite number of other considerations. It really doesn't matter whether there is a correlation between race and hockey because you can only know about hockey practice by asking. Not all scheduling is based on race or culture. They could be busy on Saturday babysitting their sibling while their mom works. You're hyper fixating on race and culture when it is actually irrelevant. What's relevant is whether they are occupied at that time or not. If you only consider culture you are missing all the non-cultural scheduling conflicts. Leaders should be cognizant of culture only when it is naturally relevant, not as a central factor in their thinking.
I think you may have misunderstood me. I don’t think they’re being hypocritical (at least with regard to DEI.) DEI requires them to treat people differently based on skin color. It’s their commitment to those principles that makes them implement race-conscious policies.
DEI can also include other forms of identity, such as disability. I work as a sign language interpreter in professional & academic settings, helping Deaf individuals participate in education, employment, and healthcare that would otherwise be largely inaccessible to them. My job is a form of DEI, and I'm pretty resistent to arguments that it should not exist.
DEI seems like a pretty slippery concept. It seems to cover some pretty reasonable, harmless policies and also some policies that make a lot of people feel dehumanized. I don't think it's a good idea to keep a label like that around; the innocent are going to get tarred with the same brush as the guilty, that way.
"DEI requires them to treat people differently based on skin color."
Not of there is a norm or a historical bias that has treating people differently based on skin color built in, and the DEI effort is working to correct that.
You might agree with their reasons for doing it, but that doesn't change that what they're doing is treating people differently based on skin color.
There is nothing inherently wrong with treating people differently based on skin color. For example, producing dark colored bandages is treating people differently based on skin color. So I think you have to be more specific as to exactly what your objection is.
Actually, I don't. I'm trying to frame my warning as more of a matter of taste than a moral objection, although I'm probably not very good at hiding my true feelings.
Most Americans think that purely aesthetic racial discrimination, like your bandage example, is reasonable and harmless. My original comment links to a document where the college denounces a Supreme Court ruling that requires colorblind college admissions. Look there and see whether you think their policies fall into the category of harmless aesthetics.
The DEI effort's actions seem indistinguishable from those of a group trying to impose a *different* standard of differential skin-color-based differential treatment, which they believe to be more (politically) correct than the old standard, while operating under the constraints of current law. And the DEI effort's words, all too often leave me believing that, yep, that's the plan.
Which specific DEI effort are you referring to?
>DEI requires them to treat people differently based on skin color.
?As I said, that is not true. See my example. I really don't get why you think I was making a claim about hypocrisy. I was not.
It seems like you think that it’s bad to treat people differently on the basis of their skin color? In that case, I think you’re against this college’s policies.
As I said, I am not opining on Hampshire College specifically. It is literally the first thing I said: "Leaving the specifics of Hampshire College aside, . . ." I said that specifically because, as I mentioned elsewhere, I rolled my eyes when I read the statement. But the statement does not necessarily imply that every DEI policy at Hampshire is illegitimate, let alone every DEI policy everywhere.
You don’t care about the college; I don’t care about the arcane semantic details of the term “DEI”. I’m here to warn people that this college asking for money explicitly and proudly racially discriminates, as policy. You’re here to… what, get me to admit that colorblind DEI exists? Fine, there’s colorblind DEI, who cares.
I don’t actually care about the semantics of the term “DEI”, you can feel free to define it any way you like.
Yes, that is exactly my point: You don't care about what DEI actually is. That is not a point in your favor.
I get the impression that Matthew doesn't care about what DEI actually is only to the extent that DEI proponents _also_ don't care about what DEI actually is.
DEI might be a movement to be culture-agnostic, race-agnostic, and so on, but that is not what it is in practice.
Now that is an enormous Bailey. Well done
No. Pointing out that OP is defining DEI by its most extreme manifestation is not a bailey.
Defining Equity with your example, which is just the common sense of not scheduling an activity when most of the class can't attend, is about as wide a definition as is possible. You promoted equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes, by scheduling the class when everyone could attend.
The 'most extreme manifestation' can be seen in the Hampshire's linked statement above. Not only do they advocate for treating people differently based on skin color, this is how they describe the SCOTUs decision to refrain from doing so:
"This decision is in keeping with a concerted and intentional effort to erase the realities of racial advantage and oppression, alongside state efforts to ban the accurate teaching of this nation’s racialized history, to protect the privileged from the discomfort of honestly facing our country’s past and present acts of oppression, to eliminate efforts to support diverse, equitable, and inclusive educational environments, and to define any discussion of white supremacy as a “divisive concept.”"
I would argue that this is the central manifestation of DEI, not its most extreme, but either way Hampshire has made their position clear.
I think the class schedule example is an instance of DEI. Having a class rescheduled to suit you is a special privilege; presumably one that Defining Equity would not extend to white children.
If he or she would happily reschedule the class for an activity explicitly honoring white racial identity too, then, yeah, I agree it’s not DEI. But I doubt it.
>reschedule the class for an activity explicitly honoring white racial identity too,
I did not reschedule the class "for an activity explicitly honoring racial identity."* I rescheduled it because students were not available. I would have done so if the majority of students had had football practice, or went hunting every Saturday, or whatever.
The point is NOT the rescheduling. It is the INITIAL scheduling, which I did out of cultural ignorance.
*Chinese school is basically Chinese language instruction.
>is about as wide a definition as is possible.
That is the point. Being culturally sensitive (which I was not, when I initially scheduled the session for Saturday am) is a central aim of DEI.
>The 'most extreme manifestation' can be seen in the Hampshire's linked statement above.
I thought I made clear that I was not commenting on Hampshire's policies in particular. Personally, I found their statement to elicit eye-rolling.
Edit:
>You promoted equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes, by scheduling the class when everyone could attend.
I am no expert, but DEI is not necessarily "equity of outcomes" but definitely does require equity of opportunity. When I was in high school play production, rehearsals often went late, and sometimes were on Saturdays. Technically, everyone had an equal opportunity to participate, but in practice kids who were bussed in from South Central LA to did not have equal opportunity. Would there have been something wrong with providing those kids, but only those kids, with cab fare, or arranging for them to spend the night with local families? Because it seems that some anti-DEI types in the current administration would oppose that.
DEI IS necessarily equity of outcomes. Now that wokeness is less popular there are many out there who would act as if it was only the extremists that were hateful and illiberal, essentially retreating to the motte (I realize in my first post I should have said motte not bailey).
Thankfully there are loads of official statements from universities like Hampshire's that make the record hard to fudge. DEI is just racist, racism will always be an easy idea to sell, and rebranding racism as "anti-racism" made it wildly successful.
"You promoted equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes, by scheduling the class when everyone could attend."
Unless Sunday morning doesn't work for kids attending church with parents? Or sports events? Or from very strict Sabbath-keeping denominations? Or even just "crikey, it's Sunday, why school today?" But yes, perhaps everyone at that school was impeccably secular.
> If, on the other hand, that sort of thing is distasteful to you, then it seems like it would be a mistake to give them money.
You can dislike their attitude here without thinking that it automatically overwhelms the pros of the other things one might like about the place.
This does seem somewhat inflammatory.
The college seems intent on making its racial priorities a significant feature of every aspect of its activity. If the chef brags about putting cumin in everything, it’s not weird for me to say, “If you don’t like cumin, don’t spend your money there.”
But I understand supporting an institution you believe in, even if you disagree with some things they do. I have that relationship with some things. Eat the meat, spit out the bones, is what we say.
If they are practicing or advocating for race and sex based discrimination that’s a pretty big deal to a lot of people. I’m glad it was highlight.
Going by the Wikipedia article, they had a lot of problems not just "some bad financial decisions made by the administration":
(1) Never had an endowment fund so always heavily reliant on tuition income.
(2) Admissions went up and down; high in the 70s, declined, then high again in the 90s. That doesn't make for stable financial planning.
(3) Problems with accreditation? Again, that would make it much harder to attract students, if you're asking their parents to fork out $43,000 per year for tuition then at the end they get a parchment that's on a par with "Redneck Bible School which no accreditation body will recognise because they are anti-gay rights".
(4) Competition with other small, private, liberal arts colleges for that pool of students and funding.
Now, if in the heady days of the 80s or 90s the administration went hog-wild and took out huge loans backed by nothing but "we've got hundreds of acres of prime real estate", then yeah, they're at fault. But the problems seem to run deeper than can by solved by "please somebody with deep pockets buy us and bail us out".
What's your understanding of the tree of percepts and inferences and value judgements and SWAGs that lead to this behavior from Hampshire College? Just disagreeing with me isn't inherently a downcheck, sometimes people are even right to.
They’ve articulated their position very clearly; I have no reason to believe there’s any other explanation for their policies than what they say. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
Does anyone have any good links to what the actual effects of Elon Musk slashing USAID has been?
I am trying to update on whether or not to see Elon Musk as a super villain. According to the forecasts from early 2025, his cuts should have killed millions by now. But I have seen more recent sources denying this, claiming that it only lead to a temporary decrease of a few percent of actual medicine given out, and that everything including AIDS medication is now back to 2023 standards. I would love to know what the situation actually is so I can properly condemn/exonerate this entire DOGE business.
FWIW I think updating to see any person as a super villain is vastly more likely to be a mistake than not. If I'm just overreacting to a bit of arch humor I apologize.
Yep, I would also be very careful doing so. But I think the word is appropriate enough if his actions are actually causing the deaths of millions of people. And that is why I think we really need to see if that is what he has actually done, instead of just relying on the earlier forecasts.
I recall reading this article a while back, might help?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qgSEbLfZpH2Yvrdzm/i-tried-reproducing-that-lancet-study-about-usaid-cuts-so
I am not nearly good enough at statistics to second guess either rba or the Lancet, but I do agree with this:
> I have no love for the administration or many of its actions, but when the world’s foremost medical journal publishes work indicating that a policy’s results will be comparable in death count to history’s engineered mass-starvations by year’s end, I’m going to be skeptical.
>when the world’s foremost medical journal publishes work indicating that a policy’s results will be comparable in death count to history’s engineered mass-starvations by year’s end, I’m going to be skeptical.
I assume that the Lancet is indeed overstating the deaths, but +1.8M deaths does not strike me as entirely implausible. There were 5 million deaths just of people under age 5 in 2024, compared to 6 million a decade earlier https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2025/ So, just reversing that trend and returning to the numbers of a decade ago could = 1M more deaths. Add to that increased deaths from things like TB, and the totals could get pretty big.
Thanks a lot I hadn't read that one yet, wil do so. But still, that is talking about a one year old prediction about how many people will die. Now it is 2026, so the numbers must be coming in about how many people have actually died because of Musk's chainsaw.
>Now it is 2026, so the numbers must be coming in about how many people have actually died because of Musk's chainsaw.
It looks like UNICEF publishes an annual report re child mortality trends. But the data lags quite a bit. The 2025 Report, released a couple of months ago, actually only has data through 2024. https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2025/
Agreed with one caveat. One of the points in that article is that the data quality from some of the countries is awful, so if it really is millions of excess deaths, we probably should see it, but if it’s less, we may not be able to see it at all.
The gutting of USAID has left a void China will not fill
https://economist.com/asia/2026/05/07/the-gutting-of-usaid-has-left-a-void-china-will-not-fill?giftId=ZWQwMjg1OGQtYzJhYi00NTBjLWE1Y2UtNGJhYWNlYmM5ZmE4&utm_campaign=gifted_article
Is there a way to develop a normal amount of jealousy?
I've never been jealous. The thought of my long term partner having sex with someone else is either neutral or hot. Long term partner doesn't feel the same way. Like a normal functioning person, he feels jealousy.
I'd love to become more normal in this way, perhaps it would make monogamy easier for me.
Don't try to become normal in this way, it's reducing your options for no benefit.
If your current partner doesn't like it, don't mention it to him.
Future partners may consider it a superpower. Don't hobble yourself for this one.
If it's purely sexual I can see feeling that way. The complication is that most sex with a new partner does not happen as a wham-bam transaction. It happens after days, weeks or even years of the people getting emotionally more intimate. If your partner were frequently coming home late because of the fun happy hours after work, texting a person at work during evening hours, or taking multiple business trips with the person they cheat with, you might feel differently.
But people are different so maybe those don't bother you either.