There is another obvious guess based on the content, which came to mind immediately, the sha256 hash of which begins 4dceea9. I think it'd be poor form to share out loud given the desire for anonymity.
(for example, `echo -n 'Scott Alexander' | sha256sum` gives 1fa97b...)
Can you elaborate? What you're saying sounds interesting, but I didn't understand. "The sha256 hash of which begins..." When I put the author's name into sha256sum, I get 3432d6, for instance. When I give the name of his blog/website, I get 06fb76.
I'd just like to understand what you were saying for the sake of understanding.
The footnote and return anchor links don't work. They're formatted as absolute links to somewhere on slatestarcodex.com. They should be formatted as relative works so that they'll work regardless of where the page is located. (As in, the link href should only contain "#anchortolinkto", not the rest of the URL.)
I've directly copy-pasted raw HTML into substack before and I think I've gotten this to work before, I can try again and report back. There's a lot of document features in substac you can only get if you write up some HTML, open it in a web browser, copy, and paste directly.
3. Open in browser, Ctrl+A to select all, copy-paste
4. Go to substack, write post, paste, publish (on a zero audience list for testing purposes).
From what I can tell, the substack WYSIWYG even seems to notice this. You can set an anchor link by typing e.g. "#footnoteid" in the link content. However, I can't find a way in the WYSIWYG to set the underlying "id" parameter on the tag you want that anchor to jump to. You can slip it past the goalie by copy pasting a naked HTML file directly into substack, tho.
I run an (extremely tiny experimental and nascent substack) that I generate HTML for as part of my research at work, and the way we get all our formatting in is this:
1. Generate the HTML (simple, has only basic tags, no reliance on CSS)
2. Open in browser, Ctrl+A, copy (I said copy-paste above, I meant copy)
3. Paste in substack
Substack seems to ingest it just fine, recognizes tags like <blockquote>, seems to handle our images pretty well, etc.
So if anyone submitted book reviews to you in a plain-jane HTML format, my advice is to copy it from a browser and paste THAT directly into substack and see how it looks; if they're not relying on any weird CSS and it's just structured text with basic tags chances are it should work. If it has simply formatted anchor tags for footnotes, in theory those should work too!
That doesn't make sense -- there's no way that Substack forces you to use absolute links to slatestarcodex.com! At the very least it should be possible to use absolute links to the actual URL, rather than a wrong one.
I used SSC to convert the raw HTML into a readable format. When I realized that broke the footnotes, I changed every SSC link to the corresponding ACX link. When that didn't help, I gave up.
I wouldn't say "that didn't help" -- it got rid of linking to a page that didn't exist! It's still an improvement, it just didn't solve the problem all the way. :)
Looking at the source code, the problem is that the links point to anchors that don't exist. So e.g., footnote 2 links to an anchor "fn:replant", and the link back from footnote 2 links to an an anchor "fnref:replant", but there are no such anchors, so they don't work. So, if you want this to work, you'll have to add the appropriate anchors. So e.g., the footnote 2 link should, in addition to href="...", also have name="fnref:replant". And at the beginning of foonote 2 there should be an 'a' tag with name="fn:replant".
I do notice you changed the anchor links from absolute on slatestarcodex.com, to absolute on the correct page; that will work, once you add the names, but I would still encourage you to use relative anchor links as described above -- where you only include the anchor (including the number sign), not the rest of the URL -- so that they will still work if this is posted elsewhere, as general good practice.
You may not like it, but 'Ranked Choice Voting' has been co-opted by IRV advocates, and is now the most common definition, whatever multiple definitions you may have been used to.
'Ranked Voting', or 'Ordinal Voting' now seems to be the preferred name for the category of systems you are referencing.
Yeah, which is something that threw me off the book a bit (but not the review, which is great). It sounds like Elickson makes it seems as if the hypothesis is less mainstream than it is. It won a Nobel prize...
Yeah, when I started reading this, I was thinking, "this all sounds like a case study from "Governing the Commons"" (which happens to be from 1990, though I think her work began in the 1970s, and she won the Nobel prize in 2009).
I don't really see a moral difference between "animal killed for a person's enjoyment" and "animal tortured for a person's enjoyment".
I think you're getting cross-talk between applying rights to animals and non-veganism, but have carved out an exception rather than resolving the basic issue.
(My personal resolution is to reject rights entirely for non-self-aware animals, and to oppose the farming of ape, dolphin or crow.)
I agree. I also don't see how people can act like harming an animal is an outrage while killing it outright isn't. Death is certainly a harm if anything is harm. That said, like you, I don't think most animals have moral value at all so I don't care whether or not they suffer.
Our knowledge of which animals are and aren't self-aware currently seems incomplete and highly uncertain. I think we can be pretty sure that adult humans are self-aware, and that bacteria aren't. Everything in between is increasing degrees of murky. Pigs seem to be on the ape/crow/dolphin end of the spectrum though, and are farmed a lot.
Personally, I've become vegan out of caution. I don't think chicken turning out to be conscious is highly likely, but with how little we still understand of consciousness, I have a very hard time putting the chance of it below p=0.2 or thereabouts. Which means that statistically, killing chicken or other animals of chicken-level intellect should register as at least a fifth of a death for me.
I don’t follow your logic here. I think most people and animals would rather be shot in the leg than killed. Some animals actually demonstrate this preference (rabbits for example) by gnawing off their own legs when caught in a trap. My impression wasn’t so much that the ranchers were going to take the thumbscrews to the animal, as that they might wing it.
We have all been spoiled by warlessness for so long, we have forgotten how anyone could live differently then this. The symptom of wealth can only exist in an era of peace, at least on a local level. Every good quality arises naturally while at peace.
Prediction and fulfillment, the favourite pastime of the brain, handles all the accounting and grumpiness for us on it's own. Provided there's not fights breaking out over every petty grievance, that is.
Every single example cited aims at having peaceful interactions for many generations, which is really hard if you're talking about weeks at see with lots of pointy sticks at your disposal, for example.
I think he explains the symptom, not the source.
(also, good god this not only is long, it feels long... very interesting but very few lighthearted moments that usually are the stamp at every base camp)
That's similar to my pet theory of ethics: that it's mostly a way of avoiding destructive conflict. So its mostly about getting neutral results in instead negative-sum results, with positive-sum results being a bit of an optional extra.
Yeah, I'm not buying the hypothesis. It seems like a noble savage stereotype targeted at rural communities translated into a hypothesis.
I've experienced more than a few of these close knit, traditional societies, both in the US and outside of it. Perhaps more importantly, I was in one of them as an insider and another as a quasi-insider. These communities were certainly orderly but because the enforcers of that order were private they in turn could use that authority for personal projects. A completely social society is a society without objective standards, which in turn means everything is a matter of social dominance. This might sound horrible but the advantage is that there is no dispassionate enforcement. If the law says X, and X is monstrous, you can at least be sure there's no bureaucrat paperclip maximizing X. The private enforcer will realize this is stupid and stop. And no one gossips, "Look at Scott, he stopped maximizing paperclips!"
But make no mistake. These societies can be very cruel. They can also be very kind. But they don't necessarily have to be. For example, a bunch of Southern plantation owners instead would also use this kind of enforcement and not to good ends. Lynching was violence aimed at social control very famously. This is without getting into problems inherent the system, like how they have forces inherently pushing them towards insularity, conformity, and (often hereditary) hierarchy.
These kind of rural, neighborly societies solve many problems caused by deracinated urban life. You'll never feel alone, or out of place, or like you don't have a purpose or place in life. But they have other issues.
I sort of live in one of those anarchist paradises right now. Let's say there is a lot that goes on beneath the surface, you can't google it, but everyone knows it.
It can be good or bad. It can be why conflicts can be resolved without resort to lawyers or violence, it can be kind, it can be genuinely merciful, it is the basis of small-town morality (because everyone not only knows everyone else, everyone knows everything about everyone else, so you will get a reputation and it does matter). In a little town not far from where I live, it is what burned some white supremacist jackass's church building flat to the ground, before he even had a chance to open it, and none of the locals ever saw a thing.
It also is why outsiders and newcomers are not trusted, until they prove themselves. Or why JoeBob's Aggregate ever always only wins all the bids to do the road work in the county, year after year (because Commissioner BillyBob is porking JoeBob's wife, three times nightly). It can be why the no-account kid of some asshole member of the local gentry can tear around his pickup night after night, drunk as a lord, and the local cops pretend not to notice or take the kid back home rather than teach him a richly deserved lesson. It can be the very real threat of violence against anyone who speaks up or who gets out of line and the local notables don't appreciate the competition.
Not only all that, but to paraphrase Karl Marx, this type of social arrangement reflects a certain type of economic situation and, to the extent it works, it works only in that specific situation. As I alluded in an earlier post - it doesn't work in the big city where nobody knows anyone.
At its best, it is "ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid" ("An Irish language expression whose literal meaning is ‘It is in each others’ shadow that people live’ but which, more broadly, invokes a sense of community and interdependence"). At its worst, it is the Valley of the Squinting Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_the_Squinting_Windows
This is actually not something I want to get into - Travellers versus settled community, perception of criminality, the whole tangled mess - because it has the potential to be offensive to *everybody*.
There are gangs that target the vulnerable elderly out the country because they are perceived - however correct that may be - to have sums of cash on hand, and at least equipment that can be stolen. And because they are out the country and isolated, that makes it easier for gangs to drive up and brazenly steal and threaten and rob. It's not all Travellers, far from it. And while I agree that people should not be shooting off shotguns with itchy trigger fingers, at the same time it is easy to understand how anxious and fearful vulnerable people in isolated areas that have had neighbours robbed would decide to 'shoot first and ask questions later'.
Oh, God. Ohhhhh, God. This is one of those questions that invites a punch in the nose 😀 If I had any sense, I wouldn't touch it.
Er. Well. Irish Travellers are *not* Roma or English Gypsies, let's establish that at the start. There are names that are clan names, such as the one mentioned in the case above - Ward. McDonagh would be another one, as would Connors. Accent would be another signifier - Travellers do tend to have a slightly different but noticeable accent from settled people. Anything more is going to veer dangerously into "that's racism/prejudice" territory.
There's a *very* Politically Incorrect comedy sketch from several years back about Travellers which touches on all the stereotypes (including the liberal TV show presenter who comes down to spend time amongst the quaint people and make a documentary about their lives with a very patronising tone). Watch at your peril! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAOY5bW0JVY
The joke about "I'm Pa Connors named after my father and he's Pa Connors named after his grandfather" is based on reality because there are family names where you can have brothers and cousins all named, for example, Patrick McDonagh. The musical joke is that the air they're playing is called "Banish Misfortune" and they play the same tune over and over but call it different names.
Yeah, I'm avoiding sharing stories but this matches my experience. That said, I don't think it's necessarily economic. You could create a similar environment in a city. But modern American cities don't in a way that (for example) some Italian cities do.
> For example, a bunch of Southern plantation owners instead would also use this kind of enforcement and not to good ends. Lynching was violence aimed at social control very famously.
I'll note that neither of these examples seems to contradict the hypothesis, violating both the "close-knit" and "workaday affairs" clauses. That is, I assume slaves weren't in a close-knit group with their masters, and lynch victims typically weren't in one with their killers, and anyway the hypothesis excludes situations where someone can be killed with impunity.
That said, I think you make a good point. One could reply "it's a descriptive hypothesis, not a normative one; if we don't like the outcomes, that doesn't mean the hypothesis is false". But I think that would be a cheap shot, because the enforcement mechanisms themselves might harm welfare. Like, if someone generally prefers living under the shadow of a dispassionate legal system, to living under the shadow of gossip and personal retribution, then... that doesn't necessarily show up in the welfare function, but if enough people feel that way it might do?
Slave owners and slaves (or freedmen sharecroppers) were in a close knit relationship. Close knit does not mean good or brotherly, it means close. And most Southern plantation owners lived closer and had more social interaction with their black subjects than with each other. Those were the people who lived closest to them and who they talked to more than anyone else, if only to order them around. The idea that simple proximity creates fellow feeling is just... not true.
But more broadly, this is my point. I'm not saying that close knit non-deracinated societies don't have some advantages over modern ones. I'm saying they have other issues and this seems ignorant of them.
To clarify, "close-knit" is used in a somewhat technical sense in the book and review. It indeed doesn't mean good or brotherly, but it doesn't just mean close either.
> A “close-knit” group is one where “informal power is broadly distributed among group members and the information pertinent to informal control circulates easily among them.”
So I repeat that I think the hypothesis simply has nothing to say about groups of slaves and slave-owners.
But I also repeat that more broadly, I now think you're right that Ellickson doesn't focus enough on the downsides of close-knit groups, and I didn't pick up on that.
Yeah, I don't think we're disagreeing here. Just clarifying. I feel the term is drawing bad boundaries in its technical sense. Most systems looks good if you cut out the bad examples and only focus on the good.
Of course, it might be worthwhile as a corrective to an instinctive prejudice or horror at rural America that some people have. But we shouldn't idealize it.
I agree, but I'm tentatively okay with it. It would mess with the flow of the review if they had to either remove these references to the ideas, or else use weasel words to pretend that these were links to someone else's work. Additionally, I have no idea who this person is even after clicking the links, so I don't feel compromised in any way, though I am not especially deep in the broader community here and probably wouldn't recognize most peoples' home pages. And I'd expect that people who do know the author well would probably be able to figure it from the essay alone based on the writing style and the way they think.
The only people this will affect are people who:
-Are going to vote in the contest
-Know the author well enough that knowing their identity could affect their vote
-But wasn't able to recognize the person based on their writing style
-Click the link
-Recognize who the person is based on their home page
-Weren't already going to vote for/against the author anyway (ie, someone who dislikes a person and their writing style won't be meaningfully biased against them since they weren't going to vote for them anyway)
This is probably a very small set of people, though I suppose it's somewhat larger if you restrict to the set of all people who are going to vote, a small percentage of votes swinging one way or another will matter. However, anyone who has genuine concerns about compromising their own vote can deliberately avoid clicking the links to the author's home page.
I think there is a real cost here in the imprecise anonymity, but I think there is a tradeoff in that allowing it creates a slightly better review, and years from now this review will still exist in the archives and the contest will long be over, so in my eyes it's worth it. Probably.
I like the case studies better than the theorizing. Learning about what people actually do in these circumstances is fascinating. The theorizing seems inconclusive at best?
I think he means that Marxism sees norms in a capitalist society as serving the bourgeois and not the proles.
Are you saying that this isn't true? Certainly, Marxists have historically been very opposed to norms such as privately-owned corporations and real estate (I happen to agree at least in principle with both of these).
I think it depends what a "norm" is. The "norm" against eating nothing but chocolate for a month? That's a fairly class-neutral norm as far as I can tell. The "norm" of privately owned corporations? Can we even consider that a "norm"? Surely the history of primitive accumulation (as documented by Marx) should at least raise questions here.
Well, no one's advocating for eating solely chocolate for a month. If people were, and they weren't middle-class whites, I think it'd be fairly easy to find leftists defending them.
"Well, no one's advocating for eating solely chocolate for a month."
Then it's a good example of a strong norm, which was my intention.
The second sentence of your post seems to be an entirely hypothetical situation that you just made up, and then you assumed that your outgroup would take a position that you disagree with. I suppose you might find that illuminating, but I don't.
Regardless, we are still no closer towards a citation that shows Marxists think that norms serve "only a small subset of a group".
> A second sociological theory, one less upbeat than functionalism, holds that members of powerful interest groups manipulate the content of norms to serve their own selfish interests. Traditional Marxist analysts, for example, see much of the normative baggage of a society as part of the false consciousness that deludes and hence pacifies the underclasses. Some neo-Marxist scholars, such as Isaac Balbus, and non-Marxist scholars, such as Howard Becker, also seem to have interest-group conceptions of norms.
With citation
> See Isaac D. Balbus, "Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the 'Relative Autonomy' of Law," 11 L. & Soc'y Rev. 571 (1976); Howard S. Becker, Outsiders 15-18, 147-163 (1963). Michael Taylor, "Structure, Culture, and Action in the Explanation of Social Change," 17 Pol. & Soc'y 115, 145-148 (1989), presents two examples, involving respectively the Christian church and British colonialists, that are consonant with interest-group theory.
"Much of the normative baggage" seems softened as compared to compared to the review's phrasing "Marxism, which sees norms as serving only a small subset of a group".
Also it's strange that the citation would say "Traditional Marxist" AND "neo-Marxist" scholars and then only cite a neo-Marxist (Balbus)?
Ah, to clarify, the bit I quoted above isn't literally the only thing the book says about Marxism, just the only bit that's cited. The other mention comes a few pages later, and is closer to the phrasing I used:
"The hypothesis is inconsistent, moreover, with Marxism and other ideologies that see norms as serving the narrow interests of some members of a group, presumably at the greater expense of other group members."
One of the bullet points towards the end of the review links to a post on the author's blog (or at least claims to do so). This would seem to violate the anonymity premise of the contest?
You could dismiss this as liberal-moralistic pearl clutching by the anthropologists, but the criticism is widespread, and often based on first hand experience.
I've taken to saying things like "The law only matters if someone's willing to go to court". I've knowingly been the victim of lawbreaking - even in contexts where correcting it would be fairly painless and modestly profitable to me - and gone along with it because I didn't think they were doing anything immoral. (tl;dr, the one union job I've ever had, my union somehow managed to bargain away my legally guaranteed holiday pay. But the base pay was high enough that the deal still seemed more or less fair.)
Laws exist for the big offenses, the sort where you'd solve it by rounding up your family members to bring guns and ropes to bear if the law didn't exist. The sort where corporations have millions (or billions) at stake, or where you want to ensure that nobody screws up and kills a bunch of people. For all the smaller issues in the world, the time-honored rule of "Don't be a dick" is the true law. And it's mostly for the best.
I think your distinction between global and local maxima is a good articulation of why both totalitarianism and anarchism fail as (large scale) social structures: you need coordinated, organized efforts to overcome collective action problems and overcome high cost social transition - but you also need organic, bottom-up structures (like norms) to help optimize for welfare within a given local range of solutions.
I see that it has now been over a decade since I read & blogged about this book, but my blogging didn't add enough value to be worth linking to.
Turnbull is somewhat notorious now that he's not around to defend himself. It has been said that he liked groups that let him indulge his proclivity toward pederasty and hated those (like the Ik) that didn't, thus motivating his depiction of the latter.
"The first chapter of Grinker's biography of Turnbull, as published in the New York Times in 1997, is largely gay pedo-porn."
Joseph A. Towles was ~22 when he met Turnbull, and the NYT review indicates that Kenge was "the same age". That's young, but not in the "pedo" range. Is there any particular evidence Steve Sailer is using here to give weight to his pedophile accusation? It seems a quite serious thing to accuse someone of.
"Is there any particular evidence Steve Sailer is using here to give weight to his pedophile accusation?"
Probably the text he referenced in the same blog post where he made the claim. There's a short quote that is indicated to be representative, which you would have seen if you had taken 30 seconds to investigate yourself before you posted to ask other people to perform unpaid labor that is apparently beneath you.
But quote talks about his relationship with Kenge, who the NYT implies is in his early 20s. If that's a representative quote then the evidence seems pretty weak. If Sailer has better evidence he should present it.
Where's the evidence? It's not quoted and never either Sailer or the NYT make the case that Turnbull's lovers were underage. If it's in the biography somewhere then Sailer should quote the biography.
The text Sailer quotes includes no evidence that the person Turnbull was sleeping with was underage. You're flat wrong here, which makes it that much more inexcusable that you're being such a dick about it.
(And I'm saying this as someone who usually considers marxbro at best a half-step better than a troll.)
I think the pederasty claims are about Kenge, not Towles. From the blog post TGGP linked, quoting the NYT biography: "On most mornings in 1957, the Scottish anthropologist Colin Macmillan Turnbull would wake up in his hut next to his young Mbuti assistant, Kenge, their legs and arms intertwined in the way that Mbuti men like to sleep with each other to stay warm. At four foot eight, Kenge was more than a foot and a half shorter than Colin"
Also - I definitely misread the comment thread and posted my comment in reply to a claim nobody made. I thought a commenter above had just missed the quote I copied, when they had already considered it.
There's a lawyer with a youtube channel called "Fudd Busters" devoted to debunking incorrect beliefs about gun laws. The "Fudd" comes from Elmer Fudd, and it's not just backwoods hunters who are ignorant. Federally licensed firearm dealers frequently don't know the actual law they deal with as part of their jobs.
I cannot tell you the number of rednecks who have insisted on the basis of no discernable law that they are legally entitled to murder without provocation anyone who strays onto "muh property".
When I showed one itinerant hilljack the record of a local court decision of a man sentenced to life for doing just that, he exclaimed "That's communism!" Then he thought about it for a second, and said "That's it, I'm moving to Canada!"
When I told him that the various provinces of the Dominion of Canada take an even more dim view of such antics than does his home state, he gaped at me in slackjawed wonder, as if I had horns growing out of my head. "You mean in Canada, they're even more communistic than we are?"
I found the summary of the book and its claims to be interesting, useful, and readable. The tone is a bit "inside baseball" by SSC standards, expecting that readers will be familiar with concepts from LessWrong and certain fields of econ. It didn't help that I had no idea what the subject and thesis of the book were until the middle of the review. Only at the very end did the practical relevance of Ellickson's thesis really click for me. The reviewer engages with Ellickson in a technical, nuts-and-bolts kind of way that I found unhelpful and a bit tedious, mostly due to my unfamiliarity. I did come away feeling like I understood the book, though, which is a win.
in East Texas a saw a loose horse beside the highway. I pulled over and nabbed the horse. when a pickup came by I waved it down. they just shook their heads. "Naw, that's so-and-so's horse, and he don't help us with our loose stock and we don't help with his."
sounds to me like I've got a basis for 450 page book.
It's the same basis as the Little Red Hen. Nobody can be 100% of the time having oversight on every element of their farm, from fences to "the sheep are in the corn" to straying cattle. It puts a brake on free riders - if Farmer Smith never does any work helping catch loose stock or mending fences or whatever while the rest of the community applies the norms to him, then you cut Farmer Smith loose. After a few times when his cattle or sheep or horses get drowned in the creek or fall off a cliff or get hit by a car, he will either shape up and join in the community norms, or he will go under from the financial losses. Either way, you get rid of people coasting on the benefits of community without contributing themselves.
Re the lying part. I think societies have an incentive to channel/control topics and methods of dishonesty. In the immortal words of not only Shakespeare but also Neal Peart, “all the world’s indeed a stage/and we are merely players/performers and portrayers.” Dishonesty is (imho) an unavoidable side effect of this multiple-masks aspect of human nature. So societies say “don’t lie” but what they mean is “lie about only certain things in certain ways.” Deciding what the acceptable lies are in any given social context is sort of illuminating. Hence the bafflement of some serial philanderers; that territory used to be a safe lie.
A comment on the system of an informal "balance of favors" across the entirety of the interactions between two people:
A major advantage of accounting like this is that there's no need to agree on the value of any particular favor. At all times, you have a balance of trade with the other party. Either you've done more for them than they have for you, and your balance is negative, or they've done more for you than you have for them, and your balance is positive. But that balance can never be zero; it's a real number.
So instead of expecting an unachievable balance, the expectation is that the balance shouldn't be too far from zero in either direction. If you think it's too far toward you, you fix that by asking for a favor. If that doesn't work, you complain to your friends.
And at this point, it doesn't matter whether both parties agree on what the balance is! Even if I think you owe me a minor favor and you think I owe you one, that is fine - eventually someone will ask for a favor, and the balance will shift in their direction. No problems arise unless several recent favors all have sharply asymmetric valuations, such that each party's estimation of the overall balance is wildly different from the other's.
A balance of favours system is also why boycotts and shunning work. Outside of large scale industrialised agri-business, farmers or cattle producers or as you like need help at certain times of the year or for certain large projects. You help your neighbours and they help you. This is the basis of the meitheal system:
"Meitheal is the Irish word for a work team, gang, or party and denotes the co-operative labour system in Ireland where groups of neighbours help each other in turn with farming work, such as harvesting crops. Neighbours who give their work to others are helped in turn with their own heavy seasonal tasks. To the heart of the concept is community unity through cooperative work and mutually reciprocal support."
It also makes for social controls and sanctions: if you offend against the norms, or piss off enough of your neighbours, they will boycott or shun you. Then you have to try and hire in external labourers to work in bringing in the harvest, which you may not have the money to do so, or which will severely cost you even if you manage it, and connections are broken until they are repaired or until the offender is driven out.
"Or, what about dueling traditions? We might again say the “workaday” assumption (that brings rules against murder) is violated, but that seems like a cheat. My vague understanding, at least of pistol dueling as seen in Hamilton, is it was less lethal than we might expect; and fell out of favor when better guns made it more lethal. But neither of these feels enough to satisfy, and we should demand satisfaction. Did the group gain something that was worth the potential loss of life?"
Leaving aside the "non-lethal" part and aiming straight at duels to the death - yes, there is a social benefit to having the accepted means of resolving (serious) disputes be a duel to the death, primarily based around social unity.
1) A duel to the death doesn't leave an aggrieved party who might want to relitigate matters. There's a winner (who isn't aggrieved) and a loser (who is dead).
2) In particular, in reasonably-small societies where individual charismatic politicians are a big deal, this tends to defang rabble-rousers and cut down on civil strife. A would-be revolutionary is going to wind up getting challenged to a duel at some point (or will themselves challenge existing leaders), which can end in three ways: a) they win, and are now in charge, b) they lose, and are dead, c) they repeatedly refuse to fight, lose credibility, and can't mount any kind of insurrection or resistance. All of those horns will generally avoid ongoing strife.
It should also be noted that duelling has mostly involved men, and not women. On societal timescales, men are quite expendable - losing 10% of your women loses 10% of the next generation, but this is not true of men.
There's still a link to the author's blog after the phrase “my previous thoughts on ” -- depending on how much you care about preserving anonymity, you might want to remove it or something.
There is no official word limit, although Scott suggested 2000-7000 as a guide (he called this the 95th percentile of his own reviews, but especially recently he's been a bit wordier than that).
He's only written one that was over 10,000, though - Hoover, which he explicitly apologised for - and that was still 3k shorter than this).
There are a couple of links to the author's blog, actually.
I don't think simply removing them is a great solution since anonymity doesn't seem to have been a requirement of entry and the links are to "I'm leaving this stuff out because I said it elsewhere".
I strongly suspect the sheer length of this review (especially considering it had stuff left out!) is going to doom it either way.
Three comments: 1) it's very long and rather boring; 2) 'Good fences make good neighbours' is right up there with 'To thine own self be true' in the rhetorical irony top 10 - literary quotations often used by politicians, management and lifestyle guru / charlatans, unaware or unheeding their authors put them in the mouths of hypocrites and fools (Polonius, Frost's uptight WASP neighbour, etc.); 3) beef farming is unsustainable and the meat industry is killing the planet - in my anarchist paradise, it would be outlawed and all ranchers in California, Brazil and anywhere would be rounded up to work in the organic orchards and bug farms, and everyone would be much happier 😀
When you say "everyone would be much happier", do you mean "the total happiness of all people would be higher", "the average happiness of all people would be higher", "for all N, the Nth-happiest person would be happier", or "all individual people would be happier"?
This is like answering "all of the above" to "which of the following would be true: everyone will be able to afford 3 acres of land; everyone will be able to afford 3 acres of land; everyone will be able to afford 6 acres of land; everyone will be able to afford 10 acres of land". It's logically coherent, but it tends to suggest you didn't understand the question.
(Then again, the fact that the first two options presented are exactly the same [unless the policy includes making adjustments to who is or isn't alive] tends to suggest that magic8muchroom didn't understand the question either...)
#1 and #2 would be identical if the same number of people were alive, yes. However, it is a known fact that insectivory and herbivory are more efficient than carnivory at converting sunlight into human; ergo, his policy *would* increase the carrying capacity of his fiefdom by somewhere between 50% and 200% (depends on the baseline meat consumption and on the insect consumption posited). As such, #1 is a *much* weaker claim than #2 for this particular policy in the long term (#2 would require that on average people are happier on a vegan+bug diet; #1 would require only that they're on average at least ~half as happy).
#1 was the easy out that I actually agree with. #2 and #3 are more dubious, and #4... well, see my actual reply.
But for your analysis of #1 / #2, you're comparing people in the future (when notional increased capacity has been exploited in actual population increases) to people now. You can't do that for #4, because the individual people are different; the claim would have no meaning. So I interpreted all of the scenarios as "a set of people in the normal-food-production universe, versus the same set of people in the bugs-and-trees-only universe". And in that framing, you can't distinguish between total happiness and average happiness, because the population is constant. (It's not even that the population size is constant -- the population, down to each individual, is constant.)
More to the merits of your point, we are not close to current carrying capacity now, so it isn't immediately obvious that increasing capacity would increase the population, but it's not an unreasonable assumption either.
I mean, if you're running a totalitarian state (which the whole "enslaving former ranchers" thing kind of implied) and are in full "that Conclusion ain't Repugnant" mode, you could max it out within a few decades (i.e. some of the people would still be around from before you started). Human biology can sustain a rather impressive growth rate (particularly if you screw with the sex ratio), and my impression is that we're maybe a factor of 3 off max (with current diets). But otherwise, a fair point.
I'm curious why you think that about Northern California in particular. It's been a while since I lived in that area, but I was next to several beef farms and they were free-grazing the naturally occurring grass on hilly, rocky terrain that didn't seem obviously usable for any other agricultural purpose. This was nothing at all like leveling Amazonian rainforests to mass produce meat for Big Macs.
I am no agronomist, but typically land that can be used for crops is more profitable when used to raise crops than for beef production. Ranches are usually on marginal land, like what you see Out West.
"California has more than 100 million acres of land, 38 million of which are range and pasture lands. Of these 38 million acres, approximately half are owned by the federal government. California’s rangelands are classified as Mediterranean, desert, and intermountain, and are among the most productive in the West. California’s predominant range type is Mediterranean annual rangelands, which encompass all of the Central Valley, as well as the coastal and foothill ranges. Annual forage production in these regions is seasonal, but grazing of green or dry forage occurs year round. The Mediterranean grasslands of the North Coast, because of the region’s moderate climate and increased rainfall, produce forage for a longer period.
The state’s desert rangelands are located primarily in the southeastern region of California. A mixture of annual vegetation, perennial grasses and shrubs provide forage for domestic livestock and many species of wildlife. Winter and spring rains support annual plant growth; however, rainfall can be erratic and shrubs provide feed for livestock during dryer periods. Intermountain rangelands are located in the northern and eastern regions of the state. Winter dormancy and spring-summer growth dictate livestock management systems vastly different than in other regions of the state.
Cattle typically graze lower elevation forage in the spring, and are then moved to higher elevation pastures during the summer months. Ranchers in the intermountain areas generally harvest and store forage during the summer for winter feeding. During the fall, cattle may graze crop residue, residual rangeland, or pasture forage. Cattle may be fed hay or transported out of the region during the winter months."
Moving cattle is transhumance, which farmers everywhere do; it was called "booleying" in Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundale and you can still see it today with sheep farming, where the sheep are brought down from the hills to the sea-level pastures for the grass growing period in Spring (and lambing season).
"However, since 1984, California has lost 1.5 million acres of irrigated agriculture and rangeland, said summit presenter Keali’I Bright, assistant director of the California Department of Conservation. Between 2014 and 2016, 130,000 acres of grazing lands were converted to orchards or vineyards.
“Why are lands changing?” Bright asked. “The population is increasing, and, driven by cost of living, there’s a drastically changing commute tolerance and different transportation options.”
A fishery is basically the term for a specific group of fish in a specific place. The Grand Banks Cod Fishery, or the Antarctic Wale Fishery or whatever. You can have multiple different fisheries in the same place, but they're going to be different kinds of fish being pursued with different methods. Traditionally, each fishery was operated by a specific group, which had its own norms. These days that's less the case.
Also, it's probably worth pointing out that virtually all American whalers were out of New England, even the ones in the Pacific.
Surely some fish migrate – or is that rare? Or are the fisheries themselves seasonal? (That would make sense.)
And are no fish (or other marine animals) nomadic, i.e. neither mostly stationary nor migrating between mostly stationary fixed locations on a regular schedule?
Yes, fish migrate, and those fisheries are seasonal. As for nomadic fish, I'm not sure. If they exist, they certainly weren't fished until relatively recently, because traditional methods wouldn't have worked.
Can you share any links to more details about this?
I've been partial to the idea that fisheries should be 'privatized' (i.e. some kind of legal 'property right' should be created and, e.g. auctioned) and I don't think I've read many technical details about how exactly people would, e.g. monitor or track the schools of fish that make up a 'fishery'.
I'd imagine that traditional methods might, at least occasionally, catch 'nomadic' fish, but I think I understand you as claiming that those traditional methods would have (naturally) focused on the larger 'stocks' of fish that were (somewhat) reliably available in specific places and times.
I'm not an expert on fishing, so this is based on the research I did for https://www.navalgazing.net/Merchant-Ships-Fishing. These days, they have sonars and such which allow them to track specific schools of fish, but those only work at reasonably close range. The only way to do global tracking would involve either getting access to SOSUS (good luck with that) or building a private alternative (way too expensive, also likely to make navies nervous). You're correct about my claims on the traditional method. Fishing vessels were a major capital item, so their owners would have been chasing reasonably reliable returns, which you don't generally get from truly nomadic fish. (Assuming those are even really a thing. Given what I know of the ocean's food distribution pattern, you're not going to have much biomass doing that because food appears in specific areas at specific times.)
Yes – I'm skeptical of lots of political projects that would probably be very good (e.g. carbon taxes/pricing), particularly those that require global coordination.
"Ellickson mentions a tribe where they “cut a finger from the hand of each of a man’s close female relatives after he dies”; what medical knowledge are they lacking that makes this seem welfare-maximizing?"
Did he give no further detail on what tribe this is from where, or are you leaving it out? An initial notion that comes to mind is the fear of witchcraft, so by social sanctions such as this you are trying to prevent bad outcomes - a potential witch wanting to curse someone to death has to bear in mind the loss of a finger, and other female family members who are at risk will try to prevent the witch from doing anything. Substitute "poison or otherwise encompass the murder of an abusive male" and the same applies. But not knowing the social and cultural background leaves a lot of information out - what is the position of unmarried daughters/sisters, of widows and mothers, when it comes to "close female family members"? Is this about sacrificing for the benefit of the deceased man in the afterlife - the custom of sati was religiously sanctioned in Hinduism as examples of chaste wives who would benefit their families and the souls of their husbands by virtue of their sacrifice, as well as widows being considered inauspicious and capable of bringing misfortune to others. There may be a lot of reasons for such a practice and I'd like to know more about the tribe in question.
Which brings us on to the naive belief in Science and Progress doing away with the Darkness of Superstition, and quite frankly I'm surprised that even a book from the 80s would be holding on to that kind of hopefulness:
“A tribe that used to turn to rain dancing during droughts thus is predicted to phase out that ritual after tribe members learn more meteorology. Tribes are predicted to abandon dangerous puberty rites after members obtain better medical information. As tribe members become more familiar with science in general, the status of their magicians and witch doctors should fall. As a more contemporary example, faith in astrology should correlate negatively with knowledge of astronomy. These propositions are potentially falsifiable.”
A tribe that knows to tune in to the nightly weather forecast on the TV news may still engage in rain dances as a matter of cultural heritage, and because it's fun to dress up and have dances as a social activity. Magicians and witch doctors will still have places as sources of traditional wisdom and advice on matters that "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" can't address - how do I propitiate my mother-in-law's ghost because my marriage is going badly and she always threatened to come back and haunt us because she never liked me? 'Dangerous puberty rites' may be tidied up by having trained medical doctors carry out FGM https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-019-0817-3 and for other rites, adolescents will always find ways to risky behaviour involving sex, drugs, fights, jumping off heights, driving very fast, and so on.
As for astronomy and astrology - tell that to all the psychic hotlines, ghost hunter TV shows, Tarot readings and astrology websites that are still up and running even though we have The Hubble Telescope etc.
He names them as "the Dani tribal group in Western New Guinea", and his citation is "Richard A. Barrett, Culture and Conduct: An Excursion in Anthropology 5-6 (1984)."
I feel like most of your comment is saying "these things haven't vanished yet"? But that feels too much to expect. If they're declining, that seems consistent with Ellickson's prediction.
Okay, having done some Googling, I got information on this from (of all places) a "Daily Mail" article:
"As well as their quite liberal view towards clothing, the tribe are also well known for their unique practice of self mutilation.
After the passing of a loved one, relatives are expected to cut off the top part of their fingers as a sign of respect and grieving.
The practice is meant to symbolise the pain one feels after losing a loved one with many people in the tribe often amputating multiple fingers during their lifetime. "
It's only women who are expected to do this, and it has been outlawed by the Indonesian government so it's the old women of the tribe who show marks of this. The Peabody Museum has a very short piece including this:
"Indeed, warfare dominated much of life. Its causes were complex and varied, including the ritual pacification of ghosts and revenge for previous deaths incurred in battle. ...A death, by enemy action in ambush or battle, was considered particularly dangerous for the community, and elaborate funerals were staged to placate the ghosts of an alliance's dead."
So yeah, I think that cutting off a fingertip is meant to be apotropaic, to placate angry ghosts and evil spirits. Animist cultures don't have a very benign view of the dead and tend to live in constant dread of the influence of the spirits who are very easy to offend or to break taboos. A culture built around low-level but constant skirmishing, which can erupt into serious violence, is going to have an elevated risk of male death and the concomitant necessity for female family members to placate angry ghosts by symbolic sacrifice to offset the loss of life (cut off a finger tip instead of burning a widow).
"I feel like most of your comment is saying "these things haven't vanished yet"? But that feels too much to expect. If they're declining, that seems consistent with Ellickson's prediction."
I meant more (a) when exposed to Science and Progress, cultures don't automatically switch from "we need to dance to bring rain" to "why did we do such stupid things?", they hold on to customs and traditions and find a way to incorporate them into the new paradigm. Look at American Hallowe'en, so very different from its origins in Irish and Scottish traditions, which has become so successful it is a global export even to the countries where it originated and has displaced the traditional version (I doubt any Americans are going down to the river at midnight to draw their shifts against the current to find out who their future husband will be; if they are wearing shifts at all, it's to dress up as Sexy Ghost or Sexy Witch). Science'n'Progress didn't stop the USA from "yay, ghosts, spirits and witches! fun!" because that is how things shake out.
So to my eyes, Ellickson seems to have the 19th century high-minded Victorian ideal of education will overcome the darkness of ignorance, as in this quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Naval Treaty":
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future."
I am surprised that he holds such a view, but I don't know enough about him to know if it's due to personal hobbyhorses or what. I'm dour enough to think that darkness, ignorance, superstition and tradition (in both the good and bad sense) have no problem clinging on to the underbelly of Science'n'Progress.
As to what is (or was, at the time the book was written) going on in Shasta County, I think it's not that "ranchers are too dumb to understand the law", it's that "the law does not take into account the norms they operate under". I think that is what Ellickson is trying to argue on a wider basis? In Shasta County, the social norms came *first*, before formal laws. Ranching in California was open range, if I understand correctly; ranching started under Spanish/Mexican governance and boomed with the Gold Rush. It was after all that was established that public law caught up with it and public governance to oversee the management and use was established; 42% of the rangeland is privately owned so plainly there is going to be tension between "we were here first and the lawmakers are johnny-come-lately". Ranchers established the norms to co-operate and punish defectors, and the traditional-minded/conservative, established ranchers are going to continue on "this is how we always did it" rather than abide by the letter of some law dreamed up by city pencil-pushers. Hence the feeling that, whatever the law technically says, ranchers and cattle were here first and if some city guy speeding on his way to town hits one of their cows, he *should* be liable (the same way he'd be liable if he hit a pedestrian in the city), never mind what the law says about whether there should be fences in place or not.
I'll note that Ellickson only devoted a single paragraph to this subject. I wish he'd given it more space, but given that he didn't, it might suggest he didn't think too hard about it. Which I absolutely think he should have done. But if I try to fill in what he might have said if he had, I think it would be something like...
We'd expect these rituals and traditions to phase out, to the extent that they're net harmful. That might look like disappearing entirely, it might look like being replaced with milquetoast versions of them, or in some cases it might just mean they stick around. If the Dani ostensibly cut off fingers to placate angry ghosts, that might be replaced with, I dunno, wrapping nettles around your finger to placate angry ghosts, and later with wrapping benign leaves around your finger to placate angry ghosts. The hypothesis predicts that behaviors would change in the direction of maximizing welfare, but if the beliefs can stay the same while doing so, they might well do.
(Thanks for looking into the Dani btw. It's a plausible idea, and reveals a mistake in my thinking. "What medical knowledge are they lacking" assumes the problem is they underestimate the costs, but instead they might overestimate the benefits. I'm not sure if Ellickson made the same mistake: he did use the phrase "obtain better medical information", but he used it in the context of puberty rites. Plausibly he meant something like "better medical information suggesting that puberty will just happen one way or another".)
I don't know what traditional Halloween looked like, but modern Halloween doesn't seem like something the hypothesis would anti-predict, regardless of whether the "ghosts and spirits and witches" angle is something people do for fun or because they actually believe in those things. And modern astrology... I dunno, even if it is seeing a recent boom, it just really does seem like it's a fairly unremarkable thing. Some people do make actual decisions based on it, but it feels like it's "below the noise threshold" in some sense.
Ellickson gives an example in a footnote:
> Members of the Algonquian tribes in Canada, for example, did discard their religious belief that a slain animal spontaneously regenerates itself after this belief had stimulated over-hunting of valuable forest animals. Various perspectives on this example are discussed in Robert A. Brightman, "Conservation and Resource Depletion: The Case of the Boreal Forest Algonquians," in The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources 121, 130-133 Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson eds. 1987). The updating of norms is likely to lag, of course, because rational actors are rightly reluctant to abandon long-standing customs.
> As to what is (or was, at the time the book was written) going on in Shasta County, I think it's not that "ranchers are too dumb to understand the law", it's that "the law does not take into account the norms they operate under". I think that is what Ellickson is trying to argue on a wider basis?
I mostly agree; certainly I don't think Ellickson thinks the ranchers are stupid, and I don't think that either, and if I gave either of those impressions I regret it.
But I do think the ranchers misunderstand the law, rather than understanding it and deciding they don't care. I mentioned the couple who didn't have enough liability insurance because they thought that in open range, motorists were responsible for not hitting their cows. That could be seen as petty rebellion, I guess. I didn't mention the people who deliberately brought these cases to court where they wouldn't win. That could have been testing the waters to see if the newly appointed judge would go against the law. But between those and various other details, my read of the book is that "ranchers misunderstand the law" is the most parsimonious explanation.
I also need to clarify what I'm trying to say. I agree that things like "huh, looks like animals do *not* spontaneously regenerate" will cause changes in thinking and beliefs. But I also think that (1) practices, customs and traditions linger on and adapt even after they have been discovered to be non-scientific, and (2) that part of the needs they are addressing aren't covered neatly by Science'n'Progress.
(1) You don't do rain dances any more because you know they don't cause rain. But you keep doing them because it's a social occasion and it's fun to dress up and dance. Maybe you do them now because it's a tourist attraction and tourism dollars keep the tribe going through drought periods. Maybe you do them because you want to keep the new generations in touch with their heritage and roots and you are consciously trying to preserve and hand on cultural practices.
(2) So rain dances don't help droughts. Now that Science'n'Progress has told you that, what can you do? Well, today you have to sit around and wait for the rains to come when and if they will come (or try something like cloud seeding which might work maybe okay probably not but hey you need to try something https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eight-states-are-seeding-clouds-to-overcome-megadrought/). Back in the old days of superstition, at least having a rain dance gave you back *some* feeling of control, that you *could* do something to influence the weather. And sometimes it did rain after you did the dance - sure, the dance had nothing to do with it, it was just coincidence, but it helped boost the morale of the community.
As to ranchers not understanding the law, yes, I think it's more "misunderstanding" than anything else. It probably *feels* more correct that a motorist who hit your cow should pay damages, rather than "sorry, you are now down $600 on a dead cow and also you may have to pay the motorist for damage to his car". And looking at this example of law, I don't know if it holds in Shasta County, but it does look on the face of it that someone might go to court because "well, the highway wasn't bounded by property like it says here" and expect not to be held liable:
§ 16902. Livestock on highway; strays; unattended animals
A person that owns or controls the possession of any livestock shall not willfully or negligently permit any of the livestock to stray upon, or remain unaccompanied by a person in charge or control of the livestock upon, a public highway, if both sides of the highway are adjoined by property which is separated from the highway by a fence, wall, hedge, sidewalk, curb, lawn, or building.
§ 16904. Collision between vehicle and animal; presumption or inference
In any civil action which is brought by the owner, driver, or occupant of a motor vehicle, or by their personal representatives or assignees, or by the owner of livestock, for damages which are caused by collision between any motor vehicle and any domestic animal on a highway, there is
no presumption or inference that the collision was due to negligence on behalf of the owner or the person in possession of the animal.
I think one thing about norm-enforcement is that there's a Keynesian beauty contest thing going on. My actions (norm-violating, norm-enforcing, whatever) are going to be seen by others as more or less reasonable, and that will affect my reputation and my interactions with them. At the extreme unreasonableness end, it will even lead others to punish me for my norm violations. I think that's the driver for a tendency to maximize welfare (visible well-being).
When the healthy guy doesn't shovel his walk because he can't be arsed, everyone knows he's just being a lazy bum. When the 70 year old widow who uses a cane to walk doesn't shovel her walk, nobody thinks she's violating any norms. (And indeed, it's quite likely that some neighborhood kid or other will just go ahead and shovel her walk while he's shoveling his own, in my neighborhood.) This works well because it's visible. If the apparently healthy guy actually has some kind of back problem and shoveling the walk will leave him incapacitated for the next week, he'll probably get a lot of unjust pushback from the neighbors, because it sure *looks* like he could do it.
If I yell at the little old lady for not shoveling her walk, everyone is going to think I'm a jerk. If I yell at the apparently-healthy guy for not shoveling his walk, everyone is going to think I've got a point. And I am instinctively weighing that kind of consideration when I decide whether or not to yell at my neighbors for not shoveling their walks. (Well, okay, I'm probably never going to yell at them for that, but I guess I *could*.)
Norm-violations and norm-enforcement that takes into account visible stuff like this works passably well, right? You can tell I'm a jerk if I yell at the little old lady for not shoveling her walk, and others who see you treating me like a jerk can see why you did it and it makes sense, and....
Evolution does a lot of optimizing, but also often falls into weird and counterproductive situations where, say, 90% of your energy budget is spent on your spectacularly long and useless tail because that's what gets mates, or your species' evolution paints you into a corner that drives you to extinction as soon as some aspect of your environment changes. I think we should be unsurprised to see norms evolve in much the same way--sometimes giving us stunningly elegant solutions to problems, sometimes giving us solutions that more-or-less work but look like they're held together with duct tape and zip ties (think of DNA copying in eucaryotes and why we need telomeres), sometimes stuff that works according to the hill-climbing, mutation/selection/drift/flow logic of evolution but is honestly a fairly shitty solution.
It seems to me this kind of analysis is the basis for a lot of science fiction. Take Heinlein: many of his books (e.g. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) run with the central point that future humans living in space will develop norms totally different from ours because of the radically different environment, and a lot of the narrative is built on his predictions of what those norms would be. Another example is 'The Expanse' with its Belter culture.
Keep in mind that ranches are big and require a long-term investment. Cattle ranching requires lots of land, and while a herd can be moved, but the land cannot. Not only that, but thanks to surveys, land law and easements, it is usually pretty clear who holds title to a given parcel of land at any given time, and who is permitted to enter on which parcel of land and for what purpose.
Further, because ranches are big long-term enterprises, there can only be so many ranches and ranchers in a given area, and it is likely that all the ranchers know one another. Their families probably all go way back. Moreover, all the ranchers will need favors or forbearances from one another from time to time (not necessarily business related), so it is best not to make long-term enemies.
Therefore, law or no law, the ranchers either have to get rid of each other (whether by violence or buyout), or they have to learn to live with one another. Wild West Game of Thrones aside, violence ends badly in the long-term for most participants, and even at best is unpredictable, especially in the age of firearms. Buyout is expensive. Learning to tolerate each other is probably the least-cost solution, not to mention the one least likely to attract heat from bankers, banditti, lawyers, and law enforcement.
In a similar vein to ranchers, dorm room anarchists assume that "primitive" tribes have no laws. In fact, such tribes typically have laws, in the sense that they have codes, often quite convoluted, governing who is allowed to marry whom, who is permitted to eat what and with whom, who is in the right in a particular type of dispute, who answers for the conduct of whom, etc.. Just that these codes are not written down or lawyered over.
Margaret Mead aside, a lot of these codes pertain to sex and family, probably because arguments over who is permitted to sleep with whom, over "is that really my kid?", over which kid is entitled to what, are the fastest way to tear a tribe apart or simply to lead to unnecessary intra-tribal conflict. And outside the tribe, you may be fair game for anyone. This is why tribes are so tribal. in the sense that it's "us against them" and at the same time, why tribal norms are so relentlessly enforced. They have to be.
For instance, in spite of his wartime prowess, Crazy Horse lost his status as Shirt Wearer in the Oglala Sioux, because he had an affair with a married woman. If he had abducted a woman from an enemy tribe, the outcome probably would have been different.
As to whether such a not-quite-anarchy solution works in other environments, one in which the participants are not incentivized to at least learn to tolerate one another - well, that is probably why city dwelling businessmen are much more litigious than ranchers or tribesmen, and city drug gangs are rumored at times to resort to even less cooperative solutions.
If the Code Duello was clear about nothing else, it was that only a nobleman could institute a duel, and a nobleman only need respond to a challenge from another nobleman.
Peons need not apply and cannot apply. For it is one thing if the Duke of Buggeringham gets into a fight with Lord FrouFrou over some perceived slight, but the social order cannot tolerate the son and heir of the duchy getting into a one-on-one fight with a peon on anything remotely resembling fair odds.
For if history and the fairy tales teach us nothing else, it is this: beware an ambitious poor boy with nothing to lose.
re: academia my sense was always that this was a kind of unofficial PR/advertising interest in publishers refraining from making a big stink. Indeed, since professors often decide what books whole classes use (often with much better profit margins than the academic books profs use) and are the ones often providing the content it would be idiotic for any publisher with an interest in having their books choosen to make a fuss about this. They also know that (more so pre-digital but scans are still inferior) established profs with the money to spare will probably buy copies of the books but while the grad students who lack the cash will favor the copies but, if they find the book appealing, will likely buy a copy at some point in their career.
It's more that the overhead of trying to do this via a formal legal process wouldn't be workable. For one, if an official copy lacks features (search) or has bad quality the publisher gets blamed and any rule they tried to articulate would run the risk of being abused at scale.
This isn't to say that it's not the kind of system held together by informal norms but that the publishers are part of this informal norm system.
My loose thinking about dueling is that it does actually serve the community pretty well. First, duels stop infinite vendetta cycles, which otherwise can seriously harm whole tribes. Everybody accepts that the point of the duel was to settle the matter once and for all. And second, when you're dueling over honor, it gives the community a certain number of people who have proven, skin-in-the-game, that they're willing to die to preserve their reputation.
We view duels as barbaric today but considering the alternatives they may have been the last barbaric option at the time. Defending reputations with violence seems to be a natural human thing. You can sue for defamation today, which makes the threat of violence more abstract, more impartial, and hopefully removes the necessity for violence at all. But if someone disobeys a court order, the state can use violence to enforce it. On the other end of the scale, compare dueling to unregulated reputation-maintenance violence. Closest thing you might see in modern society is a brawl among gang members, who don't have effective access to the courts to solve defamation issues. This violence is usually, but not always, less extreme (usually fists, not guns), but also does not offer as many off-ramps. A spur of the moment apology might prevent violence or it might not. You may or may not have an opportunity to apologize. It might be your innocent kid who ends up dead from a drive by shooting instead of you. Whereas duels offered a whole ritual process with opportunities to resolve the matter peaceably throughout.
I'd just like to say I appreciate the careful summaries and attention to detail of this review. I admit I'm glad the other reviews aren't this long, but I think this one justifies its length by giving me what I feel is a good sense of the book and its strengths and weaknesses.
The summary of Ellickson’s discussion of campus photocopying is a little ambiguous about fair use. For example, “fair-use doctrine is quite restrictive unless they get explicit permission,” can be read as suggesting that the fair use determination depends in some way on asking for permission. But the whole point of fair use is that it doesn’t require permission.
What’s really going on here, which the author gets at by referring to professors “avoiding learning the details of fair use doctrine,” is that professors almost universally believe that their photocopying is fair use. Making multiple copies for classroom use is one of the illustrative fair purposes in the statute. Professors rely on that fact and tend either not to know that it’s not conclusive or to assume that even if you do the rest of the analysis, it will obviously cash out in favor of fair use.
Ah yes, slime molds. As per usual with claims of solving NP-hard problems, the issue is that they are solving a slightly different problem than claimed.
Let's look at what they are actually solving for a moment. (Note: I'm using equality in the below in an arguably incorrect manner. Heads up.)
First, note that a slime mold (and indeed, any physics-based solution for pretty much any problem) has a finite maximum resolution. (You might argue what exactly said resolution is, but ultimately you can agree hopefully that there exists some floor here.)
Second, note that a slime mold has Θ(area) computational power (at least in theory. Biological constraints may reduce this).
Third, note that a slime mold has a finite maximum speed of information propagation (trivial bound: speed of light; practical bound - I don't know the actual figure but probably substantially less than the speed of sound). And hence requires O(max distance) time to compute a result. (Be it exact or α-approximation - if you require less than O(max distance) time, consider two points at (-L, 0) and (L, 0), and a third point at choice[(0, L/sqrt(3)), (0, -L/sqrt(3))], with L chosen to be large enough that the third point cannot communicate with the others before time is up. Without communication, you are forced to pick some common point for the Steiner node - but no matter what point you pick there's an adversarial choice where you are incorrect. Your best bet is to pick (0,0), but this results in a distance of (2 + 1/sqrt(3))L. Given that the optimal tree for both has a distance of 2L, this means you cannot approximate better than a factor of 1/(2 sqrt(3))... which is required for both exact solutions and α-approximation.)
And finally, note that the slime mold is not solving the problem exactly - assuming it is solving this particular problem exactly, it is solving the original problem within an error of... let's see.
Let's treat things as a grid, and work in distance units of our resolution. We have n nodes. Scale the problem such that the maximum dimension of the resulting problem is `s`. With this solution, we're moving every Steiner node by up to a half of a unit distance from the optimal tree; an optimal Steiner tree has at most n-1 nodes (and hence at most 2n-1 edges), so the cost changes by at most 0.5*(2n-1)=n-0.5 units. The optimal tree trivially has a distance of at least o(s). So overall our factor of error is (n-0.5)/o(s), or O(n/s).
Meanwhile, to get said factor of error we had O(s^2) area of slime mold computing for at a minimum of O(s) time [in general; obviously if a problem is restricted e.g. entirely 1d this does not happen]. Or O(s^3) total computational steps.
All told this works out to O(n^3 ε^-3) complexity. (...ish. I don't know how much of the slime mold is actually active during this entire time.)
Now, how does this compare to standard algorithms?
Steiner trees are NP-hard, yes, but Euclidean Steiner trees have α-approximation schemes for constant dimension (that is, for any given desired `ε>0`, you can construct a polynomial-time algorithm that is guaranteed to produce a result that is no more than `1+ε` times the optimal result).
The best I could find at a quick glance was O(n (log n + ε^(-C/ε))). You'll note that this is substantially better than the slime mold for large n.
(Interesting, the α-approximation schemes for Euclidean Steiner trees are also largely based around discretizing to a grid first - but they can form a finer grid because they don't spend anywhere near O(s^3) steps on the resulting grid.)
Or to put it another way: I'm not sure if we _care_ what the slime molds are doing, because we can already do better by simply exploring the entire area, sending back information about any nodes to a central spot, and doing the calculation there. (Well, we may care. But not for this particular reason.)
Seems like a problem that's better solved bottom up.
As far as I see it tit-for-tat morality and gossip as a solution to the free rider problem are well established results. They're sufficient to explain the observed phenomena without overreaching.
Elinor Ostrom got a Nobel Memorial prize for analyzing exactly this kind of stuff. I think she did a pretty good job. The book was written 30 years ago so I can understand if he doesn't mention her, but a review should show some basic familiarity with the way Ostrom described these norms.
Meh – I only recently became aware of Ostrom myself and I think the book of hers I subsequently bought is still (unread) on my 'to read' list.
Generally, I think we should give even Nobel laureates a pass on having 'read the literature' – it's too big for almost anyone to have done that nowadays (and arguably has been true for at least 30 years!).
You finally did it. You finally published something that is so long and meandering that my curiosity withered and died, even after trying to skip topics that just can't be that interesting (and were not). This was a rough start for community book reviews.
I wonder, as a thought experiment, if we applied a computer to defining counties, and states in the US, with the optimum defined as 'counties will have the smallest surface area (or some other simple geometric rule to minimize opportunity for gerrymandering in support of some group over some other group) to hold 150 people (Dunbar's number). States will be proportioned to hold as close as possible the an equal number of counties.'
Other than the absurdly high number of counties in dense cities (some buildings in New York or other dense urban core might have multiple counties, by floor perhaps?) and weird relationships for utilities (a thousand counties need to band together to pay for the sewer system for example), I wonder what would happen to governance if we limited the #'s to human understandable human walkable?
I suspect a lot of people would be really mad, because they would have to participate in governance and politics... I think many people (more urban than rural) are governmental free riders who enjoy nor having to worry about governance and such unless something triggers them for their cause du jour.
I suspect politics would be radically different (better?) when limited to human-understandable groups you could have actual human relationships with - the monthly 'County 101' dinner where all 150 voters get together for a meal and a conversation would be very different than the politics of today.
Many things would work better, and many things would be harder/worse. Interesting...
Great read! Although I'm still pretty confused on what the definition of "welfare" here is, which is obviously pretty fundamental. Could someone hopefully help and provide a more concrete definition? If it has to do with what the preferences an ordinary person holds, then how are we defining "ordinary person"- slightly different definitions (say mean vs. median vs. modal) seem to have the potential to provide radically different answers. I must be missing something.
I suppose I have three slightly different questions:
1. What's Ellickson's definition?
2. What definition does the author of this review think is best?
3. Is there a definition that anyone can think of that best steelmans the hypothesis.
'Ordinary person' is 'defined' – as much as it _is_ defined – by other 'ordinary people' (in whatever the relevant community is).
I think the answer to [3] is to 'define' it along the lines of 'revealed preference', e.g. what 'ordinary people' claim to be components of 'welfare' (either verbally or via their behavior).
Both interesting points, and seems largely correct to me! I think if you take the first point seriously though (who is considered an "ordinary person" is defined by other "ordinary people", and therefore become self-referential), then you're naturally led to questions of who has power to define who is considered an ordinary person. I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I think it's a valid point regardless.
It's absolutely a valid point, but also a little 'besides the point' for the discussion we're discussing. I think of it as a 'spherical cow' – obviously wrong or incomplete but extremely useful for considering something else in particular.
Practically, people seem mostly 'good enough' at imagining an 'ordinary person'. They're probably wrong in lots and lots of ways, but good enough for 'ordinary' social purposes, i.e. better than nothing – an often high standard!
Good analogy! While I agree this abstraction allows us to achieve "better than nothing" results, I certainly wouldn't call abstracting away all power dynamics "good enough" (perhaps I'm just nitpicking words, but I think this gets at a genuine disagreement I have with your view).
What seems like the justification for "abstracting away all power dynamics" isn't that doing so is 'good enough' – not for a real political/moral/ethical project of significance.
But it's _easier_ to think about the specific abstraction 'utility versus welfare' without also solving the NP-complete problem of how to adjust for "power dynamics", and specifically the power to affect the common understanding of 'ordinary person' in any specific community/polity.
I.e. it's more efficient to decouple 'utility versus welfare' (and the notion of 'ordinary person') than to ALSO try to fully understand and account for 'power dynamics' too.
I'm a bit of a topic expert on the history of dueling, so I noticed your aside about that.
There is a norm-centered explanation for dueling with explains it in terms compatible with Ellickson's theory. The duel (or rather the threat of injury or death in one) is often a form of norm enforcement that flourishes when recourse to formalized legal recourse is unavailable.
Thus, for example, a very prevalent and widely accepted cause of duels clear up to the end of the 19th century was incidents in which the challenged party was thought to have cheated at cards or other gambling games. More generally, betrayals outside the perceived scope of the law tended to trigger challenges that were socially supported.
Two factors that decreased the incidence of dueling were (a) increasing availability of justice through a court system and (b) increasing lethality of personal weapons. One significant transition point was reached in the 1840s when the sealed percussion cap greatly reduced the odds of a misfire or squib in damp European weather. The sword duel actually outlasted the pistol duel; the last recognizable formal sword duel was actually fought in 1967 in Paris!
I was astonished reading this that no consideration was given to the cost or reliability of turning to the legal system. There seems to be an underlying assumption by some legal economists that laws provide smooth and frictionless incentive structures. Litigation is expensive, mentally and emotionally taxing, can drag on for years, and can be uncertain in outcome. Lawyers are expensive and the legal system is extremely hostile to non-specialists. Invoking the legal system in many disputes could be viewed as a form of altruistic punishment - choosing the lose-lose option in order to deter future transgressors. In this case, the legal system would be best reserved for extreme edge cases – financially ruinous breaches of contract, life ruining torts, or reliably and investigating and prosecuting extreme examples of criminal self help (murder, assault).
Given the length, I assume you secretly entered your own contest.
There is another obvious guess based on the content, which came to mind immediately, the sha256 hash of which begins 4dceea9. I think it'd be poor form to share out loud given the desire for anonymity.
(for example, `echo -n 'Scott Alexander' | sha256sum` gives 1fa97b...)
The author also links to their own website, so it's not exactly top secret.
Hah. They do. Never mind then.
Can you elaborate? What you're saying sounds interesting, but I didn't understand. "The sha256 hash of which begins..." When I put the author's name into sha256sum, I get 3432d6, for instance. When I give the name of his blog/website, I get 06fb76.
I'd just like to understand what you were saying for the sake of understanding.
Presumably they were wrong about their guess of who wrote the article, thus the hash wouldn’t match.
Thanks!
Exactly. If the Scott Alexander example works, you know the technique.
The sha256 hash of "David D. Friedman" begins 4dceea9, but that guess is wrong anyway.
(Author here with a throwaway.) I am not David D. Friedman, but I did meet him in between reading parts 1 and 2, and he is a fan of the book.
One of the 'further questions' refers to their previous work, so...
The footnote and return anchor links don't work. They're formatted as absolute links to somewhere on slatestarcodex.com. They should be formatted as relative works so that they'll work regardless of where the page is located. (As in, the link href should only contain "#anchortolinkto", not the rest of the URL.)
Oops, I meant "relative links", obviously, not "relative works".
Technical difficulties, please stand by.
I think this might not be solveable on Substack.
In the editor, there's an option to add footnotes (far right option). They seem to work roughly as you intend.
I've directly copy-pasted raw HTML into substack before and I think I've gotten this to work before, I can try again and report back. There's a lot of document features in substac you can only get if you write up some HTML, open it in a web browser, copy, and paste directly.
Okay, I just tested it and it does work on a substack account.
Here's my test case.
1. Used this source:
https://pastebin.com/11MLJpAB
2. Save as blah.html
3. Open in browser, Ctrl+A to select all, copy-paste
4. Go to substack, write post, paste, publish (on a zero audience list for testing purposes).
From what I can tell, the substack WYSIWYG even seems to notice this. You can set an anchor link by typing e.g. "#footnoteid" in the link content. However, I can't find a way in the WYSIWYG to set the underlying "id" parameter on the tag you want that anchor to jump to. You can slip it past the goalie by copy pasting a naked HTML file directly into substack, tho.
Also -- another tech tip for substack and HTML.
I run an (extremely tiny experimental and nascent substack) that I generate HTML for as part of my research at work, and the way we get all our formatting in is this:
1. Generate the HTML (simple, has only basic tags, no reliance on CSS)
2. Open in browser, Ctrl+A, copy (I said copy-paste above, I meant copy)
3. Paste in substack
Substack seems to ingest it just fine, recognizes tags like <blockquote>, seems to handle our images pretty well, etc.
So if anyone submitted book reviews to you in a plain-jane HTML format, my advice is to copy it from a browser and paste THAT directly into substack and see how it looks; if they're not relying on any weird CSS and it's just structured text with basic tags chances are it should work. If it has simply formatted anchor tags for footnotes, in theory those should work too!
That doesn't make sense -- there's no way that Substack forces you to use absolute links to slatestarcodex.com! At the very least it should be possible to use absolute links to the actual URL, rather than a wrong one.
I used SSC to convert the raw HTML into a readable format. When I realized that broke the footnotes, I changed every SSC link to the corresponding ACX link. When that didn't help, I gave up.
I wouldn't say "that didn't help" -- it got rid of linking to a page that didn't exist! It's still an improvement, it just didn't solve the problem all the way. :)
Looking at the source code, the problem is that the links point to anchors that don't exist. So e.g., footnote 2 links to an anchor "fn:replant", and the link back from footnote 2 links to an an anchor "fnref:replant", but there are no such anchors, so they don't work. So, if you want this to work, you'll have to add the appropriate anchors. So e.g., the footnote 2 link should, in addition to href="...", also have name="fnref:replant". And at the beginning of foonote 2 there should be an 'a' tag with name="fn:replant".
I do notice you changed the anchor links from absolute on slatestarcodex.com, to absolute on the correct page; that will work, once you add the names, but I would still encourage you to use relative anchor links as described above -- where you only include the anchor (including the number sign), not the rest of the URL -- so that they will still work if this is posted elsewhere, as general good practice.
" I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite,"
Could we use an alternative voting system?
I will suggest we should use approval voting.
Seconded.
I will cast a vote for approval voting, but also multiple other votes of equal value for any alternatives to the traditional single-vote scheme.
Probably the best choice for the number of reviews there are going to be (at least a few dozen...)
I vote STAR voting of course. Approval with rating!
That sounds good.
I approve.
The heart button could be interpreted as an implementation of approval voting. (i.e. heart all of the reviews you want to vote for)
Ranked choice!
does not seem like the best choice for a book review contest
Condorcet >> instant runoff; both ranked choice systems
@Ghillie Dhu
You may not like it, but 'Ranked Choice Voting' has been co-opted by IRV advocates, and is now the most common definition, whatever multiple definitions you may have been used to.
'Ranked Voting', or 'Ordinal Voting' now seems to be the preferred name for the category of systems you are referencing.
I was surprised not to see any reference to Elinor Ostrom's work. This seems very related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom I hadn't heard of her, but yeah. I had half-expected that she'd be cited somewhere in the book, but it seems not.
Yeah, which is something that threw me off the book a bit (but not the review, which is great). It sounds like Elickson makes it seems as if the hypothesis is less mainstream than it is. It won a Nobel prize...
The intellectual world is very fragmented!
Fair! And I realized that the book is pretty old too, so even Hardy for him to know the research
Yeah, when I started reading this, I was thinking, "this all sounds like a case study from "Governing the Commons"" (which happens to be from 1990, though I think her work began in the 1970s, and she won the Nobel prize in 2009).
“ They might actually injure or kill it .”
I’m not a vegetarian so I can’t have a problem with killing it. But to injure it is to torture it, right? That’s not OK.
> I’m not a vegetarian so I can’t have a problem with killing it.
Smells like motivated reasoning.
Ya think?
I don't really see a moral difference between "animal killed for a person's enjoyment" and "animal tortured for a person's enjoyment".
I think you're getting cross-talk between applying rights to animals and non-veganism, but have carved out an exception rather than resolving the basic issue.
(My personal resolution is to reject rights entirely for non-self-aware animals, and to oppose the farming of ape, dolphin or crow.)
I agree. I also don't see how people can act like harming an animal is an outrage while killing it outright isn't. Death is certainly a harm if anything is harm. That said, like you, I don't think most animals have moral value at all so I don't care whether or not they suffer.
Our knowledge of which animals are and aren't self-aware currently seems incomplete and highly uncertain. I think we can be pretty sure that adult humans are self-aware, and that bacteria aren't. Everything in between is increasing degrees of murky. Pigs seem to be on the ape/crow/dolphin end of the spectrum though, and are farmed a lot.
Personally, I've become vegan out of caution. I don't think chicken turning out to be conscious is highly likely, but with how little we still understand of consciousness, I have a very hard time putting the chance of it below p=0.2 or thereabouts. Which means that statistically, killing chicken or other animals of chicken-level intellect should register as at least a fifth of a death for me.
I don’t follow your logic here. I think most people and animals would rather be shot in the leg than killed. Some animals actually demonstrate this preference (rabbits for example) by gnawing off their own legs when caught in a trap. My impression wasn’t so much that the ranchers were going to take the thumbscrews to the animal, as that they might wing it.
Also TL;DR. The review can’t be longer than the book you’re reviewing.
TLDR, the dating app for long-winded sapiophiles. (I’m going away now.)
It's not welfare. It's peace.
We have all been spoiled by warlessness for so long, we have forgotten how anyone could live differently then this. The symptom of wealth can only exist in an era of peace, at least on a local level. Every good quality arises naturally while at peace.
Prediction and fulfillment, the favourite pastime of the brain, handles all the accounting and grumpiness for us on it's own. Provided there's not fights breaking out over every petty grievance, that is.
Every single example cited aims at having peaceful interactions for many generations, which is really hard if you're talking about weeks at see with lots of pointy sticks at your disposal, for example.
I think he explains the symptom, not the source.
(also, good god this not only is long, it feels long... very interesting but very few lighthearted moments that usually are the stamp at every base camp)
That's similar to my pet theory of ethics: that it's mostly a way of avoiding destructive conflict. So its mostly about getting neutral results in instead negative-sum results, with positive-sum results being a bit of an optional extra.
Yeah, I'm not buying the hypothesis. It seems like a noble savage stereotype targeted at rural communities translated into a hypothesis.
I've experienced more than a few of these close knit, traditional societies, both in the US and outside of it. Perhaps more importantly, I was in one of them as an insider and another as a quasi-insider. These communities were certainly orderly but because the enforcers of that order were private they in turn could use that authority for personal projects. A completely social society is a society without objective standards, which in turn means everything is a matter of social dominance. This might sound horrible but the advantage is that there is no dispassionate enforcement. If the law says X, and X is monstrous, you can at least be sure there's no bureaucrat paperclip maximizing X. The private enforcer will realize this is stupid and stop. And no one gossips, "Look at Scott, he stopped maximizing paperclips!"
But make no mistake. These societies can be very cruel. They can also be very kind. But they don't necessarily have to be. For example, a bunch of Southern plantation owners instead would also use this kind of enforcement and not to good ends. Lynching was violence aimed at social control very famously. This is without getting into problems inherent the system, like how they have forces inherently pushing them towards insularity, conformity, and (often hereditary) hierarchy.
These kind of rural, neighborly societies solve many problems caused by deracinated urban life. You'll never feel alone, or out of place, or like you don't have a purpose or place in life. But they have other issues.
I sort of live in one of those anarchist paradises right now. Let's say there is a lot that goes on beneath the surface, you can't google it, but everyone knows it.
It can be good or bad. It can be why conflicts can be resolved without resort to lawyers or violence, it can be kind, it can be genuinely merciful, it is the basis of small-town morality (because everyone not only knows everyone else, everyone knows everything about everyone else, so you will get a reputation and it does matter). In a little town not far from where I live, it is what burned some white supremacist jackass's church building flat to the ground, before he even had a chance to open it, and none of the locals ever saw a thing.
It also is why outsiders and newcomers are not trusted, until they prove themselves. Or why JoeBob's Aggregate ever always only wins all the bids to do the road work in the county, year after year (because Commissioner BillyBob is porking JoeBob's wife, three times nightly). It can be why the no-account kid of some asshole member of the local gentry can tear around his pickup night after night, drunk as a lord, and the local cops pretend not to notice or take the kid back home rather than teach him a richly deserved lesson. It can be the very real threat of violence against anyone who speaks up or who gets out of line and the local notables don't appreciate the competition.
Not only all that, but to paraphrase Karl Marx, this type of social arrangement reflects a certain type of economic situation and, to the extent it works, it works only in that specific situation. As I alluded in an earlier post - it doesn't work in the big city where nobody knows anyone.
At its best, it is "ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid" ("An Irish language expression whose literal meaning is ‘It is in each others’ shadow that people live’ but which, more broadly, invokes a sense of community and interdependence"). At its worst, it is the Valley of the Squinting Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_the_Squinting_Windows
This is actually not something I want to get into - Travellers versus settled community, perception of criminality, the whole tangled mess - because it has the potential to be offensive to *everybody*.
There are gangs that target the vulnerable elderly out the country because they are perceived - however correct that may be - to have sums of cash on hand, and at least equipment that can be stolen. And because they are out the country and isolated, that makes it easier for gangs to drive up and brazenly steal and threaten and rob. It's not all Travellers, far from it. And while I agree that people should not be shooting off shotguns with itchy trigger fingers, at the same time it is easy to understand how anxious and fearful vulnerable people in isolated areas that have had neighbours robbed would decide to 'shoot first and ask questions later'.
How can people tell who is a Traveler and who isn't?
Oh, God. Ohhhhh, God. This is one of those questions that invites a punch in the nose 😀 If I had any sense, I wouldn't touch it.
Er. Well. Irish Travellers are *not* Roma or English Gypsies, let's establish that at the start. There are names that are clan names, such as the one mentioned in the case above - Ward. McDonagh would be another one, as would Connors. Accent would be another signifier - Travellers do tend to have a slightly different but noticeable accent from settled people. Anything more is going to veer dangerously into "that's racism/prejudice" territory.
There's a *very* Politically Incorrect comedy sketch from several years back about Travellers which touches on all the stereotypes (including the liberal TV show presenter who comes down to spend time amongst the quaint people and make a documentary about their lives with a very patronising tone). Watch at your peril! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAOY5bW0JVY
The joke about "I'm Pa Connors named after my father and he's Pa Connors named after his grandfather" is based on reality because there are family names where you can have brothers and cousins all named, for example, Patrick McDonagh. The musical joke is that the air they're playing is called "Banish Misfortune" and they play the same tune over and over but call it different names.
Yeah, I'm avoiding sharing stories but this matches my experience. That said, I don't think it's necessarily economic. You could create a similar environment in a city. But modern American cities don't in a way that (for example) some Italian cities do.
> For example, a bunch of Southern plantation owners instead would also use this kind of enforcement and not to good ends. Lynching was violence aimed at social control very famously.
I'll note that neither of these examples seems to contradict the hypothesis, violating both the "close-knit" and "workaday affairs" clauses. That is, I assume slaves weren't in a close-knit group with their masters, and lynch victims typically weren't in one with their killers, and anyway the hypothesis excludes situations where someone can be killed with impunity.
That said, I think you make a good point. One could reply "it's a descriptive hypothesis, not a normative one; if we don't like the outcomes, that doesn't mean the hypothesis is false". But I think that would be a cheap shot, because the enforcement mechanisms themselves might harm welfare. Like, if someone generally prefers living under the shadow of a dispassionate legal system, to living under the shadow of gossip and personal retribution, then... that doesn't necessarily show up in the welfare function, but if enough people feel that way it might do?
Slave owners and slaves (or freedmen sharecroppers) were in a close knit relationship. Close knit does not mean good or brotherly, it means close. And most Southern plantation owners lived closer and had more social interaction with their black subjects than with each other. Those were the people who lived closest to them and who they talked to more than anyone else, if only to order them around. The idea that simple proximity creates fellow feeling is just... not true.
But more broadly, this is my point. I'm not saying that close knit non-deracinated societies don't have some advantages over modern ones. I'm saying they have other issues and this seems ignorant of them.
To clarify, "close-knit" is used in a somewhat technical sense in the book and review. It indeed doesn't mean good or brotherly, but it doesn't just mean close either.
> A “close-knit” group is one where “informal power is broadly distributed among group members and the information pertinent to informal control circulates easily among them.”
So I repeat that I think the hypothesis simply has nothing to say about groups of slaves and slave-owners.
But I also repeat that more broadly, I now think you're right that Ellickson doesn't focus enough on the downsides of close-knit groups, and I didn't pick up on that.
Yeah, I don't think we're disagreeing here. Just clarifying. I feel the term is drawing bad boundaries in its technical sense. Most systems looks good if you cut out the bad examples and only focus on the good.
Of course, it might be worthwhile as a corrective to an instinctive prejudice or horror at rural America that some people have. But we shouldn't idealize it.
It looks like there are links to the authors home page towards the bottom of this essay, which compromises anonymity.
I agree, but I'm tentatively okay with it. It would mess with the flow of the review if they had to either remove these references to the ideas, or else use weasel words to pretend that these were links to someone else's work. Additionally, I have no idea who this person is even after clicking the links, so I don't feel compromised in any way, though I am not especially deep in the broader community here and probably wouldn't recognize most peoples' home pages. And I'd expect that people who do know the author well would probably be able to figure it from the essay alone based on the writing style and the way they think.
The only people this will affect are people who:
-Are going to vote in the contest
-Know the author well enough that knowing their identity could affect their vote
-But wasn't able to recognize the person based on their writing style
-Click the link
-Recognize who the person is based on their home page
-Weren't already going to vote for/against the author anyway (ie, someone who dislikes a person and their writing style won't be meaningfully biased against them since they weren't going to vote for them anyway)
This is probably a very small set of people, though I suppose it's somewhat larger if you restrict to the set of all people who are going to vote, a small percentage of votes swinging one way or another will matter. However, anyone who has genuine concerns about compromising their own vote can deliberately avoid clicking the links to the author's home page.
I think there is a real cost here in the imprecise anonymity, but I think there is a tradeoff in that allowing it creates a slightly better review, and years from now this review will still exist in the archives and the contest will long be over, so in my eyes it's worth it. Probably.
> Patrons of a singles bar at O’Hare Airport
Are there really singles bars inside airports? How would that work?
I don't know, but googling it revealed this: https://www.insidehook.com/article/food-drink-chicago/review-gaslight-club-steakhouse-speakeasy-ohare-airport
I like the case studies better than the theorizing. Learning about what people actually do in these circumstances is fascinating. The theorizing seems inconclusive at best?
"with Marxism, which sees norms as serving only a small subset of a group"
Citation needed.
I think he means that Marxism sees norms in a capitalist society as serving the bourgeois and not the proles.
Are you saying that this isn't true? Certainly, Marxists have historically been very opposed to norms such as privately-owned corporations and real estate (I happen to agree at least in principle with both of these).
I think it depends what a "norm" is. The "norm" against eating nothing but chocolate for a month? That's a fairly class-neutral norm as far as I can tell. The "norm" of privately owned corporations? Can we even consider that a "norm"? Surely the history of primitive accumulation (as documented by Marx) should at least raise questions here.
Well, no one's advocating for eating solely chocolate for a month. If people were, and they weren't middle-class whites, I think it'd be fairly easy to find leftists defending them.
"Well, no one's advocating for eating solely chocolate for a month."
Then it's a good example of a strong norm, which was my intention.
The second sentence of your post seems to be an entirely hypothetical situation that you just made up, and then you assumed that your outgroup would take a position that you disagree with. I suppose you might find that illuminating, but I don't.
Regardless, we are still no closer towards a citation that shows Marxists think that norms serve "only a small subset of a group".
The relevant text seems to be
> A second sociological theory, one less upbeat than functionalism, holds that members of powerful interest groups manipulate the content of norms to serve their own selfish interests. Traditional Marxist analysts, for example, see much of the normative baggage of a society as part of the false consciousness that deludes and hence pacifies the underclasses. Some neo-Marxist scholars, such as Isaac Balbus, and non-Marxist scholars, such as Howard Becker, also seem to have interest-group conceptions of norms.
With citation
> See Isaac D. Balbus, "Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the 'Relative Autonomy' of Law," 11 L. & Soc'y Rev. 571 (1976); Howard S. Becker, Outsiders 15-18, 147-163 (1963). Michael Taylor, "Structure, Culture, and Action in the Explanation of Social Change," 17 Pol. & Soc'y 115, 145-148 (1989), presents two examples, involving respectively the Christian church and British colonialists, that are consonant with interest-group theory.
I don't know enough to comment further.
"Much of the normative baggage" seems softened as compared to compared to the review's phrasing "Marxism, which sees norms as serving only a small subset of a group".
Also it's strange that the citation would say "Traditional Marxist" AND "neo-Marxist" scholars and then only cite a neo-Marxist (Balbus)?
Ah, to clarify, the bit I quoted above isn't literally the only thing the book says about Marxism, just the only bit that's cited. The other mention comes a few pages later, and is closer to the phrasing I used:
"The hypothesis is inconsistent, moreover, with Marxism and other ideologies that see norms as serving the narrow interests of some members of a group, presumably at the greater expense of other group members."
Ok, well if the relevant statements aren't cited well then it's hard to know what the author means or what this information is based on.
One of the bullet points towards the end of the review links to a post on the author's blog (or at least claims to do so). This would seem to violate the anonymity premise of the contest?
Turnbull's work on the Ik has been criticized by later anthropologists, who found it tendentious and even racist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ik_people#Criticism_of_Turnbull's_work
You could dismiss this as liberal-moralistic pearl clutching by the anthropologists, but the criticism is widespread, and often based on first hand experience.
Let the reader decide, I guess.
I've taken to saying things like "The law only matters if someone's willing to go to court". I've knowingly been the victim of lawbreaking - even in contexts where correcting it would be fairly painless and modestly profitable to me - and gone along with it because I didn't think they were doing anything immoral. (tl;dr, the one union job I've ever had, my union somehow managed to bargain away my legally guaranteed holiday pay. But the base pay was high enough that the deal still seemed more or less fair.)
Laws exist for the big offenses, the sort where you'd solve it by rounding up your family members to bring guns and ropes to bear if the law didn't exist. The sort where corporations have millions (or billions) at stake, or where you want to ensure that nobody screws up and kills a bunch of people. For all the smaller issues in the world, the time-honored rule of "Don't be a dick" is the true law. And it's mostly for the best.
I think your distinction between global and local maxima is a good articulation of why both totalitarianism and anarchism fail as (large scale) social structures: you need coordinated, organized efforts to overcome collective action problems and overcome high cost social transition - but you also need organic, bottom-up structures (like norms) to help optimize for welfare within a given local range of solutions.
I see that it has now been over a decade since I read & blogged about this book, but my blogging didn't add enough value to be worth linking to.
Turnbull is somewhat notorious now that he's not around to defend himself. It has been said that he liked groups that let him indulge his proclivity toward pederasty and hated those (like the Ik) that didn't, thus motivating his depiction of the latter.
Here's Sailer citing a biography (which was intended to be glowing) making that argument against Turnbull: https://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/who-was-right-about-human-nature-ayn.html
"The first chapter of Grinker's biography of Turnbull, as published in the New York Times in 1997, is largely gay pedo-porn."
Joseph A. Towles was ~22 when he met Turnbull, and the NYT review indicates that Kenge was "the same age". That's young, but not in the "pedo" range. Is there any particular evidence Steve Sailer is using here to give weight to his pedophile accusation? It seems a quite serious thing to accuse someone of.
"Is there any particular evidence Steve Sailer is using here to give weight to his pedophile accusation?"
Probably the text he referenced in the same blog post where he made the claim. There's a short quote that is indicated to be representative, which you would have seen if you had taken 30 seconds to investigate yourself before you posted to ask other people to perform unpaid labor that is apparently beneath you.
But quote talks about his relationship with Kenge, who the NYT implies is in his early 20s. If that's a representative quote then the evidence seems pretty weak. If Sailer has better evidence he should present it.
He did present the evidence, you're just loathe to expose yourself to evidence that might cause you to update your beliefs.
Where's the evidence? It's not quoted and never either Sailer or the NYT make the case that Turnbull's lovers were underage. If it's in the biography somewhere then Sailer should quote the biography.
The text Sailer quotes includes no evidence that the person Turnbull was sleeping with was underage. You're flat wrong here, which makes it that much more inexcusable that you're being such a dick about it.
(And I'm saying this as someone who usually considers marxbro at best a half-step better than a troll.)
I think the pederasty claims are about Kenge, not Towles. From the blog post TGGP linked, quoting the NYT biography: "On most mornings in 1957, the Scottish anthropologist Colin Macmillan Turnbull would wake up in his hut next to his young Mbuti assistant, Kenge, their legs and arms intertwined in the way that Mbuti men like to sleep with each other to stay warm. At four foot eight, Kenge was more than a foot and a half shorter than Colin"
Being short doesn't mean you're a child. Britannica.com says the average Mbuti is 4'6".
Fair point!
Also - I definitely misread the comment thread and posted my comment in reply to a claim nobody made. I thought a commenter above had just missed the quote I copied, when they had already considered it.
Gotta read slower!
There's a lawyer with a youtube channel called "Fudd Busters" devoted to debunking incorrect beliefs about gun laws. The "Fudd" comes from Elmer Fudd, and it's not just backwoods hunters who are ignorant. Federally licensed firearm dealers frequently don't know the actual law they deal with as part of their jobs.
https://www.youtube.com/c/FuddBusters
I cannot tell you the number of rednecks who have insisted on the basis of no discernable law that they are legally entitled to murder without provocation anyone who strays onto "muh property".
When I showed one itinerant hilljack the record of a local court decision of a man sentenced to life for doing just that, he exclaimed "That's communism!" Then he thought about it for a second, and said "That's it, I'm moving to Canada!"
When I told him that the various provinces of the Dominion of Canada take an even more dim view of such antics than does his home state, he gaped at me in slackjawed wonder, as if I had horns growing out of my head. "You mean in Canada, they're even more communistic than we are?"
I was surprised when I first heard about this case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV9ppvY8Nx4
Brief review-of-the-review:
I found the summary of the book and its claims to be interesting, useful, and readable. The tone is a bit "inside baseball" by SSC standards, expecting that readers will be familiar with concepts from LessWrong and certain fields of econ. It didn't help that I had no idea what the subject and thesis of the book were until the middle of the review. Only at the very end did the practical relevance of Ellickson's thesis really click for me. The reviewer engages with Ellickson in a technical, nuts-and-bolts kind of way that I found unhelpful and a bit tedious, mostly due to my unfamiliarity. I did come away feeling like I understood the book, though, which is a win.
in East Texas a saw a loose horse beside the highway. I pulled over and nabbed the horse. when a pickup came by I waved it down. they just shook their heads. "Naw, that's so-and-so's horse, and he don't help us with our loose stock and we don't help with his."
sounds to me like I've got a basis for 450 page book.
It's the same basis as the Little Red Hen. Nobody can be 100% of the time having oversight on every element of their farm, from fences to "the sheep are in the corn" to straying cattle. It puts a brake on free riders - if Farmer Smith never does any work helping catch loose stock or mending fences or whatever while the rest of the community applies the norms to him, then you cut Farmer Smith loose. After a few times when his cattle or sheep or horses get drowned in the creek or fall off a cliff or get hit by a car, he will either shape up and join in the community norms, or he will go under from the financial losses. Either way, you get rid of people coasting on the benefits of community without contributing themselves.
you are probably right in theory, but it remains there's some who just plain like being assholes.
That seems inevitable given that people behave differently at all (i.e. the least agreeable person is always going to be 'an asshole').
Re the lying part. I think societies have an incentive to channel/control topics and methods of dishonesty. In the immortal words of not only Shakespeare but also Neal Peart, “all the world’s indeed a stage/and we are merely players/performers and portrayers.” Dishonesty is (imho) an unavoidable side effect of this multiple-masks aspect of human nature. So societies say “don’t lie” but what they mean is “lie about only certain things in certain ways.” Deciding what the acceptable lies are in any given social context is sort of illuminating. Hence the bafflement of some serial philanderers; that territory used to be a safe lie.
A comment on the system of an informal "balance of favors" across the entirety of the interactions between two people:
A major advantage of accounting like this is that there's no need to agree on the value of any particular favor. At all times, you have a balance of trade with the other party. Either you've done more for them than they have for you, and your balance is negative, or they've done more for you than you have for them, and your balance is positive. But that balance can never be zero; it's a real number.
So instead of expecting an unachievable balance, the expectation is that the balance shouldn't be too far from zero in either direction. If you think it's too far toward you, you fix that by asking for a favor. If that doesn't work, you complain to your friends.
And at this point, it doesn't matter whether both parties agree on what the balance is! Even if I think you owe me a minor favor and you think I owe you one, that is fine - eventually someone will ask for a favor, and the balance will shift in their direction. No problems arise unless several recent favors all have sharply asymmetric valuations, such that each party's estimation of the overall balance is wildly different from the other's.
A balance of favours system is also why boycotts and shunning work. Outside of large scale industrialised agri-business, farmers or cattle producers or as you like need help at certain times of the year or for certain large projects. You help your neighbours and they help you. This is the basis of the meitheal system:
"Meitheal is the Irish word for a work team, gang, or party and denotes the co-operative labour system in Ireland where groups of neighbours help each other in turn with farming work, such as harvesting crops. Neighbours who give their work to others are helped in turn with their own heavy seasonal tasks. To the heart of the concept is community unity through cooperative work and mutually reciprocal support."
It also makes for social controls and sanctions: if you offend against the norms, or piss off enough of your neighbours, they will boycott or shun you. Then you have to try and hire in external labourers to work in bringing in the harvest, which you may not have the money to do so, or which will severely cost you even if you manage it, and connections are broken until they are repaired or until the offender is driven out.
Note that the Amish do not voluntarily resort to law or courts, but shunning works for them in their situation.
"Or, what about dueling traditions? We might again say the “workaday” assumption (that brings rules against murder) is violated, but that seems like a cheat. My vague understanding, at least of pistol dueling as seen in Hamilton, is it was less lethal than we might expect; and fell out of favor when better guns made it more lethal. But neither of these feels enough to satisfy, and we should demand satisfaction. Did the group gain something that was worth the potential loss of life?"
Leaving aside the "non-lethal" part and aiming straight at duels to the death - yes, there is a social benefit to having the accepted means of resolving (serious) disputes be a duel to the death, primarily based around social unity.
1) A duel to the death doesn't leave an aggrieved party who might want to relitigate matters. There's a winner (who isn't aggrieved) and a loser (who is dead).
2) In particular, in reasonably-small societies where individual charismatic politicians are a big deal, this tends to defang rabble-rousers and cut down on civil strife. A would-be revolutionary is going to wind up getting challenged to a duel at some point (or will themselves challenge existing leaders), which can end in three ways: a) they win, and are now in charge, b) they lose, and are dead, c) they repeatedly refuse to fight, lose credibility, and can't mount any kind of insurrection or resistance. All of those horns will generally avoid ongoing strife.
It should also be noted that duelling has mostly involved men, and not women. On societal timescales, men are quite expendable - losing 10% of your women loses 10% of the next generation, but this is not true of men.
There's still a link to the author's blog after the phrase “my previous thoughts on ” -- depending on how much you care about preserving anonymity, you might want to remove it or something.
I haven’t counted, but it seems a bit longer than 500 word limit in the comp t&cs ... or are those ‘rules’ like the fences of shasta county? 😉
There is no official word limit, although Scott suggested 2000-7000 as a guide (he called this the 95th percentile of his own reviews, but especially recently he's been a bit wordier than that).
He's only written one that was over 10,000, though - Hoover, which he explicitly apologised for - and that was still 3k shorter than this).
Ah thanks! I must have hallucinated that 500 word count limit - sure I read it somewhere, hence my 493-word entry! I see now no mention of word limits on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-final-rules, but brevity is still the soul of wit imho...
The link about open-source reveals the author. Scott should probably remove that one.
There are a couple of links to the author's blog, actually.
I don't think simply removing them is a great solution since anonymity doesn't seem to have been a requirement of entry and the links are to "I'm leaving this stuff out because I said it elsewhere".
I strongly suspect the sheer length of this review (especially considering it had stuff left out!) is going to doom it either way.
Three comments: 1) it's very long and rather boring; 2) 'Good fences make good neighbours' is right up there with 'To thine own self be true' in the rhetorical irony top 10 - literary quotations often used by politicians, management and lifestyle guru / charlatans, unaware or unheeding their authors put them in the mouths of hypocrites and fools (Polonius, Frost's uptight WASP neighbour, etc.); 3) beef farming is unsustainable and the meat industry is killing the planet - in my anarchist paradise, it would be outlawed and all ranchers in California, Brazil and anywhere would be rounded up to work in the organic orchards and bug farms, and everyone would be much happier 😀
When you say "everyone would be much happier", do you mean "the total happiness of all people would be higher", "the average happiness of all people would be higher", "for all N, the Nth-happiest person would be happier", or "all individual people would be happier"?
All of the above, plus the rest of the ecosystem... my anarchist utopia, my rules 😉
So is it compulsory re-education or straight-up "to a gas chamber, go!"? Because presumably the ranchers don't want to work in orchards or bug farms.
Oh yes they will, when they realise the error of their ranching ways 😀
This makes me think you know Sweet Fanny Adams about orchards, rather than "your anarchist utopia will be paradise on earth!"
Not to mention ranches or ranchers.
> All of the above
This is like answering "all of the above" to "which of the following would be true: everyone will be able to afford 3 acres of land; everyone will be able to afford 3 acres of land; everyone will be able to afford 6 acres of land; everyone will be able to afford 10 acres of land". It's logically coherent, but it tends to suggest you didn't understand the question.
(Then again, the fact that the first two options presented are exactly the same [unless the policy includes making adjustments to who is or isn't alive] tends to suggest that magic8muchroom didn't understand the question either...)
Not sure how I mangled "magic9mushroom" so badly. :(
#1 and #2 would be identical if the same number of people were alive, yes. However, it is a known fact that insectivory and herbivory are more efficient than carnivory at converting sunlight into human; ergo, his policy *would* increase the carrying capacity of his fiefdom by somewhere between 50% and 200% (depends on the baseline meat consumption and on the insect consumption posited). As such, #1 is a *much* weaker claim than #2 for this particular policy in the long term (#2 would require that on average people are happier on a vegan+bug diet; #1 would require only that they're on average at least ~half as happy).
#1 was the easy out that I actually agree with. #2 and #3 are more dubious, and #4... well, see my actual reply.
Don't worry about the typo; it happens.
But for your analysis of #1 / #2, you're comparing people in the future (when notional increased capacity has been exploited in actual population increases) to people now. You can't do that for #4, because the individual people are different; the claim would have no meaning. So I interpreted all of the scenarios as "a set of people in the normal-food-production universe, versus the same set of people in the bugs-and-trees-only universe". And in that framing, you can't distinguish between total happiness and average happiness, because the population is constant. (It's not even that the population size is constant -- the population, down to each individual, is constant.)
More to the merits of your point, we are not close to current carrying capacity now, so it isn't immediately obvious that increasing capacity would increase the population, but it's not an unreasonable assumption either.
I mean, if you're running a totalitarian state (which the whole "enslaving former ranchers" thing kind of implied) and are in full "that Conclusion ain't Repugnant" mode, you could max it out within a few decades (i.e. some of the people would still be around from before you started). Human biology can sustain a rather impressive growth rate (particularly if you screw with the sex ratio), and my impression is that we're maybe a factor of 3 off max (with current diets). But otherwise, a fair point.
I'm curious why you think that about Northern California in particular. It's been a while since I lived in that area, but I was next to several beef farms and they were free-grazing the naturally occurring grass on hilly, rocky terrain that didn't seem obviously usable for any other agricultural purpose. This was nothing at all like leveling Amazonian rainforests to mass produce meat for Big Macs.
I am no agronomist, but typically land that can be used for crops is more profitable when used to raise crops than for beef production. Ranches are usually on marginal land, like what you see Out West.
When I was looking up the history of ranching in California, there seems to be a few things around rangelands:
(1) The lush greenery is nearer the coast https://calcattlemen.org/ranching-in-california/
"California has more than 100 million acres of land, 38 million of which are range and pasture lands. Of these 38 million acres, approximately half are owned by the federal government. California’s rangelands are classified as Mediterranean, desert, and intermountain, and are among the most productive in the West. California’s predominant range type is Mediterranean annual rangelands, which encompass all of the Central Valley, as well as the coastal and foothill ranges. Annual forage production in these regions is seasonal, but grazing of green or dry forage occurs year round. The Mediterranean grasslands of the North Coast, because of the region’s moderate climate and increased rainfall, produce forage for a longer period.
The state’s desert rangelands are located primarily in the southeastern region of California. A mixture of annual vegetation, perennial grasses and shrubs provide forage for domestic livestock and many species of wildlife. Winter and spring rains support annual plant growth; however, rainfall can be erratic and shrubs provide feed for livestock during dryer periods. Intermountain rangelands are located in the northern and eastern regions of the state. Winter dormancy and spring-summer growth dictate livestock management systems vastly different than in other regions of the state.
Cattle typically graze lower elevation forage in the spring, and are then moved to higher elevation pastures during the summer months. Ranchers in the intermountain areas generally harvest and store forage during the summer for winter feeding. During the fall, cattle may graze crop residue, residual rangeland, or pasture forage. Cattle may be fed hay or transported out of the region during the winter months."
Moving cattle is transhumance, which farmers everywhere do; it was called "booleying" in Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundale and you can still see it today with sheep farming, where the sheep are brought down from the hills to the sea-level pastures for the grass growing period in Spring (and lambing season).
(2) https://www.morningagclips.com/sustaining-the-tradition-of-ranching-in-california/ There's a change from raising cattle to market gardening:
"However, since 1984, California has lost 1.5 million acres of irrigated agriculture and rangeland, said summit presenter Keali’I Bright, assistant director of the California Department of Conservation. Between 2014 and 2016, 130,000 acres of grazing lands were converted to orchards or vineyards.
“Why are lands changing?” Bright asked. “The population is increasing, and, driven by cost of living, there’s a drastically changing commute tolerance and different transportation options.”
The writing it's tedious, I'd rather had read the book. In fact, given the length, I feel like I have...
Personally, I enjoyed the author's point-blank writing. I wouldn't have expected to enjoy reading about cattle law.
If you want to really enjoy reading about cattle law, I suggest this: https://www.amazon.com/Lucky-Luke-Adventure-Barbed-Prairie/dp/1905460244
Granted, it's long, but it's a fantastic review that made me go right out and buy and book.
A fishery is basically the term for a specific group of fish in a specific place. The Grand Banks Cod Fishery, or the Antarctic Wale Fishery or whatever. You can have multiple different fisheries in the same place, but they're going to be different kinds of fish being pursued with different methods. Traditionally, each fishery was operated by a specific group, which had its own norms. These days that's less the case.
Also, it's probably worth pointing out that virtually all American whalers were out of New England, even the ones in the Pacific.
Surely some fish migrate – or is that rare? Or are the fisheries themselves seasonal? (That would make sense.)
And are no fish (or other marine animals) nomadic, i.e. neither mostly stationary nor migrating between mostly stationary fixed locations on a regular schedule?
Yes, fish migrate, and those fisheries are seasonal. As for nomadic fish, I'm not sure. If they exist, they certainly weren't fished until relatively recently, because traditional methods wouldn't have worked.
Can you share any links to more details about this?
I've been partial to the idea that fisheries should be 'privatized' (i.e. some kind of legal 'property right' should be created and, e.g. auctioned) and I don't think I've read many technical details about how exactly people would, e.g. monitor or track the schools of fish that make up a 'fishery'.
I'd imagine that traditional methods might, at least occasionally, catch 'nomadic' fish, but I think I understand you as claiming that those traditional methods would have (naturally) focused on the larger 'stocks' of fish that were (somewhat) reliably available in specific places and times.
I'm not an expert on fishing, so this is based on the research I did for https://www.navalgazing.net/Merchant-Ships-Fishing. These days, they have sonars and such which allow them to track specific schools of fish, but those only work at reasonably close range. The only way to do global tracking would involve either getting access to SOSUS (good luck with that) or building a private alternative (way too expensive, also likely to make navies nervous). You're correct about my claims on the traditional method. Fishing vessels were a major capital item, so their owners would have been chasing reasonably reliable returns, which you don't generally get from truly nomadic fish. (Assuming those are even really a thing. Given what I know of the ocean's food distribution pattern, you're not going to have much biomass doing that because food appears in specific areas at specific times.)
I'm skeptical that property rights in fisheries could be made to work given the legal regime that currently governs the world's oceans. https://www.navalgazing.net/Territorial-and-International-Waters
Thanks!
Yes – I'm skeptical of lots of political projects that would probably be very good (e.g. carbon taxes/pricing), particularly those that require global coordination.
Maybe the U.S. Navy could be convinced to release the fishery related data for SOSUS.
I expect that would be difficult without _also_ releasing data that would be (potentially) militarily significant.
"Ellickson mentions a tribe where they “cut a finger from the hand of each of a man’s close female relatives after he dies”; what medical knowledge are they lacking that makes this seem welfare-maximizing?"
Did he give no further detail on what tribe this is from where, or are you leaving it out? An initial notion that comes to mind is the fear of witchcraft, so by social sanctions such as this you are trying to prevent bad outcomes - a potential witch wanting to curse someone to death has to bear in mind the loss of a finger, and other female family members who are at risk will try to prevent the witch from doing anything. Substitute "poison or otherwise encompass the murder of an abusive male" and the same applies. But not knowing the social and cultural background leaves a lot of information out - what is the position of unmarried daughters/sisters, of widows and mothers, when it comes to "close female family members"? Is this about sacrificing for the benefit of the deceased man in the afterlife - the custom of sati was religiously sanctioned in Hinduism as examples of chaste wives who would benefit their families and the souls of their husbands by virtue of their sacrifice, as well as widows being considered inauspicious and capable of bringing misfortune to others. There may be a lot of reasons for such a practice and I'd like to know more about the tribe in question.
Which brings us on to the naive belief in Science and Progress doing away with the Darkness of Superstition, and quite frankly I'm surprised that even a book from the 80s would be holding on to that kind of hopefulness:
“A tribe that used to turn to rain dancing during droughts thus is predicted to phase out that ritual after tribe members learn more meteorology. Tribes are predicted to abandon dangerous puberty rites after members obtain better medical information. As tribe members become more familiar with science in general, the status of their magicians and witch doctors should fall. As a more contemporary example, faith in astrology should correlate negatively with knowledge of astronomy. These propositions are potentially falsifiable.”
A tribe that knows to tune in to the nightly weather forecast on the TV news may still engage in rain dances as a matter of cultural heritage, and because it's fun to dress up and have dances as a social activity. Magicians and witch doctors will still have places as sources of traditional wisdom and advice on matters that "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" can't address - how do I propitiate my mother-in-law's ghost because my marriage is going badly and she always threatened to come back and haunt us because she never liked me? 'Dangerous puberty rites' may be tidied up by having trained medical doctors carry out FGM https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-019-0817-3 and for other rites, adolescents will always find ways to risky behaviour involving sex, drugs, fights, jumping off heights, driving very fast, and so on.
As for astronomy and astrology - tell that to all the psychic hotlines, ghost hunter TV shows, Tarot readings and astrology websites that are still up and running even though we have The Hubble Telescope etc.
He names them as "the Dani tribal group in Western New Guinea", and his citation is "Richard A. Barrett, Culture and Conduct: An Excursion in Anthropology 5-6 (1984)."
I feel like most of your comment is saying "these things haven't vanished yet"? But that feels too much to expect. If they're declining, that seems consistent with Ellickson's prediction.
Okay, having done some Googling, I got information on this from (of all places) a "Daily Mail" article:
"As well as their quite liberal view towards clothing, the tribe are also well known for their unique practice of self mutilation.
After the passing of a loved one, relatives are expected to cut off the top part of their fingers as a sign of respect and grieving.
The practice is meant to symbolise the pain one feels after losing a loved one with many people in the tribe often amputating multiple fingers during their lifetime. "
It's only women who are expected to do this, and it has been outlawed by the Indonesian government so it's the old women of the tribe who show marks of this. The Peabody Museum has a very short piece including this:
"Indeed, warfare dominated much of life. Its causes were complex and varied, including the ritual pacification of ghosts and revenge for previous deaths incurred in battle. ...A death, by enemy action in ambush or battle, was considered particularly dangerous for the community, and elaborate funerals were staged to placate the ghosts of an alliance's dead."
So yeah, I think that cutting off a fingertip is meant to be apotropaic, to placate angry ghosts and evil spirits. Animist cultures don't have a very benign view of the dead and tend to live in constant dread of the influence of the spirits who are very easy to offend or to break taboos. A culture built around low-level but constant skirmishing, which can erupt into serious violence, is going to have an elevated risk of male death and the concomitant necessity for female family members to placate angry ghosts by symbolic sacrifice to offset the loss of life (cut off a finger tip instead of burning a widow).
"I feel like most of your comment is saying "these things haven't vanished yet"? But that feels too much to expect. If they're declining, that seems consistent with Ellickson's prediction."
I meant more (a) when exposed to Science and Progress, cultures don't automatically switch from "we need to dance to bring rain" to "why did we do such stupid things?", they hold on to customs and traditions and find a way to incorporate them into the new paradigm. Look at American Hallowe'en, so very different from its origins in Irish and Scottish traditions, which has become so successful it is a global export even to the countries where it originated and has displaced the traditional version (I doubt any Americans are going down to the river at midnight to draw their shifts against the current to find out who their future husband will be; if they are wearing shifts at all, it's to dress up as Sexy Ghost or Sexy Witch). Science'n'Progress didn't stop the USA from "yay, ghosts, spirits and witches! fun!" because that is how things shake out.
The 18th century Enlightenment was all about Science'n'Progress, and it was also about the explosion in occult secret societies and Continental Freemasonry. Granted, astrology as a serious science has gone the way of the dodo, but it's an industry worth around $2 billion and even venture capitalists are putting money into it https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/horoscopes-astrology-industry-venture-capitalists-aquarius-a8886341.html. It would seem that the pandemic has been a boon for the business: https://www.businessinsider.com/astrology-industry-boomed-during-pandemic-online-entrepreneurs-2020-12?r=US&IR=T
So to my eyes, Ellickson seems to have the 19th century high-minded Victorian ideal of education will overcome the darkness of ignorance, as in this quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Naval Treaty":
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future."
I am surprised that he holds such a view, but I don't know enough about him to know if it's due to personal hobbyhorses or what. I'm dour enough to think that darkness, ignorance, superstition and tradition (in both the good and bad sense) have no problem clinging on to the underbelly of Science'n'Progress.
As to what is (or was, at the time the book was written) going on in Shasta County, I think it's not that "ranchers are too dumb to understand the law", it's that "the law does not take into account the norms they operate under". I think that is what Ellickson is trying to argue on a wider basis? In Shasta County, the social norms came *first*, before formal laws. Ranching in California was open range, if I understand correctly; ranching started under Spanish/Mexican governance and boomed with the Gold Rush. It was after all that was established that public law caught up with it and public governance to oversee the management and use was established; 42% of the rangeland is privately owned so plainly there is going to be tension between "we were here first and the lawmakers are johnny-come-lately". Ranchers established the norms to co-operate and punish defectors, and the traditional-minded/conservative, established ranchers are going to continue on "this is how we always did it" rather than abide by the letter of some law dreamed up by city pencil-pushers. Hence the feeling that, whatever the law technically says, ranchers and cattle were here first and if some city guy speeding on his way to town hits one of their cows, he *should* be liable (the same way he'd be liable if he hit a pedestrian in the city), never mind what the law says about whether there should be fences in place or not.
I'll note that Ellickson only devoted a single paragraph to this subject. I wish he'd given it more space, but given that he didn't, it might suggest he didn't think too hard about it. Which I absolutely think he should have done. But if I try to fill in what he might have said if he had, I think it would be something like...
We'd expect these rituals and traditions to phase out, to the extent that they're net harmful. That might look like disappearing entirely, it might look like being replaced with milquetoast versions of them, or in some cases it might just mean they stick around. If the Dani ostensibly cut off fingers to placate angry ghosts, that might be replaced with, I dunno, wrapping nettles around your finger to placate angry ghosts, and later with wrapping benign leaves around your finger to placate angry ghosts. The hypothesis predicts that behaviors would change in the direction of maximizing welfare, but if the beliefs can stay the same while doing so, they might well do.
(Thanks for looking into the Dani btw. It's a plausible idea, and reveals a mistake in my thinking. "What medical knowledge are they lacking" assumes the problem is they underestimate the costs, but instead they might overestimate the benefits. I'm not sure if Ellickson made the same mistake: he did use the phrase "obtain better medical information", but he used it in the context of puberty rites. Plausibly he meant something like "better medical information suggesting that puberty will just happen one way or another".)
I don't know what traditional Halloween looked like, but modern Halloween doesn't seem like something the hypothesis would anti-predict, regardless of whether the "ghosts and spirits and witches" angle is something people do for fun or because they actually believe in those things. And modern astrology... I dunno, even if it is seeing a recent boom, it just really does seem like it's a fairly unremarkable thing. Some people do make actual decisions based on it, but it feels like it's "below the noise threshold" in some sense.
Ellickson gives an example in a footnote:
> Members of the Algonquian tribes in Canada, for example, did discard their religious belief that a slain animal spontaneously regenerates itself after this belief had stimulated over-hunting of valuable forest animals. Various perspectives on this example are discussed in Robert A. Brightman, "Conservation and Resource Depletion: The Case of the Boreal Forest Algonquians," in The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources 121, 130-133 Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson eds. 1987). The updating of norms is likely to lag, of course, because rational actors are rightly reluctant to abandon long-standing customs.
> As to what is (or was, at the time the book was written) going on in Shasta County, I think it's not that "ranchers are too dumb to understand the law", it's that "the law does not take into account the norms they operate under". I think that is what Ellickson is trying to argue on a wider basis?
I mostly agree; certainly I don't think Ellickson thinks the ranchers are stupid, and I don't think that either, and if I gave either of those impressions I regret it.
But I do think the ranchers misunderstand the law, rather than understanding it and deciding they don't care. I mentioned the couple who didn't have enough liability insurance because they thought that in open range, motorists were responsible for not hitting their cows. That could be seen as petty rebellion, I guess. I didn't mention the people who deliberately brought these cases to court where they wouldn't win. That could have been testing the waters to see if the newly appointed judge would go against the law. But between those and various other details, my read of the book is that "ranchers misunderstand the law" is the most parsimonious explanation.
I also need to clarify what I'm trying to say. I agree that things like "huh, looks like animals do *not* spontaneously regenerate" will cause changes in thinking and beliefs. But I also think that (1) practices, customs and traditions linger on and adapt even after they have been discovered to be non-scientific, and (2) that part of the needs they are addressing aren't covered neatly by Science'n'Progress.
(1) You don't do rain dances any more because you know they don't cause rain. But you keep doing them because it's a social occasion and it's fun to dress up and dance. Maybe you do them now because it's a tourist attraction and tourism dollars keep the tribe going through drought periods. Maybe you do them because you want to keep the new generations in touch with their heritage and roots and you are consciously trying to preserve and hand on cultural practices.
(2) So rain dances don't help droughts. Now that Science'n'Progress has told you that, what can you do? Well, today you have to sit around and wait for the rains to come when and if they will come (or try something like cloud seeding which might work maybe okay probably not but hey you need to try something https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eight-states-are-seeding-clouds-to-overcome-megadrought/). Back in the old days of superstition, at least having a rain dance gave you back *some* feeling of control, that you *could* do something to influence the weather. And sometimes it did rain after you did the dance - sure, the dance had nothing to do with it, it was just coincidence, but it helped boost the morale of the community.
As to ranchers not understanding the law, yes, I think it's more "misunderstanding" than anything else. It probably *feels* more correct that a motorist who hit your cow should pay damages, rather than "sorry, you are now down $600 on a dead cow and also you may have to pay the motorist for damage to his car". And looking at this example of law, I don't know if it holds in Shasta County, but it does look on the face of it that someone might go to court because "well, the highway wasn't bounded by property like it says here" and expect not to be held liable:
https://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/fencelaw/california.pdf
§ 16902. Livestock on highway; strays; unattended animals
A person that owns or controls the possession of any livestock shall not willfully or negligently permit any of the livestock to stray upon, or remain unaccompanied by a person in charge or control of the livestock upon, a public highway, if both sides of the highway are adjoined by property which is separated from the highway by a fence, wall, hedge, sidewalk, curb, lawn, or building.
§ 16904. Collision between vehicle and animal; presumption or inference
In any civil action which is brought by the owner, driver, or occupant of a motor vehicle, or by their personal representatives or assignees, or by the owner of livestock, for damages which are caused by collision between any motor vehicle and any domestic animal on a highway, there is
no presumption or inference that the collision was due to negligence on behalf of the owner or the person in possession of the animal.
Law is best left to the lawyers!
I think one thing about norm-enforcement is that there's a Keynesian beauty contest thing going on. My actions (norm-violating, norm-enforcing, whatever) are going to be seen by others as more or less reasonable, and that will affect my reputation and my interactions with them. At the extreme unreasonableness end, it will even lead others to punish me for my norm violations. I think that's the driver for a tendency to maximize welfare (visible well-being).
When the healthy guy doesn't shovel his walk because he can't be arsed, everyone knows he's just being a lazy bum. When the 70 year old widow who uses a cane to walk doesn't shovel her walk, nobody thinks she's violating any norms. (And indeed, it's quite likely that some neighborhood kid or other will just go ahead and shovel her walk while he's shoveling his own, in my neighborhood.) This works well because it's visible. If the apparently healthy guy actually has some kind of back problem and shoveling the walk will leave him incapacitated for the next week, he'll probably get a lot of unjust pushback from the neighbors, because it sure *looks* like he could do it.
If I yell at the little old lady for not shoveling her walk, everyone is going to think I'm a jerk. If I yell at the apparently-healthy guy for not shoveling his walk, everyone is going to think I've got a point. And I am instinctively weighing that kind of consideration when I decide whether or not to yell at my neighbors for not shoveling their walks. (Well, okay, I'm probably never going to yell at them for that, but I guess I *could*.)
Norm-violations and norm-enforcement that takes into account visible stuff like this works passably well, right? You can tell I'm a jerk if I yell at the little old lady for not shoveling her walk, and others who see you treating me like a jerk can see why you did it and it makes sense, and....
Evolution does a lot of optimizing, but also often falls into weird and counterproductive situations where, say, 90% of your energy budget is spent on your spectacularly long and useless tail because that's what gets mates, or your species' evolution paints you into a corner that drives you to extinction as soon as some aspect of your environment changes. I think we should be unsurprised to see norms evolve in much the same way--sometimes giving us stunningly elegant solutions to problems, sometimes giving us solutions that more-or-less work but look like they're held together with duct tape and zip ties (think of DNA copying in eucaryotes and why we need telomeres), sometimes stuff that works according to the hill-climbing, mutation/selection/drift/flow logic of evolution but is honestly a fairly shitty solution.
The bit about tomatoes made me suspicious. You _can't_ just replant tomatoes, because you plant in the spring. This author seems dodgy.
It seems to me this kind of analysis is the basis for a lot of science fiction. Take Heinlein: many of his books (e.g. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) run with the central point that future humans living in space will develop norms totally different from ours because of the radically different environment, and a lot of the narrative is built on his predictions of what those norms would be. Another example is 'The Expanse' with its Belter culture.
Keep in mind that ranches are big and require a long-term investment. Cattle ranching requires lots of land, and while a herd can be moved, but the land cannot. Not only that, but thanks to surveys, land law and easements, it is usually pretty clear who holds title to a given parcel of land at any given time, and who is permitted to enter on which parcel of land and for what purpose.
Further, because ranches are big long-term enterprises, there can only be so many ranches and ranchers in a given area, and it is likely that all the ranchers know one another. Their families probably all go way back. Moreover, all the ranchers will need favors or forbearances from one another from time to time (not necessarily business related), so it is best not to make long-term enemies.
Therefore, law or no law, the ranchers either have to get rid of each other (whether by violence or buyout), or they have to learn to live with one another. Wild West Game of Thrones aside, violence ends badly in the long-term for most participants, and even at best is unpredictable, especially in the age of firearms. Buyout is expensive. Learning to tolerate each other is probably the least-cost solution, not to mention the one least likely to attract heat from bankers, banditti, lawyers, and law enforcement.
In a similar vein to ranchers, dorm room anarchists assume that "primitive" tribes have no laws. In fact, such tribes typically have laws, in the sense that they have codes, often quite convoluted, governing who is allowed to marry whom, who is permitted to eat what and with whom, who is in the right in a particular type of dispute, who answers for the conduct of whom, etc.. Just that these codes are not written down or lawyered over.
Margaret Mead aside, a lot of these codes pertain to sex and family, probably because arguments over who is permitted to sleep with whom, over "is that really my kid?", over which kid is entitled to what, are the fastest way to tear a tribe apart or simply to lead to unnecessary intra-tribal conflict. And outside the tribe, you may be fair game for anyone. This is why tribes are so tribal. in the sense that it's "us against them" and at the same time, why tribal norms are so relentlessly enforced. They have to be.
For instance, in spite of his wartime prowess, Crazy Horse lost his status as Shirt Wearer in the Oglala Sioux, because he had an affair with a married woman. If he had abducted a woman from an enemy tribe, the outcome probably would have been different.
As to whether such a not-quite-anarchy solution works in other environments, one in which the participants are not incentivized to at least learn to tolerate one another - well, that is probably why city dwelling businessmen are much more litigious than ranchers or tribesmen, and city drug gangs are rumored at times to resort to even less cooperative solutions.
Re: duelling.
If the Code Duello was clear about nothing else, it was that only a nobleman could institute a duel, and a nobleman only need respond to a challenge from another nobleman.
Peons need not apply and cannot apply. For it is one thing if the Duke of Buggeringham gets into a fight with Lord FrouFrou over some perceived slight, but the social order cannot tolerate the son and heir of the duchy getting into a one-on-one fight with a peon on anything remotely resembling fair odds.
For if history and the fairy tales teach us nothing else, it is this: beware an ambitious poor boy with nothing to lose.
re: academia my sense was always that this was a kind of unofficial PR/advertising interest in publishers refraining from making a big stink. Indeed, since professors often decide what books whole classes use (often with much better profit margins than the academic books profs use) and are the ones often providing the content it would be idiotic for any publisher with an interest in having their books choosen to make a fuss about this. They also know that (more so pre-digital but scans are still inferior) established profs with the money to spare will probably buy copies of the books but while the grad students who lack the cash will favor the copies but, if they find the book appealing, will likely buy a copy at some point in their career.
It's more that the overhead of trying to do this via a formal legal process wouldn't be workable. For one, if an official copy lacks features (search) or has bad quality the publisher gets blamed and any rule they tried to articulate would run the risk of being abused at scale.
This isn't to say that it's not the kind of system held together by informal norms but that the publishers are part of this informal norm system.
My loose thinking about dueling is that it does actually serve the community pretty well. First, duels stop infinite vendetta cycles, which otherwise can seriously harm whole tribes. Everybody accepts that the point of the duel was to settle the matter once and for all. And second, when you're dueling over honor, it gives the community a certain number of people who have proven, skin-in-the-game, that they're willing to die to preserve their reputation.
We view duels as barbaric today but considering the alternatives they may have been the last barbaric option at the time. Defending reputations with violence seems to be a natural human thing. You can sue for defamation today, which makes the threat of violence more abstract, more impartial, and hopefully removes the necessity for violence at all. But if someone disobeys a court order, the state can use violence to enforce it. On the other end of the scale, compare dueling to unregulated reputation-maintenance violence. Closest thing you might see in modern society is a brawl among gang members, who don't have effective access to the courts to solve defamation issues. This violence is usually, but not always, less extreme (usually fists, not guns), but also does not offer as many off-ramps. A spur of the moment apology might prevent violence or it might not. You may or may not have an opportunity to apologize. It might be your innocent kid who ends up dead from a drive by shooting instead of you. Whereas duels offered a whole ritual process with opportunities to resolve the matter peaceably throughout.
*least barbaric.
I'd just like to say I appreciate the careful summaries and attention to detail of this review. I admit I'm glad the other reviews aren't this long, but I think this one justifies its length by giving me what I feel is a good sense of the book and its strengths and weaknesses.
agreed
The summary of Ellickson’s discussion of campus photocopying is a little ambiguous about fair use. For example, “fair-use doctrine is quite restrictive unless they get explicit permission,” can be read as suggesting that the fair use determination depends in some way on asking for permission. But the whole point of fair use is that it doesn’t require permission.
What’s really going on here, which the author gets at by referring to professors “avoiding learning the details of fair use doctrine,” is that professors almost universally believe that their photocopying is fair use. Making multiple copies for classroom use is one of the illustrative fair purposes in the statute. Professors rely on that fact and tend either not to know that it’s not conclusive or to assume that even if you do the rest of the analysis, it will obviously cash out in favor of fair use.
Ah yes, slime molds. As per usual with claims of solving NP-hard problems, the issue is that they are solving a slightly different problem than claimed.
Let's look at what they are actually solving for a moment. (Note: I'm using equality in the below in an arguably incorrect manner. Heads up.)
First, note that a slime mold (and indeed, any physics-based solution for pretty much any problem) has a finite maximum resolution. (You might argue what exactly said resolution is, but ultimately you can agree hopefully that there exists some floor here.)
Second, note that a slime mold has Θ(area) computational power (at least in theory. Biological constraints may reduce this).
Third, note that a slime mold has a finite maximum speed of information propagation (trivial bound: speed of light; practical bound - I don't know the actual figure but probably substantially less than the speed of sound). And hence requires O(max distance) time to compute a result. (Be it exact or α-approximation - if you require less than O(max distance) time, consider two points at (-L, 0) and (L, 0), and a third point at choice[(0, L/sqrt(3)), (0, -L/sqrt(3))], with L chosen to be large enough that the third point cannot communicate with the others before time is up. Without communication, you are forced to pick some common point for the Steiner node - but no matter what point you pick there's an adversarial choice where you are incorrect. Your best bet is to pick (0,0), but this results in a distance of (2 + 1/sqrt(3))L. Given that the optimal tree for both has a distance of 2L, this means you cannot approximate better than a factor of 1/(2 sqrt(3))... which is required for both exact solutions and α-approximation.)
And finally, note that the slime mold is not solving the problem exactly - assuming it is solving this particular problem exactly, it is solving the original problem within an error of... let's see.
Let's treat things as a grid, and work in distance units of our resolution. We have n nodes. Scale the problem such that the maximum dimension of the resulting problem is `s`. With this solution, we're moving every Steiner node by up to a half of a unit distance from the optimal tree; an optimal Steiner tree has at most n-1 nodes (and hence at most 2n-1 edges), so the cost changes by at most 0.5*(2n-1)=n-0.5 units. The optimal tree trivially has a distance of at least o(s). So overall our factor of error is (n-0.5)/o(s), or O(n/s).
Meanwhile, to get said factor of error we had O(s^2) area of slime mold computing for at a minimum of O(s) time [in general; obviously if a problem is restricted e.g. entirely 1d this does not happen]. Or O(s^3) total computational steps.
All told this works out to O(n^3 ε^-3) complexity. (...ish. I don't know how much of the slime mold is actually active during this entire time.)
Now, how does this compare to standard algorithms?
Steiner trees are NP-hard, yes, but Euclidean Steiner trees have α-approximation schemes for constant dimension (that is, for any given desired `ε>0`, you can construct a polynomial-time algorithm that is guaranteed to produce a result that is no more than `1+ε` times the optimal result).
The best I could find at a quick glance was O(n (log n + ε^(-C/ε))). You'll note that this is substantially better than the slime mold for large n.
(Interesting, the α-approximation schemes for Euclidean Steiner trees are also largely based around discretizing to a grid first - but they can form a finer grid because they don't spend anywhere near O(s^3) steps on the resulting grid.)
Or to put it another way: I'm not sure if we _care_ what the slime molds are doing, because we can already do better by simply exploring the entire area, sending back information about any nodes to a central spot, and doing the calculation there. (Well, we may care. But not for this particular reason.)
Seems like a problem that's better solved bottom up.
As far as I see it tit-for-tat morality and gossip as a solution to the free rider problem are well established results. They're sufficient to explain the observed phenomena without overreaching.
Elinor Ostrom got a Nobel Memorial prize for analyzing exactly this kind of stuff. I think she did a pretty good job. The book was written 30 years ago so I can understand if he doesn't mention her, but a review should show some basic familiarity with the way Ostrom described these norms.
Meh – I only recently became aware of Ostrom myself and I think the book of hers I subsequently bought is still (unread) on my 'to read' list.
Generally, I think we should give even Nobel laureates a pass on having 'read the literature' – it's too big for almost anyone to have done that nowadays (and arguably has been true for at least 30 years!).
You finally did it. You finally published something that is so long and meandering that my curiosity withered and died, even after trying to skip topics that just can't be that interesting (and were not). This was a rough start for community book reviews.
I wonder, as a thought experiment, if we applied a computer to defining counties, and states in the US, with the optimum defined as 'counties will have the smallest surface area (or some other simple geometric rule to minimize opportunity for gerrymandering in support of some group over some other group) to hold 150 people (Dunbar's number). States will be proportioned to hold as close as possible the an equal number of counties.'
Other than the absurdly high number of counties in dense cities (some buildings in New York or other dense urban core might have multiple counties, by floor perhaps?) and weird relationships for utilities (a thousand counties need to band together to pay for the sewer system for example), I wonder what would happen to governance if we limited the #'s to human understandable human walkable?
I suspect a lot of people would be really mad, because they would have to participate in governance and politics... I think many people (more urban than rural) are governmental free riders who enjoy nor having to worry about governance and such unless something triggers them for their cause du jour.
I suspect politics would be radically different (better?) when limited to human-understandable groups you could have actual human relationships with - the monthly 'County 101' dinner where all 150 voters get together for a meal and a conversation would be very different than the politics of today.
Many things would work better, and many things would be harder/worse. Interesting...
Great read! Although I'm still pretty confused on what the definition of "welfare" here is, which is obviously pretty fundamental. Could someone hopefully help and provide a more concrete definition? If it has to do with what the preferences an ordinary person holds, then how are we defining "ordinary person"- slightly different definitions (say mean vs. median vs. modal) seem to have the potential to provide radically different answers. I must be missing something.
I suppose I have three slightly different questions:
1. What's Ellickson's definition?
2. What definition does the author of this review think is best?
3. Is there a definition that anyone can think of that best steelmans the hypothesis.
'Ordinary person' is 'defined' – as much as it _is_ defined – by other 'ordinary people' (in whatever the relevant community is).
I think the answer to [3] is to 'define' it along the lines of 'revealed preference', e.g. what 'ordinary people' claim to be components of 'welfare' (either verbally or via their behavior).
Both interesting points, and seems largely correct to me! I think if you take the first point seriously though (who is considered an "ordinary person" is defined by other "ordinary people", and therefore become self-referential), then you're naturally led to questions of who has power to define who is considered an ordinary person. I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I think it's a valid point regardless.
It's absolutely a valid point, but also a little 'besides the point' for the discussion we're discussing. I think of it as a 'spherical cow' – obviously wrong or incomplete but extremely useful for considering something else in particular.
Practically, people seem mostly 'good enough' at imagining an 'ordinary person'. They're probably wrong in lots and lots of ways, but good enough for 'ordinary' social purposes, i.e. better than nothing – an often high standard!
Good analogy! While I agree this abstraction allows us to achieve "better than nothing" results, I certainly wouldn't call abstracting away all power dynamics "good enough" (perhaps I'm just nitpicking words, but I think this gets at a genuine disagreement I have with your view).
That's a good point.
What seems like the justification for "abstracting away all power dynamics" isn't that doing so is 'good enough' – not for a real political/moral/ethical project of significance.
But it's _easier_ to think about the specific abstraction 'utility versus welfare' without also solving the NP-complete problem of how to adjust for "power dynamics", and specifically the power to affect the common understanding of 'ordinary person' in any specific community/polity.
I.e. it's more efficient to decouple 'utility versus welfare' (and the notion of 'ordinary person') than to ALSO try to fully understand and account for 'power dynamics' too.
See this for some details about the 'decoupling versus contextualizing' split I'm thinking of here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms
I'm a bit of a topic expert on the history of dueling, so I noticed your aside about that.
There is a norm-centered explanation for dueling with explains it in terms compatible with Ellickson's theory. The duel (or rather the threat of injury or death in one) is often a form of norm enforcement that flourishes when recourse to formalized legal recourse is unavailable.
Thus, for example, a very prevalent and widely accepted cause of duels clear up to the end of the 19th century was incidents in which the challenged party was thought to have cheated at cards or other gambling games. More generally, betrayals outside the perceived scope of the law tended to trigger challenges that were socially supported.
Two factors that decreased the incidence of dueling were (a) increasing availability of justice through a court system and (b) increasing lethality of personal weapons. One significant transition point was reached in the 1840s when the sealed percussion cap greatly reduced the odds of a misfire or squib in damp European weather. The sword duel actually outlasted the pistol duel; the last recognizable formal sword duel was actually fought in 1967 in Paris!
I was astonished reading this that no consideration was given to the cost or reliability of turning to the legal system. There seems to be an underlying assumption by some legal economists that laws provide smooth and frictionless incentive structures. Litigation is expensive, mentally and emotionally taxing, can drag on for years, and can be uncertain in outcome. Lawyers are expensive and the legal system is extremely hostile to non-specialists. Invoking the legal system in many disputes could be viewed as a form of altruistic punishment - choosing the lose-lose option in order to deter future transgressors. In this case, the legal system would be best reserved for extreme edge cases – financially ruinous breaches of contract, life ruining torts, or reliably and investigating and prosecuting extreme examples of criminal self help (murder, assault).