OT40: Martin Luthread King

This is the bi-weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Comments of the week are some rocket scientists discussing the significance of the latest SpaceX advances, Eric Raymond discussing the history of duelling (and continued on his own blog), and Richard on the reasons the soda tax failed in Berkeley but succeeded in Mexico.

2. This has a deadline of February 1, so I’m putting it here instead of waiting for the next links thread: Professor Stephen Hsu, who writes the blog Information Processing, is running for Harvard’s Board of Overseers as part of a wider “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” campaign. Their platform is to use the college endowment to help subsidize tuition (with “free tuition” as a long-term goal), plus more transparent admissions process with special consideration to stopping discrimination against Asians. I’ve linked Steve a lot, and I know he agrees with this blog’s opinions about credentialism; he’s also one of the top scientists investigating human intelligence enhancement. Having a person like that helping lead Harvard would be…interesting. Right now it looks like he needs Harvard alumni to sign a petition to get him on the ballot; if you are an interested alumnus, contact ron@freeharvard.org

3. Some people on the subreddit are planning a London Rationalist Diaspora Meetup for LW, SSC, and/or EA participants. As per the usual rules everyone who reads this is invited, and you shouldn’t worry that you shouldn’t come because you “don’t feel interesting enough” or “feel like you wouldn’t fit in” or whatever. Meetup is at 2 PM 1/24/16 at the Shakespeare’s Head (which is exactly the sort of thing I imagine buildings in Britain being called) 64-68 Kingsway, WC2B 6BG London, United Kingdom. You can RSVP on Facebook if you want. I will not be able to make it but I send my good wishes.

4. Unsong update: chapters 2 and 3 are now up. And even if you don’t like fiction, you might be interested in Interlude ב, which I wrote sort of as a companion piece for SSC post Mysticism And Pattern-Matching.

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1,307 Responses to OT40: Martin Luthread King

  1. Anonymous says:

    I love you

  2. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    SSC SF Story of the Week #6
    This week we are discussing “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov.
    Next week we will discuss “Non-Player Character” by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      Don’t have much to say about the science in this one, but I have to say that I love the characters. The professional Theremon, determined to cover the story to the end; the no-nonsense, short-tempered Aton, stalwartly leading his men in collecting the data that may let the world break the cycle of destruction; the jolly and self-deprecating Sheerin, come to lighten up the observatory in its darkest hour… they really carry the piece. Some people complain that Asimov writes flat, boring characters, but this story is a wonderful counterexample.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      Obviously leans more heavily on the fiction than on the science, but I’ve always enjoyed this one.

      For one, I really enjoy examining how a particular system’s dynamics affect the development of societies within that star system. The other great example I can think of is Krikket, from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’d really enjoy reading other stories like this, if people are familiar with them.

      For another, I also enjoy cyclical histories and ancient cataclysms. The idea of slowly approaching, inevitable doom I really enjoy savoring, and the fact that in this case it always happens just as the society is on the cusp of overcoming it makes it even more delicious. Reminds me of a more naturalistic Reaper cycle (from Mass Effect) or the Blight (from A Fire Upon the Deep).

      • tgb says:

        Yes, finding a 2000 year periodic orbit in a system that complicated would be… unlikely. But other than that, there’s not much “science” to get wrong in this (it’s been some time since I’ve read it, though). Though you could argue that it gets wrong human nature and the fact that science developments appear to get repeated at an amazingly similar rate each time, but those strike me as fair game for an author to play with as needed.

        The reveal at the end, though, I think somewhat justified the implausibility of the star system and did a good job of making the reader go “hmm maybe I *would* get wowed by that, even though I’ve been scoffing this whole time at how there’s no way nightfall could cause society to collapse.” Discussion of developmental order of scientific results was excellent.

        Asimov’s “The Dead Past” is another one that would be a *great* discussion piece, in my opinion. For being 60 years old, it seems to be even more relevant today than when it was released. So that’s a nomination for future weeks.

        And I’ve got A Fire Upon the Deep on my shelf for my next read. Maybe I’ll start it tonight!

        • Jiro says:

          “The Dead Past” had one really major premise which seems hopelessly naive today:

          Gur tbireazrag xrcg gur grpuavdhr frperg gb cebgrpg rirelbar, orpnhfr yrggvat rirelbar ryfr unir fheirvyynapr jbhyq qrfgebl crbcyr’f cevinpl.

          Gur vqrn gung gur tbireazrag vgfrys vf gur cnegl gung fubhyq or gur yrnfg gehfgrq jvgu havirefny fheirvyynapr, gung vg jbhyq or qbvat gur zbfg cevinpl ivbyngvat, naq gung nalguvat vg fnlf nobhg cebgrpgvat bguref vf cebonoyl n frys-freivat yvr qvqa’g rira bpphe gb Nfvzbi. Vg’f n fgbel gung jbhyq unir orra cerfpvrag, vs Nfvzbi jnfa’g ba gur fvqr bs ovt tbireazrag.

      • You might like the Crucible of Time by John Brunner.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          This is exactly what I was hoping for with my comment – book recommendations!

          Thank you, I shall add it to the list.

      • Loquat says:

        You might enjoy Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, depending on how much stretching your suspension of disbelief can take – the central premise there is that intelligent life managed to evolve on a planet with an extremely unstable, and more importantly unpredictable, orbit around a 3-star system.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Three Body Problem

          Meh. The cultural/historical context was interesting, but he committed a cardinal sin for science fiction: introduced an intriguing, baffling, seemingly-impossible situation, teased us about it for the rest of the book, and then resolved it with an idiotic bit of pseudo-scientific bafflegab barely above the level of “reverse the polarity of the plasma coils”.

        • Bugmaster says:

          Bah. That book introduces some interesting ideas at the beginning, and then disintegrates into a pool of random technobabble, cliched conspiracies, and the kind of incredibly bad writing one usually associates with adolescent fanfiction. After reading it, I’ve resolved to make a special effort of avoiding any works by Cixin Liu from now on.

          • Loquat says:

            I chose to blame the quality of the writing on the translator, a guy whose actual philosophy of translation is that the work should never ever let you forget that you’re reading a translation.

            There’s apparently a movie in the works scheduled to come out later this year, which I hope will leave out some of the more egregious scientific sins.

          • Mary says:

            I stopped reading after we had a solemn discussion about scientists committing suicide because they found the laws of nature were not invariant.

            Good heavens, by the standards they were using, we discovered that the first time someone learned that you have to boil an egg longer on the mountain.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            I’m only a quarter of the way in but I figured the hallucinations had something to do with the suicides rather than just the whole “science no worky!”

          • Mary says:

            Those came later — after I had already given up.

            Fixing a problem doesn’t work if you’ve already driven me off.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          This is the first time I’ve heard it mentioned outside the Puppies fight that occasionally crops up in the comments here. That discussion had sort of piqued my interest, so I’ll probably have to slot this onto the list, too.

          I’ve been slowly coming to grips with becoming at least literate in Chinese, so I may try and tackle this work in the original once I feel up to it. Best way to learn a language.

      • Moebius Street says:

        Since you mentioned the Blight, I was surprised you didn’t mention A Deepness in the Sky, another novel in the same universe for which this cycle, and the society evolving within it, is the heart of the story.

        Also along the same lines is The Mote in God’s Eye, by Niven & Pournelle.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          I haven’t made to A Deepness in the Sky yet – It’s definitely on my list, hell, it’s even on my shelf, but I haven’t yet read it. I feel uncomfortable discussing books I haven’t yet read.

          • I like Vinge, but some of his later books had parts that got too dark for my (admittedly very wimpy) tastes, so I haven’t finished them.

            He says he can write darker than he can read.

        • Murphy says:

          Throw in The Wheel of Time and The Stormlight Archive with it’s Desolations.

          For a quick bit of fun, try SCP-2000

          http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2000

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            Wanting to know more about the Desolations is my primary motivation for thirsting after new Stormlight books. Thankfully Sanderson is like the anti-Martin when it comes to writing speed, so I never need to wait long.

            As for the Wheel of Time, it was tough to get through, as I kind of loathe Jordan’s style, but the bits where we learned more about the War of Power and the history of the various peoples scattered around the world were by far my favorite.

    • Deiseach says:

      “Nightfall” is good because we get a sense of the characters, even if they’re very much based on stereotypes of the time. They feel like persons in the story, not simply “And this is the scientist and this is the journalist and we’re only going through the motions until THE ENDING”.

      Asimov tries very hard but doesn’t quite, I think, achieve the sense of grandeur of the blazing skies (he’s rather too feet-on-the-ground as a writer and thinker to successfully achieve poetry) but he does manage to communicate something of the “imagine we’d never seen the stars and then one night – how would we react?”

      And he makes sense of the reactions of his people (which, in contradiction of the quote that inspired the story, are fear and panic not awe and wonder) by the set-up of the world under constant sunslight and never truly dark – until one night, it is.

      I also like the mild scoffing at religious myths by the science types in the story (and how that mild scoffing gets turned back on them) because honestly, world-destroying cataclysms? What else would you expect from Bronze Age superstition? (When it turns out that actually, yes, world-destroying cataclysms). And the idea that, well, given that civilisation collapses so badly that the only way to carry forward knowledge is in the kind of fossilised, stylised oral transmission that religions can create and keep, once eventually written down, even if badly garbled, because the underlying structure of a church or sect or hierarchy is stable enough to survive through the years.

      The Yudkowsky story is terrible. I won’t discuss it any more because I don’t think I can do so charitably (for a start, I’d be doing the kind of line-by-line concrit of the writing style that I was accustomed to back in the days of shared group critiques online, and that’s shooting fish in a barrel with this prose style).

      • Mary says:

        “Nightfall” is a very atypical story for him, on the theme of the hubris of man’s over-reaching intelligence. All the smart guys, ever so sure they know what they are facing. . . .

    • switchnode says:

      I’ll be the odd man out and say that, despite imprinting on Asimov at an early age and still counting him as one of my favorites, if people didn’t make such a fuss over “Nightfall” I’d probably have forgotten it. The idea’s a winner, as usual, but the execution is painfully on-the-nose. Asimov’s characters themselves are all right, but I guess even as a kid I was skeptical of their turn-key psychology.

      (“Breeds There a Man…?”—now that one gave me the shiveries!)

    • Echo says:

      How did people like the expanded novella vs the short story version?

      • William C. says:

        Of Nightfall? I thought the short story worked a whole lot better. The characters were well-pictured, and the problem was vivid enough to stick in my imagination for years. The longer book just tacks on a post-apocalyptic story which doesn’t add anything to the central message of the story, and a final twist that even subtracts from the message.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          That is my complaint about a lot of mid-Century SF longer-than-the-original versions! Nightfall; Fahrenheit 451; that one that ended “I’m tired of being poor!” … others I seem to be mercifully blanking on. A good short gimmicky short short, with something long and dull tacked on.

        • “Blood Music” was a solid short horror story. Blood Music was a much weaker novel with some hand-waving to allow the human race to survive, in a manner of speaking.

          “Flowers for Algernon” was much better than Charlie.

          Actually, the interesting question might be whether there were any expanded versions which were at least as good as the original.

          • Jiro says:

            I think 2001 (the book) was at least as good as The Sentinel.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            “Flowers for Algernon” was much better than Charlie..

            FfA belonged in my list, but at least Charlie wasn’t a long dull chunk tacked on before or after, it was expanded by details added within each stage of the original with very relevant human interest.

    • J says:

      Story request: The Road Not Taken, by Harry Turtledove. Opening line:

      “Captain Togram was using the chamberpot when the Indomitable broke out of hyperdrive.”

      • Marc Whipple says:

        While that is a marvelous story, the site you are linking to appears to contain a large repository of pirated works. Out of respect for the authors and their rights I would politely ask you to reconsider linking to it.

      • Bugmaster says:

        WARNING: Spoilers ! Read at your own risk !

        LAST SPOILER WARNING !

        I dislike that story, because I can’t quite suspend enough disbelief to really get into it. My problem is not with FTL or space raccoons (I love both), but with the author’s depiction of science. In the real world, science is not just a random agglomeration of facts; instead, it is a belief network that ties together all of our models of reality. This means that, unfortunately, the more we learn about nature, the less likely it is that we missed some simple shortcut to the stars… And, at present, we actually know quite a lot, so the idea looks preposterous.

        Imagine reading a fantasy story about humans who have magical powers, complex feudal societies, wizards and swordfighters, rousing adventures, etc… And yet, these people have never invented chairs (not even magi-chairs), so they’re just standing around all the time. It’s like that.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Likewise spoiler warnings.

          With all due respect…

          … that is the whole POINT OF THE STORY.

          One of the characters even points it out: her literal words are, “It’s humiliating.” Whatever The Secret is, it’s just totally orthogonal to everything we know about the Laws of Physics, and it only does one thing. (He even specifically mentions that it’s not useful for anything else.)

          How many centuries did we have reasonably well-organized scientific inquiry before some smartass said, “You know, you don’t just feel lighter when the elevator goes down, you actually are lighter, and HOLY SHIT GRAVITY AND ACCELERATION ARE THE SAME THING?” Why are you so sure that there aren’t a few more moments like that waiting somewhen?

          If it makes you feel better, set the story around the time Einstein was describing Relativity or a decade or two after while everybody was still all “THE UNIVERSE IS A WHIRLING PIT OF MADNESS.” We’d still have kicked the space raccoons’ adorable fuzzy behinds from Hell to breakfast, it just would have taken a little longer.

          Now, if you’re wondering why the space raccoons and their other allies haven’t developed further than they have (I myself wonder how they make really good airtight space vessels that can withstand the vacuum and/or radiation) that’s a better argument, but he addresses it. It’s not a great explanation, but it’s there.

          To be fair, the weakest point of the whole story to me is the assertion that almost every yellow sun has at least one planet with an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a Goldilocks ecosystem. If I was gonna facepalm and drop, it would have been there.

          • Bugmaster says:

            Whatever The Secret is, it’s just totally orthogonal to everything we know about the Laws of Physics…

            That’s my entire point, though. The more we learn of physics, the less likely it is that “orthogonal to the laws of physics” is a phrase that makes any sense. In this way, contragravity is similar to something like spirits.

            Is it totally impossible that a whole world of spiritual existence exists in parallel to our own ? Well, no, it’s not impossible. However, every discovery we’ve made since mastering fire has made the existence of this world progressively less likely.

            This is the dark side of science, when you think about it. We know so much — what powers stars, what causes disease, how old the Universe is — and we can apply this knowledge to create amazing technologies. But the same exact knowledge tells us that we are probably never going to invent contragravity or FTL. It’s not an analogy or a metaphor, and there are no workaround. The same laws are in play here. The more certain you are that F=GMm/r^2 or that E=mc^2, the more certain you must be that FTL can’t exist. It’s the same law.

    • DavidS says:

      Possibly I read this at a particularly impressionable age, but this has always stood out as a SF short story for me. I think it’s because it’s got a fablic quality to it – you can retell the bones of the story to yourself or others – combined with the simple but effective example of how weak some of our assumptions are when we work by a single analogy to ourselves (I LOVE the ‘obviously life could only exist on a binary star system’)

  3. xtmar says:

    First question, for the stats people:

    What do you call a trend which has one direction of correlation within a population, and the opposite direction of correlation between populations, and how serious of a problem is this in statistical analysis?

    For instance, if you look at the trend between countries, obesity is positively correlated with wealth and GDP per capita. On the other hand, if you look within the country, or at least within the US, it is inversely correlated with GDP per capita.

    Similarly, if you look at guns and crime, you see positive correlations between gun deaths and guns between countries, but you see the reverse between states.

    Obviously, in both cases there are lots of confounding factors that could be controlled for, but in either case I think it’s still strange that you see one direction of correlation when you look at one set of populations, and the reverse correlation when you look at a given subset.

    So, how often do we see this in other areas, and what does it usually mean?

    • Zakharov says:

      Simpson’s Paradox?

      • Rainmount says:

        Nope. Simpson’s paradox would be if the US had a lower obesity rate than Italy but the northern US had a higher rate than north Italy and the southern US had a higher rate than south Italy.

        • Blake Riley says:

          I think Simpson’s Paradox is broad enough to cover any reversal after conditioning on groups. The figure at the top of the wikipedia page is a spot-on depiction of what xtmar described.

        • Alraune says:

          Simpson’s Paradox is definitely at play in the US gun stats case.

    • Ilya Shpitser says:

      It’s Simpson’s paradox. Taken literally it’s not a paradox, it’s just a property that tables of numbers can have. The reason people often find it confusing is they don’t have in mind Y changing after conditioning on an event X, they are thinking of a causal relationship. But conditioning isn’t causal necessarily.

      There is a paper that dissolves this issue, by Judea Pearl: http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r414.pdf

      • Jack V says:

        I think a paradox is something that APPEARS contradictory, doesn’t Simpson’s paradox fit that?

        • Philosophers often classify paradoxes into veridical, falsidical, and antinomy. Simpson’s Paradox would be a veridical paradox, since it is apparently absurd, but is found to be true on further analysis.

          • fubarobfusco says:

            To expand:

            A veridical paradox is a screwy result that turns out to just be a non-obvious truth. (Example: The Monty Hall paradox. It’s contrary to naïve common sense, but when you work out the possible cases it’s just ordinary true.)

            A falsidical paradox is a screwy result that rests on a fallacy leading to a false conclusion. (Example: The various 1=2 proofs. They look like mathematical proofs but contain invalid steps such as dividing by zero; the result 1=2 is just ordinary false.)

            An antinomy is a screwy result stemming from inconsistent premises. (Example: The barber who shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself. The premise sounds like it makes sense, but it actually contains a contradiction.)

    • Robert says:

      The situation you describe is exactly the Simpson’s paradox. Wikipedia has some examples:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

    • The Do-Operator says:

      I don’t think this is Simpson’s Paradox. He is not talking about changing the sign of the effect by conditioning on a covariate, he is talking about changing the sign of the effect by analyzing the data at a different level of aggregation, ie where each row in the dataset is a summary measure of the lower level of analysis. The most relevant fallacy is the “ecologic fallacy”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy , i.e. making inferences at a different level of aggregation from that which the data was analyzed at.

      • Ilya Shpitser says:

        I don’t understand your comment. One way in which one aggregates data is by marginalizing…

        Your link claims Simpson’s paradox is a special case, actually.

        • The Do-Operator says:

          Imagine a situation where every gun murder would have been conducted with a knife if the murderer did not have a gun. In all states, gun ownership is assigned randomly. In all states except State S, the probability of owning a gun in p. However, in state p, some additional fraction of the non-murdering people decide to get guns to protect themselves. These additional people are non-violent and do not commit murder.

          In this world, there is a marginal negative correlation between gun ownership and being a murderer.

          If we condition on state, there is still a negative correlation between gun ownership and being a murderer (in state S, other states have no correlation).

          However, if we create a dataset with one row per state, where each state has a variable for “percentage gun ownership” and a variable for “number of murders” we will see a positive correlation between these two variables.

          This suggests to me that the ecologic fallacy is not the same thing as Simpson’s paradox.

        • The Do-Operator says:

          Another way to think about what I’m saying:

          Suppose we have two ways to set up the data set: Either one row per person (with variables representing personal attributes) or one row per state (with variables representing the average of personal attributes in that state). The states may have different size.

          Suppose you know the directed acyclic graph at the individual level. My intuition is that it will not be trivial to deduce the DAG at the state level. Also, my intuition is that d-separation on the individual level is not the right starting point for reasoning about how the graph on the state level looks. Therefore this is not the same problem as Simpson’s paradox. However, I will yield to your expertise on this if you disagree

          Next suppose you know the graph at the state level and are trying to deduce the graph at the individual level. I am almost certain that this will not be possible? Person-to-person interference will be one of the problems..

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Ok, suppose we have one personal attribute X with two values, and a state variable Y with two values, (TX and CA), and a probability of owning a gun given X,Y: p(G | X,Y).

            So we have a table with 8 entries that gives us P(G, X, Y). If we compare p(G) vs p(G | X) vs p(G | X,Y) we get Simpson’s paradox. Are you saying we are really looking at p(G | X) vs p(G | Y)? Doesn’t this have p(G | X) = P(G) (G independent of X) as a special case, in which case we are comparing p(G) vs p(G | Y)?

            Or did you mean something else?

            I agree with your comments about graphs and interference. DAGs aren’t closed under marginalization, which is why people use latent projection mixed graphs instead.

          • The Do-Operator says:

            I don’t think that is what I’m saying

            Suppose you have individual level data on the correlation between individual gun ownership G, individual attribute X and state Y.

            Now suppose you take the expected value of these variables in each state. In other words, define H= E(G|Y) such that H for California is the probability of owning a gun in that state. Similarly define for each state I=E(X|Y) such that I for California is the probability of having personal attribute X.

            Suppose next you use the dataset where states are the fundamental unit of analysis, and calculate the correlation between H and I. This may be different from the correlation between X and Y. In fact they may have opposite signs. However, I don’t think this is Simpson’s paradox

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Did you mean: “This may be different from the correlation between X and _G_”? Otherwise you are changing what pair of variables you are talking about after conditioning on Y.

            If so, I am not sure how that’s not the same thing. You are comparing dependence of X and G, which is about p(X | G), and dependence of X and G within strata of Y, which is a function of p(X | G, Y). Conditioning on Y can induce big changes in this dependence, which is what Simpson’s paradox is about.

            ???

    • roystgnr says:

      Are you sure about the gun correlation between countries? Everything I’ve seen with a positive correlation uses “selected countries” (because if we used all the data it would be bad because hey-look-over-there!) or “peer countries” (because the USA is basically Europe with more guns and no other significant differences, right?).

      Plots of every country in the world end up looking more like:

      https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/3o1gja/all_murders_vs_gun_ownership/

      which still has a negative (and still almost insignificant) correlation:

      https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/3o4sa2/gun_control_hardly_effects_homicide_rate_but_guns/

    • The Ecological Fallacy is the superset of Simpson’s Paradox (I think).

  4. Chevalier Mal Fet says:

    Aw, figures. I finally stumble into an open thread early and I have nothing to say.

    I don’t suppose anyone else here follows the NFL with much interest? No? Aw, well, it was a long shot. I’ll just stick to the book discussions.

    • bluto says:

      I enjoy some football. Haven’t watched as many games this year as last year (was involved in a local drama production in the middle of the season) but caught the last few weeks of the season and have been enjoying the playoffs.

      It’s fun to see Carolina’s sucess this year even if they’re not my team.

      • hlynkacg says:

        I live in San Diego so all the news is “of the field” this year. I kind of stopped paying attention around week 12.

        I’ll watch the Patriots v. Broncos game out of nostalgia but it just hasn’t been the same since they started winning on a regular basis. There is now a whole generation of New England fans out there who don’t know what it’s like to be the underdog.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          I’m a Kansas City native, living in St. Louis, so the NFL has been dominating media in both my homes these past few weeks.

          In KC, it was all positive, as the Chiefs managed to not lose a game between the middle of October and the middle of January. They went from 1-5 to 11-5 and broke their 22-year playoff win drought! Overall it was very exciting.

          Meanwhile, here in StL stuff has fallen to pieces over the Rams. Reactions range from shrugs to outright devastation.

          I’ve grown to quite like professional sports in the last few years, I must say – at least in the US they’re for the most part harmless expressions of tribalism, and infinitely preferable to the growing political schisms in the nation.

          I also enjoy that they serve as essentially artificial story creators. You lay down the rules, wind up the teams, and then watch them go, you’ll be able to get all sorts of dramatic, touching, comedic, exciting, or tragic narratives out of any season in any major sport.

    • Rock Lobster says:

      Where do you think RG3 is gonna go?

      • bluto says:

        I had been thinking thinking Texas or Dallas throughout the season, but with Kelly getting signed in San Fran, could see him going there. Where do you think?

    • blacktrance says:

      Even more of a long shot, but does anyone here follow e-sports? Specifically, DotA?

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        No, Alliance is not going to win the Major nor TI, no matter how many times in a row Icefrog buffs their playstyle.

        • blacktrance says:

          I’m just happy to see them winning again. Alliance is back! Memes aside, there will be at least one patch between now and TI, so there’s room for things to change. Alliance didn’t do much of their classic ratting at Starladder, they mainly benefited from the buff to playmaking mids (Puck and Batrider). If they (and the ever-important Furion and Lone Druid) don’t get nerfed, then Alliance has a good chance of doing well. But they’re being picked up often enough by other teams that at least the latter two are likely to be hit next patch.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            >they mainly benefited from the buff to playmaking mids

            And Chen. And a bugged KotL (but that was only at WCA).

            And I dunno, it’s always good to see your team win, no matter what. It just seems like Alliance always gets this surge right before big events, and we all start saying “Alliance is Back!” and then they massively disappoint (TI4, TI5 qualys, Frankfurt Major).

            But I’m an Empire fan, so I know suffering all too well.

          • blacktrance says:

            It just seems like Alliance always gets this surge right before big events, and we all start saying “Alliance is Back!” and then they massively disappoint (TI4, TI5 qualys, Frankfurt Major).

            Maybe we’ll see that again, but they’re doing better than at any of those times. They got first place in two high-caliber tournaments in a row, when the last time they finished first before that was before TI4.

            By the way, what do you think about having ~half of NaVi on your team?

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            I think Funn1k sucks and xboct is worse than Silent, but there weren’t a lot of options to choose from. My hope is that they get yoky back, now that he finally decided to go back to the offlane, and get ubah but as a carry (although xboct isn’t that bad).

            If Resolut1on is really going to NA (And I hope not, because I don’t want to root for DC), get General for mid again.

          • blacktrance says:

            My hope is that Navi gets yoky, now that they’ve kicked Ax.Mo (and rightly so, he was the weakest member of their team in addition to the unprofessionalism). I’m really a Navi fan when it comes down to it, but they get eliminated too early I support Alliance.

      • MF says:

        I think there was some drama at one point over whether or not Alliance deserved the invite to the next Major over Liquid. I watched their series against each other during Starladder, and let me suggest an alternative: neither deserved the invite. That was some genuinely awful Dota. Of course, you can’t extrapolate too much from one BO3, but ugh.

        With Secret playing as awful as they have been lately, I think I’d prefer if there were fewer invites to the Majors and instead more qualifier slots.

        • blacktrance says:

          Is there any doubt that if there had been four EU qualifier spots, Secret, Alliance, and Liquid all would’ve made it through? Also, I think it makes sense to invite better-established teams instead of sending them through the qualifiers – they could have a few off days and not make it through, but if they were invited, they could revert back to their mean, while qualified teams that play unusually well could revert back to tier 3 play.

          • MF says:

            With respect to Secret, I don’t think they would have made it through the qualifiers right now. Given their utterly horrendous performance since the last Major (this isn’t just a few bad days), I think it’s unfair to the qualifier teams that Secret got a direct invite. Alliance might have made it through, though I question that too…

            I totally get your point that the risk of a proven team failing to make it through qualifiers due to having a bad day is undesirable, but I’m really not sure Secret is going to stage a comeback and revert to their mean.

            Maybe Secret will show up to the Major and prove me wrong, but I’m certainly not going to bet on it.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            Secret was second place in the last major, easy route to the finals or not (and for the record, yes, their route was easier). You can’t just not invite the runner up of the last major event (that wasn’t even so long ago) because of bad perfomances in a qualifier and two tournaments (one of which was after the invites).

            I do think Secret probably wouldn’t have gone through the qualifiers, but I still have more faith in them doing OK in Shangai than Alliance.

      • Another commenter123 says:

        It is fun to watch the western – US and European teams be dominant. I wonder how much longer it will last. There is a lot of money in the sport now, and just being invited to TI can provide an above average salary in some countries.

        I think you will have to play hours every day to be competitive in the near future. And I don’t think playing pubs will cut it. There are a lot of things you do in those to win that are counter-productive in a tournament game. I think playing pubs, particularly solo-queuing, may just create bad habits.

        We are now seeing Eastern teams create “youth” teams which I think will give them a good team to scrimage against and really accelerate their tournament play.

        A lot of the fun of the sport is watching people who you get to know through their streaming of pub games, play in tournaments. As the scene further professionalizes I think that will be lost as it isn’t in anyone’s self interest, but it will probably be to the detriment of the game as a whole.

        • blacktrance says:

          I think you will have to play hours every day to be competitive in the near future. And I don’t think playing pubs will cut it. There are a lot of things you do in those to win that are counter-productive in a tournament game. I think playing pubs, particularly solo-queuing, may just create bad habits.

          Then why are teams picking up and succeeding with pubstars like Sumail/Miracle/w33? Of course, having Eight Thousand Matchmaking Points is a different skill from being good in a pro team, and you have to practice with the team and play scrims, but that’s been the case since at least TI4. (IIRC, wasn’t it around then that NaVi didn’t feel like practicing and started their decline?) And we’ve seen Miracle change his playstile as he’s played more professionally, going from clever AM blinks to something more conventional, but there was a reason he was picked up in the first place. For all that DotA is a team game, individual skill is still important – for instance, Artstyle seems to be a decent captain but a mediocre player, which really undermined NaVi at TI5. Maybe he should play pubs more.

          As for streaming, unless we start seeing more focused professionals regularly beating streamers, I don’t think it’ll change. And with how the most popular streamers are also on the most successful teams, I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          >I wonder how much longer it will last.

          If trends are to be believed, intermitently right up to TI, then not at TI.

      • Brad (the other one) says:

        Even even more of a long shot, but does anyone here follow Fighting Games / Street Fighter? (Or Starcraft, since I play that far more than Street Fighter.)

        • Held in Escrow says:

          I’m a big FGC head but this type of blog seems like it’s probably going to be the exact opposite of the type of community that would have lots of fighting game fans

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            I loved the series on Playing to Win, it made me /almost/ interested in fighting games.

            As for Starcraft I will occasionally watch a well-commentated match, but I never touch it myself. RTSes aren’t my style.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            If you’re interested in getting into fighters, with Guilty Gear Xrd out on Steam and Street Fighter V dropping in a month there hasn’t been a better time to start than now. Especially if you don’t have a local scene as they both have focused on making a strong online gaming experience.

        • Montfort says:

          I like fighting games enough to watch major tournaments after the fact for Street Fighter and Guilty Gear (even Killer Instinct, when it shows up), but I don’t know if that counts as following for your purposes.

          I thought it might be a fun hobby to pick up, but I think I have a serious technical skill deficit – I can’t even hit the combos in the skullgirls tutorial.

        • house says:

          I follow and play super smash bros melee. The most recent tournament, Genesis 3, was amazing.

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      I know it’s not fixed, but the playoff’s bracket looks super stacked in the Patriot’s favour.

    • Protagoras says:

      I feel guilty about still being a fan, what with the concussion/CTE issues, but I do indeed still follow the NFL. I root for the Vikings (my original home team), and the Patriots (the local team where I live now), so I’m even still interested in the current playoffs. The Vikings’ exit was heartbreaking, but heartbreaking playoff losses are kind of a Vikings thing; I certainly prefer them to the years when they just don’t make it to the playoffs. And I hugely enjoyed watching the victory over the Packers that got them the divisional championship at the end of the season.

    • eccdogg says:

      I follow college more closely, but still catch about one NFL game a weekend. I am a bandwagon Panthers fan so this year has been pretty fun.

      Its been very intersting this year to watch how the Panthers have developed their offense to Cam Newton. When they drafted him I was skeptical of how good he would be, not because I doubted his talent but I doubted that an NFL team would ever allow him to use his ability as a runner fully. Carolina proved me wrong. About half the time they are running an offense that would look very normal on Saturdays (College) but is quite unique for Sundays (Pro). Its not just Carolina either Kansas City, Seattle, Philly all have adopted college tactics (spread offense, running QB, read plays, WR screens) to a certain extent and IMO are ahead of the curve because college tactics have been ahead pro tactics for quite a few years.

      If it is Carolina vs NE in the superbowl it will be the first matchup of a classic “Pro Style” QB vs a “College Style” QB (maybe you could say we had that last year as well with Wilson/Brady, but I think Seattle does not incorporated Wilson running nearly as much as Carolina).

  5. sweeneyrod says:

    Any thoughts on this poem?

    oft plopped the unimaginable spoon
    the foolishness is like the artful tide
    the dulcet violet is like the moon
    the innocents inherited upside
    they shelled the unimaginable fin
    the ax is like the perishable rum
    the soft lucidity is like the grin
    they snowed the unintelligible hum
    the two humiliations sneaked anew
    they smashed the unintelligible beam
    the immutable paints dislodged askew
    he shed the unimaginable scream
    they ragged the inviolable flares
    the intimates are like the millionaires

    • Agronomous says:

      It sounds like it was written by a computer. Or Gertrude Stein. I like it.

    • pngwn says:

      Looks like a random word generator set up with basic grammar rules.

      Except for forms of “to be,” all the verbs are past tense.
      Adverbs are placed immediately after the verb they modify.
      Adjectives are placed immediately before the noun they modify.
      “the” is placed before nouns and adjectives noun pairs seemingly indiscriminately. “the foolishness / the soft lucidity”

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Kind of reminds me of @clashofclangs

    • Tracy W says:

      The last line seems rather anti-climatic after all that build up.

  6. Linch says:

    I mentioned this in an earlier thread, but now that it’s reposted to HuffPo, figured that I’ll mention it again (hope it’s not too annoying!!):

    I wrote a personal essay about my experiences with the bystander effect, historical analogues, and how it relates to the actions that some members of this community have chosen:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linch-zhang/the-bystander_b_8982968.html

    Comments and suggestions for improvement will be very much appreciated.

    In addition, I have the following two questions:

    1) How do I write accessible articles for a broad audience, ideally while still being interesting to my peer group and without losing intellectual rigor? Now that I’m an official HuffPo contributor (with my salary of $0.00!), I want to write more and do more idea-spreading.

    The current article only has 70 likes, 12 shares, and no comments, which seems ridiculously low for a post that appeared on the front page (admittedly I don’t know what the appropriate reference class is).

    2) How do I write genuinely interesting articles *quickly*? Ideas for the Bystander essay have been simmering in my mind for like five years, the writing itself took something like 3 days, and the crowdsourced proofreading took like a week.

    • Anonymous says:

      This reads like a high-school senior trying to turn out a college application. Write less like that.

      The opening anecdote is a patchwork of cliché. The physical unfairness. The comparison of different units of time. The surrender. The blood. The devastating final blow. The crunching sound. The only thing that’s stopping me from asking “did this really happen?” is the mention of thirty or forty kids—now that’s remarkable! How did it happen, did you know them all, were you anticipating the fight? If so, why; if not, how did it play in to your understanding of the bystander effect? A good anecdote requires specificity. (Here is one from a member of the diaspora, who is a writer and knows how it’s done.) Granted, any details increasing the length of the article will probably depress your shares, but—broad success on social media; intellectual rigor appealing to your peer group; make your decisions.

      The martial arts paragraph is bad. “some semblance”, “discovered various ways”—ooh, those hurt me. Did you ‘discover’ a ‘semblance’ of techniques by mimicking YouTube videos, or did you legitimately dedicate time to learning a system of self-defense, as I assume you’re trying to say? The “semblance” is both needlessly self-deprecating and a touch pretentious (there’s that college-application whiff again); the “discovery” is both a touch pretentious (someone taught you, didn’t they?) and needlessly self-deprecating (“various ways” makes them sound like a collection of curios). —But none of this matters, because you never bring it up again. You say you still don’t know if you’d step in, so I assume you haven’t actually used any of your experience. Was it worth the time? Why is this paragraph even here? Tie it in or cut it.

      The next seven sentences in a row start: “I increased my knowledge”. “I learned”. “I read”. “I learned”. “I also learned”. “I read about”. “I studied”. “I pored over text”. Why? This is not an application, and you are not selling yourself! You’re selling—at least, I assume you want to be selling—EA. Either the specific story of how you encountered and learned to understand these things is worth going into detail on, or you can stand back and let the facts speak for themselves, just as they spoke to you. —At any rate, it doesn’t matter again, because while the ‘other bystanders in history’ paragraph is OK as a lead-up to Rabe, the paragraph of impersonal statistics that you’ve slapped “I” on should be cut from this section and go afterwards, in the GiveWell discussion.

      The Rabe paragraphs are good; he’s a novel and interesting hero. The fantasy of hoarding courage, and the statement that it is a practice, not a stockpile, are good remarks. (But cut “in” from before “that way”; it’s spoiling your prosody.)

      After that is where I started skimming. I’m familiar with the statistics, and you were getting very dramatic. I realize I’m fighting the message as well as the medium here—500 deaths a day should be dramatic! But they aren’t, not halfway around the world. You’re working yourself into high dudgeon for an emotional reality you admit has never really sunk in, even for you. (One last whiff!) Why are you fighting it? Because it’s what charitable campaigns are supposed to look like? Writing can’t substitute important for interesting. What proportion of heartstring-tuggers are aimed at captive audiences?

      Relax, and just make the point that your last paragraphs actually support. “The final decision was easy”. It’s easier to ignore two hundred thousand deaths in Nigeria than an assault in front of your nose, but it’s also easier to intervene. No matter how flawed, everyone can do something; one of the best things about EA is that it requires no courage at all.

      (P.S. Try asking someone specific to proof your essays rather than crowdsourcing it. “The larger kid pummeled the smaller kid for what felt like minutes but was probably only seconds, he fell” is not a grammatical sentence, and the next one starts “[he] fell” again. Comma after “back of my mind”. “That if I never spent any of it…” starts in subjunctive and slips into declarative. “on”, not “in”, the back of a van. Could use some tightening all round.)

      • Linch says:

        Thanks! I REALLY appreciate the constructive criticism. It’s hard to tell if praise is honest or people are just being supportive, but criticism is much more likely to be genuine.

        With regard to the personal parts, there was broad consensus that people like personal details about donors and it increases the chances that they will do the same.

        The first paragraph was really emotionally difficult for me to write so I had to distance myself from it. I still cringe upon rereading that paragraph even though it used to be a lot longer. That probably weakened some of its effect. I need to think about your points about the martial arts paragraph. My instructor is pretty private and may not appreciate it if some of the abstraction is taken away.

        Definitely agree with your point about the “I” statements. Like, I’m totally making so many right now! Being less egotistical is definitely something I still need to work a lot on! I respectively disagree with your case against the pathos argument. Empirically it seems to be effective.

        I don’t really know how I could sound less likely a high schooler, other than more practice. Part of the issue is that I wrote a lot more “serious stuff” in high school than afterwards, and quality control was a lot less necessary then.

        “one of the best things about EA is that it requires no courage at all.” Yes, I think that’s a really important point.

        Really appreciate the typographical help. Implementing it right now! 🙂

        Thanks again!

        PS “Try asking someone specific to proof your essays rather than crowdsourcing it.” Would you be willing to help with proofing an article or two next time? That way future essays can be a little more persuasive and I’ll embarrass myself less next time.

  7. Agronomous says:

    The March for Life in Washington, DC is this Friday, January 22, 2016—the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision.

    If you’re pro-life, I invite you to attend to lend your support. The rally is from Noon until 1:00 on the Ellipse (South of the White House).

    If you’re not pro-life (or if you’re at all interested in media bias), I invite you to observe the rally, estimate how many people you see, and compare it to the media coverage the next day. (Hint: you may have to check the back of the B section.) For bonus points, head over to the Supreme Court and count the counter-protesters; then you can calculate how over-represented they are in the next day’s paper.

    • Anon says:

      Are Marches for Life particularly newsworthy? I’d forgotten when the anniversary was, but I knew there would be one this year, just as there was one last year.

      • Agronomous says:

        The March for Life falls into this uncanny news valley where it’s newsworthy enough to cover, but not enough to cover accurately or fairly. A couple years ago, one local TV station’s web site carried only pictures of counter-protesters (and if you looked at the pictures you could see there were only ten of them, represented over and over), with literally none of the tens of thousands of marchers.

        Speaking of which, our crowd of tens of thousands invariably gets reported as “thousands”, if not “hundreds”. If you can’t tell the difference between thousands and tens of thousands of people, maybe journalism isn’t for you.

        It’s a running joke that we get wall-to-wall coverage on NPR—in the local traffic reports.

        We might get a bunch of coverage this year, though, since lots of people can’t make it due to the snow emergency: the entire New York contingent will be staying home, and Students for Life even had to cancel their conference (just the East Coast one). If we only get 20,000, I wonder if we’ll be “dozens”….

    • Zoned says:

      I’m a little bit interested in how many pro-lifers at the march are Trump supporters. Maybe you could keep track of pro-Trump insignias while you’re there?

      I was vaguely supportive of Trump until I realized he’s pro-choice, but to my dismay I don’t think most pro-life Trump supporters have noticed.

      • Nathan says:

        Trump, if you believe him, claims to be pro-life now. His rationale is that someone he knew was going to have an abortion, didn’t, and the the kid is a really cool person now.

        Regardless of whether you agree with him on an object level or not, I’d regard that as fairly good evidence (if needed) that he arrives at conclusions for pretty bad reasons.

        • suntzuanime says:

          You can say that all the people who support gay rights because they like their gay friends are arriving at conclusions for bad reasons, but it’s pretty hard to stand up and say “well, this person I care about should be dead”.

          • Dirdle says:

            That only follows if you’re already (quite strongly) pro-life. There’s a difference between saying “this person should never have been born” and “this existing person should die.” Even if we concede they’re both wrong things to want, they’re still different. I think you have to go right the way through to immortal-soul-added-at-conception before you get an equivalency between the two.

            To put it another way, I think you’ve misidentified the bad argument. The problem isn’t being rooted in an emotional response to the suggestion that a friend should be dead; that part is fine. The problem is saying that since the unborn might become good people, we have a duty to cause them to come into existence. From a pro-life perspective, they already have come into existence, but from a pro-choice perspective, they haven’t. So if Trump was and is being honest (doubtful), he was persuaded by an argument that should have only worked if he were already persuaded!

            Which looks remarkably like preaching to the choir, oddly enough. Can’t imagine why.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I think you may overestimate how nice a thing it is to say of someone that they should never have been born.

          • Dirdle says:

            Apologies, I’m not quite sure what gave you that impression?

            Your case seems to be something like “Trump could have not said that the non-aborted kid is a good person, which is equivalent to Trump saying the kid should have been aborted, which would be a bad thing to say. This is like how not saying you like your gay friends is equivalent to saying you think they should be killed. Even if Trump’s reasoning is bad, at least he’s not an inhuman monster who goes around telling people they shouldn’t exist.”

            I am saying that the position as I understand it is just, well, not particularly solid. Not-saying X is not the same as saying not-X; saying someone shouldn’t have ever existed, while bad, isn’t as bad as saying someone should die; and finally I’ll add that this is irrelevant to the original point, which was that Trump’s reasoning behind his change of heart isn’t very good. Even if you could establish that he absolutely had to say that in order to not be a complete monster, it wouldn’t make it a valid argument for the pro-life position.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            saying someone shouldn’t have ever existed, while bad, isn’t as bad as saying someone should die;

            Really? I’d be much more offended if somebody told me I should never have been born than if they told me I should die.

            Your case seems to be something like “Trump could have not said that the non-aborted kid is a good person, which is equivalent to Trump saying the kid should have been aborted, which would be a bad thing to say. This is like how not saying you like your gay friends is equivalent to saying you think they should be killed. Even if Trump’s reasoning is bad, at least he’s not an inhuman monster who goes around telling people they shouldn’t exist.”

            I thought the point was more along the lines that people arrive at conclusions for bad reasons all across the political spectrum, and that it’s bad rational form to only hold this against people who arrive at conclusions you don’t like.

          • Dirdle says:

            That makes a lot more sense. My apologies, I did not correctly infer that we were comparing Trump to the alternatives.

          • Nathan says:

            My assumption in what I stated was that given the sheer number of abortions, it’s obvious that some of the aborted children would have otherwise grown up to be cool people (some would have been real jerks too). Trump’s story involves him changing his mind on the basis of what really should not be considered new information. If he hadn’t already taken the fact that this could easily happen into account, he really lacks imagination.

            More to the point, it’s not in any way relevant to the question of whether abortion is a moral act.

            If this is his reason for being pro life, it’s a bad reason. If he was willing to abandon his pro choice views for such a bad reason, he must not have had a good reason for those either. Right or wrong, I would like someone who makes life and death decisions with a bit more careful consideration.

            (For reference, I am strongly anti abortion)

          • suntzuanime says:

            Right or wrong, I would like someone who makes life and death decisions with a bit more careful consideration.

            Right or wrong I’d like a million bucks, but I think we’re stuck with politicians.

          • Anonymous says:

            I think you may overestimate how nice a thing it is to say of someone that they should never have been born.

            People say this all the time. Usually, it takes the form of “their mother should have kept her legs closed.”

        • Furslid says:

          Yeah, and evidence that he really evades the question. The pro-life/pro-choice question isn’t “Is abortion a good idea?” The question is “should we use the law to punish people for getting an abortion?”

          • Zoned says:

            Ehh….sort of. That’s a technically accurate way to describe the issue, but it doesn’t capture the reasons people have for lining up on one side or the other.

            Pro-life people believe either that human life begins at conception and thus abortion is murder, or that absent certain knowledge of when human life begins we should err on the side of caution.

            You are correct to point out that the issue is NOT about “Are there people who it’s better to kill before they’re born?”

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Human life does begin at conception because sperm and eggs only have one set of chromosomes. That isn’t the issue- the issue is ‘when do you get the legal rights of personhood’?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Samuel Skinner:

            There’s definitely something alive at conception, but is it human? Sperm and eggs are alive, too, and in a certain sense they are human.

            There are certain things blastocysts have in common with newborn babies. There are also many things (more things) they do not have in common. Arguing about whether they are “really human” seems to me fruitless.

            Most obviously, this is because one of the key factors in determining whether are not we should classify them as human is going to be whether we think blastocysts have rights. If blastocysts have rights, that’s a powerful reason for grouping them under the category “human”. If they don’t, that’s a powerful reason for maintaining them in a separate category, such as “pre-human”.

            Alternatively, we could say that they are a type of human which doesn’t have rights, or a type of thing which has rights that is nonetheless not human. The tight connection between “being human” and “having rights” argues against this because such a division would make things needlessly confusing.

            The most important thing is: any way we do it, there is simply no way to manipulate definitions in order to avoid giving a substantive answer to the relevant questions. Which are: what is the basis of rights (if any), and do the reasons for according rights—or at least pragmatic state protection against killing—to adult humans or newborn babies also apply to blastocysts?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Human just means genetics. A corpse is a nonliving human after all. I was pointing out that using human as a category doesn’t work for moral relevance.

          • Nathan says:

            Yep, a (human) blastocyst is clearly human, but that distinction alone doesn’t necessarily mean anything from a moral standpoint.

            On the other hand it is also living, growing, and a distinct organism with its own genetic code. So that creates a distinction between it and a dead human, or a human toenail.

          • xq says:

            The idea of considering the haploid and diploid life stages of an organism as distinct species is, as far as I can tell, unique to the abortion discussion.

          • Nornagest says:

            Species, like class, order, genus, etc., is just a way of divvying up the taxonomic space. It does not carry any ethical significance beyond what you give it.

          • xq says:

            Sure. It is nevertheless good to have a useful and sensible division of taxonomic space. Human life does not begin at conception. I don’t claim that this has any relevance to the ethics of abortion. I do claim people should stop saying it, because it’s wrong.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Yep, a (human) blastocyst is clearly human, but that distinction alone doesn’t necessarily mean anything from a moral standpoint. ”

            I agree. That is why I point that out whenever people say ‘human life’.

            “On the other hand it is also living, growing, and a distinct organism with its own genetic code. So that creates a distinction between it and a dead human, or a human toenail.”

            You might want to use a definition that doesn’t rule out conjoined twins.

            “Human life does not begin at conception.”

            Where do you list human life as beginning?

          • xq says:

            “Where do you list human life as beginning?”

            Divergence from Chimpanzee.

        • Zoned says:

          Sounds like a revelation of convenience to me.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            I was going to ask if there was any other kind, then I read an article today about a guy who had a revenge porn site and took it down when somebody pointed out to him with great sincerity and clarity that that was a major dick move.

            Apparently, he wasn’t the most introspective person, and nobody had ever really explained to him that what he was doing was hurting actual people. Once he was clear on that, he shut down the site and deleted the entire archive.

          • Zoned says:

            OK, more specifically, a revelation of political convenience:

            Trump suddenly realizes he’s got an issue where he’s totally at odds with his base of support, and puts the “My views have recently changed because [silly reason that doesn’t illustrate understanding of his supporters’ views]” band-aid on it.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Oh, no, no, I was agreeing with you. I was just surprised to see that article and a case of a genuine revelation of non-convenience. Shutting down the site cost the guy quite a bit of money, which he didn’t have a lot of, relatively speaking. But he did it anyway. People will occasionally surprise you.

          • Zoned says:

            Oh. I guess I don’t agree that genuine revelations are as rare as you suggest. Now that I think about it, that’s part what makes Trump’s claim so outrageous: in a world where many people have genuine transformations in their views, it’s even easier to spot the people who are pretending to have had their views transformed.

      • Agronomous says:

        Anybody who hauls themselves to DC on an overnight bus to walk a couple miles in uncertain weather is probably paying enough attention to the issue to see through Trump. For every Trump supporter at the March, I can probably find you a Libertarian for Life and two Feminists for Life. The Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians is pretty well-represented, as well.

        On the opposite side, the Catholic Church is very pro-illegal-immigration, so a number of speakers and a good chunk of marchers would give Trump a thumbs-down just for that. And proceed to vote for Democrats in November (*sigh*).

    • Pku says:

      Could we do something like averaging out the Fox new and MSNBC coverage numbers to get something roughly accurate?

      Speaking of issues that are ridiculously overrepresented in the media, the democratic candidates named “equal pay for women” among their three top issues in their debate. Only one poll on this list* even had “women’s issues” (the closest match to that) on the list of issues that concern voters, at 2%. (quoted from 538, which is strange, since they’re usually pretty biased on SJW issues).

      *http://www.pollingreport.com/prioriti.htm (someday I’ll learn how to embed links).

      • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

        >(someday I’ll learn how to embed links).

        It still won’t be worth the effort.

        But then again, I don’t even bother to properly use quotes either, so I might just be particularly lazy.

      • Links are embedded as follows.
        [a href = “http://your.url.here” ]Descriptive text for URL.[/a]

        With brackets replaced by angle-brackets ().

        And, for Whatever Happened to Anonymous, there’s a [blockquote] tag, that can be used similarly to the [a] tag above; just start the quote with [blockquote] and end it with [/blockquote], again with brackets replaced by angle-brackets.

        And the bolding for the name was done with [b], similarly.

        HTML is fun!

  8. xtmar says:

    Second question, for general discussion:

    How likely is a given country to be in a state of civil war or disorderly change of government in a year? This came up in the gun control thread in the context of how possibly successful or not civilians with rifles could be in overthrowing the government, but I would like to look at it in a broader context, including outside influences, as well as general chaos.

    At the simplest, most naive, level, the United States had five years of civil war in 240 years of history as an independent nation, which would suggest a value of around 2%, possibly more if you count the Utah War, the wars against the Indians to close the frontier, and so on.

    If you look a little more broadly, even within the OECD, most of Europe had a change in government in the 1939-1946 time period, with some of them more recent than that, like the end of the Iberian dictatorships, and the transition from Communism to Democracy, which would again suggest something in the 1-2% range, perhaps higher if you look at the post-WWI instability in Europe. If you move to the poorer countries, especially outside of Europe, the average term of government is probably on the order of twenty years.

    I would guess that how you answer this is quite dependent on your definitions, as to what constitutes rebellion, civil war, or change of government. For instance, England has had undivided government for at least a century, but even they lost Ireland to a violent uprising in the 1920s, and faced varying degrees of armed resistance in Northern Ireland until quite recently.

    In order to look at it in a more advanced way, I would think you’d need to try to control for wealth, perhaps wealth distribution, geographic isolation, cultural homogeneity, and perhaps former colonial ruler, as the (white) British colonies seem to have been unusually peaceful, though I would suggest that’s correlated with their geographic isolation and a combination of natural resources and not having to integrate large numbers of the indigenous people.

    So, I would ask:
    1. Does this seem like a decent way to approach it?
    2. Does anyone know where you could find a decent database that you could use for this sort of thing?
    3. How would you define these terms broadly enough to include conflicts short of total civil war, but also narrowly enough that not every little riot and protest counts as armed rebellion?
    4. Perhaps most inflammatory, what’s your guess on involuntary change of government or civil war in the US or the core of Europe in the next decade?

    • John Schilling says:

      1. Yes, though it’s going to run foul of “Things are different now because we almost all have Democracy, the One True Form Of Perfect Government”. Which may be true, or it may only seem true.

      2. Can’t help you there. A related approach would be to look at the mean or median age of currently-exisiting governments and assume this is roughly half of the mean or median interval between successful revolutions, civil wars, and conquests. For that, Wikipedia may be able to help. Advantage, it helps sort out the “maybe modern democracies are more stable than old monarchies” effect; disadvantage, it doesn’t count unsuccessful revolutions, civl wars, etc.

      3. I don’t know that there is a generally agreed standard here. I generally use 10,000 deaths as the threshold for a “real war”, civil or otherwise, but that may not be adequate for revolutions in smaller states.

      4. Ten years is almost, but not quite, too short a timeframe for a wholly new trend to rise to the level of triggering a civil war, so the numbers are going to be dominated by things that are visibly happening now if you care to look. In the United States, the kerfluffle in Oregon is not one of those things; those of us paying attention have been seeing that sort of thing consistently fail to result in civil war for at least thirty years. The election of President Donald Trump might do it, but that’s a very long shot. There are a few other long-shot possibilities and maybe time for a dark-horse casus belli, so call it 5% over 10 years?

      Europe, there’s a pretty good chance that the EU will fragment for all of the reasons you’ve been hearing about, I’m going to guesstimate that at 20% over 10 years. The core governments of the EU I don’t see as being seriously threatened, but if your threshold for “civil war” is set low enough, conflicts between muslim immigrants and right-wing nationalists might possibly qualify.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I’m honestly trying to understand how Trump could make a civil war more likely as compared to Obama.

        • John Schilling says:

          Obama is a skilled politician with a pragmatic understanding of what can actually be accomplished with the power of the Presidency, and of how many people he can afford to piss off. Trump isn’t.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Fascinating. I disagree with you regarding every single assertion you made. That doesn’t happen very often.

            In any event, I see your point, but I took the prior poster’s assertion a little differently. It’s not how many people either of them does/will piss off, or how much they have/will piss them off, it’s which people. The kind of people Obama pisses off are much more likely, IMO and as I took it in the context of the prior poster’s assertion, to start a civil war than the kind of people who Trump pisses off. I thought it was a reasonable point, viewed in that regard. 🙂

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @John Schilling/@Marc Whipple:
            Yes, Marc has the essence of my thought process correct.

            Perhaps I am wrong, but I view the people who are backing Trump (of the major candidates) to be the most overlapped with those who are claiming to be considering armed insurrection as a means of changing the government.

            This could be incorrect, but certainly the people who currently match this description are far, far more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. It’s not the the possibility is zero, just that it seems much less likely.

            You do make a valid point that Trump has no seeming sense of finesse.

            But I would guess that Bernie Sanders is the candidate whose election is most likely (on a relative scale) to result in something like civil war. (Although the Murrah Federal Building bombing was during the last Clinton presidency, so maybe that is wrong.)

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            I am gratified. 🙂

            However, while again I take your point, I have to differ. I see Hillary Clinton as the candidate who is more likely to do this. I don’t see any of them as all that likely to do so, but if I had to pick one, it’d be her. Wouldn’t even have to think about it. (Which means I’m probably wrong. 🙂 )

          • John Schilling says:

            Trump seems to have no respect or even understanding of the legal and constitutional limits to executive authority, and if you fear that some of his followers combine that a willingness to engage in extralegal political violence, I share your concern. Trump also incites in his opponents the feeling that he is so far beyond the pale that anything, even violence, would be justified to stop him from exercising the power of the POTUS.

            If he is elected, I would expect things to get dicey whenever he is (inevitably, repeatedly) blocked from legally implementing one of his policies/demands and won’t take “No” for an answer. I don’t know that this would certainly lead to civil war, but it plausibly might. I don’t much care which side fires the first shot.

          • NN says:

            But I would guess that Bernie Sanders is the candidate whose election is most likely (on a relative scale) to result in something like civil war. (Although the Murrah Federal Building bombing was during the last Clinton presidency, so maybe that is wrong.)

            The OKC bombing was largely a reaction to Waco and Ruby Ridge. I’ve heard that part of the reason that law enforcement has yet to take direct action against the Oregon militia takeover is because ever since OKC the federal government has followed an unofficial policy to treat this sort of thing with kid gloves (those policies aren’t shared by local police, as demonstrated by Ferguson, etc.).

            So if you want to determine which candidate would be most likely to provoke a violent reaction from people like Timothy McVeigh, the question to ask is which candidate would be most likely to respond with excessive force when faced with a confrontation by the more unhinged members of the Red Tribe. My answer to that would have to be Trump, considering his comments about targeting terrorist’s families, among other things. Sanders may be more likely to provoke those sorts of confrontations in the first place, but I don’t think he would be likely to respond to them with excessive force, considering his comments on things like Ferguson (calling the Ferguson PD an “occupying army”).

            With Trump, there is also the disturbing amount of times that his supporters have gotten violent at his rallies. Yes, emotions tend to get heated at this sort of thing, but there are only so many times you can hear about a protester getting beaten up or threatened with being set on fire before you start worrying.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Sanders may be more likely to provoke those sorts of confrontations in the first place, but I don’t think he would be likely to respond to them with excessive force, considering his comments on things like Ferguson (calling the Ferguson PD an “occupying army”).

            OTOH, urban blacks are generally considered to be members of, or at least affiliated with, the blue tribe. Sanders might not have been so understanding if it had been members of his outgroup smashing things up.

          • TheNybbler says:

            Poor urban blacks are definitely not part of the blue tribe (nor red, obviously). The Blue Tribe as Scott declared it is a decidedly middle-to-upper-middle class phenomenon, with some inclusion of poor-but-educated. The Blue Tribe is one of the Democratic party’s core constitutencies; poor urban minorities are a separate one.

            Wealthy urban blacks are, I imagine, rather thin on the ground in Ferguson.

          • brad says:

            The OKC bombing was bad, and I could see things that bad or maybe even one order of magnitude worse from the “militia right” under a Clinton or Sanders. But even several major domestic terrorist attacks aren’t a civil war. I suppose the reaction to those attacks could lead to a cycle of escalation, but I just don’t see it as anything but a tiny possibility.

            I share John Schillings concern that Trump could do something totally boneheaded like order the military to shutdown Congress or the Supreme Court. Maybe the military ignores him, he’s impeached, and everything works out just fine, but that is the sort of scenario that can get very far out of hand.

            That tail risk is the reason that, even though I want the Democratic nominee to win, and even though I think Trump as an opponent maximizes the chances of that, I still hope like hell he doesn’t win the Republican nomination.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Cumulative effects. Obama alienates half the country and then Trump alienates the other half.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            There is that that, but I have even less hope for Hillary, I means are we seriously considering an admitted oathbreaker and felon for highest office?

          • Pku says:

            But Obama alienated half the country in the same way that Bush alienated the other half, by advocating for policies they didn’t like, sometimes in ways they perceived as underhanded. Trump OTOH seems to base his entire persona on antagonism. (For comparison, I’d find the idea of an armed uprising against Bush abhorrent even if he had total control of congress, but I find the idea of rebelling against Trump in the same circumstances rather appealing).

      • NN says:

        3. I don’t know that there is a generally agreed standard here. I generally use 10,000 deaths as the threshold for a “real war”, civil or otherwise, but that may not be adequate for revolutions in smaller states.

        A threshold of 10,000 deaths would exclude the Northern Irish Troubles (3,530 deaths) and the Second Intifada (~6,000 deaths). Perhaps a better threshold would be 10,000 (or whatever number) casualties, including injuries? That would definitely include the Troubles, which caused more than 50,000 total casualties when injuries are included in the count, and would absolutely include the Second Intifada no matter what injury count estimates you use. I can see a number of problems with counting only deaths, especially when taking into account things like body armor and modern medicine. It seems absurd to me to say that the 1996 Manchester bombing, for example, wasn’t an act of war, even though it didn’t kill anyone.

        Incidentally, setting a threshold of 10,000 casualties would mean that Al Qaeda’s campaign against the US would qualify as a “real war,” mostly because of 9/11 and the 1998 embassy bombings. But that still wouldn’t count as a civil war, because virtually all of the American casualties were inflicted by foreign nationals.

        • Pku says:

          I don’t know if the second intifada should count as a real war, considering you could live in the war zone and be about as worried about dying due to it as you were of dying by car accident.

        • John Schilling says:

          Part of the reason for the 10,000 death limit is to deliberately exclude things like The Troubles, or terrorist campaigns in general. Not every violent conspiracy by people with political motives is deserving of the label, “War”. There is a qualitative difference between what happens when armies (even irregular ones) contest the control of territory, and what happens when political criminals go about murdering people in the shadows. And, as I alluded to in another post, nobody who has set foot in Aleppo lately has any business saying that Belfast was ever a “war zone”.

          Wars are deadlier by far than terrorist campaigns, and more intensely focused in time and space, but also more predictable and more likely to actually resolve a conflict. Which is why we have two different words for the two different things, and it’s a distinction I would like to preserve even if it does sometimes come with a fuzzy boundary.

          • NN says:

            I see your point, but there is a level of conflict between civil unrest and full-scale war that may not be as bad as the latter, but is still definitely something to worry about. I understand why 1970s Belfast doesn’t fit your definition of a “war zone,” but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to live there, had I been alive back then.

            Also, your 10,000 death threshold may not always capture the distinction that you want to make. The Mexican Drug War has killed more than 100,000 people by some estimates, but the drug cartels have never, as far as I know, attempted to contest the Mexican government’s control of territory. Meanwhile, the IRA actually did contest control of large parts of Derry for several months in 1971-72.

    • Alraune says:

      Categorization here is very hard. God’s-eye-view, however, is that dynasties most commonly fail at the founder’s grandson, and this periodicity has held for America so far as well. So I’d estimate we expect a large-scale, usually violent reorganization every 75 years. If it takes 5 years to restore order, which is optimistic, we can conclude that a nation where Civil War = False 95% of the time is uncommonly stable.

      • jack says:

        I don’t know a lot of history. could you point me to a source (with examples) for the idea that dynasties/political-orders fail at the founder’s grandson’s generation ?

        • roystgnr says:

          http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the_first_generation_builds_the_business_the_second_makes_it_a_success_and

          These aren’t evidence it’s a *true* aphorism, though, just that it’s a well-spread meme. It’s cropped up in other cultures, too, if “Fu bu guo san dai” is an authentic Chinese proverb.

          Apparently there’s some evidence that rapid decay of family wealth is common:

          “A US study by Merrill Lynch’s private banking arm this year found that, in two out of three cases, family wealth did not outlive the generation following the one that created it. In 90 per cent of cases, it was exhausted by the end of the third generation – illustrating the “clogs to clogs” adage.”

          http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/25a029f6-64f7-11e4-bb43-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3xZ5BqPlh

          But that sounds like standard exponential decay, not a particular failing of the grandkids.

        • Deiseach says:

          Irish proverb: “From a king to a cobbler, three generations”.

          Possibly affected by our history, though, where chieftains who allied with the losing side against the English incoming government(s) ended up stripped of lands and titles which were awarded to the victors (as with the Cromwellian land grants, where speculators and soldiers were awarded for money now grants of land to be confiscated later from the Irish rebels):

          The Long Parliament had been committed to mass confiscation of land in Ireland since 1642, when it passed the Adventurers Act, which raised loans secured on the Irish rebels’ lands that were to be confiscated. The Act of Settlement 1652 stated that anyone who had held arms against the Parliament would forfeit their lands and that even those who had not would lose three-quarters of their lands – being compensated with some other lands in Connacht*.

          …Over 12,000 veterans of the New Model Army were given land in Ireland in place of their wages, which the Commonwealth was unable to pay.

          *Origin of the saying, allegedly in reply to the dispossessed about what would they do, “[You can go either] To Hell or to Connaught”.

        • Zykrom says:

          I’ve most often heard this said about the Mongols and other nomadic empires. They work especially well since the whole empire would fall apart as soon as it was led by a weak leader.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            If by weak leader you mean any leader, I might just have agreed. It’s like saying that Charlemagne’s frankish empire collapsed because his own sons were weak, when wonky succession customs explain either circumstance very well.

    • Steven says:

      “Does anyone know where you could find a decent database that you could use for this sort of thing”

      Check out the correlates of war project.
      Among other things, it has data on civil wars and revolutions.
      http://www.correlatesofwar.org/

      • US says:

        Yep, the COW is a major resource in this area worth knowing about. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is another important resource.

        Be aware that it can matter a great deal which database you use, because differences in the instruments can have large effects – for example, “differences between two of the main quantitative conflict datasets – the UCDP and the COW [Correlates Of War] – in terms of the measurement of armed conflict result in significant differences in interpreting patterns of conflict. This has led to conflicting findings not only about absolute numbers of civil wars, but also regarding trends in the numbers of such conflicts.” (quote from The Routhledge Handbook of Civil Wars).

    • Jaskologist says:

      I don’t know the right way to do it, but averaging out a back swan event uniformly seems incorrect. One civil war of 4 years is not the same as two civil wars of 2 years. The fact that most American generations have not seen a civil war is significant (to say nothing of the fact that by far most of the historical population has lived in internal peace-time).

      Moreover, I don’t think that it’s very significant whether the one Civil War lasted 4 year (as it did), or a hypothetical 6 years, but if I run the numbers as a probability calculation, it’s extremely important.

      4 year civil war over 240 years = 1.6667% chance of war in a given year
      1 – ( ( 1 – (4/240) ) ^ 50) = 56.8% chance of civil war in the next 50 years.

      6 year civil war over 240 years = 2.5% chance of war in a given year
      1 – ( ( 1 – (6/240) ) ^ 50) = 71.8% chance of civil war in the next 50 years.

      That’s a big gap, and not one I think can be justified.

      • Steven says:

        Agreed.
        To correct for this, start with the number of years that started without being in a civil war, and count the share of those in which a civil war started.
        We’re estimating the probability of a civil war, conditional on not already being in one.

        So 240-3 = 237 for the denominator.
        1 for the numerator.
        => 1/237 = 0.4%.
        Sounds about right to me, or at least more plausible than 1-2%.

        Can tweak by chosing different start/end dates.

        • Jaskologist says:

          19.1% chance of revolution in the next 50 years. This is still at “start stockpiling” levels.

          • John Schilling says:

            What do you propose to stockpile, and what is the anticipated benefit of this stockpile for a civil war that is expected ~25 years in the future?

          • DavidS says:

            Other MAJOR question is the likelihood of another revolution happening sufficiently quickly and without clear antecedents that you can’t stockpile then. Seems to me that there are better reasons for ‘prepping’ than this, as you’d presumably see a revolution coming whereas you might have less warning of other things (pandemic? some sort of small asteroid hit? Terrorists with nuclear weapons somehow?) Not sure what but pretty sure that revolution would have some lead-in. My limited knowledge of the English and American Civil Wars would tend to agree, especially for the latter. French revolution probably also. Problem is disentangling hindsight.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Food, guns, and ammo, I assume? I haven’t really looked into it, partly because I don’t even know what a modern American Civil War would look like, but mostly because I don’t actually believe that I am likely to see one in my lifetime.

            I’m running the 50 year projections as a gut-check, and the check fails on “more likely than not to see a revolution.” But I don’t actually know. The fact that so many here implicitly think otherwise could push me in the other direction.

          • Sfoil says:

            @John Schilling

            Start out by imagining you can’t get any power from the grid or go shopping for two weeks and try to figure out what you would need. Non-perishable food, a way to purify water, etc.

            You should own an autoloading rifle, although lots of people overestimate the usefulness of having tons of guns (or they just need an excuse to pursue their hobby). The pro is that guns and ammo last basically forever. My great-grandfather’s revolver is perfectly serviceable and not even particularly out of date (my great-great-grandfather’s revolver also still works, although it’s decisively obsolete technology).

          • Nonnamous says:

            If I believed in a revolution (or war) coming in the next 50 years, which I don’t, I guess I’d be stockpiling gold coins? And by stockpiling, I mean, buy maybe one a year. That way, when I have to run away from the Nazis I’ll have something to buy my way out, maybe.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Sfoil: I am not unfamiliar with the basics of survivalism, or “prepping” as I believe the kids are calling it these days. And I consider myself reasonably well prepared.

            But war, civil or otherwise, is different. It is not the absence of civilization, but the presence of inimical civilization. Two contending hostile forces, of which the smallest tactical formation of either will overpower any resistance you can hope to offer, each of which will play the “if you’re not with us you’re against us” card against anyone who attracts their attention. Meaning, anyone with a gun who isn’t wearing their uniform. Meaning, anyone well-fed when their neighbors are starving. Meaning, anyone with a light on after the power is cut.

            Prepping, in the conventional sense, is probably worse than useless when it comes to avoiding the consequences of a civil war. If you plan to embrace the war, by signing on for one side or the other (or starting your own), there may be a modest benefit in initial status if you e.g. show up with your own rifle, but really any side worth joining, any side with a chance to win, will have a rifle for you if you are otherwise useful to them.

            Unconventional sorts of prepping might be appropriate and worth exploring, and that’s what I was asking about. I’d recommend a Swiss passport and bank account, a few thousand dollars and Euros each of ready cash, and the mental fortitude to leave the country and never come back at least a year before the shooting starts.

          • Sfoil says:

            @Schilling
            Even in the case of a complete collapse, the frenetic opportunistic looting burns out pretty quick, and then you’ve got to start living again, preferably with friends.

            Having seen civil war/anarchy up close, I wouldn’t downplay having a rifle. While it’s true that one rifleman isn’t going to drive off a hostile squad, you and the neighbors on each side of you can probably manage it. You WILL have to form/join a neighborhood militia, too, if you plan to/must stick around. If you instead find yourself subject to a paranoid government threatened by distant insurrection, surrendering your weapon is a decent sign of good faith if nothing else.

          • I’ve wondereid about survivalism which is based on the ability to relocate and do well rather than the more usual survivalism which based on going to ground.

            I’ve never seen discussion of relocation survivalism, though needing to run seems more likely than civilization falling apart, and the relocation style seems more consistent with having a good life in the present.

          • brad says:

            I’d think the best thing you could do to prepare for relocation is get a second passport. A fair number of Americans qualify for one by decent but never bother to do the paperwork.

            Those of German decent (including Austria) and African-Americans are out of luck, as are DAR types, but if you have any grandparents born aboard there’s a decent chance and some countries will extend it for even longer than that.

          • The extreme version (my thinking is influenced by the Holocaust, though the same applies to some Nazi scientists) is to work on becoming the sort of person who would be would be welcome in a number of countries. Easier said than done, of course.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Now I’m interested in seeing how people game this out. How should one prepare for an American civil war? Do we have any guesses as to what that would look like for the common man?

            My only point of reference is Hurricane Sandy, where I know a lot of people whose utilities were out for 2 weeks. It’s not a great comparison, but it’s something. Cell phones were mostly useless, but so were land-lines; communication will be severely crippled.

            I’d want to have at least one month worth of food stockpiled, since supply chains are going to be all screwy (post-Sandy, supermarkets had armed guards guarding bags of ice). I’d want to have guns and ammo (no idea how much) to make sure nobody else takes my stockpiled food.

            I think a good action plan would be to go to the nearby Amish and offer protection. Those guys will be doing just fine. It might help if I got to know a few Amish before societal collapse.

            Fireplace good. Oil heat better. Natural gas or electric heat bad.

            Beyond that, I don’t know. Having a good chunk of cash will be important for when the credit card systems are down, and gold is good for if things really fall apart and nobody wants American dollars. At which point, maybe feeling to Asia is the smart move, but if America collapses the rest of the world is going to be in pain, too.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            If you are near the areas of concentrated fighting, bugging out is the only sensible option. Modern armed conflict would destroy any reasonable individual or small-group preparation and barely notice it was there.

            If not, consider a scenario like that of “Fear the Walking Dead.” Weeks to months at a stretch of martial law, intermittent services, etc. What would you like to have to make your life more secure and comfortable which would not draw excess attention from the local armed force and/or your neighbors?

            Probably the best and most important preparation would be moving somewhere away from concentrated populations, resources, or terrain of strategic importance. This is the approach taken by the protagonists of the notorious survivalist novel Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse. (Note that Google confuses this book with one called Patriots by David Drake. The one I mean was written by James Wesley, Rawles.) While that book can be highly off-putting in its promotion of Christian Identity politics, it’s not a bad description of the way intelligent people might try to do what we’re talking about. (Including the major shortcoming of setting up a survival outpost in the boonies while one or more of your group continues to live in cities a long way from it.)

            ETA: John Schilling has the right of it: by the time things break down enough for that, the situation is going to be quite desperate indeed. (Early modern survivalist Kurt Saxon referred to this as the “Killer Caravan” stage. While he thought taking one on would be great fun, for most people avoiding it would be the prudent course.) Much better to have plausible deniability for as long as you can manage it.

            Compare and contrast the novels The Shattered City and The Rift. The first is about a localized earthquake in Seattle which produces several days of utter chaos, although outlawry is minimal. The second is about a major earthquake on the New Madrid fault zone which devastates most of the central United States. The chaos is so overwhelming that there are several areas which essentially go all Road Warrior for quite some time, including places where fringe movements seize local control and an overwhelmed Federal government literally can’t do anything about it. (Not least because due to the utter disruption of communications they sometimes don’t even know about it.) The latter is probably approaching what it would be like in a serious civil conflict situation in the US.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’d want to have guns and ammo (no idea how much) to make sure nobody else takes my stockpiled food.

            The problem here is that in the civil war scenario, the people who are trying to take your food come in platoons. And in the unlikely event that you are capable of fighting off a platoon, they are probably going to put you in the category of “threats we can’t afford to leave in our rear” and come back with a regiment, even if the quantity of food would not justify such a force.

            This is fundamentally different from the natural-disaster scenario you are using as a model. Natural disasters, and even some sorts of human disasters like opportunistic rioting, the forces of law and order break down and it takes time for the forces of chaos (or of the new order) to get organized. That leaves a period where you face disorganized threats, where one rifle might make a difference. Though being one step ahead of everyone else in organizing a neighborhood watch would make a bigger difference.

            Civil war, law and order doesn’t break down until the opposition is well enough organized to take on the Army, or at least a SWAT team. The bit where you with your trusty rifle hold off the hungry rebels who just took on a SWAT team and are still standing, isn’t going to end well for you.

            Now, figuring out how to hide your food well enough that you’ll still have it even when you’ve prudently opened your doors and said “Yes, Sir!” to both Army and Rebel foraging parties, that might be useful. Also figuring out how to make it less than obvious that you have a stash of hidden food when your neighbors are all halfway to starvation.

          • Anonymous says:

            The Balkan conflicts are probably a good source of information on what works and what doesn’t. Anyone know of any good publications describing civilians surviving through the conflict(s)?

          • John Schilling says:

            While it’s true that one rifleman isn’t going to drive off a hostile squad, you and the neighbors on each side of you can probably manage it. You WILL have to form/join a neighborhood militia, too, if you plan to/must stick around.

            A: One more rifle, more or less, won’t make or break a militia. Either the neighbors on either side of you can drive off a hostile squad without your help, or you need to bug out.

            B: Militias don’t just defend their own gun-toting members.

            C: Having a rifle, even the ultimate tacticool rifle, doesn’t necessarily get you membership in a militia. Often, Tremors notwithstanding, it gets you to the top of the list of people the Militia feels it has to run out of the neighborhood to make things safer.

            When nerds and geeks with internet-mediated social lives (raises hand) say things like “Shit is getting real – you need to get yourself a good semiautomatic rifle”, and not “Shit is getting real – you need to start attending the local church, and go to your neighbor’s Superbowl party even though you hate sportsball”, I’m guessing those aren’t the nerds and geeks who are going to survive the first month of a civil war (or whatever).

            TL,DR: Stockpile friends. Or die alone and silent.

    • How you define “the core of Europe”?

      • John Schilling says:

        In this context, the nations which formed the proto-EU more than half a century ago and have been the driving force of pan-European “nationalism” ever since. Their governments are stable, or in Italy’s case the instability has a reliably peaceful outlet, and I expect them to remain tightly allied even if the EU as such breaks apart.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      You asked two different questions.

      what’s your guess on involuntary change of government or civil war in the US

      That seems to me like a sensible thing to want to know about. But at the beginning you asked:

      How likely is a given country to be in a state of civil war or disorderly change of government in a year?…the United States had five years of civil war in 240 years of history as an independent nation, which would suggest a value of around 2%

      which seems to me like a silly calculation answering a silly question. It was just one war. If I want to prepare for the future, I want to know the probability of civil war in the next 10 years. I don’t want to know the expected proportion of those years are spent in war. Maybe I want to know the distribution of lengths of wars to help plan a stockpile, but I find it hard to imagine a use for that summary statistic.

      ━━━━━━━━━

      Also, not including the initial revolution is an error. It systematically biases down your results. You might want to assign that to the old regime rather than the new regime, but by sampling from regimes that still exist, it is impossible to observe their ends. If you are sampling conditional on regimes existing today, the best solution is to assign the initial transition to the new regime. If you mix past and current regimes, it is important not to double count-transitions, so only assign them to the new regime. That works if the regimes are homogeneous, but if you want to measure the effect of democracy, it is nonsense.

  9. Rock Lobster says:

    Hello, mostly lurker here.

    TL;DR Despite my best efforts and a romantic fixation with the idea of it, I really have trouble actually enjoying “serious” or “great” literature, past and present. Please validate me, explain what I’m doing wrong, or direct me to more elevated discussion on the matter. In a nutshell, I don’t understand how Harold Bloom exists.
    ___________

    You ever watch a mediocre sketch comedy show? Think MadTV or the lesser SNL sketches. The #1 problem that they have is that you, the viewer, get the joke within the first couple minutes, and even if it’s a funny joke and made you chuckle, that’s it. They’re just dragging the one joke out over 12 or so minutes, and you get bored. That’s kind of how I feel reading great literature, whether it’s classic or contemporary. Even if the point is novel or interesting, the moments of interest are punctuated within hundreds of pages of boring, tedious writing. I just finished Don Quixote and this is pretty much how I felt. I enjoyed the central premise and how meta it was and so on, but boy getting through 1000 pages of it was not the most fun thing if I’m being honest with myself. I’m also a slow reader (I read a page in about a minute and a half) so a 1000 page book is basically 24 hours’ time.

    I like to think I’m a smart guy, but when I was in school I was that guy in your English class who didn’t care about the book. “Who cares if the forest is a symbol of man’s inevitable mortality? I already know I’m gonna die and didn’t need this book to tell me that.” “I already know slavery is bad without reading this boring book.” Etc.

    But when people say that reading Cervantes was one of the singular pleasures of their life, I’m just dumbfounded. They’re using language that I would use to describe seeing The Allman Bros at the Beacon, or maybe reading a truly fascinating history book.

    So…what am I doing wrong? Am I just so removed from from time, place, outlook on life, baseline level of sensory excitement, and attention span (thanks internet) that I won’t appreciate the work?

    I would add to this, I’m usually just not impressed with the…quality of elevated thinking in “serious” books. To be honest I usually find that they’re full of simplistic philosophizing, amateurish and naive political and social commentary, and obvious observations on the human condition. Baaarrf. Write an essay. I’m a grown-ass man and don’t need new ideas to be mixed in with my fictional apple sauce to make it more palatable.

    P.S. What brought this on is that I’ve been reading 50 pages a day of vegetables as a New Year’s resolution. I’m done with Don Quixote and am now about 100 pages into War and Peace.

    • bluto says:

      I really enjpyed Anna Karenina, the Scarlett Pumpernel (the title sounded boring but it’s basically Batman in the french revolution), and Count of Monte Cristo which all had pretty gripping plots relative to many serious books.

      My enjoyment increased the more classical lit (including the Bible) I read because the lit is filled with references to them.

      • xtmar says:

        All of the Dumas I’ve read is quite good. Father Goriot is also pretty good, though a bit harder to get into.

        • bluto says:

          Thanks, that sounds like a good one for the list, do you recommend a translation?

          • xtmar says:

            Not in particular. I just read the translations off of Project Gutenberg on my kindle, which also have a great price.

          • bluto says:

            Great that’s my favorite source. Some of them are pretty archaic.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            Anthony Burges (of Clockwork Orange fame) did a lot of French to English translations that are really good, put his focus was more on plays and short-stories than full novels.

      • Deiseach says:

        Minor correction: that would be the Scarlet Pimpernel. Written by Baroness Orczy and precisely the type of blood and thunder historical romance with little to no pretensions to historical accuracy beyond ‘the French Revolutionaries are the bad guys’ and great fun.

        Sir Percy Blakeney is a proto-Batman, down to the civilian identity as rich, useless playboy and secret identity as The Scarlet Pimpernel.

    • Anon says:

      The simplest explanation I have for you is that “great literature” is almost as diverse a category as “literature”, and most books will not be interesting to a given person. That something is a classic work does serve as a good recommendation, but no more than, say, your brother giving it to you for Christmas.

      You may wish to consider looking a little harder for books you will actually enjoy.

    • anon says:

      What books do you like?

      • I’m fond of _Kim_ by Kipling, his one really good novel.

        _The Lord of the Rings_ is another favorite.

        Casanova’s _Memoires_, which is in some sense the original of the Count of Monte Cristo—autobiography not fiction.

        Egilsaga is my favorite of the Icelandic sagas.

        For modern, I like Cherryh’s _Paladin_. Bujold’s _The Curse of Chalion_ and much of her other writing. Heinlein _Double Star_, _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, and much else. Poul Anderson _Three Hearts and Three Lions_.

        • keranih says:

          Have you read CJC’s nighthorse series? Loved that. (I love most of her non-Cyteen work – she tells such great adventure stories, but let her get too far into the psychology and she gets too dense for me to enjoy.)

          • Which are the nighthorse books? I like the Chanur series. The Morgiane series, which are early, exhibit what I think is a flaw in her writing. She is good at doing people under pressure, in a terrible hurry, and overuses it.

          • keranih says:

            Rider at the Gate and a direct sequel, Cloud’s Rider. They are kinda the antithesis of Misty Lackey (and every one else’s) magic white horse books.

            I loved the Morgaine books, but they are early, as you say. Chanur was also good, but the long passages in the middle books which were just Py thinking shared a lot of the weaknesses (imo) with Cyteen.

            IMO, Downbelow Station and the ridership (Heavy Time, Hellburner) books were the best blend of action and introspection – I would put Paladin on the action side of the ledger.

            Mileage, of course, may vary.

    • voidfraction says:

      Check out Borges’ short stories. They’re mostly very short, conceptually dense, and absolutely fascinating. He wrote about dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, tigers, knife-fights and the folly of emperors trying to build maps representing territories in perfect detail. See if you can find a copy of http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/0140286802. (It’s a translation, albeit an excellent one, he only wrote in Spanish)

    • Joe says:

      I feel basically the same. I rarely read fiction but every now and then I feel guilty about it and pick up a classic. I read “Pride and Prejudice” a year ago and found myself wondering what the fuss was about. I mean it was wholesome and had some good ideas but ultimately it just seemed like a 19th century teenie-bopper romance.

      • xtmar says:

        ultimately it just seemed like a 19th century teenie-bopper romance.

        For better or worse, most of the classic “great literature” works of fiction were written to be popular rather than written to be great works of art. While some works are written with particular pretension as the great American novel or whatever, most of them are written to sell, writing not being a particularly lucrative profession.

      • smocc says:

        Did you read the first sentence?

        Pride and Prejudice currently has an unfortunate contemporary reputation as being one of the great romances of English literature. This is perpetuated in part by film and TV adaptations starring Colin Firth and other hunky men playing Mr. Darcy.

        This is wrong. It is actually a hilariously sarcastic social satire, with a pleasant little romance story along for the ride.

        • Mary says:

          Read an Indian reader’s review of the book, and he was hooked from the opening — how he felt for Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy — and recounted the story of his being at a wedding and being introduced to a woman of middle years who immediately began talking of his being old enough to settle down.

      • Deiseach says:

        xtmar has a good point in that a lot of what are now “classic works” were popular culture hits back in their day. Austen is a case in point: the novel had rather degenerated, by her time, into highly coloured and stylised melodrama, and it was not thought of as a genre for serious work. Think of Gothic fiction as the kind of thing. Indeed, her “Northanger Abbey” is a deliberate parody of the kind of novel-reading of the day.

        Her reputation (and it really only became widely established in the 20th century) was based on writing realistic work: ordinary situations, ordinary people (yes, middle-class and upper-class people, but in the everyday world). Instead of the heroine being menaced by moustache twirling villains in a haunted castle, you have young women needing to make financially prudent marriages, and the tensions (as in “Persuasion”) between family wanting – even for the best reasons – a suitable marriage, and the woman herself wanting to marry for love but allowing herself to be persuaded out of it.

        Austen had a clear, low-key, natural style which was quietly funny in its way. Sir Walter Scott did a good review of her early works:

        Also read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!

        The point about the teeny-bopper romance is part of why they are so popular as costume drama adaptations in television and film; you have a love story which you can play dress-up with while missing all the subtle social commentary.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Deiseach
          “you have a love story which you can play dress-up with while missing all the subtle social commentary.”

          Serious question revealing ignorance: what level of social commentary do you mean? For a Young Person of Today, “Hey, there was a time when the only ‘career path’ for an intelligent woman above certain class, was marriage” may be a revelation. But I doubt Austen was giving it out as news; hadn’t it been background to plots for decades if not centuries?

          • Jon H says:

            I suspect it’s more class-based? Or commentary on other measures of social standing that were relevant?

          • Tracy W says:

            Okay, take Sense & Sensibility: Marianne Dashwood is the romantic ideal, and learns that there is value in self-control and the social rituals of politeness.

            There’s also a lot of harshness on men who marry pretty young fools (eg Mr Bennet), or who wreck their lives and their loved ones by being careless with money.

            And then there’s some scenes like the appallingly terrible dinner in Sense & Sensibility where the only thing the women find to talk about while the men are having their port is the height of two of their children, or other scenes of intellectual idleness.

            But this is just a sample of the range of matters she comments on.

            One side of Austen’s social commentary does make me smile. She’s very big on social equality between the highest in society down to, say, spinster daughters of poor clergymen, but that servants or shopkeepers may think similarly to her never appears to occur to Austen at all.

          • Deiseach says:

            The social commentary is in things like “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, which is the very first sentence of the book.

            Writing a realistic novel, which is not overtly declaring a didactic purpose in a THIS BOOK IS REVEALING THE CORRUPTION OF MODERN SOCIETY fashion like Hogarth’s engravings of Marriage a la Mode, can be taken on the surface as a novel of close observation of a limited sphere (the same criticism made about women poets in the early 20th century that they were too occupied with the domestic and the personal, unlike male poets who could write on The Grand Themes), but underneath there is the satire, and acknowledgement of the reality, of things like the marriage market.

            Bingley is seen as a catch and his worth is calculated solely on his monetary value, not on his personal character. Mrs Bennett is considered a figure of fun, but when you look a little closer into the novel, Mr Bennett is not really The Cool Dad, he’s a neglectful parent. He’s making little or no provision for his daughters, even though they will be homeless and lacking an income on his death. Mrs Bennett, with her foolishness and lack of education and her touting her daughters in the marriage market is actually doing her practical best to make sure that her daughters at least have a roof over their heads and a bed to sleep in once they’re married.

            Kitty, too, who makes a dreadful (according to the conventional morality of the day) hash of her life does not get the treatment she should do in a properly didactic work; she does not return home repentant, Sadder But Wiser. There is every indication she and Wickham will continue to live a mayfly life, sponging off their families for money, and with no sign of learning any lessons about responsibility and duty – and no sign Austen felt they needed to learn such lessons, or that there were no such people in real life.

            The reason it feels over-familiar as a plot is probably because so many works since then have taken the structure of the Elizabeth-Darcy romance; every romance novel and rom-com movie has the spunky heroine and brooding hero who start out mutually disliking one another and end up with wedding bells.

            But there’s more to it than a simple “gowns and ballrooms romance” plot, and because it doesn’t hit us over the head with the sledgehammer message of THIS IS ABOUT THE MORAL OF THE STORY, it’s easy to miss.

            Elizabeth and Darcy both suffer from pride, and both must learn to look outside their settled views about “I know all about that kind of person”. Marrying for money is not the purpose of marriage, but marrying for love is also problematic (Kitty and Wickham, Mr and Mrs Bennett) if you are only going on emotional impulse and don’t think about can you make a life with this person.

            You can get a happy ending, but you have to work for it.

            You can start questioning “Well, why don’t Elizabeth and her sisters have options other than making an advantageous marriage? Why do we pretend it’s not about cold hard cash? Character or money and rank – which is more important, and why?”, but only if you want to.

            It’s possible to enjoy the novel as a novel, without needing to mine it for “What is the author’s message here?”

          • John Schilling says:

            Kitty, too, who makes a dreadful (according to the conventional morality of the day) hash of her life

            I think you mean Lydia here; memory and Wikipedia have her marrying Wickham while Kitty serves only to pointlessly increase the Bennett sister count to five. And, conventional morality aside, her choices are dreadful for the very practical reason that, barring Darcy Es Machina, they basically doom her to dying in a gutter by the age of thirty.

            And that’s basically the point of the work. This isn’t “teenybopper romance”, and not just because almost all of the principals are twenty-something. This is the game of romance played for Game of Throne stakes; you win or you die, because Austen sets up the story ruling out the few other options that would have been plausibly accessible to the Bennetts. That leads to three very different readings:

            1. Romantic drama, in which we remember that this is Regency England and so understand how exceedingly foolish Lydia and Mr. Bennett are being, and the desperation of Jane and Mrs. Bennet, the actual villainy of Wickham and the dangerous boldness of heroine Elizabeth, and are nonetheless rewarded with a happy ending for all.

            2. Social satire, in which Austen (who was fortunately able to opt out of the game herself) lets the reader know exactly what she thinks and what they should think of the society that set up this absurd game with its ridiculous rules, by way of not-entirely-kind mockery. And if we’re not actually residents of Regency England, we get to learn about a fascinating alien culture from the inside.

            and now 3. Light romantic comedy, in which we forget all of that because this is the 21st century and nobody takes romance seriously any more but it’s still fun to fantasize about marrying a handsome rich guy or witty beautiful girl who adores us.

            That Hollywood always goes for option 3, is I think a disservice to Austen.

          • Joe says:

            John
            I think I did pickup on some of the social commentary. I couldn’t help but notice how lazy the men are in the book. I think she discribes one character as always falling asleep playing cards in the parlor. Downton Abbey kind of confined this about Regency England. All they seemed to do all day was change clothes for meals. I can’t imagine how worthless and ashamed I would feel as a man in that class and time period.

          • John Schilling says:

            I can’t imagine how worthless and ashamed I would feel as a man in that class and time period.

            Well, Austen isn’t exactly playing fair here. A gentleman was expected to administer an estate that was the livelihood for maybe a hundred families, and provided food for more still. Doing that well should be a source of pride even if one never personally hoes a row. And as England was then(*) at war with Yet Another Continental Tyrant Trying To Take Over The World, the second sons who went off to military service had opportunity to do something honorable and useful (even if not all of them actually did).

            But from Austen’s female POV, gentlemen were simply vested with small fortunes by some arbitrary process, which they could invest or squander however they pleased with little social or even economic consequence. Maybe they would use some of that wealth to keep some gentleman’s daughter from dying in the gutter, or maybe not.

            So, yeah, no mercy from Austen. The best of the lot is Darcey, and the best that can be said of him is that his house and garden are well-kept and the staff speaks highly of him. If there had been anyone with the notion that gentlemen as a class were intrinsically deserving of respect, Austen was going to put several nice, sharp skewers through that one.

            (*) Both of your examples sort of fit here, but you do understand that Downton Abbey is set almost exactly a century after Pride and Prejudice, I hope. And one or two class levels higher.

          • Tracy W says:

            It’s made clear in the novel that if it were not for Mr Bennet, Mrs Bennet would have run the family into debt long before the events of the novel.

            Mrs Bennet likes visiting and balls so she does that for her daughters. But she’s not some self-sacrificing figure for her kids, she doesn’t like saving, or forcing her daughters to become accomplished, so she doesn’t.

            More generaly, I think Jane Austen mostly accepted her society’s tenets. Take Emma, who is independently rich, intelligent and clearly going nuts with boredom. All Austen offers her at the end is a marriage. None of her heroines even try taking up writing. They marry and presumably have children and maybe continue to play the piano and read, being heroines.

            Austen’s books are very detailed about what it takes to live in society, and the impact of selfish or neglectful attitudes on everyone else, but she’s no social revolutionary.

          • Tracy W says:

            @John: Austen’s better than that. It’s made clear in _Emma_ that Knightley, the hero, is very involved in running his farm and helping his tenants, and Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, when he looks like he might almost redeem himself, starts caring about his tenants. While Lady Catherine is involved to the point of overcaring.

            We see Darcy mostly away from Pemberley, so we don’t see the involved manager.

          • John Schilling says:

            Austen’s better than that. It’s made clear in _Emma_ that Knightley, the hero, is very involved in running his farm and helping his tenants,

            Yes, I should have made it clear I was talking specifically P&P there. _Emma_ has a slightly different perspective, in that the titular protagonist is independently wealthy and can play the socioeconomic role traditionally reserved to gentlemen. That story gives her Mr. Knightley as a confidante and an example of how to do the job well. I haven’t read _Mansfield Park_, and I agree that any sensible person would want Lady Catherine DeBourgh managing their affairs as little and from as great a distance as possible.

          • Mary says:

            “A gentleman was expected to administer an estate that was the livelihood for maybe a hundred families, and provided food for more still. Doing that well should be a source of pride even if one never personally hoes a row.”

            A lady was expected to keep her eye out for the tenants who needed a bit of additional help. The fun thing is that you can see hints of the ladies at work at this in the novels. Emma’s comments about how she might hope to be useful to anyone below the social rank of farmer, or Anne’s sad reflection that the poor were probably better off with the home rented out than they had been with her family.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Deiseach
            The social commentary is in things like “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, which is the very first sentence of the book.

            I hope to get back later, but … but … dare I hope that Austen really did invent that line, rather than picking up a shallow buzz-phrase (and using it doubtlessly ironically) as I have seen suggested?

      • Tracy W says:

        Jane Austen isn’t about the plots, but about what she does with them.
        Eg she’s a funny writer. But each of her characters are distinct. Mrs Bennet and Mr Collins are both fools, but they’re foolish in very different ways. There’s no way a speech from one of them to be given to another.
        If you read more of her books, Edward Ferrars, Henry Tilney and Mr Elton are all clergymen in their twenties who get married in the course of the books, and all their characters are distinct.

        And on a micro-level, her writing is superb (if it appeals to your sense of humour).

      • Anthony says:

        When in high school, a friend of mine did a “compare and contrast” essay comparing “Wuthering Heights” and typical Harlequin Romances, where he found that really, they’re very much the same.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I believe there’s a theory that this is the whole point of the novel, with Heathcliff being a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the brooding romantic anti-hero.

    • keranih says:

      1) There is no accounting for taste. You are not required to like anything that someone else likes.

      2) Given (1) there are books which were noteworthy in their time as having impressed/been enjoyed by many people of the era, and so had an impact on what other people thought about the subject at hand (or: had an impact on the Overton window of discussion/depiction.)

      3) Books that had an impact on how people thought about or expressed their opinions about (note: not the same thing!) Important Topics are Useful To Read because they help writers and thinkers share the same language. Think of these as annoying grammar lessons. You can muddle through without them, but your ability to express yourself well – and to understand other people – will be highly improved by them. This is Kipling. You don’t have to like it, but you do need to know who Tommy was and wtf the Gods of The Copybook Headings were all about.

      4) Books that have had an impact on the Overton window of discussion/depiction are less useful now because they are not a common touchstone (overcome by events on the ground) but are historical examples of how things change from Then to Now. IMO you can ignore these. This is e.e. cummings. All you need to know from cummings is that some people expressed their ‘edge’ in no caps and free verse.

      As others have said, what sort of books do you like? I suffered through Daisy Miller, loved The Heart of Darkness and The Sea Wolf.

      • xtmar says:

        Re 3, this is why it’s worth reading the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Even if you don’t enjoy them, they’re probably the two sets of works with the greatest influence on written English.

        • nope says:

          I’m not nearly so convinced of the value of *reading* Shakespeare as I am of watching a good rendition. A good cast can bring out Shakespeare’s brilliant characterization and wordplay, but unless you’re intimately familiar with the language of the era or don’t mind slogging through the “no fear” versions, reading Shakespeare straight will take most of the joy out of it. And no one should read Shakespeare and not enjoy it.

          • Virbie says:

            > but unless you’re intimately familiar with the language of the era or don’t mind slogging through the “no fear” versions, reading Shakespeare straight will take most of the joy out of it.

            I’ve found that a good middle ground were the editions we used throughout middle and high school, which had definitions of idioms and terms used on the opposite page instead of just a modern translation. I’ve only glanced at a No Fear Shakespeare once or twice but I’ve found the translated text to be rather dull and flat. With definitions (and background) of select text, you can read as much as you’d like in the raw and the facing page serves as a convenient reference for anachronistic words, as well as a way to catch subtext or puns you may have missed.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            I agree that Shakespeare really ought to be seen/heard to get the full effect but second Virbie’s recommendation of “annotated editions” as an acceptable substitute.

          • Moebius Street says:

            I find Shakespeare awfully tiresome. Even watching what the critics say is a great performance, or watching a director whose other work I adore (Joss Whedon), I just can’t get through it.

            I’ve heard it said that people reading Shakespeare in translations are luckier than those of us reading in English. They get to read something in a modern, easily understood dialect. But we have to try to get some understanding from something that’s rather archaic. While that’s *possible*, it certainly interrupts any “flow” while reading, and prevents my enjoyment.

            I love reading, and I’ve realized that I’ll only be able to read a finite number of books in my life. So there’s no sense on wasting that time on ones I don’t enjoy, especially when it even takes me far longer to get through those. I no longer feel any obligation to read what other people view as great works, and I don’t feel guilty if, after enough pages that I think I can reasonably make a conclusion, I decide to set aside a book without finishing it.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            I’ve never seen a stage production of Shakespeare, but I have seen films of his plays which kept the original dialog (such as the 1968 Romeo and Juliet movie and the 1996 Hamlet movie) and I found them almost incomprehensible compared to reading the annotated plays. Then again, I often find movies and songs difficult to understand without captions and lyrics, respectively, so it might just be me.

          • Bugmaster says:

            Call me boorish, but I’ve never liked Shakespeare. I do enjoy reading the annotated versions, but not because of the actual content; rather, I enjoy the detailed explanations of all the historical circumstances, political commentary, and, of course, crude sex puns. However, the plays themselves are usually about 30% content / 70% filler. I understand some of the reasons for all that filler, but it’s still pretty boring 🙁

      • adequ8 says:

        wrt cummings, if thats all you got out of him, i’d suggest you try again.

        alternatively, gr8 b8 m8

        • keranih says:

          I am confident that my previous exploration of e.e. cummings was sufficient – but I am not certain. What do you see there that you think I’m missing?

          • adequ8 says:

            gracious, wasnt expecting a reasonable reply! but then this is ssc, i keep forgetting.

            ok, how about the poem l(a to me it is just so delicately beautiful, he manages to create both a picture with the arrangement of the letters and a haiku like expression of stillness whilst describing motion. i know of nothing else like it. i just dont see how that is in anyway an expression of ” ‘edge’ in no caps and free verse.”

          • I like some of Cummings’ poems, but I would like to argue that Kipling is more of a modern poet than most who are so described, because he uses features of the modern world as poetic material.

            My favorite example is “Hymn to Breaking Strain,” in which the underlying metaphor is the table of breaking strains at the back of an engineering handbook. But consider McAndrew’s hymn, where it is steam engines. Or

            I SENT a message to my dear—
            A thousand leagues and more to Her—
            The dumb sea-levels thrilled to hear,
            And Lost Atlantis bore to Her!

            Behind my message hard I came,
            And nigh had found a grave for me;
            But that I launched of steel and flame
            Did war against the wave for me.

            Uprose the deep, in gale on gale,
            To bid me change my mind again—
            He broke his teeth along my rail,
            And, roaring, swung behind again.

            I stayed the sun at noon to tell
            My way across the waste of it;
            I read the storm before it fell
            And made the better haste of it.

            Afar, I hailed the land at night—
            The towers I built had heard of me—
            And, ere my rocket reached its height,
            Had flashed my Love the word of me.

            Earth sold her chosen men of strength
            (They lived and strove and died for me)
            To drive my road a nation’s length,
            And toss the miles aside for me.

            I snatched their toil to serve my needs—
            Too slow their fleetest flew for me.
            I tired twenty smoking steeds,
            And bade them bait a new for me.

            I sent the Lightnings forth to see
            Where hour by hour She waited me.
            Among ten million one was She,
            And surely all men hated me!

            Dawn ran to meet me at my goal—
            Ah, day no tongue shall tell again!
            And little folk of little soul
            Rose up to buy and sell again!

          • Bugmaster says:

            I understand the intent behind the e.e.cummings poem, but it does nothing for me. The only emotion I experience upon reading it is, “I see what you did there”. His poems basically read like crossword puzzles to me; I spend so much effort on decyphering them that I have no CPU cycles to spare on emotional engagement.

            I think this is why I (like David Friedman) find Kipling much more moving. The rhyme and rhythm of his poems form a sort of powerful wave, that carries you where he wanted you to go. Kipling doesn’t throw his skills in your face, he just uses them so gracefully that you don’t even realize he’s doing it.

          • keranih says:

            @adequ8 –

            My apologies, I thought I had already answered this but apparently not.

            (SSC has a high level of civility, which I do not reach as often as I would like. Thank you for the encouragement to continue to strive to do better.)

            That poem does very little for me – in terms of emotional impact, it conveys nothing to me that I have not gotten already from Frost, Archibald MacLeish, and translations of original Japanese verse. As a form of expressing that impact, I find it inferior due to the possibility of confusion in the reader.

            I also don’t think it’s typical of most of ee cumming’s work – it’s more evocative/nature-centric and with far less social commentary than other works I’ve been exposed to.

          • For several different Cummings poems that I enjoyed:

            “She Being Brand New” (Erotic poetry based on an analogy to driving a new car)

            “Pity this Busy Monster Manunkind”

            “It may not always be so, and if …”
            (First line–I don’t remember the title)
            Love poetry on the subject of his love leaving him for another.

    • Anon. says:

      This may sound counter-intuitive, but try reading more slowly. Way more slowly. 40 pages/hour is a good pace for pop science. When it comes to literary fiction I feel that you’re missing a big part of what makes it worthwhile by sprinting through it. Try doing a bit of close reading, especially of the most important passages.

      Also, try going for something a bit more recent. The Quixote was written 400 years ago, people wrote in a very different style back then. How about some DeLillo?

      • onyomi says:

        I would second the recommendation to read slowly. Giant novels are not always the best place to start for this. Shakespeare might be better both because the poetry of it is much more densely packed, and because the plays are much shorter than War and Peace.

        I would say that in terms of “getting it,” it may be good, while you’re reading slowly, to focus more on the form of what’s being said, rather than the content.

        To paraphrase Deiseach’s comment of a month ago:

        https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/10/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-hive-mind/#comment-280774

        “Not poppy nor mandragora
        Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
        Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
        Which thou owedst yesterday”

        is not the same as

        “No drugs or sleeping pills will ever give you the restful sleep that you had last night.”

        They technically mean the same thing, but the latter loses all the musicality, resonance, etc.

        To put it another way, what is the point of painting, now that we’ve got photography?

        • Thecommexokid says:

          I agree, those are not the same. For instance, I understood what the hell the second sentence was trying to say.

          • Deiseach says:

            Try reading the original aloud. Pay attention to the assonance and the sibilants: the ‘hissing’ effect they evoke, which should make you think of a snake, which should colour your perception of the speaker (Iago) and his good intentions and reliability.

            Shakespeare was meant to be performed (that’s not to say you can’t get the enjoyment as well as from reading). Language is very important, both spoken as well as written, here.

            I’m prejudiced here: back when I was fifteen and got my hands on a modern English version of “Hamlet” (one of the school texts where all the old spelling is tidied up and you get neat footnotes explaining references) and decided I should give this Shakespeare bloke a try, even if it was Poetry and everyone knows Poetry is Difficult, Dull and Obscure.

            I had bells ringing in my head because the words were all gently striking off one another and chiming together. The music of the language has never quite faded for me 🙂

          • Virbie says:

            I think that’s the point of the suggestion to read slowly. I’ve read enough Shakespeare in my life [1] that I can flow through that pretty quickly and get all the meaning, but if you can’t, that’s precisely what going over it more slowly is intended to help with. There’s nothing in the quote (beyond perhaps mandragora, depending on one’s familiarity with botany) that is difficult to understand: it’s mainly a consequence of the less-than-straightforward sentence structure.

            [1] Boy, I’m expressing precisely what I mean to but that sentence sounds snotty as hell. For the record, I mean this purely in terms of cached familiarity with different patterns of sentence grammatical structure. I should also note that a small majority of the Shakespeare I read was in high school.

        • Nornagest says:

          Even beyond reading slowly, I’d suggest reading Shakespeare as poetry, not for the plot. There’s plenty of plot to be read (and an astonishing number of dick jokes), but it’s pretty dense if you haven’t pickled yourself in Elizabethan English for a few years. But the sound of it still rings as clear as it did on the day it was written, and most of the wordplay’s easy enough to understand if you have an annotated edition or have a browser window open.

          • The Anonymouse says:

            I suspect that, if I were ever placed in the hell that is being a high-school English teacher, I would teach Shakespeare by rewarding the students who could spot and explain the greatest number of dick jokes.

          • BillG says:

            @Anyonymouse. I’m currently helping a book club of friends through Ulysses by, in part, identifying at least one or two dirty jokes per episode. Makes it far more fun.

    • PSJ says:

      I don’t know if I can help with the majority of your problem, but I definitely think it would help not to be reading the “serious” books that are the longest or generally considered to be most boring. Maybe start with the great books of the 20th century: Lolita, 1984, Great Gatsby, Catch-22, Native Son, Gravity’s Rainbow (obviously barely the beginning of a full list, but most of these are fairly accessible and are varied enough to choose for your own personal taste)

      Edit: http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/all/ This is a good list to start with as well!

    • Zippy says:

      I know what you’re saying; often I find the summary of a “great novel” to be more impactful than the actual book itself. The books themselves are… OK.

      I find there are some books that avoid this problem:

      1) Books with good bread and butter: Mainly funny (and especially intelligent) books, like Catch-22 and HPMOR, but I also found it a pleasure to read about southern kids doing whatever in To Kill A Mockingbird.

      2) Very short books: Albert Camus respects your time; he himself had many beautiful women he had to make love to, and he assumes you do too. That’s why you can read The Stranger in two-and-a-half hours, apparently.

      3) Books where not being able to tolerate reading the book is like the point of the book or something: People claim Heart of Darkness is like this, but I’m guessing obnoxiously huge paragraphs were just fashionable back then.

      Presumably you’re just smarter than the great authors of the past due to the Flynn effect.

      Eventually I learned to deal with the drudgery of great literature by finding Christ symbolism everywhere.

      I agree with your remark about apple sauce.

      Just stop reading things you don’t want to read, man! SparkNote it or something!

      • Anon. says:

        I think we can give Conrad a bit more respect than just handwaving the paragraph lengths as some stylistic fad of the times. He forms and deploys his paragraphs very deliberately. Take a look at this chart of paragraph lengths in HoD: https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6023/5950016208_d7c75bf848.jpg

        The central, longest paragraph is of course also the most important one content-wise.

      • onyomi says:

        “Presumably you’re just smarter than the great authors of the past due to the Flynn effect.”

        Not to in any way impugn OP’s intelligence, but probably not.

        Far more likely, especially when dealing with works of significant age, is that one is not really the audience: people used to be a lot more bored, for one thing, and thought little of spending a whole day at a theater in many premodern cultures, for example.

        Also, as I said above, in many cases the “point” of the book is not really the “point.” The manner of expressing it is. James Fenimore Cooper was rightly criticized even by his contemporaries (Mark Twain) for having a long-winded, meandering style, and I think Twain has a point. At the same time, Cooper’s books aspire to a kind of loving, detailed evocation of certain times and places such that “getting to the point” is not really the point.

        The fact that the times and places he describes may now have less resonance for us and we less patience for sitting down and reading them does not make us smarter.

      • The Anonymouse says:

        Just stop reading things you don’t want to read, man!

        I second this. I used to be a lit major–until I realized that my life was better without any pretension to postmodernism–but really, my life changed when someone told me, basically, “Hey, there are so many great writers in the world that the world is gaining worthwhile books faster than any person can read them. So, if you don’t like it, put that shit down and read something else!”

        Before that, I felt compelled to finish reading everything I started.

        Classics–the “canon”–are not interchangeable. Every classic is such because some group of influential people said it is . . . but those aren’t always the same people! You can love Crime and Punishment and hate Dickens; hate Shakespeare and love the Bible (KJV, please!); hate Joyce and love Dickinson; or hate Hemingway and love Achebe.

        Almost everyone has had the feeling of picking up a “classic” and thinking “ugh, what the shit is this about?” But so many of the classics are classics for pretty good reasons.

    • BillG says:

      I think the best advice I can give is to avoid reading as a quest for meaning, at least in the typical sense. Most modern criticism is, frankly, more fun specifically because it often portrays literature as something that is resistant to a direct meaning.

      In other words: if you’re reading to learn a lesson, pick up some essays/non-fiction. If you want to enjoy literature, do so to experience something.

      This also probably changes what you want to read. Read things that give a depth of experience you want to have. That may mean something modern, something romantic, whatever. There will be some “good literature” that touches on those things. At least, that’s where I’d start.

    • Mary says:

      You have succeeded in maintaining your natural interests in stories. an excellent achievement.

    • Deiseach says:

      You may not be doing anything wrong, “serious” literature may simply not be for you. There’s an argument to be made about making an effort to appreciate any artform, to educate yourself and try to expose yourself to various elements within it.

      But that doesn’t mean you will get anything out of it in the end, even if you make the good faith effort. A personal example here is Sir Harrison Birtwistle; I tried listening to a broadcast version of his opera “Gawain” back in the 90s in the cause of “I should really acquaint myself with one of the Big Names of modern classical music” and it made me sea-sick listening to it, so I had to give up about twenty minutes in.

      A lot of classic works are not originally in English, so the quality of the translation is very important. And a lot of the older translations are stodgy or leaden or do some editing according to the translator’s personal biases. As well, language has changed. Not having the patience to read through three hundred pages of 19th century English is not a failing. It’s hard to accustom your ear to speech that is meaningless as far as you’re concerned.

      I’m lucky in that (a) my paternal family are freaks when it comes to being able to read early and fluently and (b) I read a lot of stuff before I ever encountered it in school, which meant I became accustomed to orotund phraseology long before I was exposed to modern, ‘relevant for the kidz’ literature.

      It genuinely may not be for you, as The Allman Brothers at the Beacon is not for me. My advice would be (a) try and find good, up-to-date translations (b) if you really can’t stick a long, long book nobody says you have to (c) if you can find a “serious fiction” author you like, that’s always a help (d) there is nothing at all wrong with preferring genre fiction or non-fiction.

      A lot of it is pleasure in language, and that’s like pleasure in music, or visual arts: everyone’s taste is slightly different. Words on a page may not translate into sound/musicality of spoken word/rhythm/links, connotations, references and allusions they conjure up for you.

      A certain amount of vegetables is good for you but don’t force yourself to consume twenty pounds of cauliflower. There are many classical works of literature I’ve never read, and I’ve decided I’m not going to at this stage, and I don’t care.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      @ Rock Lobster

      Lazily cutting through a lot of good explanations downstream, I (far-left voter myself) would put up _Atlas Shrugged_, per John C. Wright’s modified praise of it, as a Great Novel. It fits the specs at all levels: a big important new message, events illustrating it, memorable colorful characters, readable plot … all the way down to quotable playful phrases on a Henry James level (tho I don’t see them quoted much). The plot and character level stuff is long and heavy enough that you get caught in it for its own sake.

      Meta-wise, to learn to appreciate a form or genre little practiced now, I think a good way is to start with something now-popular that you already enjoy that uses a lot of the old elements, and work backwards from it a decade or so at a time. Eg “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for working toward earlier pulp adventures.

    • Sastan says:

      I’m partially with you mate. I’ve always loved to read, but I’d say 95% of “serious” literature is pretentious horseshit. And completely misunderstood and over-analysed by simpletons who want to think they “got” it. Much like films with no plot everyone thinks are “Deep” because they didn’t understand a bit of it, and don’t want to look like they don’t understand a bit of it. I have a special hatred for “Catcher in the Rye”.

      That said, I think you have to read a lot of stuff to find the things you like. And it’s probably different for each person. For instance, I can’t stand Hemingway’s novels, but a couple of his short stories are just shy of perfect (The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber springs to mind). I’ve found some brilliant stuff in the classics (Epictetus, for one). Shakespeare is a cliche for a reason, the man wrote some incredible stuff, but you do have to basically learn to read a new language.

      Often, I find that, like bands, a writer’s most popular work isn’t their best. Everyone reads Camus’ “The Stranger”, but I hated it. “The Fall”, “The Plague” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” are all great, though.

      However, I will say that so much “regular” fiction is just as good or better than so much “serious” fiction. I’ll put CS Freidman’s fantasy and sci-fi up against anything produced in the last century. Some of the best thought experiments, examinations of human motivation and morality, and most enjoyable reads will never be considered “serious”, because academics have redefined “serious” literature to mean boring, pretentious shite. Here’s a hint: Mark Twain wasn’t writing for the Harvard Chair of Theoretical Literature. He was writing to sell books. The cartelization of “literature” into an academic discipline has destroyed serious modern writing. But have hope! There’s still tons of good shit out there, and all you have to do is read to find it!

    • Rock Lobster says:

      Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. To respond to a few questions:

      -I have read the Bible. I read the KJV a few years back, and then some months later read it again, using Robert Alter’s translation for the Five Books of Moses and then kind of switching between the KJV and NLT translations for the rest. I actually liked the Bible a lot. Or rather I should say, it was undoubtedly repetitive and tedious and a slog to get through, but it also had very beautiful and deep prose, especially in the Old Testament. The way the Bible (and ancient writers more generally) grapple with the inevitability of suffering and death really sticks with me.

      -I like history, especially European and ancient Mediterranean history, most of all. I’m also down for science, finance/economics, and other popular non-fiction, but I find a lot of those books are of the type where, I haven’t read it but I’m 99% sure I know EXACTLY how it goes.
      -Within the realm of “great” literature, I like a good amount of the ancient stuff: Homer (the Odyssey, not as much the Iliad), Sophocles (not so much Aeschylus and really not Euripides), the Bible, the first half of the Aeneid, Plato I like aesthetically even though he was wrong about everything go figure; I like what Shakespeare I’ve read so far (I plan to read more but I recall enjoying Julius Caesar most of all back in high school); I love the writing style of the late 1700s, so anything the Founding Fathers wrote, or Adam Smith, and the like, though that isn’t really literature for our purposes here; I love Orwell, both his fiction and his essays (Wells, Hitler, and the World State is my favorite, but that’s an essay). There are others but those come to mind most readily.
      -I especially did NOT like The Great Gatsby, Dickens, Hemingway, most of Steinbeck. Anybody where I suspect they got famous by pushing the buttons of gullible liberals annoys me; ugh I had to read Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup once and that was the worst case of that I’ve ever seen. I am a moderate liberal myself but I can’t deny that when it comes to artsy stuff they’re such suckers. I didn’t care for Dante, but I think that had more to do with constantly having to look up all the inside jokes about 13th century popes in the back of the book.

      • nope says:

        If you’re a bit sensitive to pretension, there are a ton of Russian writers that would probably be right up your alley, especially romantic period Russians, whose whole ethos was a rejection of Western, particularly French, sophistication and pseudo-intellectualism. I personally am very fond of Lermontov.

      • Deiseach says:

        I didn’t care for Dante

        *gasps*

        *clutches pearls*

        *reels back in horror and collapses on chaise longue in a fit of the vapours*

        🙂

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        I dunno, if you like history and like late 18th century writing styles, A Tale of Two Cities sounds like it’d be right up your alley. Dickens, more than anyone else, brought home the reality of Revolutionary France to me. Allow me to pull a Deiseach and quote at length…

        “But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial, the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty- the deluge rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened!

        There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the head of the king- and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the bead of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.

        And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected, which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no bearing; these things became the established order and nature of appointed things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old. Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world- the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.

        It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it ifallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.

        It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living and one dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes. The name of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was stronger than his namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God’s own Temple every day…”

        That passage, and others describing the decadence of the old ruling class, stick with me to this day.

        But you said you specifically did NOT like Dickens. :/ Which book of his did you try? Might I change your mind?

        (Full disclosure: I am an English teacher).

        • Rock Lobster says:

          Thanks for your reply.

          I guess all I can really say is that certain things cause a profound sense of beauty to sweep over me. It’s almost like little tingles down my spine. I think I’m unusual in that non-fiction reading is what most gives me this feeling rather than fiction.

          Your passage makes me think that perhaps I’m just doomed to see things differently. I read it and it just came across to me as a long-winded way of saying that a bunch of people got their heads chopped off with the guillotine.

          I think I just have a chronic case of get-to-the-point-itis (it’s a real disease, okay?!) and am 99% sure I would get more pleasure out of reading Andrew Roberts’s biography of Napoleon than reading ATOTC. And it’s a shame because there are people who get tremendous pleasure out of reading books like that, but it passes through me like a darn neutrino! Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin wrote that after reading War and Peace for the twelfth time, he finally understood his life. Twelve times! Can you imagine that? I’m ~200 pages in and ready to throw it out the window (just kidding, I live in NY and someone would probably get hurt if I did that).

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Rock Lobster
            [The TOTC] passage just came across to me as a long-winded way of saying that a bunch of people got their heads chopped off with the guillotine.

            I think I just have a chronic case of get-to-the-point-itis

            Me too. Dickens and others, I can see the point coming from almost the first sentence and no other point was added to justify the extra length (as well as the rest of the passage being so over the top that it blew Dickens’s credibility).

    • Saal says:

      I have little to add to your meta-level question beyond saying that I feel similarly: I tend to stay on the fringes of the ‘classics’ rather than diving into the heart of the literary canon.

      May I make one suggestion, however: dump the Tolstoy and pick up some Dostoyevsky.

    • I find it hilarious that the classics are supposed to be of universal human concern, and that’s why people get coerced into reading them in school. This is no doubt some meaning of universal which I don’t understand.

      This being said, I agree both with the people who say you don’t have to read anything you don’t like, and that poking around might turn up some classics that you do like.

      Back in the ancient days of rec.arts.sf.written, there was some consensus that Moby Dick was the classic that sf fans were most likely to like– probably for the geekish infodumps.

      • Saal says:

        White Jacket>Moby Dick

        But maybe it’s just me.

        • hlynkacg says:

          I recently re-read Moby Dick for the “first” time. I remember hating it in high-school and all I can say now is that I was young and stupid back then. Now I love it, and totally get why it’s held in such esteem.

          That said, I feel like you need to have “loved and lost”, had a few close friends die, or had a brush with death yourself before you can really appreciate what Melville was doing there. It really is a book that’s wasted on the young.

          • I’m inclined to think that a lot of required reading is simply fiction which is aimed at an older audience– and I have a dark suspicion that the reason it’s done that way is because all too many adults love the idea of forcing children to do things the children don’t want to do.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            I think you may be on to something there 😉

      • Nornagest says:

        Moby-Dick reads like a Neal Stephenson novel written by a Neal Stephenson who was obsessed with whaling rather then economics (and who was somewhat better at endings). Sure enough, it’s one of my favorites.

        This may partly be because I was never forced to read it in school, so I read it on my own time, at my own pace, and without ever having to fabricate symbolism as fodder for five-paragraph essays.

    • Urstoff says:

      I’ve started enjoying literary fiction (including the classics) far more since I’ve gotten a bit older, gotten married, had a child, etc. I think simply experiencing more of the vagaries of life have allowed me to empathize and take something from the vagaries that fictional characters are put through in literary fiction. I still read sci-fi, but right now I’d take a short story or novel that perfectly crystallizes a situation in life that evokes a very particular but still universal emotion or feeling of humanity over a bucket full of sci-fi novels, no matter how cool the spaceships. That all sounds very squishy, I realize, but it probably can’t be helped when talking about what people get out of literary fiction.

      George Saunders has a good take: https://vimeo.com/143732791

      In addition, reading literary fiction that has more cultural distance to it than something more recent is not going to help you much. Try a 20th century classic or just pick up a recent literary novel that you recognize or sounds interesting to you.

    • Wavey Davey says:

      I would say you are doing far too much of your “vegetables” – I’ve heard literature majors often find Don Quixote unreadable. Echoing some comments above, my recommendations are:
      a) Pick shorter works – plays and poetry can work well for this. It can be really rewarding to get under the skin of a short poem, reading it out loud, analyzing the sounds and the words and the imagery in a way you could never do with a novel.
      b) Go for twentieth century, as the cultural and stylistic differences just get harder to deal with when reading older works. The 1920’s to say 1960’s seem to have been a golden age for literature in English for various reasons. And most pre-20th C literature is frankly really long-winded …
      c) Take a class. In A-level English Lit (maybe equivalent to a U.S. A.P. class) I got really engrossed in works like “Hamlet”, “The Waste Land”, “Waiting for Godot”, and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, and having a teacher to help guide us through the themes, language and context of each was really helpful. This was pre-Internet, so maybe now you can get all the background you need online, but I think something like The Waste Land would be really hard to grok without a teacher …

      • Tracy W says:

        It’s interesting how people differ. I love many 19th century authors (eg Austen, Henry James, Dvotyesky, J. K. Jerome, Edith Wharton, Alcoutt) but the only 1920s – 1960s authors I like are mystery writers and Wodehouse.

        • Wavey Davey says:

          I think for me, the time period I mention involves literature grappling with the deep, epic topics of the modern world in a way that works prior to that didn’t:
          – the horrors of total warfare (WWI poets like Owen and Sassoon, Slaughterhouse 5)
          – the madness of modern bureaucratic, consumerist societies (Catch-22, Death of a Salesman)
          – the purpose of life given our apparent individual insignificance (Waiting for Godot, The Stranger)
          – how we respond to totalitarian societies (1984, The Crucible, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)

          It’s been a long while since I’ve read these but they were the kinds of works that stoked my mental and emotional juices as a teen and twenty-something. Whereas the Jane Austin and Charles Dickens I’ve read were interesting, but never really rocked my world-view (I’ve never read Henry James, Edith Wharton or Dostoyevsky so I could be missing out for sure).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Dostoevsky is a much more philosophical author.

            As is Victor Hugo, but in a less profound way.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Davey: hmm, those themes you discuss more strike me as those of my parents and teachers lifetimes than mine. My grandparents were the ones who went through WWII. Communism had collapsed before I hit high school.

            And the consumerist/anomist line just never really resonated for me. Perhaps not helped by reading one of those style of books for high school, but by a NZ author, and my mother looked over my shoulder, recognised the author, said “Oh, one of my friends used to date him when we were at uni. He was very odd.” From then on, whenever the teacher would be going on about what this book revealed about the dark underseams of NZ society I’d think of mum’s dismissive attitude and struggle to take it seriously.

            Although now I come to remember it, I did read a lot of mind blowing SF from that time period.

            With Jane Austen, the mind blowing thing she does is in how well she writes and delineates character, it’s in the details and it takes a while to appreciate just how good she is, and how well she does at being so readable.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          I’m with you. I love the 18th and 19th century elaborate styles, but the 20th century stuff just doesn’t resonate with me that well. Orwell and Fitzgerald I like, but that’s about it.

          I learned Spanish by reading Don Quixote, so it has a special place in my heart.

          • Anthony says:

            Mark Atwood – there’s more dialect variation within Spain than in the Americas. Once you get past the funny way Argentines talk, that Mexicans call ‘y’ by the wrong name, and that people on the caribbean coast have made ‘s’ silent, there’s not a lot of variation, especially in written Spanish.

            On the other hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGFz-zIjHE

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            The Quixote is written in in “old Spanish”, wich is kind of like spanish except for some funny words and using f instead of h.

            >Once you get past the funny way Argentines talk

            Hey! if you’re going to talk shit about some LA country’s spanish, at least pick the default target: Chileans.

      • Emile says:

        I guess I’m an outlier then – I *liked* Don Quixote, and am not remotely a lit major.

        I wonder if it may have something to do with me having read it in French, which is closer to Spanish; some quality may have been lost in English.

    • Dirdle says:

      Hum, interesting. Don Quixote was on my list of “well, if I have to do it to understand the derivative works I’ve already liked…” (along with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Earthbound, and various others that I forget). But I do start to wonder if having such a list is even a good idea. It seems like you want to want to read great classics and appreciate their sublime inner beauty, but my experience agrees that doing so isn’t actually fun. And if the aim is to have a good time, how much value can Knowing the Canon ultimately have? It can make discussion easier or more productive, but I think you could spend forever trying to ‘ground’ your appreciation of literature only to find that, like mathematics, you must accept certain axioms and do the best you can without ever knowing that you will remain consistent or achieve completeness. So why not just build a castle in the air, and when people ask where the foundations are, bite your thumb and ask what you’d need them for? It’s not like the castle is falling anywhere in a hurry.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        @ Dirdle

        The way it worked for me was, I read stuff I liked, followed it back generation by generation to some of the canon. After which re-reading the stuff I already liked was better, and I found related new stuff likable also.

        But just jumping cold into old stuff can be a bad idea. Unless it’s instantly likable in itself, and even then reading it with a view to Interpretation Questions can spoil it.

    • SUT says:

      The kid in highschool who didn’t like the books, actually really liked Walden. I was that kid. The intro and conclusion are grand transcendental sermons but the the middle bulk is deliberately pedestrian recordings of a year without plot, only seasons. The opportunity is there for the reader to take them on with patience – and like HDT – maybe come out changed (if not entertained).

    • Douglas Knight says:

      You sound like you have two complaints, about great literature in general and also about long books. So why did you combine them? If you’re going to force yourself to read great literature, why not start with shorter works?

      This isn’t a suggestion. This is a question. What are you thinking? How did you choose this program? Is it intentional or did you just take a list of great novels and the top two happened to be very long?

      • Rock Lobster says:

        Well, a few years back I decided that I hadn’t read enough “classic” literature (not completely defined) and decided to put together a big list of everything I “should” read. I used Harold Bloom’s canonical list (even though he has since disowned it) as well as a list of everything published by Penguin Classics as my universe from which to choose. I get analysis paralysis about this sort of thing so LET’S JUST SAY SPREADSHEETS WERE INVOLVED 😐 I work in finance so that’s not as nuts as it sounds.

        I’ve done a decent job chipping away at it, but my resolution this year was to go after it more aggressively. There are some things (like Shakespeare) where I’m gonna push through it no matter what, and for the rest I’ll be sticking to a rule of, if I don’t like it within 50-100 pages, toss that sht!

    • brad says:

      >> They’re using language that I would use to describe seeing The Allman Bros at the Beacon

      It’s funny how very different people can be. I have never quite understood why people go completely gaga over bands. I can enjoy a catchy tune or admire the virtuosity of a great violinist or guitar player, but the idea that going to a concert would be one of the top experiences of a lifetime is just completely alien to me. Even taking into account that it’s partly about the camaraderie of the crowd as opposed to the music per se, I still just can’t quite get it.

      • Rock Lobster says:

        I don’t ordinarily go nuts over concerts, but the Allman Bros’ live shows are pretty much my favorite music of all time. I’m also not a purist for the Duane Allman and Dickey Betts era. I think Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks, and Oteil Burbridge all did a great job and breathed new life into the band.

        They used to play a bunch of shows every March at The Beacon in NYC, but stopped after 2014 because everybody wanted to pursue their side projects. There’s been an Allman Bros-shaped hole in my heart ever since.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Rock Lobster:
          Are you familiar with the Drive By Truckers? If not start with “Southern Rock Opera” and then sample some of their other stuff.

          Also, if you get a chance to see them live, do it.

          • Rock Lobster says:

            I gave them a listen a while back and didn’t get hooked, but I’ll take this as a reason to try them again. I’ll check out that album too. Thanks for the recommendation.

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      Spoil yourself.

      This is an approach that applies to most media. Truly great stories aren’t going to be impacted by something as trivial as knowing what’s going to happen. The devil is always in the details, the true measure in the execution, not the premise.

      Read the plot summaries. Read analyses by people who love the work. Consume media adaptations, and read analyses of the adaptations, whether they liked/disliked the source material/the adaptation itself. Consume spin-offs, unofficial sequels, and parodies, look at the memes a story has generated. Find the humorous gif-filled recaps, even by people who hate the work, even read the close-read deconstructions. Read about the authors’ lives, as they’re often more interesting than their produced works anyways. Do all of this before you read the book itself.

      Thoroughly spoil yourself on what to look for when reading the text.

      I’ve found that most of the time, my appreciation for a story increases the more I know about it going in. Mostly because otherwise, I’ll default to my own priorities, (character and structure) with any intents of the author’s blowing over my head. I really love rewatching TV or Movies with commentary. A good commentary not only enhances what parts of the story the creators enjoy themselves, they’ll also tend to point out bits of their storytelling ethos, and thus might change how I digest the same technique going forward.
      Same goes for literature. Even for literature where the text has taken on new contexts and meanings away from the author’s intentions, there is pleasure in exploring the contrast between the intent and results in the text. In that way, I can find things to enjoy in stories and media that are very much Not My Thing, or are even bad. (Like appreciating the production craft even if the writing’s shit) But I have to know what to look for in the first place.

    • Rock Lobster says:

      Thanks again for everybody’s replies. I responded to a few posts but didn’t want to pollute all these sub-threads by responding to every little thing. However, I’ve read everything and would continue to welcome any other comments.

  10. steve hsu says:

    Scott,

    Thanks for your endorsement! Just to clarify, our goals are
    1. More transparency in Harvard admissions
    2. Increased use of endowment income to make Harvard more accessible

    “Free” is an aspirational goal. For me personally, #1 is the higher priority.

    The Times article tries to portray us as evil conservatives (but see http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/01/that-vast-right-wing-conspiracy.html ) and crypto anti-affirmative action campaigners. However, members of the ticket have varying opinions on affirmative action.

    All the best,
    Steve

    • Anon says:

      The article as it currently stands actually seems pretty sympathetic to me: if nothing else, simply by having the title refer to “Free Harvard Degrees” instead of “questioning affirmative action” or something they’ve cast this in a vastly better than they might have.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Okay, fixed, see if current description is acceptable to you.

      • steve hsu says:

        Thanks for the edit! (Minor typo: I think the word “he” is missing before “agrees”.)

        For those willing to sign the petition: our deadline is Feb 1, so let Ron know ASAP.

    • Troy says:

      Following the links, I see that Ron Unz and Ralph Nader are two of the other members of the campaign. Looks to me like an interesting group — best of luck to you!

  11. Edward Lemur says:

    What if coordination problems are a blessing in disguise?
    When one solves a problem numerically, one takes small steps, and even make the steps smaller as time passes, so as to not overshoot. Coordination problems might provide some sort of regularization so that we’re not too efficient and move in the optimal direction too fast.
    It might be a far fetched analogy, but I find it very interesting.

    • LeegleechN says:

      I think a better statement of your analogy is that coordination problems are an example of being stuck in a local minimum during optimization, when there is a better global minimum that could be reached if you changed a large number of variables (i.e. people’s decisions whether to cooperate) at the same time. The problem in both cases is that if you make the locally optimal decision, you miss out on the best outcome.

  12. Jiro says:

    Scott, what gives with the titles of the links on the left side? You have such things as “Embalmed Ones” and “Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel Hair Brush”. These titles literally give me zero information. You could just as well have one section titled “Links”; the only way I can figure out what those titles mean is to click on most of the links, read them, and try to play a game of “what do these things have in common”. They may be understandable for people familiar with all the in-jokes, but terrible for everyone else.

    • MF says:

      Even if you know the joke they don’t get more meaningful.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge

      • Timothy says:

        I can find some meanings:

        Embalmed Ones – dead/undead blogs
        Innumerable Ones – mathy
        Mermaids – mir or mer in the name
        Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel Hair Brush – comics
        Those That Are Included In This Classification – SSC related
        Those That Belong To The Emperor – a political cluster
        Those That Tremble As Though They Are Mad – psychology

        • Earthly Knight says:

          “Those that belong to the emperor” are specifically neo-reactionary blogs, which, studies indicate, makes the category 78% funnier. “Those that have just broken the flower vase” are, I think, the libertarian blogs.

    • Visitant says:

      Some things make sense, e.g., “Innumerable ones” are math/number related, “Mermaids” ones are just puns, “Suckling pigs” are food related (and deBoer -> boar), “…Very Fine Camel Hair Brush” are comics (comics -> drawings -> brush), “Those that are included…” is referring to links that are part of the the wider SSC, “Those that are trained” are sites of hardcore (“trained”) rationalists, “…Resemble Flies” -> “Bee”, “Wasps”, “Soares” (as in a soaring bird, which flies), and ducks also fly, “…Broken the Flower Vase” has one with “Vase” in the name, the rest I take it have fairly unconventional views (?). Not too sure about the rest.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      Key:

      Embalmed Ones– Defunct blogs
      Fabulous Ones– Scott’s and Alicorn’s fictions (“fabulous” in the sense of “pertaining to fables”)
      Innumerable Ones– Math blogs
      Mermaids– Blogs with “mer” or a homophone in the title
      Stray Dogs– Economics blogs, not sure why
      Suckling Pigs– Food blogs, Frederick deBoer (ha, ha)
      Those Draw With A Very Fine Camel Hair Brush– Cartoons
      Those That Are Included In This Classification– Other slatestar outlets
      Those That Are Trained– Rationalist diaspora blogs
      Those That At A Distance Resemble Flies– Blogs with flying animals or flying puns in the title
      Those That Belong To The Emperor– Neo-reactionary blogs
      Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase– Libertarian blogs, not sure why
      Those That Tremble As Though They Are Mad– Psych blogs
      Various Others– All others

      I’m actually pretty fond of this categorization, because of the source, because it fits with Scott’s nominalism about kinds, and because it’s surprising how well it carves up the blogs Scott wanted in his roll.

      • Jiro says:

        You’re missing the point. I don’t want to know what the links mean; I was stating that it’s a poor idea to use links whose meanings are 1) not obvious and 2) based around categories that most people would have no reason to use anyway. It’s a user-hostile user interface.

        • Dan Peverley says:

          I think it’s clever and I like it, and I don’t care if it confuses new people. In-jokes and opacity have a value of their own for an online community.

        • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

          Well, they used to be uncategorized, right? So at worst they’re nonsense and therefore irrelevant, so not a meaningful change.

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      If he did have just one section titled “links”, it wouldn’t give any more informational value, but would be less interesting/amusing.

      I liked the categorization even before knowing what it referred to, or what the in-jokes were. Because figuring it out was fun, and the titles were amusing.

  13. hlynkacg says:

    There’s an idea that I’ve been trying to nail down over the last couple days that I want to get the community’s thoughts on.

    Now I may be committing a typical mind fallacy here but it seems to me that most people form arguments based on what they find convincing or otherwise expect thier audience to find convincing. People who make logical arguments expect their audience to be at least somewhat logical. If someone uses appeals to emotion, they probably think that the audience can be swayed by emotion. To that end you can kind of get a sense of what someone thinks their audience is going to think, from the arguments they make.

    With me so far?

    There have been a couple of times recently where my initial response to an argument wasn’t so much “I find your arguments unconvincing” as it was “I have no idea why you expected that argument to be convincing in the first place” and end up at a complete loss as to how to reply.

    It feels like there ought to be a name for this, but I haven’t been able to find anything. I haven’t even been able to find someone who describes a similar sensation.

    As such I have to ask, is this just me? Or is it possible to fail an “ideological turing test” so hard that your answers are not even wrong? .

    I read some of the comment chains in recent threads and I notice that I am confused.

    • blacktrance says:

      It could be related to what Arnold Kling talks about here. Suppose I assume that we’re members of the same ingroup, and I make an argument that aims to close your mind. If I’m mistaken and you’re not on the same side as me, then it’s going to sound significantly off to you. For example (and this is somewhat of a strawman), consider an /r/atheism poster saying something like, “Fundies say to believe everything in the Bible, but they don’t believe that bats are birds, isn’t that really hypocritical of them?” – someone who’s not already convinced of the /r/atheism consensus is likely to find it off-putting.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      Does this differ from expecting short inferential distances? When someone’s rhetoric that seems convincing to them doesn’t work for you, often it’s because they have hidden premises and background knowledge that you don’t have. Maybe they read Paul Krugman or listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Rachel Maddow and you don’t, so what seems irrelevant or silly to you serves the role of conjuring up a bingo-square argument that seems obvious to them.

      • hlynkacg says:

        I think it’s potentially related, or perhaps this in conjunction with some other behavior. I feels like a bit more than “miss a step, or two” and more like a complete map-territory mismatch. In theory step 2 and step 22 of “how to build X” would both be recognizable as steps in building X even if you missed the steps in between.

      • onyomi says:

        I find calibrating inferential distance to be one of the biggest challenges of academic writing.

        For example, I have written articles and a book which analyze premodern musical dramas in terms of what the musical information tells us about the literary intent.

        Literature scholars who read it tend to find it too technical, whereas musicologists who read it tend to find it not technical enough. Pleasing one group often means displeasing the other because literature scholars, apparently, cannot be counted on to know what “do, re, and mi” mean, and musicologists can’t be counted on to even care about literature, or to accept any over-simplifications in the service of speaking to non-musicologists. In some sense, writing the work involves attempting to create an as-yet non-existent audience of literature scholars who care about music and/or musicologists who care about literature.

        Related is that advertisements for jobs, grant money, etc. often claim to like “interdisciplinary” work, but I find it is rarely actually rewarded.

      • Kaj Sotala says:

        Yes, it’s a special case of inferential distance – I’ve called it inferential silence before:

        “Every now and then, I write [a] comment on some topic and feel that the contents of my comment pretty much settles the issue decisively. Instead, the comment seems to get ignored entirely – it either gets very few votes or none, nobody responds to it, and the discussion generally continues as if it had never been posted.

        “Similarly, every now and then I see somebody else make a post or comment that they clearly feel is decisive, but which doesn’t seem very interesting to me. Either it seems to be saying something obvious, or I don’t get its connection to the topic at hand in the first place.

        “This seems like it would be about inferential distance: either the writer doesn’t know the things that make the reader experience the comment as uninteresting, or the reader doesn’t know the things that make the writer experience the comment as interesting. So there’s inferential silence – a sufficiently long inferential distance that a claim doesn’t provoke even objections, just uncomprehending or indifferent silence.”

        In real life, I’ve sometimes observed this manifesting as a person saying something, and their interlocutor blinking, staring for a brief moment, and continuing the discussion as if the first person had never said anything. “I have no idea of what they just meant or how it’s relevant, so I’ll just ignore it.”

        • HlynkaCG says:

          Ok, I think that’s pretty close. I think the sensation I’m describing is essentially this occurring in parallel with the circular logic fallacy that rubberduck describes below.

          I suspect that one is “covering the holes” in the other preventing either error from being properly recognized and thus triggering the whole “waitaminute did a human actually write that” response in my brain.

      • Anonymous says:

        often it’s because they have hidden premises and background knowledge that you don’t have.

        And vice-versa?

    • rubberduck says:

      I think what you’re getting at is a big hurdle to getting people to adapt more rational or scientific thinking in general.

      I feel like there’s a fallacy if we try to pin down exactly why rationalism is a good mode of thinking. Ultimately, it seems to me that one has to rationally decide that rational thought is for the best (if that makes sense?). We can point to the mosquito nets donated or the results (in science, etc.) to persuade others to come around to our way of thinking, but once again we are using logic and empiricism to convince people. It seems circular.

      The converse is equally true with regards to intuitive or emotional thinking. You might decide to act based on your emotions not because that’s the most utilitarian choice, but because those same emotions have convinced you that listening to them will make you feel better.

      I haven’t figured out a way to bridge this issue.

      • Kaj Sotala says:

        If you want to try to make someone adapt more rational or scientific thinking, I think you need to give them habits of thought that are reasonable given their existing mindset and which they adopt because they can see that they work, but which also nudge them towards more scientific thinking.

        I originally got this idea from Venkatesh Rao, who wrote that:

        I have never met anybody who has changed their reasoning first and their habits second. You change your habits first. This is a behavioral conditioning problem largely unrelated to the logical structure and content of the behavior. Once you’ve done that, you learn the new conscious analysis and synthesis patterns.

        This is why I would never attempt to debate a literal creationist. If forced to attempt to convert one, I’d try to get them to learn innocuous habits whose effectiveness depends on evolutionary principles (the simplest thing I can think of is A/B testing; once you learn that they work, and then understand how and why they work, you’re on a slippery slope towards understanding things like genetic algorithms, and from there to an appreciation of the power of evolutionary processes).

        There are some simple but deep notions like “figure out and test your underlying assumptions” that you may get people to adopt by finding contexts in which they see that they’re useful. E.g. something like Murphyjitsu may appeal to them if they realize that their plans keep blowing up. Or the whole lean startup philosophy if they’re into business.

        Basically, sell them on the usefulness of applying the scientific method in their daily lives, without calling it that.

      • “I think what you’re getting at is a big hurdle to getting people to adapt more rational or scientific thinking in general.”

        And if they did, would it lead to inferential gaps vanishing? Epistemic rationalism may allow you to identify and articulate your deepest values and axioms, but…

        “. It seems circular.”

        ..rationalists don’t have to share axioms. The problem of finding non-circular justifications for underlying principles means they may have to agree to differ.

    • dust bunny says:

      Sounds at least a lot like something I fret about almost daily. In my mind I’ve labeled it with “discourse across different paradigms is impossible”.

  14. Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

    So… UK savvy folks, is this really a contraversy?. I mean, it’s like the Independent has no idea how a charity luncheon actually works. The whole point is to resell the tickets for thousands or millions of pounds. Seriously. People will apparently pay $2.2 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett, of all people, so I am pretty sure lunch with the freaking queen is an insanely lucrative fundraising opportunity.

    And besides, what kind of asshole goes to a party without at least bringing a nice bottle of wine, or a dish to pass? Every party I have ever been to has had some expectation that guests would contribute; either through gifts for the hosts, gifts/food/drinks to share, or cash. The analogy is a total fail, even at face value.

    But I don’t know, they’re weird over there sometimes. (Also, I realize it is a tabloid, but I don’t have a good sense of were they fall on the making-crazy-shit-up spectrum.)

    • sweeneyrod says:

      No, this isn’t a controversy (I’d not heard of it before reading that article). I agree that the article is very stupid. The Independent is a bit odd – the paper version (or at least i) is a good broadsheet, but the website is much more tabloidy.

    • Mister Eff says:

      First, the Independent is (or was?) a broadsheet, and (at least used to be) considered respectable. It has been increasingly clickbaity for several years now, so it’s anyone’s guess how long it will be more respected than the Daily Mail. For now it is, though.

      Second, at least in my circles, it’s not a controversy so much as a point of division between republicans and everyone else. (I’d say there are 3 camps: republicans, monarchists, and apathetic-but-resistant-to-change – the latter being the comfortable majority.)

      • g says:

        For what it’s worth, I’m a (not particularly firebreathing) republican but am entirely unbothered by this “controversy”.

    • Ano says:

      It actually sounds like a pretty smart scheme. Sell tickets to a bunch of respectable charities at below market rates. Those charities then sell on a portion of the tickets to rich fellows who want to go to a big fancy party and bask in the Queen’s radiance and make money. The Queen gets to have a big fancy birthday party, the charities make some money and get invitations to the aforementioned party, and some rich idiots finance the whole affair.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Dave Barry alleges that the reason rich people have charity functions is so that the headlines will read “CHARITY BALL RAISES MILLIONS” and not just “RICH PEOPLE AMUSE THEMSELVES.”

        • Ano says:

          Well, I suppose the question is what expensive charity fundraisers are funging against. Somehow, I suspect that if we forbade rich people from holding elaborate fundraisers (which is in any case impossible), they wouldn’t simply give all that money instead to charity. I get that it’s ridiculous that we need to play these games where we bribe rich people with invitations to birthday parties in order to get them to give money to charities, but if it works, it works.

          (Plus, I think if rich people wanted to have a party for no reason, they could keep it out of the press. I find it hard to believe that the reason we don’t hear stories of debauchery and excess among the elite is because they do it all at charity fundraisers.)

    • Phisheep says:

      It’s one of those things that would be whipped up by the press whichever way it went. If there’s a charge it is dirty money-grubbing. If there isn’t a charge the whole thing is of course a waste of taxpayers money.

      I don’t think anyone than journalists cares either way.

      Kind of strange subject to make my maiden comment on too.

    • JBeshir says:

      I hadn’t heard of it before now.

      Seeing it now makes me just think of the whole Keeping The Content Machine Whirring thing where you deliberately pick a topic and then write a passionate essay on it to rile people up and get clicks from people wanting to see what the fuss is without necessarily having any really strong feelings on it yourself. Or for that matter, anyone else necessarily having them before you started a Dispute and made people pick sides.

      It’s that kind of pointless article about nothing.

  15. CatCube says:

    Linked for no other reason than I think it deserves more than 49,000 views:

    Shibboleth

    • Sastan says:

      I think my favorite was on Top Gear, when they asked for anyone from Scotland, and had the guy say “Burglar Alarm”

      • Mister Eff says:

        Ah, being told asked to say things by non-Scots. “Burglar alarm”, “baby”, “Auchterarder”, the list goes on… There’s nothing I find more tediously predictable, but I suppose I should be glad I have a party trick.

        • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjO1BXzZLpE

          Let’s just say that auto-complete knows this one– it showed up before I’d gotten very far into “scots elevator”.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            The use of the name “Cholmondley” reminded me of the hilarious Cholmondley-Warner skits parodying interwar newsreels. Mr. Cholmondley-Warner is a character who stands in for the stuffy and elitist aristocrat.

            This one on the working class in England is the best.

            Grayson: Good night, Mr. Cholmondley-Warner. Or should I say, “Ta-rah, guvnah”?

            Cholmondley-Warner: No.

            Or actually, this is the funniest line:

            Narrator: Slum housing is the order of the day in the East End, and the people like it that way! Of course, you and I might think they’d be happier in nice houses, like us. But top scientists have proved that if you give a working man a nice house, he’ll quickly let it fall into a state of filth and depravity.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          As a southern-raised american in canada, the locals derived great amusement from having me say “vehicle”. If you run into any southern Yanks, you should try the same.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I assume you mean saying “VEE-HICK-el” instead of “VEE-ic-el”.

            I’m from Alabama, but I say “vehicle” the regular way. However, I was quite surprised the first time I referred to one of the things you push around the grocery store to transport your purchases as a “buggy”, to someone from elsewhere. They didn’t know what I was talking about and found it very funny. And I can see how someone would find it funny, but that’s what my mother always called it.

            I like this dialect quiz from the New York Times. It didn’t work perfectly on me. It said I was either from Tennessee or North Carolina, but I’m actually from Alabama. However, most of that was due to a few words that I rarely use or would call by both names (like “yard sale” vs. “garage sale”: I don’t really have a preference between them.) And there are other words which are common locally but have largely been supplanted due to mass media influence, like “lightning bug” vs. “firefly”: the older generation would definitely say the former, but I would say the latter.

          • brad says:

            Drawer and draw sound the same when I say them, and I got teased about it quite a bit at my college in the south.

  16. gbear605 says:

    Does anyone have any thoughts on Tulpas? According to http://tulpa.info, “A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness. They are able to think, and have their own free will, emotions, and memories. In short, a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you.”

    There’s also a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/tulpas

    It’s extremely interesting to me, since this community’s been around for 3+ years and is still fairly active, so it’s probably not some sort of prolonged prank.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      To the extent that such a thing is knowable, I’m pretty sure my ex-wife had several. Their interactions left me with some unbelievably strange experiences, most of them reasonably positive. Her mental health on the whole was not good, but I have no idea whether the induced personalities were helping with that or making it worse.

      • onyomi says:

        Is this any different from “multiple personalities”?

        • Marc Whipple says:

          No, but then “multiple personalities” is a pretty broad term.

          It’s not incompatible with Disassociative Identity Disorder, which is the official mental health term du jour for the psychological phenomenon most people think of as “multiple personalities,” but it’s not a one to one map, either. For instance, a writer arguing with one of their fictional characters in their heads (or even out loud) is unlikely to have DID, but arguably they at least temporarily have “multiple personalities.” The example FC gives is a lot closer, at least from the brief description, to the DID end of the spectrum, but not necessarily there yet.*

          *Standard disclaimer: I am not a doctor of any kind, let alone a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. I’ve just read a lot and I happen to have a single fairly involved clinical interaction with a person diagnosed with DID.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Onyomi – “Is this any different from “multiple personalities”?”

          …I have no idea? I was given to understand that “multiple personality disorder” was currently regarded with a great deal of skepticism by the scientific community. She claimed to have induced them deliberately, rather than them manifesting at random, and seemed to have a fair amount of control over which was in charge, and could switch them around more or less at will. It seemed much more organized and orderly than most descriptions I’ve heard of MPD, to the point that there didn’t seem to be any “disorder” associated with them, beyond one of them being a bit of a jerk.

    • Calico says:

      The only recommendation about tulpas is to find *some* positive social group before reverting to that for interaction. It can be online or offline.

      Prolonged pranks can go on for thousands of years with the participants half-believing in it.

    • Deiseach says:

      The only thing I know about tulpas was in connection with Tibetan Buddhism, and the vague idea I took away that you really should be careful not to create one.

      I have no idea about trying to create secondary personalities in your mind.

    • roystgnr says:

      I know that, like many people, my conscious mind is capable of having an uninterrupted train of thought or conversation at the same time as my subconscious mind is doing things up to and including correctly navigating and safely driving a car “on autopilot”. If that’s not a separate ability to “think” it’s at least in the vicinity. I’ve also noticed several examples in the past where I made life decisions “on autopilot” that turned out to be Machiavellianly clever, but that may have been coincidental rather than free will. I’ve had no evidence of subconsciously independent emotions or memories, but they’re an obvious extrapolation from the above, plausible enough that I wrote it up as a psychological horror story long before I’d ever heard of “tulpas”.

      Since then I’ve seen more circumstantial evidence for separate personalities, such as the split corpus callosium experiments:

      “Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”” – Michael Gazzaniga, “The Ethical Brain”

      Even if behavior like that *usually* requires brain surgery, the fact that it’s so straightforward suggests the possibility of less artificial exceptions.

    • Anatoly says:

      Tulpas creators don’t seem very different from otherkin and from headmates:

      – loneliness, desire for social interaction/validation
      – vague feelings/intrusive thoughts reinforced and channeled into a specific form by
      the existing community
      – the community encourages therapeutic sharing and strongly discourages criticism of experience
      – often you see “I felt exactly like this before finding the online community”, but it’s likely to be a retrofitted self-deception. They’d felt something, later convinced themselves they’d felt exactly that.
      – probably a social phenomenon to a much larger degree than it is a psychological one.

    • Muga Sofer says:

      Everyone who talks about them seems vaguely worried that they might grow too strong and attempt to escape.
      The ones who think they’re magic, the ones who think they’re religion, the ones who think they’re science, the ones who think they’re imaginary, the ones who think they’re Just An Interesting Psychological Phenomenon …

      … so they’re probably fine.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      Without reading the website (which I will in a bit) I’m at a loss to see how this summary is any different from the description of the alters of a person with Disassociative Identity Disorder. (Which is hella rare, but not so rare as some people think, IME.) Is it perhaps that tulpas never fight for control of the physical body? Again IME, not all DID alters do that either.

      I have done hypnotherapy with a person with diagnosed DID, under the supervision of a psychiatrist. It was fascinating, although I feel bad saying that as the person had some very serious mental health issues. I like to think that I helped them, though not long after I started working with them their life circumstances improved quite a bit which may have been more impactful than anything the psychiatrist or I did.

      ETA: Ah, I see. “Created” here is used in the willful and deliberate sense. Interesting. I need to learn this trick of making amalgam clients, because the client I worked with would make an interesting contrast/discussion element.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      Our Gracious Host answers a question on tulpas:

      Q: Do you think it is safe to create a tulpa? It sounds really interesting, but i am Afraid of becoming psychotic

      A: I really can’t say this and have no evidence either way. My impression is that it’s pretty hard to make yourself psychotic unless you have a family history or other predisposition or you’re using drugs or something.

      I can’t argue – and it would be pretty arrogant of me to try – but I will say that “predisposition” is a very big word. And pretty much everybody has a family history if you look hard enough. 🙂

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      Lots of fiction authors (including some non-professional hobbyists I know) seem to have a spontaneous version of these in their heads: see Taylor et al. 2003.

      The illusion of independent agency (IIA) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent that adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction. Fifty fiction writers were interviewed about the development of their characters and their memories for childhood imaginary companions. Ninety-two percent of the writers reported at least some experience of IIA. The writers who had published their work had more frequent and detailed reports of IIA, suggesting that the illusion could be related to expertise. As a group, the writers scored higher than population norms in empathy, dissociation, and memories for childhood imaginary companions.

      Among other things, the interviewed writers report that they’ve had to argue with their characters and make deals with them in order to get them to go along with the story (“I promise you’ll get a happy ending if you agree to undergo this unfair imprisonment earlier on”). Other fun examples from that study:

      * “I live with all of them every day. Dealing with different events during the day, different ones kind of speak. They say, “Hmm, this is my opinion. Are you going to listen to me?””
      * “I was out for a walk and on my way to the grocery store. I wasn’t really thinking all that deliberately about the novel, but suddenly, I felt the presence of two of the novel’s more unusual characters behind me. I had the sense that if I turned around they would actually be there on the sidewalk behind me.”
      * “I see my characters like actors in a movie. I just write down what they say.”

      I’ve also experienced something similar spontaneously happening in extended role-playing campaigns: play a character for long enough, and they start to develop their own personality, whose wishes do not always align with those of its player.

      My personal hypothesis (slides) is that

      I hypothesize that tulpas may arise from the combination of three factors. First, conscious thought acts as a “reality simulator”, and imagining something is essentially the same process as perceiving it, with the sense data being generated from an internal model rather than from external input (Hesslow 2002, Metzinger 2004). Second, our brains have evolved to be capable of modeling other people and predicting their behavior, so as to facilitate social interaction. Third, according to the predictive coding model of the brain (Clark 2013), action and perception/prediction are closely linked: doing something involves us predicting that we will do it, after which the brain carries out backwards inference to find the actions that are needed to fulfill the prediction.

      This allows for a tulpa-creation process in which the practitioner starts with imagining the kind of person they wish to create, and how that person would behave in different situations. The mental images produced by this process are picked up by the people-modeling modules of the brain, which might not be able to distinguish between imagined and perceived sense data, and they begin creating a model of the tulpa that is being imagined. Practitioners report their tulpas sometimes doing new and surprising things, which could be explained by the brain doing backwards inference to find possible “deep causes” of the tulpa’s imagined behavior, whose other consequences are then simulated, causing the tulpa to act in ways unanticipated by the practitioner. Eventually, once the model and the practitioner’s ability to imagine the tulpa become strong enough, there will be a selfsustaining feedback loop: the model of the tulpa creates new predictions of its behavior, which are experienced as happening, and these experiences are fed back into the model, giving rise to new predictions and behavior. By this point, the tulpa will be experienced as acting independently and separately from the “main” personality.

      (This was considered plausible enough that I was allowed to give a talk on the topic on a scientific conference on consciousness, but the quality of peer review in that conference was *totally* random, so this isn’t saying much.)

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Okay now you are totally creeping me out because I have had characters refuse to follow the plot and I thought it was just my subconscious telling me a better version of the story but maybe they were tulpas and they’re in my brain right now and…

        *deep breath*

        I mean, that’s a very interesting way to put it. I usually have a pretty good idea of where a story is going to end up, but occasionally while I’m typing (I am a gardener/pantser type of author) I find the character’s dialogue and actions start to go in a different direction. Interestingly, it’s almost always a pretty big jump from being unethical and uncaring to being ethical and finding redemption for a past mistake, or vice versa. The two things happen at about the same frequency. I thought that fellow was bad: turns out he’s not. I thought that lady was nice: turns out she’s a ruthless killer.

        But I’m pretty sure it’s just my subconscious telling me which would be a better story. While of course no one is ever told what would have happened, in every story this has happened to I was pleased with the outcome and afterwards couldn’t imagine it happening any other way.

        • Kaj Sotala says:

          > Okay now you are totally creeping me out because I have had characters refuse to follow the plot and I thought it was just my subconscious telling me a better version of the story but maybe they were tulpas and they’re in my brain right now and…

          I actually kinda intended to have the opposite effect. “Tulpas aren’t such a big deal, lots and lots of fiction writers have some spontaneous form of them, while remaining just as sane and functional as anyone else. Just our normal other-person-modeling circuitry being a little more active than usual, nothing to worry about.”

      • It’s a less extreme version of your point, but one of my conclusions from writing my first novel was that no plot survives contact with the characters. To make the story work, your characters have to do what those people would do, which is not necessarily what you planned for them to do.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          And for you I bet this is also a problem:

          How To Write About Characters Who Are Dumber Than You

          • A complaint some people make about my fiction, and something others like about it, is that the characters are too reasonable. It’s not something I plan to change.

            And, like the author of the bit you linked to, I am irritated by fictional characters doing stupid things.

          • Tibor says:

            I am usually irritated by characters who are supposed to know better and who still do the stupid thing. I am fine with characters who are not supposed to know better. Usually what they do causes problems and those then can lead to a more interesting plot. So I guess I just like the characters to stay believable.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Tibor
            “I am usually irritated by characters who are supposed to know better and who still do the stupid thing.”

            If a smart, rational character is about to do the right thing according to his knowledge at the time, but the audience knows something he doesn’t … well, it’s all in Aristotle (and Hitchcock).

          • I don’t think I’m bothered by someone doing the wrong thing for what is, in his context, a good reason. In each of my two novels, one of the central characters is initially doing the wrong thing. In each he eventually realizes it is is the wrong thing and changes his behavior accordingly.

            (James in _Harald_, Coelus in _Salamander_, for anyone who has read either.)

          • Marc Whipple says:

            I will not only make that exception, I will grant a waiver for any smart character who does a stupid thing if you give me a good reason for the discontinuity. For instance, the main character of one of my novels does something incredibly stupid despite being extremely intelligent. This is because he is also incredibly curious and it is made clear, if I do say so, that a) the only way for him to find out something he really wants to know is to do something incredibly stupid and b) he is the sort who had rather do something he knows is incredibly stupid than not find out.

            For another example, consider the inscription on the bell in the Great Hall of Charn:

            The choice is yours, adventurous stranger;
            Strike the bell and bide the danger…
            Or wonder, ’til it drives you mad
            What would have followed if you had.

            (Punctuation mine, I didn’t bother to go look up the precise layout.)

            It comes right out and says what any halfway intelligent person would have already gathered: ringing the bell is not a risk-free proposition. Nevertheless, there are a great many people (your humble author amongst their number) who despite being very intelligent and entirely aware of the danger, would probably not be able to resist ringing the bell.

        • Tibor says:

          @Marc: I’d ring the bell but also I’d try prepare myself for the danger first 🙂

          @houseboatonstyx If the character does something that is reasonable based on his own knowledge, then I cannot know that he ought to know better.

          One particular thing which I find irritating is the main character (or one of the two main characters I guess) in No country for old men. Now, he is not exactly a genius but he is not stupid and he a hunter, so he should know that the guy with several gunshot wounds who begged him for water in the hot Texan (Or New Mexican? Something like that) steppe sometime in the early afternoon won’t be alive at night any more. He even realizes that it is a stupid thing to come back to the site but he still does it even though he knows he endangeres himself and possibly his wife that way…all that to give water to a dead man who belongs to a cartel anyway and who he doesn’t even know. Without that incident, the plot would not have to be changed much either. Sure, the psychopatic villian would not be able to to track him down that easily but he would still be able to do so because of the tracking device in the money bag (sorry to all who have not seen the film…but the plot is not the main thing that makes the film so good anyway).

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            I cut films a lot of slack, because whatever missing motivation etc may be lying somewhere on a cutting room floor.

      • Leif K-Brooks says:

        Third, according to the predictive coding model of the brain (Clark 2013), action and perception/prediction are closely linked: doing something involves us predicting that we will do it, after which the brain carries out backwards inference to find the actions that are needed to fulfill the prediction.

        Is this a plausible mechanism of action for “The Secret” (the Oprah thing)?

        • Kaj Sotala says:

          This? I hadn’t heard of it before, but skimming the Wikipedia article, I guess that you’re referring to the claims about visualizing your desires making them more likely to come true.

          Psychological research says that goal visualization is often helpful, but there’s an important caveat. If you only visualize your goal, this is likely to actually reduce your chances of success. A part of your motivation system experiences a vividly visualized outcome as already being true, so becomes less likely to pursue it. In order to make it work, you need to first visualize a goal, and then visualize the biggest obstacle that currently stands between you and the goal, contrasting the two. That will focus your attention on the obstacle, and on what you need to do in order to overcome the obstacle.

          http://www.woopmylife.org/ is slightly cringe-inducing in its very pop-sci branding, but it explains this “mental contrasting” technique and contains references to the research papers. Also a popular book that explains the research, including going into detail about how pure goal visualization (which The Secret apparently sells) is likely to be more harmful that useful.

          As for whether the predictive coding model could explain why mental contrasting works – it sounds plausible enough. Something like “seeing the desirable state and the obstacle that’s in the way kicks a planning mechanism into action and motivates you to follow that plan” seems to be what happens with mental contrasting, though I don’t know of research linking it with predictive coding in particular. (Then again, I don’t claim to be an expert.)

          • Marc Whipple says:

            My daughter enjoys bowling, so we take her bowling from time to time. I am not very good at bowling: I tend to both overpower and to get the bowling equivalent of the yips.

            I have found that visualizing the ball following the path I want it to take while taking a few deep breaths right before I throw it is very helpful. Visualizing all the pins falling down is not. (The deep breaths help by themselves, but there was a further improvement when I started imagining the ball going the way I wanted it to go.)

  17. Stefan Drinic says:

    My own country runs what Americans, well-meaning or not, might call a socialised education system. Private elementary and high schools do not exist: there are religious schools and special-purpose ones, but refusing people because their parents couldn’t hypothetically pay tuition doesn’t happen. Students do some tests at the end of primary education, and based on that they are sent to a high school of a certain ‘tier’, after which they may or may not pursue higher education. The low ‘tier’ schools may end up in you going to a trade school of sorts, the higher ones let kids go on to study medicine or whatever. College fees are the same across the board for every tier: tuition for medicine in city A is exactly as expensive as tuition for astrophysics in city B.

    The reason I mention this is because every time I see a bunch of people from the US go on about their education system, I think of how many such problems our system simply lacks. We don’t have places where firemen and entry level salespeople are expected to have a degree in anything because every idiot with a paycheck doesn’t get let into university. We don’t have a sort of 90/10 divide with a few elite universities and further education for the grans mass of people who feel they ought to study something because people who shouldn’t even try to study chemistry or physics, can’t. We don’t have stupid high levels of college debt because having things inbetween highest-tiered education and none at all means people who aren’t mathematicians and doctors aren’t unemployable because they must be very stupid or somesuch.

    Our system has flaws, and half-assing another place’s take on anything at all generally does more harm than good as per the uncanny valley effect, but if/when I see people lamenting how things work out for their own nations or when I see people on this blog argue for complete privatisation of everything, I kind of wonder what I’m missing that makes us awful, the US different enough that something similar wouldn’t work, and privatised education better.

    Note: in case anyone was wondering, I’m Dutch.

    • Anon. says:

      How many of the top 1% Dutch students go to study in the US/UK? How many of the top 1% US/UK students go to study in the Netherlands?

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        Yes, the quality of edication at Harvard of Oxford is going to be higher than it is in Eindhoven or Leiden. It’s worth the balancing out on the other end.

        • Anon. says:

          >It’s worth the balancing out on the other end.

          Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but let’s not decide without a rigorous cost/benefit analysis.

          Also, I think a significant factor that makes it “worth it” for the Netherlands is that you can freeride on the research coming out of America. They don’t have the same luxury.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but I can accuse you of all the research that may or may not happen just as much. You could tell me the Netherlands might be much less wealthy without PC’s, and then I could cheerfully go on to claim that Bill Gates needed no Harvard to succeed, either. I’m not convinced.

          • Virbie says:

            @Stefan,

            To me that response looks like Anon mentioned research coming out of universities, and you stood up a strawman of something that _didn’t_ come out of university research and then predictably knocked it down by saying…that it didn’t come out of university research.

            Since one of my favorite parts of the SSC comments section is that there’s seems to be a lot more charitable interpreting going on here than anywhere else, I have to ask: did I misunderstand your comment or do you actually have no rebuttal to the university-research-free-riding claim other than an extremely transparent strawman?

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            It was an example of an American product being very useful to the Dutch economy without said product actually having been the product of someone who’d actually finished or worked for a university very long. It’s not a strawman, it’s a way of showing that not everything America produces is due to it having a small amount of top-tier universities and a ton of crappy ones. If you want to tell me that the US produces research of quality disproportionate to what you’d expect when also held up against the Netherlands/Sweden/whatever, and also argue that this makes these countries money in some way, prove that before you tell me I’m being uncharitable and strawmanning people.

          • onyomi says:

            I don’t think I accept the premise that the US has a small number of top universities and a ton of crappy ones.

            What primarily distinguishes the top research universities from other universities and colleges is the amount of research being done there by professors, not the quality of the education offered to undergrads. If you sat in on an undergrad class at Harvard and an undergrad class at a mid-tier university you’d probably be hard-pressed to guess which was the Harvard class (in fact, you might very well find that the actual teaching at the mid-tier university was better, since the Harvard class is more likely to be taught by a top researcher who doesn’t much care about teaching). To the extent you guessed right it would probably be because of the students themselves who, at Harvard, will probably dress better, seem more on the ball, ask more insightful questions, etc.

            Most US states have at least one good state university which is basically free for state residents who can pass a very low testing/gpa bar. The education you can receive as an undergrad at most institutions is not very different from the education you can receive at Yale or Harvard.

            Where Yale and Harvard distinguish themselves is in the number of PhDs they produce and in giving top researchers the money and time to do research. But at that level the PhD fellowships and professorships are fully funded, so ability to pay is not an issue.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Also, I think a significant factor that makes it “worth it” for the Netherlands is that you can freeride on the research coming out of America.

            Is this true? In terms of scientific papers per capita and Nobel laureates per capita, the Netherlands is above the US.

            If the Netherlands “free rides” on the research coming out of US is just because the US has a larger population, not because the US academia is better.

          • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

            As far as nobel laureates go, I think where they were born is less important than where did they do their most important research.

          • @vV_Vv

            Yeah, I’ve seen versions of the free-riding claim before, and the figures din’t bear it out at all.

            ” In terms of scientific papers per capita and Nobel laureates per capita, the Netherlands is above the US.”

            I can name Gerard t’Hooft. which is more than can be said for Jim Parsons.

        • Calico says:

          Its best to quantify the quality of the education.

          Its a mild annoyance of mine. The quality of the education is mostly a result of the typical competence of the student in the class(done reasonably quickly with those two day hour end-of-education tests), along with just spending a bit of time finding relevant material.

          For some reason the quality of a nations highest-tier uni’s seems closely correlated with the national wealth,population size, and global power of the university. Once china becomes richer and more powerful than America suddenly the highest quality uni will no longer be HYPS but…TPZ….with perhaps no real change in the educational system!

          I’m not saying that the national wealth does not matter for research uni’s (it clearly obviously does) Its just really not a function of the educational system being somewhat streamlined and socialized. That top Russian universities and research was so great was also simply a consequence of national size, power, and a large population with a good median I.Q., to take full advantage of the bell curve and associative mating.

        • Jon H says:

          They may not go to the US or UK, if they go at all, until after they get their PhD.

          At least, I know one Dutch guy who did undergrad through PhD in the Netherlands (Molecular Bio) , then did postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Is it?

          It’s the tiny, tiny fraction of hypercapable people who move civilization forward. Your system seems less likely to actualize them than ours.

          • Winfried says:

            If only opportunity cost was directly visible and labeled that way in life.

            It’s easy to make a tradeoff between concrete options but discussing requiring suffering (or at least deprivation) by real people now and possible benefits for everyone later is hard.

            I mean, if we could have a gods eye view of everything and see that allowing vast differences between high and low would lead those at the peak to advance enough to save us all, it would be a much easier trade to make.

        • phisheep says:

          I’m not so sure about that. I’m in the perhaps unusual position of having graduated from three different universities – one top-five-world-class, one almost-exactly-middle-tier, and one scarcely-recognised-by-any-employer.

          So far as I could tell the quality and type of tuition, *and* the quality of the students was pretty well indistinguishable between the top one and the bottom one – except the top one had a much bigger library and much older buildings. The student quality thing came as a surprise, but I think it is because there was an unusually high number of rich freeloaders at the well-known one.

          What I found dreadfully disappointing was the middle tier. The tuition was regimented, the students lethargic, the scope for exploration limited. Box-ticking was rife.

          I’m not quite sure what to put it down to, other than that both on the top tier and on the bottom rung the students and lecturers seemed to be trying hard to make the best of what they had, while in the middle all, or at least most, were merely going through the motions.

      • Tatu Ahponen says:

        US and UK have, in their pop culture dominancy, one of the mightiest advertising mechanisms in the world for advertising the superiority of their top universities, among other things. After all, everyone in the world who has watched their share of American and British TV also knows, from several references, what Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge are and what their status is. And considering what powerful motivators status and networking are for top universities, it creates a self-feeding cycle.

    • xtmar says:

      The advantage of the American system is that it gives everyone a shot at the top, which is true not only in education, but in other areas as well. In the US, it’s viewed as improper to suggest that people should be held down by the system, which means that almost everything in education is geared towards college prep. Part of this is because of a past history of discrimination, but I think it’s also a deeper fundamental value of the American populace. This means that pretty much everyone theoretically has a shot at Harvard or whatever, but it also means that the people who don’t reach that level end up worse than if we decided in eighth grade that they would never rise above pipefitter.* In many ways this is mirrored in the broader economic outcomes. If I recall correctly, the US has more churn in its political and economic elite than Europe,** but less churn among the average people. What I take this to mean is that the US system is more focused on getting the best out of its top performers, and is willing to sacrifice a lot in order to do so, whereas Europe has decided to focus more on the average outcome, even if it means less success for the top.

      While there are certainly merits to each approach, I think the US approach results in more material wealth, as witnessed by our higher per capita GDP, larger house sizes and cars, etc, while the European approach has somewhat better outcomes in terms of intangibles.

      *Ignoring the fact that a pipefitter will probably outearn many college grads.

      **Realizing of course that Europe is a rather vague construct with a lot of internal variation, but used in this case to mean the northern European social democracies of Germany, Benelux, the UK, France, and the Nordics.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        Our system does in fact allow for ‘advancement’ between tiers, though. A kid in the middle tier with his high school diploma can attend the final two years of that of a higher one, for example. I’ll agree that this leaves out the people who think it’s unfair to not just let anyone who can afford it attend, but the reverse argument that applies to our system is that some rich kid shouldn’t be allowed to take the spot in studying medicine from someone who actually knows what a neuron is.

        I’m not sure if the endgame of GDP per capita and such is something you can attribute to education, but whatever the cause might be, you seem to describe effect fairly well.

      • vV_Vv says:

        So how does the Netherlands manage to produce more scientific papers per capita and Nobel laureates per capita than the US?

      • DavidS says:

        This is interesting! Some bits I don’t fully get, e.g.

        “In the US, it’s viewed as improper to suggest that people should be held down by the system, which means that almost everything in education is geared towards college prep.”

        Surely in Europe it’s also improper to suggest people should be held down by the system too? And I’m not sure I see the link between ‘not held down’ and college prep. Here in the UK, the philosophy of ‘not holding people down’ seems to be responsible both for rising levels of higher education AND for drives to give greater funding/status/respect to less academic things like apprenticeships

        I think the US approach results in more material wealth, as witnessed by our higher per capita GDP, larger house sizes and cars, etc,

        Interesting again! I always took larger houses compared to the UK to just relate to more space rather than anything else. Would definitely be interesting to see if ‘big cars’ correlates across nations with wealth in general. I think of them as an almost uniquely American thing, but that’s probably not fair.

        • xtmar says:

          And I’m not sure I see the link between ‘not held down’ and college prep.

          I think a large part of this is the US’s history of racial discrimination, because the people who ended up as janitors were almost inevitably minorities, which has left a deep legacy of distrust. However, I think it also has to do with wider American values. Basically, by putting someone off the college prep track, they’ve forfeited their chance to be part of the elite, be it running Goldman Sachs, running for federal office, or doing groundbreaking research. There are certainly a lot of other rewarding career paths out their, and I think tracking actually has a lot to recommend it, but to deny that being placed on the non-college prep track forfeits a chance to excel is to cling to the most remote of possibilities.

          While I’ve only spent a little time in Europe, my impression is that the reason for why this isn’t seen as quite as divisive is that a) the society is somewhat more focused on end results rather then possibilities b) it’s actually more divisive than people make it out to be on the internet and c) as a legacy of their feudal past. Though c) is obviously somewhat trite, I think people dismiss the historical influences on culture too easily, as they often show up in very weird places, even when the nominal manifestations of these historic practices have disappeared.

          I always took larger houses compared to the UK to just relate to more space rather than anything else.

          That’s certainly a large part of it, because space is comparatively cheap in the US relative to Europe. However, if you look at other areas that aren’t as space dependent, the US still has a somewhat higher standards of living, and certainly a higher per capita GDP over most of the income distribution.

          The other thing is that there is a lot of selection bias in people’s visions of each country that aren’t born out in the numbers. For instance, most American’s have a view of the UK that is basically London and its environs. While this is certainly the most economically and culturally important part of the UK, it’s also by far the highest earning (and most expensive!) part of the Kingdom, and isn’t representative of the UK as a whole. Neither is a Welsh coal town, but the truth is certainly less glamorous than what most American think.

          ETA: Re the cars, depending on the size, American cars are most popular in Canada (obviously), the Americas, and Australia, plus a few places in the Mid-East. However, much like other industries, the auto market is increasingly global for a lot of sub-maximum size models.

      • “The advantage of the American system is that it gives everyone a shot at the top”

        As opposed to what?

        “his means that pretty much everyone theoretically has a shot at Harvard or whatever, ”

        What, theoretically, is keeping people out of Oxford? at one time there was a requirement to know Latin, which wasn’t taught in non-Elite schools. but that finished ages ago.

        • xtmar says:

          As opposed to what?

          As opposed to tracking people into the trades and away from a college prep high school curriculum. Even if they’re theoretically able to apply to Oxford, not having the requisite prior coursework is a practical bar that a tracked system places in the way of their advancement.

          • JBeshir says:

            This isn’t actually routinely done in the UK- there’s calls to provide more ‘vocational’ options at the 16+ level within high schools, and you *can* leave entirely and go to a college 16-18, do a two year vocational thing, and then go on to a moderately prestigious university from that as an alternative path which won’t meet Oxford’s requirements, but it’s unusual and not the default recommendation for anyone.

            You always have the option at 16+ of taking the lots and lots of academic-focused A-levels and learning the interviewing skills that you need to get into Oxford, which will then take the same government-provided automatic student loan for tuition, and get you the same government-provided loan for living off, as any other university. You might be advised against it, if they think you’ll fail due to taking on too much workload, but that doesn’t seem unreasonable.

            Elsewhere in Europe might be different- the UK is a little weird by comparison in a bunch of respects, e.g. it has an unusually short normal undergraduate university degree of only three years, with no ‘liberal arts’ requirements, and an unusually early average graduation age for graduates in the population, whereas at least Scandinavia goes the other way, I think.

          • “As opposed to tracking people into the trades and away from a college prep high school curriculum. ”

            Every system I have heard of that worked that way allowed transfers.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            There are very few people who are practically unable to get into Oxbridge for reasons other than lack of intelligence or conscientiousness. Apart from a few people who live in areas where all the schools are really bad, pretty much anyone can decide they want to go to Oxbridge at the age of 16, and go to a school or college that allows that. Of course, some schools (Eton) send 30% of their students to Oxbridge, whereas others might send 0.3%, but this is a quantitative, not qualitative difference.

      • sabril says:

        I wonder how much American wealth is a result of network effects. If there are a lot of important industries where economics dictate there will be only one or two leading companies or one or two hubs, then a country like the United States may end up having a big advantage in attracting these kinds of hubs and monopolies. Or rather a small advantage which has a tendency to snowball.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I just want to make a meta point that this is a really great example of being charitable to people you disagree with. If everyone was this nice, debates would be so much more productive.

  18. onyomi says:

    Though a matter of consternation for some, I think there are enough libertarians and people interested in libertarianism here to ask a meta-question about libertarian strategy, building upon a comment in the last thread:

    1. What explains the failure of Rand Paul to deliver on the promise of being a more broadly acceptable libertarian candidate?

    2. What is the best political strategy for libertarians, given the current situation (that is, to the extent working within the current system helps, how should we do it)? Can there be any useful coalition with the left and/or blue tribe?

    My tentative answers to 1 are:

    An unusually strong Republican field (whatever else one can say about them, the GOP doesn’t lack for interesting primary candidates this go round), including wild card, Donald Trump, who took away a lot of the red fringe who had been Ron Paul’s allies by default.

    The rest of the field stealing libertarian ideas (think Ted Cruz talking about the gold standard)–a good thing, since, as David Friedman has written, the point of libertarian politics may not be to get actual libertarian party politicians elected, but to steal enough of the vote to force mainstream politicians to start stealing their ideas.

    Rand Paul’s own lack of charisma.

    Lastly, libertarianism has the advantage of (imo) being right, but the disadvantage of not tapping into many visceral political impulses (other than, maybe, that of the impulse to be left alone and not coerced). It’s somewhat inherently anti-tribalistic and has neither the superficial appeal of socialism nor nationalism.

    My tentative answer to number 2 is:

    Keep trying to inject libertarian ideas into mainstream discourse so that more and more politicians are incentivized to steal them. It would be nice if we could get an actual libertarian president at some point, though that seems a lot less likely now than it did a year ago.

    Re. coalitions, I am still deeply skeptical of the efficacy of trying to turn yellow dog Democrats into libertarian voters. Even if we can make a good intellectual argument for why we are not, from their perspective we are just really crazy Republicans. That said, there may be certain issues, like drug legalization and anti-war where there is a better fit for us on the left.

    The strategy of selling different pieces of a libertarian platform to those audiences most willing to listen to them seems, on the surface to be a viable option, though one wonders how much can be achieved if all the blue voters you hope to convince by talking about drugs realize you secretly also want to shrink the government, and all the red voters you convince by talking about shrinking the government realize you mean the military too. The red tribe and the Republicans seem to have thus far been a better fit because, for all their jingoism, they have a more fundamental skepticism of government which is a prerequisite for accepting most aspects of libertarianism, but not sure if it always has to be that way. Silicon Valley and the “grey tribe” seem like a kind of “third way,” but not yet sure how that will work out.

    But I am also interested in others’ answers to 1 and 2, as I’m not entirely satisfied with my own as yet.

    • blacktrance says:

      1. What explains the failure of Rand Paul to deliver on the promise of being a more broadly acceptable libertarian candidate?

      His father is the obvious point of comparison. What was different? The assumption was that Rand could maintain his father’s base while expanding beyond it to more conventional Republicans, but that didn’t work. It seems to me that he lost the libertarian base for two reasons: first, he was seen as excessively compromising with the mainstream of the party, and second, the base itself had become more disillusioned with politics in general (so I don’t think even Ron Paul could’ve gotten his previous level of support if he ran again). He didn’t successfully portray himself as sufficiently anti-establishment to appeal to the generically anti-establishment voters, which would’ve been difficult anyway considering Trump’s successes. And mainstream Republicans already had a lot of candidates to choose from and saw nothing particularly appealing about Rand. The lack of charisma also doesn’t help – Ron Paul could at least tap into “crotchety old man”, which appeals to some (see Bernie Sanders).

      2. What is the best political strategy for libertarians, given the current situation (that is, to the extent working within the current system helps, how should we do it)? Can there be any useful coalition with the left and/or blue tribe?

      We should take every opportunity to advance libertarian causes when they come up, but I don’t think there’s much return to engaging directly in the electoral process, whether by running Libertarians or by supporting libertarian-leaning members of other parties. Broader cultural advocacy seems more promising, maybe by persuading Grey Tribe-adjacent people (e.g. the children of Red Tribers who have already rejected Red Tribe but aren’t Blue) to adopt more libertarian-leaning positions. In some cases, previously taboo behavior could be portrayed as something normal that doesn’t conflict with a middle-class lifestyle (this was done for homosexuality and could be done for marijuana legalization). But I think the biggest benefits may come from outside politics, from indirectly undermining government by building agoric institutions that by design are difficult to control or stamp out.

      • onyomi says:

        “building agoric institutions that by design are difficult to control or stamp out.”

        I used to be somewhat skeptical of this approach, thinking of it as an idealistic shying away from the harsh realities of realpolitik, but am increasingly seeing it as, perhaps, the most effective: Uber and Bitcoin rather than trying to get a better transportation commissioner or Fed Chairman.

        As libertarians, we want to assure the public that better, private institutions will arise if we shrink the government, but maybe the best way to do that is to just set about building the private alternatives now, difficult as governments sometimes make that.

        • An important general point is that the answer will be different for different libertarians—there isn’t one right strategy. If you are good at helping with political campaigns and enjoy doing it, then getting involved in politics, either to use libertarian campaigns to spread ideas or to insert libertarian ideas into the culture of people who do politics, might be the best way you can spread libertarianism.

          If you are good at academic stuff, then working in some relevant field with a libertarian point of view affecting what research you do might be the best way.

          If you are a good novelist …. . Ayn Rand affected a lot of people.

          If you like teaching and are good at it, teaching with ideas informed by your libertarianism might be the best approach.

          If you are an entrepreneur, starting institutions that provide acompetitor for government institutions—UPS, for instance.

          I think one of the reasons people in political movements spend so much time fighting those close to them is the illusion that the movement has a pool of resources and if people are persuaded to follow the wrong strategy, they are wasting “our” resources. But the main resource is volunteer labor. If you persuade someone who hates political activity that that’s the only way to go, the result is not that his time is spent on Rand Paul’s campaign but that he spends his time playing WoW instead. The resources belong to individuals and will be used to spread libertarian ideas only if there is some way that individual can and wants to do it.

        • Seth says:

          Regarding Bitcoin, have you seen the recent post

          https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7
          “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment”

          “Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.”

          That’s not at all assuring.

          I think Bitcoin is a really good case study on mind-fallacy. There’s so much history about currency and its failure-modes. But the evangelists don’t want to hear it, and some (not all, not every one, but some) of them launch into ranting attacks on critics with the full fury of a True Believer. It’s one of the things I believe would drive away almost anyone in the general public. It’s like Gold Buggery for geeks, but with added technological determinism (i.e. the Gold Bugs say “Gold is the only real currency”, but the Bitcoin believers say “Bitcoin *will be* the only real currency”).

          • Raph L says:

            Bitcoin is turning into quite a soap opera. The best thing I’ve read so far in response to Mike Hearn’s rant is this Reddit thread. I think there will be a lot to learn about human nature, economics, and crypto protocols, from the way this all plays out.

    • bluto says:

      Endorsing Mitch McConnell without explanation seems like another factor in 1. His father cultivated an outsider status of doing what he believed was right rather than expedient, and that sort of move seems like the exact opposite.

    • Alraune says:

      I think the dominant factor is simply #DoSomething. A decent chunk of people will find libertarian arguments convincing in a vacuum, but vanishingly few find them motivating, particularly when in a crisis mode. And crisis modes are the only way anything gets done in democracy, and we’re currently in one perpetually.

      Strategy-wise, this suggests a sort of libertarianism-by-omission: the ratchet only goes one direction, but the scope of human affairs is constantly increasing as well, and if we can slow the ratchet to beneath that rate freedom will increase on net. How that’s best done appears to be the source of the post-libertarian split into the “solve the underlying crisis” and “eliminate democracy” camps.

      Edit: Oh yeah, there’s also the cypherpunk camp that thinks the most efficient method is to push the decentralized portions of society to grow even faster.

    • Chalid says:

      1) There’s nothing to explain. Libertarian candidates never get much support. Probably this is because libertarianism isn’t very popular. I doubt this has anything to do with the tactics of Rand Paul’s candidacy.

    • Sastan says:

      I am fairly libertarian, but deeply ambivalent about any impact we can have directly on the political process.

      To 1: I would say all your answers are good, and there’s only one to add: everyone’s a little libertarian, but very few are systematically libertarian. It’s a great set of politics to win arguments with, and a terrible one to govern with. I’ve come to believe that some aspects of libertarian canon are there because they are logical, but violate all known laws of psychology. Haidt’s research backs this up. Libertarians are never going to be a strong political force, because the psychological oddities required will never be widespread. Also, because hyper-dogmatic logical systemizers will always splinter rather than compromise.

      To 2: Throw libertarian ideas at the wall and see what sticks. We’re finally making progress on the War on Drugs. Accept that change will always happen slower than we’d like. Accept that other people have different priorities than we do.

      • onyomi says:

        “Libertarians are never going to be a strong political force, because the psychological oddities required will never be widespread.”

        On the one hand, I’ll agree one probably has to have a certain set of psychological traits in order to be strongly predisposed to libertarianism. On the other, I think history shows that almost any crazy ideology can become a dominant ruling ideology if only it can attain the level of status quo. This is because most people, regardless of their “native” psychological inclinations, largely accept whatever the dominant ideology of their culture happens to be.

        If this were not the case then we’d have to say that the genetic makeup of Texans and Californians was radically different, or that the native psychology of the Germans and Japanese had undergone a seismic shift since the 1940s.

        Maybe the traits which make one inclined towards libertarians are rare enough that not even a critical mass of thought leaders will ever have them or be convinced by the arguments of those who have them, but that is a much more tenuous claim, I think.

        • Sastan says:

          If you want to affect the status quo, you should probably start in the colleges. Whoever indoctrinates the imbecile freshmen controls the social narrative for the next forty years.

    • Jaskologist says:

      I think the real answer is mu: you’re trying to draw a conclusion from far too few data points. The ways of the primary are subtle and mysterious, and it’s rarely clear why a particular candidate failed to catch on. This year in particular had a lot of good candidates, plus the wild card, and all but one of them are fated to lose.

      Basically, if you can’t apply the answer you gave for Rand to Jindal and Walker, it’s probably not valid.

    • John Schilling says:

      I think the elephant in the room here, or elephantine ego at least, is Donald Trump.

      I do not believe that any new political party or movement can achieve success by the efforts of its committed ideologues alone. Much of the necessary support has to come from ambivalent believers, who will support the cause if and only if there isn’t something more important going on, and the generically dissatisfied who will back the most popular protest candidate or third party that isn’t actually opposed to their interests.

      This election cycle, the relevant protest votes are going to Trump (with a side order of Carson and Sanders). And for marginal libertarians who haven’t gone over to the Trump side, stopping Trump is a more important and more plausibly achievable goal than pushing Rand Paul into a third-place finish in the Republican primaries.

      • onyomi says:

        I think this is very true, which is also why I can’t entirely agree with the fatalistic viewpoint which says “only 5% of the population thinks like libertarians, so libertarians will never get more than 5% of the vote.”

        In politics especially, individual personalities (unfortunately) matter a lot. If Rand Paul had had the same positions but been a more charismatic person he might have had a real chance at winning. And historical contingency matters a lot too. If the more charismatic and historically unusual Donald Trump had not happened to run at the same time as Rand, I think he might have had a much better shot at it too.

        I think Chris Christie has suffered this fate as well, actually. In 2012, people were literally begging him to run for the nomination, but he refused, presumably because he didn’t want to run against incumbent Obama. This seemed pretty shrewd at the time. In hindsight I think it doesn’t, as Rand’s decision to compromise his libertarianism in hopes of attracting a wider audience also does not seem shrewd, even though many people, myself included, felt in 2012 that his father might have had a better shot at the nomination if only he’d compromise more (maybe not true even then, but it kind of seemed that way).

    • alexp says:

      I think that a lot of Ron Paul’s supporters weren’t principled supporters of the tenets of libertarianism, but rather people who, for whatever reason, support ‘outsiderness’ or candidates they see as outside the political mainstream. This election cycle, a lot of them are supporting the Anthropomorphic Personification of Crony Capitalism, or even a self-labeled Socialist, instead.

      Though Rand Paul’s campaign was going off the rails even before that.

      • Nathan says:

        FWIW I supported Paul Sr in 2012, despite being very non-libertarian. This year Rand is maybe my 7th pick of the Republicans.

        Part of the reason is I have better options this time (Santorum was a joke, Gingrich was a egotistical scoundrel, and Romney was probably my least favourite politician who wasn’t an actual evil dictator). Part of the reason is that I felt like I knew what I would get with Ron, even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Rand feels more likely to make compromises and I’m not sure what kind of compromises they would be.

  19. Zoned says:

    Can anyone think of a product (preferably a software-type product, though it can be anything) whose features might be different had the designers put special attention into ethical considerations? (E.g., how the product might negatively impact people’s relationships; how the product might help erode important social values; how the product cause users to be less conscientious once they go off and use other products; etc.)

    What is the product, and what features would be different? What ethical considerations are involved?

    (I’m interested in more neutral/sophisticated examples than just “unethical product minus unethical feature” BTW.)

    I’ve been trying to come up with as many examples as I can but for some reason I keep drawing a blank.

    • God Damn John Jay says:

      I got the feeling one of the major goals of Facebook was to allow men to ogle women’s pictures and that the security holes they constantly add (graph search) are in a large part intentional. Not 100% unethical, but a little shady.

    • Jon H says:

      AirBnB seems like one.

      People violating their leases to rent out rooms. People violating the terms of their insurance to rent out rooms. People renting out places on AirBnB that aren’t safe (no smoke alarms, etc). People buying apartments to rent out via AirBnB, to the extent that people who need a place to actually live have a hard time finding a place, and perhaps rents are driven up, harming people who already have apartments. People being evicted by landlords who want to rent the space out via AirBnB. AirBnB renters abusing the properties they stay at, throwing parties, shooting porn flicks, etc.

      How you would control this in the software, or enforce ethics, is beyond me.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Does it count as a responsive answer to the question if you point out things which would never have existed at all if ethics had been a strong consideration at the time of their creation? AirBnB is a good one. The “Stolen” app for Twitter which just died a well-deserved and ignominious death is another.

      • DavidS says:

        I’m really interested in this (and the response to it) which seem to see AirBnB as a clear ‘bad thing’.

        AirBnB seems to me to be a classic case of a disruptive industry in a market that’s usually quite slow-moving, analagous to Uber. And so there are some issues, but also a lot of resistance by people with vested interests. But I’m happy to be convinced otherwise.

        Specifically, on your issues
        1) People breaking landlord/insurance terms. This is obviously breaking law/contract, but not convinced it’s an ethical issue beyond that. I’m always dubious of e.g. rules against sub-letting which have no link to end results (wear and tear etc.) Ban on resale is always a bit of an odd beast in capitalist systems
        2) Safety is obviously an issue, though there’s a quesiton about transparency/choice. And no worse than it being used for other purposes, obviously
        3) I’m inclined to think housing needs more regulation than other areas as its stock is more inherently limited. But it seems to me that Air B’n’B should be a much more efficient way of meeting demand for short-term stays than alternatives. The real issue is surely things like people keeping holiday homes that they just leave except for a month a year etc.
        4) Feels like a matter for contract between person renting out their place and other party. Not sure what Air B’n’B could or should do about it.

        • brad says:

          There’s a lot that could be said and I think I could defend the law part at least to a certain extent, but just to concentrate on the ethics of breaking a contract point:

          I don’t take the position that it is everywhere and always an ethical obligation to perform contracts, but there’s a big difference between efficient breach due to changed circumstances, particularly if you quickly pay your expectancy damages, and entering into a contract in bad faith from the start–perhaps with a fake name or straw third party–and then take advantage of every tenant protection mechanism in the book to avoid getting evicted, much less paying damages. The shady guy that rents out a dozen apartments to list them on AirBnB isn’t some brilliant entrepreneur making an honest buck, he’s an unethical scumbag burning social trust to make unearned dollar. To the extant that AirBnB makes a huge portion of their revenue from these guys, and know or should know that they are, they are unethical as well.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Yeah, the de facto hotels that have sprung up in NYC is the example that was brought immediately to mind when reading the post by DavidS.

          • DavidS says:

            Oh sure: but I wasn’t aware this was a big part of what Air B’n’B was. I know people who live in apartments but rent them out sometimes. Some of these people own, sometimes fully, sometimes in leasehold. Others rent. I don’t know what the T+Cs are with landlords. But then, all the people I know who live with a bunch of housemates seem to be in contracts that mean that if one person leaves the rest have to share his part of the rent and the landlord can drag out the process of vetting a replacement indefinitely. In practice, they tend to just find replacements and not tell the landlord.

            Not aware of these ‘de facto hotels’. Not sure if that’s an issue where I am (London). Also, as with Uber, you do wonder if this is terrible abuse or just a symptom of regulation being a bit outdated.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @DavidS:

            Here is an article that looks at it from the other side. Landlords are breaking leases to convert their buildings into AirBnB hotels.

            I have to think this is going both ways, although, the power available to a landlord seems likely to mean it goes more this way than tenants abusing landlords and other tenants.

    • I get the impression from what I read about Tinder that its main function is setting up casual sex. If its creators believed that lots of casual sex was on the whole a bad thing—a defensible position, whether or not a correct one—they might have designed it in ways more likely to promote longer term relationships. How I have no idea.

      Of course, it might also have then been a lot less successful.

      • Joeleee says:

        This is a bit OT from the original post, but I don’t think Tinder is about casual sex, even though there’s a lot of it. I see it as a substitute for traditional avenues of meeting partners. Yes, there may be more casual sex through Tinder than there used to be in these traditional avenues, but there’s also more casual sex now in these traditional avenues.

        For me Tinder is very similar to many other ways of meeting people for romantic purposes. You make a decision on whether to engage with someone based on how they look, attempt to strike up a conversation and use this imperfect information to decide whether it’s a relationship you would like to pursue. For some this pursuit means only sex, for some it means sex possibly leading to something, and for others it means the desire for a deeper connection.

        In short, I don’t think Tinder creates a great deal more demand or supply for casual sex, but provides a better market for all romantic relationships, an increasingly larger number of which are simply casual sex.

      • Tibor says:

        I tried installing Tinder on my phone after a friend told me about it. One thing I really did not like about it was the necessity to log in through a facebook account…which I have but I keep it empty (I use it as a notice board for events around me and I use the chat function with some people) and I would at least have to have photos there if I were using Tinder.

        Other than that, I mostly decided it was not very helpful based on two things. A) There were very few female users in my age group and area (which surprised me as I live in a student town) B) I talked about Tinder with a friend who tried it. She said that she was on two dates with guys she saw on Tinder but that she found out she could not judge whether she would find someone attractive in person from photos only. I pointed out that when you meet someone in a bar or more or less everywhere, you first decide whether you are going to go talk to him/her based on the looks as well. But she said that there is a lot that a photo cannot capture and that a look at someone in person can – such as the way he behaves and moves and so on. I guess there is something to that.

        However, I also don’t think that Tinder is necessarily a one night stand app. I find the various dating sites with loads of detailed information rather tedious. I suppose that a list of favourite books or films can tell me something about the other person but not something I would not notice after a short conversation (in person). Tinder seems to be above all an app designed to make people meet a lot of other people in person. I guess that this is less practical if you are extremely busy and don’t have, say, an hour or two a week to meet someone.

        It is true though that Tinder does have a reputation of being a sex app. In fact, I noticed that some users explicitly mention “no one night stands” or something similar in the short description one can optionally provide there with their photos.

        Anyway, I came to a conclusion that since I like dancing (salsa) and a lot of men don’t (while probably most women do), the best way for me to meet women is to go to salsa evenings and dance. It is also more fun than to go through profiles online. Inviting someone to a dance also provides a more natural way to start a conversation than just trying to talk to strangers in a bar or even some place where people do not expect you to meet new people. One just has to learn dancing a bit, but I would go to the dancing course one way or another.

        • Chalid says:

          This probably varies by location, demographic, who you swipe on and what signals your own photo sends, etc.

          There are definitely people who use it as a casual sex app.

      • bartlebyshop says:

        Everyone I know using Tinder (physics grad students) is using it try to find relationships. Some, like my gay friend, because they don’t want to do “the Grindr thing” and haven’t had success on OKC. Others (the straight guys) would probably have casual sex if they could find partners regularly enough but from what I hear they have “settled” for looking for girlfriends. A few women I know who used it used it to find relationships (I don’t know a lot of women interested in men who are also into hook ups).

        I think there are two pretty disconnected subclusters on the service: people who hate OKC but want a mono/low-commitment relationship, and the people hooking up on it.

    • Jiro says:

      Ashley Madison.

      (Unless you’re a utilitarian who wants to maximize happiness and deduces that as long as an affair is kept hidden from the person who would be upset by it, it doesn’t reduce happiness.)

    • Jaskologist says:

      Free-to-play games with purchasable add-ons, which are often designed to snare certain segments into addictively spending way, way more than they should on the game.

      Change: max out in-game purchases at $1,000.

      • Heh. My 5yo son accidentally spent $400 on such a game. The game itself is perfectly inoffensive, but the bonus packages are ridiculously overpriced. I’m still disputing it with my credit card company.

      • Loquat says:

        I’ll add to that games with pay-to-open “lockboxes” that generally yield random loot with a miniscule chance of getting something really good but rarely publish the odds of actually getting the good stuff. They’re a staple of the free-to-play MMORPG genre precisely because some people, particularly those prone to having a gambling problem, wind up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on them.

        Minor Change: actually publish the odds
        Serious Change: get rid of lockboxes in MMOS entirely – if you want to make money off online gambling just have an online casino

        • Marc Whipple says:

          As many of the people here doubtless know this (random positive reinforcement) is the most effective way to get somebody to keep gambling. (Although determining the actual appropriate volatility level is a deep, dark art and highly context-dependent.) And if you salt the paytable during the user’s initial habit formation, you can get quite a lot of people seriously hooked.

          In actual regulated gaming, this is why there are anti-lure regulations as well as strict requirements to make the paytable known to the player. Not sure how much it actually helps, but I think it’s a pretty ethically valuable thing to do.

          • suntzuanime says:

            This idea of salting the paytable during habit formation reminds me of the most recent Magic: the Gathering set, which has randomly distributed ultra-rare ultra-valuable “expedition cards” that you can open in your booster packs. I opened two of them during the prerelease, and haven’t opened any since. Now, this could just be small numbers talking, because they are rare and I haven’t opened that many packs, but I have to wonder if maybe Wizards of the Coast is trying to scam its players by upping the number of expeditions in the prerelease packs.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @suntzuanime:

            It’s not uncommon for large releases of such things to just be messed up due to poor planning or quality control, so if I were you unless I’m hearing that from a lot of other people I’d write it off as either a) chance or b) bad shuffling.

          • I’ve long thought that WoW would be more fun if, in contexts where the loot you expect to get is below the level of what you are already wearing, there was some small probability of getting something really good.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @David Friedman:

            This is in fact the case. There are several ways that killing a mob far below your level might give you something you needed/wanted. There are World Drops, there are plot-related rare items, and now with Transmogrification you might go a-hunting for something that just looks really cool and then have the ability to power it up for current use. 🙂

            But as far as “Level 22 mob drops Level 100 thing one in a thousand times,” no, that doesn’t happen. Is that the sort of thing you meant?

          • Yes.

            I agree that transmogrification meets my requirement for people who care a lot about the appearance of their gear.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Okay. You’re right, a little more of that would probably make WoW more “fun” if by fun you mean “engaging at various levels,” or “addictive.” It would sure make multi-charactering a lot more enjoyable, since after the first couple leveling is more or less a complete and utter grind for most people.

            Note that Transmogrification and World Drops also provide things which are highly salable for grinders (or just the lucky,) even if they don’t want the things themselves. Money is a pretty universal incentive. 🙂

          • Sivaas says:

            Hooray, something I actually feel qualified to comment on!

            Blizzard has actually taken this a step further: there are “warforged” drops that are slightly-better versions of raiding gear, but much rarer (as well as a few other ways items can be randomly-better-than-stock). This helps break up the monotony of clearing a raid you already have most of the gear from, because that small increase in power often pushes an item you wouldn’t normally consider up into the realm of possibility (and since there are three separate things that can boost power and an item can have all three at the same time, there’s always that tiny hope of the perfect item).

            The world drops Marc mentions are also pretty relevant, because they often represent a significant boost earlier in the expansion, and they can drop from just questing in the world, which is a pretty big difficulty step down from raiding.

            Typically the stuff that can drop at real low levels is “neat-to-have” stuff like pets and transmog rather than actually important gear, because it’s rather unpleasant to be forced into mass-farming low-level content as an endgame player, and that’s certainly what people will do if there are relevant drops there (and they’ll do it much more efficiently than someone playing through at the appropriate level).

            I think one of the things Blizzard has done pretty cleverly that I don’t see in other games is revisiting content: they’ve added rare nice-to-have drops to old raids, they’ve added the transmog system to incentivize going back and getting outdated gear, and now they have a system where they scale you down to the level of old dungeons to revisit them. It’s a rather effective way of stretching out the amount of player time spent per each development hour.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Sivaas:

            Yep. I forgot about Warforged stuff (I haven’t been playing much lately.)

            For fun, here are my mains:

            http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kirin-tor/Rahand/simple

            http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/blackwater-raiders/Rallandan/simple

            (I also have a Level 100 Hunter.)

            Note that each only has one piece of Warforged gear at the moment, which were World Drops in Bonus Objective zones. That does provide a little incentive to grind them. As does the upgrade scheme, although frankly I think the upgrade path is WAY TOO TEDIOUS. I understand why, but Blizzard seems to have no setting between “If you want BiS you need to play six hours a day, every day, for two months to get the wootzits to finish the upgrade” and “okay, now that all the grinders have it here’s a barrel of wootzits, you’ll be done by tomorrow. We’ll throw in a free cup of Grinder Tears of Outrage.”

            Once I get into an Open Loop on a piece of gear or a mount or something, I can be pretty bloody-minded about it. (You will note that I have the achievements “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been,” “On Wings of Nether,” and “For the Alliance!” among other insanity) But for whatever reason that hasn’t happened for a while. I didn’t play for several months after maxing out in WoD. Then my wife, who collects pets, wanted flying in Draenor, so I helped her grind it out (and got it for myself.) Then I stopped again. I probably won’t play much until Legion comes out.

          • Sivaas says:

            Marc:

            I’ll forgo a link for fear of the spam filter, but my main is Sivaas@Thrall. I play the game pretty seriously.

            I actually disagree with you on the catch-up mechanics: I think it’s really important to allow people to have shortcuts to current content to avoid coming back to the game and immediately being turned off by being six months behind everyone else. Starting raid gear in the expansion was 655, and a current moderate-level raider would be in about 715 gear. Getting from 655 to 715 now would be a monumental task, especially because many of the intermediate steps (previous tier raids) are rarely if ever run. So Blizzard makes it easy to get 695 gear, which is good but still quite a bit below 715. That helps current raiders (because we always need new recruits, and we still have a big edge over people who haven’t been playing) as well as returning players (because their grind back to current-level raiding is manageable).

            And typically the rare “nice-to-have” things like Ashes of A’lar remain exceedingly rare, forcing people to invest luck or time. The only system I can think of that sorta matches your pattern is Apexis Crystals, but those weren’t a realistic path to good upgrades at launch, it was more a broken, uninteresting system that Blizzard fixed into something interesting (and even as a grinder, I really appreciate fast wootzits on my other characters).

      • Kaj Sotala says:

        Here’s a fun essay that chronicles some of the “dirty tricks” that F2P games use to get people to pay.

        Including:

        Premium Currencies. Have people buy things using an in-game currency, rather than real money directly, so that it doesn’t feel like using actual cash. As a bonus, you can offer a bulk discount on the purchase of the premium currency, so that the player feels that they’re saving money by buying a lot of it at once.

        Disguise a money game as a skill game. E.g. have easy starting levels that are straightforward to beat, gradually increasing the difficulty, until at later levels you need to buy powerups in order to have a reasonable chance of beating them:

        If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game.

        Reward Removal. Give the player a reward, and then threaten to take it away unless they pay money, exploiting loss aversion. E.g. let them play for an hour or more, accumulating rewards throughout the levels, and then have them face a boss battle where they’re very likely to lose… and have all their hard work and rewards from the last hour wasted, unless they pay a small amount of money to keep it.

        Progress gates. Require the player to spend money in order to proceed in the game. This doesn’t necessarily involve any trickery… but it’s possible that it does, e.g. if the extra content unlocked behind the progress gate is mostly one of a money game where it was a skill game before, with there being a calculation that sunk costs are going to push people into buying more boosts once they’ve already paid to enter the money game area once.

        Non-transparent boosts. Allow in-game purchases (“boosts”) to be “merged” to obtain more powerful boosts, but make it hard to figure out exactly how rare/expensive some of the boosts needed for the combos are. As a result, a player may end up investing hundreds of dollars before realizing that in order to get the high-level boost they were going for, they may need to spend thousands of dollars.

        Ante games. Allow players to spend money to boost how well they do; then have the players compete against each other while keeping this option enabled, so anyone can spend more money to boost their position relative to the others. This is kinda like turning dollar auctions into a game mechanic.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          That second one is why I stopped playing Clash of Clans. Once you get to a certain level you will be raided and lose resources faster than you can accumulate them and further progress becomes almost impossible unless you buy additional resources.

          Right now my game-on-the-train is Dungeon Boss, which does not appear to have this problem. Once you reach max level, it becomes difficult to get significant quantities of the in-game currency* that you use for powerups, but you can still progress and more importantly you do not feel like you are constantly losing ground.

          *The two main ways you get it are either to buy it with real money, or as a reward for completing levels. Once you’ve completed all the levels it becomes much harder to get. There are other ways to get it so it still trickles in, just slowly.

        • JBeshir says:

          Some more general tricks, including outside the monetisation itself, to keep people hooked and not walking away in another article from the same site here.

          A particularly interesting addition to the above list, for me, was:

          The open loop. Tadhg Kelly, a brilliant social game consultant, explains that many social games are built around our innate desire to complete tasks, to close loops. Those games are offering the player to complete lots of small tasks: to plant carrots and harvest them, to complete a construction, to gather enough resources to finish off an upgrade, to “hire” enough friends to staff a building, etc.

          The player never has enough resources — energy points, gold, lumber, oil, etc. — to complete them. Those are free to acquire, but they need time to build up, so the player, when she logs off her game, knows that she leaves behind uncompleted tasks, open loops.

          Her dearest desire becomes to return to the game to close the open loops. And, of course, as soon as a loop is closed, another one is created. It is a never-ending story. Well-designed F2Ps generate endless number of tasks. The result is that the player logs in the game very often, but only plays a few minutes at a time.”

          It’s very much targeted, not as an expose, but as advice to people making things. I was looking for advice on designing a thing at the time I came across all this stuff. I don’t think I found anything I felt was both applicable and, well, moral, at the time, though.

          • Kaj Sotala says:

            You can also see open loops behind the addictiveness of some games sold under a more traditional business model, e.g. the classic “one more turn” phenomenon of the Civilization series. I’ve gotten sufficiently allergic to the pattern that any major amount of them (a small number is fine) will easily turn me off a game these days.

            Which is part of the reason why 4X games have stopped being one of my favorite genres. I liked to play them for the sense of wonder and scale and the feeling of building an empire, but I e.g. gave Civilization V a few tries and my experience was mostly “EXPLICIT OPEN LOOPS EVERYWHERE” and it made it *way* too obvious that the game was ultimately just about maximizing arbitrary numbers. It stopped being fun and started being stressful.

            Not sure whether the older iterations actually had *fewer* open loops, but at least they were less obvious. Civ II didn’t constantly show you the number of turns before a city would reach the next size, for example – you had to go to the city screen and calculate it yourself if you wanted to know. These days a lot of 4X games in general seem like they’re basically just exercises in building as many open loops as possible, and making sure that the player is aware of them so that they’ll stay hooked.

          • Leit says:

            Fallout 4’s Minutemen faction are made of this. “A settlement needs your help. Let me mark it on your Pip-Boy” has become the most recognisable meme generated by the game so far, and it’s turned Preston Garvey into one of the most ridiculed NPCs in recent memory.

            Settlement building is another issue. “Remember that spot where you planted a recruitment beacon 2 weeks back? Yeah, they need like 12 beds, a water purifier, a bunch of turrets and some crops now”. And Odin help you if you don’t respond to one of the easy-to-miss settlement attack popups, because then everything is screwed and you get to do it all over again.

            Oh, and most of the stuff you need to set up decent settlements comes from junk that you collect from the repopulating dungeons. Seriously, if you don’t ignore Concord entirely, 4 feels like an offline MMO.

            Beth plz. Gief Obsidian.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Leit:

            I’m not even sure how addictive these things are. I think the ultimate example of “this is tedious and basically mandatory and I have no idea how anybody thought this would be fun” is planet mining in Mass Effect 2. You have to do it for the points you get, and it sucks.

            The settlement system in Fallout 4 is garbage in its design (they couldn’t just give an isometric view, and make it easier to assign people and view all assigned settlers?), the opposite of fun, and I’m not even sure what it does for the player. I’ve been doing it anyway, because the game clearly wants me to, but I’ve kind of gotten bored of Fallout 4. The main story is the opposite of compelling, and while they’ve done a great job of building a 3D, convincing ruined city, everything else is just kind of sterile.

            Beyond the Skinner Box type addictive stuff, I think it’s a huge problem that “you will spend upwards of 60-90 hours playing this game!” has become a selling point.

          • Leit says:

            @dndnrsn

            How fun was farming for firemarks in WoW’s Cata expansion? Or the endless rep grind that basically *was* the MoP launch? But people did it anyway. Okay, WoW’s got the social element and a lot of inertia behind it, so there’s that.

            ME2’s planet mining was really, really shallow, but at least it was quick. You could core out a world in less time than drinking a glass of water.

            4’s settlements, on the other hand, are a slog. Part of that is, as you point out, the terrible interface. More of it is the obtuse requirements and constant, ongoing upkeep requirements. As you say, the disease of needing to be able to put “x hour experience!!1one!” on the back of the box.

            There are people who enjoy it, though! There are folks who manage amazing things with the scraps they’ve been offered, and who spend hours crafting the glittering spires of tomorrow out of driftwood and prefab shacks. Thing is, those guys are usually using mods to remove the time-sucking make-work aspect and/or the game’s own restrictions in order to just play in more or less sandbox mode.

            The game wants you to engage in shack-building and pushes it at every opportunity because there’s not a whole lot of game there, honestly speaking. There’s virtually no replay value due to the way perks, path choice and conversation were implemented, so all the game has is amazing exploration* and the Skinner box. They dived head-first into this cycle of settlement support, either because of or in order to mitigate the design choices they made.

            * And I mean that. Beth does their best storytelling in the little vignettes you find lying about the wasteland. Also ruined Boston looks incredible from the op of a crumbling tower.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Leit:

            I never played WoW, so I wouldn’t know about that.

            I’m not sure if RPGs have more grind than they used to. I know that when I went back and played Fallout 1 and 2 (which I had loved in my teens) I thought “gee, there’s a lot of combat”. They’re still great games, but you spend a lot of time in turn-based combat. I’d love to play Planescape: Torment again for the story, but same issue. Real-time combat like Mass Effect and the current generation of Fallout at least makes the combat feel like less of a slog. So I might be falling victim to nostalgia when I complain about grind and busywork in games.

            Still, it feels like “hundreds of hours of gameplay!” is a newish selling point, and stuff like mining/resource collection/crafting seems like a new thing (is it an MMO-influenced element?)

            And it’s hardly solely an RPG thing either – think of GTA and all the roaming around finding secret packages, all the odd jobs you can do, all the side missions, etc.

          • Leit says:

            Hmm… “x hours gameplay” isn’t really new. I remember it as a reaction to the rash of games a decade or more ago that were basically very pretty tech demos with nice setpiece trailers.

            Torment is on my favourites list too. Thing is, though, it plays more like an interactive novel than a turn-based RPG, and the real-time with pause combat style is definitely faster than waiting for 68 thugs to run their 6 steps forward in New Reno. More to the point, building a combat munchkin in PS:T is probably the least effective way to play, and the old isometric Fallout games particularly were friendly to the idea of a pacifist run – you could finish the entire game without firing a single shot if you so desired.

            That depth has been lost completely in 4. It’s all about crawling dungeons to kill raiders and gather materials. That’s why I call it MMO-inspired… the principle where there’s all this content available, but your choices in approaching it amount to Go Kill All These Mobs Now or Do That Later. Or preferably, from the designer’s point of view, both.

            As an aside, have you been keeping up with the news on Torment:Numenera? Looks like it’ll have combat purely as flashpoint setpieces.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Leit:

            As an aside, have you been keeping up with the news on Torment:Numenera? Looks like it’ll have combat purely as flashpoint setpieces.

            I am, but on the other hand I bought the combo pack with Wasteland 2, and I only played about an hour of that one. I just couldn’t get into it. I’ll check out the Director’s Cut at some point.

            I really do want to finish Planescape: Torment at some point, but the interface is pretty frustrating. And the morality system is not very clear in regard to things like lying making you chaotic.

            I’m interested in Numenera’s “tides” system. It’s definitely original. But I’m also skeptical of whether it will really work. Will the moral choices really be interesting with such a weird system? I don’t find any of the tides especially compelling.

            In contrast, there was a discussion just recently here of the Magic: The Gathering ethical/magical system. And that’s still a pretty unique take, but the different “colors” are more compelling in themselves.

        • switchnode says:

          Ooh! Are we sharing long articles about Skinner-box freemium?

          The System
          who killed videogames? (a ghost story)

          Tapped In (also contains discussion of actual casino gambling)

          (I’m not as vehement about the phenomenon as having multiple favorite posts on the subject suggests, but they make for awfully interesting reading.)

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      Most examples I’m thinking of were created into order to bypass ethical considerations of a previous industry. Like the taxi industry now trying to impose their regulations upon ridesharing companies.

      Every time Tumblr puts out a change to their interface, there’s a huge bemoaning over how this changes the Tumblr experience from how people had optimized before, and how this contrasts with other previous fandom-popularized social media platforms, like Livejournal.

      For that matter, Dreamwidth was created to address the ethical concerns fandoms had with Livejournal. Similarly, you can compare and contrast the various fanfiction repositories, and how each pick a different issue to address, and how that changes the audience they eventually accrue. fanfiction.net banned script fics, real-person fics, and certain levels of explicitly-depicted sex. AO3 was initially invite only, and so is concentrated around fandoms that the creators belonged to, as well as having a certain minimum level of writing quality. Wattpad has commenting at any point of the text, so reactions are more “real-time” than review-based, which would also incentivize more moments-based writing. Mediaminer requires a birthday check to ensure 18+ age readers.
      You can look at the different features for each notable fan-site for a single fandom. Comment/moderation policies and convention harassment policies.

      Away from fandom dynamics, aren’t we seeing an example of this evolve over time right now with the discussion of self-driving car ethics?

      And finally, example email, and some of the things trying to replace it.

      • Zoned says:

        Aside from the “will your driverless car save your life or those of the busfull of schoolkids” scenarios, what other ethical discussion is there WRT driverless cars?

        I’ve proposed several other ethical considerations there but I haven’t really seen any addressed widely besides the one I noted above.

        • arbitrary_greay says:

          Perhaps not a traditional ethics problem, but self-driving cars are too law-abiding, which is enabling accidents.

          And then on the “legal practicalities” side, who gets sued? Can people be criminalized for their cars?

          • Loquat says:

            When I was first learning to drive, my mother used to remind me that the speed limit was a LIMIT, not a FLOOR.

            I guess that google car that got pulled over for doing 24 mph in a 35 zone and backing up traffic was following the same philosophy.

        • Anonymous says:

          I must admit I’m baffled when people talk about self-driving cars as though the ethical/legal questions they bring up are totally novel. I would have thought that the question of who is legally responsible when a machine goes wrong has been asked and answered and written into the laws many, many times in the past – no?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            From a legal point of view, the way we (lawyers/the legal system) determine whether something is negligence or gross negligence or willful act is sort of weird and complicated and often heavily fact-dependent. By and large, we do have a pretty good system. But since there aren’t a lot of precedential fact patterns and/or laws for self-driving cars, yes, we’re going to have to have a lot of legal arguments before we know what the rules are. We’ll analogize to semi-autonomous factory robots and remote-controlled whatchamacallits… and then the courts will tell us whether they like our analogies or not.

            Ethically, it’s not anything all that super novel, no, but since new technology rarely has such a wide-ranging, immediate and profound ethical association as self-driving cars promise to have, it will likely produce a lot of similar “this time it’s different” and “no it isn’t” arguments.

            In my opinion.

          • Zoned says:

            I don’t think the ethical problems caused by driverless cars are novel. But the fact that the problems were raised in another context, and the fact that people get all excited and hyped up about new technologies like driverless cars, means that when they don’t get raised about driverless cars people forget about them and it’s as if the problems were never discussed.

    • grort says:

      Wall Street comes immediately to mind. If the designers (of the trading software, or of the relevant laws) had been more interested in ethics, they would have found a way to prevent high-frequency trading. Also “leverage”.

      News, as a field. Most news programs operate by finding the most outrageous or terrifying anecdotes and telling us about those. I want a news show that works on the level of trends and statistics, and trying to understand why they happen.

      Politics. Why don’t we have a solution for gerrymandering? Why don’t we have campaign finance reform?

      Advertising. Good advertising would say: “Here’s a product you didn’t know anything about previously. Here’s how it works. Maybe you should try it!” Most in-practice advertising consists of brand names attached to warm-and-fuzzy-feeling-invoking scenes.

      I’m worried that none of these things quite answer your question, because you’re looking for things where the designers were careless about ethics, and I’m describing things where the designers deliberately did questionable things in order to get more money. This is what I’ve got, though.

  20. BillG says:

    Question for the Christian 12%:

    Assume I have an above layman’s understanding of the bible, was raised in a mainstream protestant church and left the church relatively young. My understanding of the major debates between denominations is lacking and, though I have broad philosophical leanings, I also have not formed a nuanced enough viewpoint on scripture, tradition and etc to really have an opinion. But, I’m the type that will ultimately have such an opinion.

    Now, I’m considering rejoining a church. How would you approach learning about these? Would you join a church first? Study until you had a stronger understanding first? If so, what would you review?

    Obviously don’t want sniping between denominations, but looking for starting points.

    • Zoned says:

      Disclaimer: I’m Jewish. But, I attended church 1+ times/week for several months about a year ago, knowing very little about the differences in denominations. The church I attended was Baptist–but not Southern Baptist–and it felt very self-helpy. “Jesus will give you strength to help you through the terrible problems you’re having” etc. As I understand it, most other denominations are not like that.

      Later a friend explained that the differences between several types of Protestantism (I forget which ones exactly but they included Calvinism and Lutheranism) involved disagreements over freewill and therefore over the nature of sin and redemption. I don’t remember which sects had which views.

      Sorry, that’s probably not as helpful an answer as you were looking for, but hopefully it’s enough to narrow your search a bit?

      • Jiro says:

        I suspect that disagreements over the nature of sin and redemption will make absolutely no difference for the majority of people attending a church. People don’t go to church as an intellectual exercise and don’t follow the logical consequences of the church’s teachings in such detail.

        • Jaskologist says:

          This is correct. The most noticeable differences by far will be stylistic. A liturgical service in the Catholic or Lutheran style will be very different from a church with a rock band up front, which is different still from a black Pentecostal church. Most people don’t know the theological details.

          • Bill G says:

            But most are also not the type to read SSC and ask about them 😉

          • Zoned says:

            Good point. The decision is really about the kind of experience you want.

            As Hank Hill said of mixing rock bands with Jesus, “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity any better, you’re only making rock-n-roll worse?”

    • The Anonymouse says:

      I’ve always figured that at a first blush, a good idea is to look at a church’s flock. Do they seem happy? Do they form strong, stable families? Do they make strong communities? Do they act like they believe in their church, or do they show up for easy-listening guitar concerts?

      “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit,” and all that. If a church bears good fruit in terms of its attendees, it’s worth a longer look.

      • Wrong Species says:

        If that is your criteria then Mormons should seem to win easily. The problem is that you are also probably going to be more isolated from non-Mormons. That could be a positive or a negatives depending on how you look at it.

        • tinduck says:

          There is also the risk of being more isolated from non-Mormons, and while having a greater risk of being kicked out of the church compared to other denominations. Mormons run a tight ship from my anecdotal understanding.

          I don’t think I would risk my social structure in such a way.

    • hlynkacg says:

      I guess my first suggestion would be to consider who you know. Are there friends or co-workers you can talk to?

      In my case I was fortunate in that I had a lot of opportunities through my old job and local veterans’ organizations to meet volunteers from the various congregations around town.

      If you have the time go looking for volunteer gigs, or see if any of them host a Wednesday night softball game or some such. Those are usually a good way to get a feel for the sort of people you’re dealing with while keeping your options open. Generally speaking noone’s going to turn away fresh coffee and a helping hand, and if they do, they aren’t people you want to be hanging out with anyway.

    • Calico says:

      That you read this blog, means Unitarian Universalism is probably for you.

      • Bill G says:

        I’m curious why you say that. I grew up around some Unitarian Universalists and my, admittedly unstudied, viewpoint on them tended to be that they had great features in terms of acceptance and willingness to discuss new approaches, but ultimately lacked much of a “firm” viewpoint.

        • Winfried says:

          That’s exactly why I left the churches I grew up in.

          Too much wishy washy feel good messages with only exhortations to tithe more faithfully to season the meal.

          If I’m going to be part of a church, I want it to be a real church with substance and not just a social meeting place.

    • JPA says:

      Church denomination geek here. My first practical recommendation would be to sit in on a church for a while. Talking in person is a good way to see what people actually pay attention to, and it’ll help you figure out what you like and don’t like about the service types and cultures. After that, many churches have discussion groups to talk with other people and develop theological view in the presence of some sanity checking. I would hold off on joining a small group until you have some level of confidence that you like the church.

      If you don’t have a summary of the culture and theology of denominations, a summary might be helpful. I’ll try to summarize everything, because I’m crazy. We’ll start with the mainline Protestantism we both probably know most about and work out.

      Most mainline protestant churches have fairly overlapping views on a lot of the things that to me seem the most important (eg: liberal interpretations of scripture) but the traditional disagreements still exist.

      Methodism: (Mine) Widest variance of the mainline denominations, usually very reflective of the surrounding population. Theologically focused on grace.

      Episcopalianism: Very high-church with the most traditional worship. Of mainline protestants, they’re the closest to the catholic church in doctrine, but much more liberal.

      Presbyterians: Split into PCUSA (liberal) and PCA (evangelical). The most theologically distinct, they hold with the interesting, but usually discomforting doctrine of predestination.

      Lutheranism: (Least knowledge personally) I’m under the impression that the theology is more focused on sin and salvation through grace than the other mainline denominations. Can’t speak much the the culture.

      These liberal denominations usually ordain women and welcome lgbt people. Next is the evangelical cluster, which tend to not do those things. Either despite or because of this, they are growing rather than shrinking. To this group belong most of the mega-churches and it’s where you’ll find bands with drums and guitars replace choirs and hymnals (on average). Sola scriptura defines the theology.

      Baptists are traditionally separated by adult baptism, but biblical inerrancy has become the more serious division.

      Non-denominational churches belong in this category. They are usually very close to baptists.

      Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are a separate cluster not defined by theology and are, … probably not for someone with a philosophical bent.

      Catholicism: Salvation through faith and works and the lack of sola scriptura differentiate Catholic theology. Liberation theology was born here, but was stamped out in favor of an orthodoxy that nevertheless would surprise someone familiar with Protestant Evangelical theology with it’s nuance and non-literal interpretations. Mass is an acquired taste coming from Protestantism.

      Eastern Orthodoxy: Split from Catholicism over the issue of the Pope. They emphasize early Church teachings. In the US, most churches reflect the cultures and languages their immigrant populations. Even the heavily Americanized church I visited was so traditional as to be unrecognizable.

      How’d I do? I’d be happy to talk more.

      • How’d I do? I’d be happy to talk more.

        I’m a Jew who has been fascinated for years with the denominational variation in American Christianity, and I think your summary is very good.

        Lutherans (a particular interest of mine) used to be divided up by ethnicity and geography; changes in recent years have changed that to divisions based on political/cultural ideology.

        As of a generation-plus ago, the ALC was mostly Scandinavian and Minnesota-focused, and the LCA was more German and Pennsylvania-focused. The small Wisconsin synod (WELS), which still exists, was and is very German and extremely traditional. The Missouri synod (LCMS), mostly German, was the largest, and used to be considered middle-of-the-road.

        (Though many people associate Lutheranism with the Scandinavian countries, where it has been the official state religion, most American Lutherans are of German ancestry.)

        Starting in the 1970s, the Missouri synod took a hard turn toward the right, while the LCA (traditionally moderate) became more liberal. A liberal minority of the Missouri synod split off into its own group. In 1988, the Missouri defectors, the ALC, and the LCA, all merged into a new mostly liberal Lutheran denomination called the ELCA.

        The three remaining groups, then, are the ELCA (left, and now the largest), the Missouri synod (right), and the Wisconsin synod (traditionalist, and smallest).

        I haven’t looked at the numbers in years, but working with county-level data in the 1980s, I noticed a fairly strong negative correlation between percent Lutheran population and homicide death rate. At that time, North Dakota, which is by far the most Lutheran state in the USA, had consistently the lowest homicide rate year after year.

        • alexp says:

          I remember a quote to the effect that Protestant Churches will Schism at the drop of a hat, and then schism again decades later over how the hat was dropped.

      • Bill G says:

        JPA and Laura, these are great! Thank you.

        My hunch was toward sitting in on different services. My concern was that doing so would make it more challenging to be intellectually honest about my conclusions. That is, the one with the friendly Priest and the great men’s group would all of a sudden start sounding correct about all of their theology.

        Starting from at least this background is a great guide, thank you!

        • JPA says:

          There are sometimes inter/non-denominational bible studies. I think the concern about intellectual honesty is a good one. Keep in mind that every denomination has good priests and good groups somewhere.

      • keranih says:

        Catholicism: Salvation through faith and works and the lack of sola scriptura differentiate Catholic theology.

        A quibble/word in your ear, regarding the Catholic pov – Salvation comes from God, full stop. A human is incapable of generating sufficient worth to be worthy of salvation on their own, no matter what they did or how hard they tried. Having said that – a person who says ‘I will follow god and do right’ will, if they actually mean it demonstrate that “doing right” through their actions, not just their words or thoughts. And the actions of doing the right thing are useful to humans to put down the muscle memory of not being a nasty little shit, and instead being someone who helps people, is kind, etc.

        From the inside, it’s very difficult to see how one could think that Catholics hold salvation comes from works, but it’s evidently not as clear from the outside, because people keep saying it. It’s still a bit of a sore point, the implication that a person could earn their way into heaven.

        The other thing that is different about Catholic mass celebrations is that a *lot* of the bible is read during the service, different bits each week. This can be unexpected for people who expected just a couple of verses, the way it is done in many (low church) Protestant services.

        (I hope this is explaining helpful, and not inter-denomination snipping. )

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          A quibble/word in your ear, regarding the Catholic pov – Salvation comes from God, full stop. A human is incapable of generating sufficient worth to be worthy of salvation on their own, no matter what they did or how hard they tried. Having said that – a person who says ‘I will follow god and do right’ will, if they actually mean it demonstrate that “doing right” through their actions, not just their words or thoughts. And the actions of doing the right thing are useful to humans to put down the muscle memory of not being a nasty little shit, and instead being someone who helps people, is kind, etc.

          There are actually multiple Catholic positions on salvation and grace. (At least four: Thomism, Molinism, Augustinianism, and Syncretism.)

          They all reject Pelagianism, which is the view that original sin is only a tendency to sin, and that given free will one can theoretically refrain from sin and merit heaven—but in practice everyone messes up and does need God’s unearned forgiveness. Some modern Protestant denominations de facto accept a variant of Pelagianism by emphasizing free will to a very high degree.

          And on the other hand, Catholics reject Calvinism/Jansenism, which says that human freedom plays no role in salvation; that God simply arbitrarily picks out whom to save and whom to damn.

          What unites them is a sort of moderate position where they say that, on his own, man is completely unable to merit entry into heaven—but God grants “sufficient” grace to everyone, but in order for it to become “efficacious”, one must “freely” choose to cooperate and accept God’s grace. And both rejecting belief in God (“faith”) and failing to avoid sin (“good works”) are forms of rejecting God’s grace, by which they don’t per se merit hell (since everyone merits hell), but they give up the grace by which they could be saved from hell.

          (The difference between the groups is basically in how this free choice happens. They don’t want to say that God isn’t the cause of your choosing good, but they also don’t want to say that he is the cause of your choosing evil. And they also don’t want to say that God can’t know whether you will freely choose good or evil ahead of time. But if he does know, they don’t want to make it sound like he set you up to fail by putting you in a situation where he knew you’d sin. So they have these really complicated theories to obfuscate resolve the issue.)

          On the other hand, all the traditional Protestant denominations reject the concept of free will. As Martin Luther said, free will after the Fall is “only a word”. In most versions, only Adam had free will, but after his sin, free will was lost and humanity was rendered solely dependent on God.

          Of course, they got this not only from the Bible but also from reading Augustine who, along with almost all major early/middle Catholic theologians, was a compatibilist. Augustine (as well as Aquinas) believed that man has “will”, but in such a sense as is compatible with utter determinism. Man acts “voluntarily”, but God “turns” his will so that he wills whatever God wants him to will.

          Augustine in “defense” of the principle that we act by will, not by necessity:

          [T]he only thing that is within our power is that which we do when we will it. . . . So we can rightly say, ‘We grow old by necessity, not by will’; or . . . ‘We die by necessity, not by will,’ and other such things. But who would be crazy enough to say ‘We do not will by the will’? Therefore, although God foreknows what we are going to will in the future, it does not follow that we do not will by the will.

          And on its compatibility with determinism and predestination:

          [N]ot only men’s good wills, which God Himself converts from bad ones, and, when converted by Him, directs to good action and to eternal life, but also those which follow the world are so entirely at the disposal of God, that He turns them wherever He wills, and whenever He wills,–to bestow kindness on some, and to heap punishment on others. . . . God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills wherever He wills, whether to good deeds according to His mercy, or to evil after their own deserts. . . .

          In any case, the Catholic Church to this day tends to be compatibilist, i.e. believes in one-hundred percent determinism and redefines “free will” not to conflict with this. As opposed to metaphysical “libertarianism”, which holds that people genuinely can choose differently from how they actually do end up choosing. There are exceptions, such as the medieval Catholic theologian Peter John Olivi—who is one of the better presenters of libertarian free will—but they face the insoluble problem of how God knows what people are going to do before they do it. Some of them went as far as to say that God doesn’t really know, but just has a good idea based off one’s past character, but that’s a fairly heretical position.

          (The Augustinian position, popularized by C.S. Lewis, that God knows the future because he exists outside of time, does not solve this. Rather, it is a compatibilist solution: God’s existing outside of time implies eternalism, which implies determinism.)

          • Troy says:

            On the other hand, all the traditional Protestant denominations reject the concept of free will. As Martin Luther said, free will after the Fall is “only a word”. In most versions, only Adam had free will, but after his sin, free will was lost and humanity was rendered solely dependent on God.

            Of course, they got this not only from the Bible but also from reading Augustine who, along with almost all major early/middle Catholic theologians, was a compatibilist.

            Although there’s some truth to this, I think this is a bit too simplistic. With respect to Protestant churches, libertarian free will is typically taken to be a central tenet of Arminianism (which is held to by, e.g., the Methodists).

            As for Augustine, Christian libertarians and compatibilists both claim Augustine for their side. It’s not clear which, if either, is right: Augustine never formulated the issue in exactly the terms we do today. He says some compatibilist-friendly things, but also some libertarian-friendly things: e.g., the central burden of On Free Choice of the Will is to argue that the will, and not God, is the cause of sin.

            Although one might question how in line they are with tradition, I’m fairly confident that most Christian philosophers today are libertarians. According to the PhilPapers survey, 49.2% of philosophers of religion accept libertarianism, and 31.1% accept free will. 68.4% of philosophers of religion are theists, and the large majority of those are Christians. (Source: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=All+respondents&areas0=22&areas_max=1&grain=coarse) There’s also a correlation of 0.385 between theism and belief in libertarian free will. (Source: http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most.pl)

            There are exceptions, such as the medieval Catholic theologian Peter John Olivi—who is one of the better presenters of libertarian free will—but they face the insoluble problem of how God knows what people are going to do before they do it.

            The popular line among Christian philosophers today is the “Molinist” position (named after Luis de Molina) that God has “middle knowledge” of “counterfactuals of freedom”: that is, he knows, prior to creation, what free creatures would do if he were to create them in certain circumstances. This allows him to exercise providential control over the future without actually choosing people’s actions for them.

            I don’t accept this solution, but from what I can tell it’s the most popular position today about the relation between God’s foreknowledge and human freedom, at least among philosophers.

      • Troy says:

        JPA’s summary is good, and I would also echo xtmar’s comment below that in most denominations nowadays you can find fairly conservative and fairly liberal churches, which will tend to be quite different.

        Note also that denominations (and individual churches) will differ not only in their theology but also in the degree to which they emphasize theology and the degree to which you will be expected to or feel pressure to adopt a particular theological viewpoint. If you have a philosophical bent (and are the kind of person who reads SSC), and you think through the various issues different churches have debated, it’s unlikely you’ll find a denomination that endorses all and only the theological positions you do — and it’s not clear that that’s what you should want out of a church anyway.

        In general, mainline and liberal churches will tend to be less dogmatic about theology, although they will, obviously, lean towards more liberal understandings of Scripture, God, tradition, etc.

        The Catholic Church has more official dogma than most other churches, and so officially extends its theological authority more widely. In practice, though, many Catholics do not endorse Church teaching on a variety of issues, and in my experience Catholics tend to emphasize correct belief less than evangelicals.

        Some evangelical churches will be insistent that you toe the theological line on issues like the inerrancy of Scripture, creationism, a penal substitution model of the atonement, etc. However, there are many evangelical churches that either do not endorse these views or are open to a variety of opinions on them.

        Personally I think most churches either err on the side of being too dogmatic about theological matters which are non-essential (which, in my view, includes most stuff not in the Apostle’s Creed) or on the side of simply giving up orthodox Christianity altogether. One exception, not mentioned above, is the Mennonite Church, which came out of the so-called “radical reformation” in Europe. It was originally distinguished from other churches by adult baptism, political non-participation, and pacifism. Today (with adult baptism more common) pacifism is the most distinctive feature of the Church; the Church tends to be more politically involved than in the past, and is active in social projects like those of Mennonite Central Committee. But its emphasis has always been on right Christian practice; issues like predestination, the nature of the Trinity, etc. have never been issues the Church has pronounced dogmatically on, and Mennonites will hold a variety of views on these matters.

        Note also that although they’re less likely to be codified into church dogma, different churches also have different political views and different degrees of openness towards political views. Mainline and liberal churches tend to be allied with progressive politics and evangelical churches with conservative politics, although there are many exceptions. In my opinion, the Catholic Church tends to offer refreshingly non-partisan perspectives on social and political issues, even when I don’t agree with them.

      • tinduck says:

        Episcopalianism can be broken down to TEC(liberal) and the ACNA(conservative).

        TEC can be conservative in certain parts of the South, however most of the conservative churches in the TEC will not leave do to the threat of litigation.

        Of course, the Diocese of South Carolina was the typical exception.

    • xtmar says:

      At least for most of the mainstream Protestant denominations, I think the theological differences between denominations are smaller than the intra-denominational differences, at least as it’s normally preached and practiced. That is to say, the Lutheran and Methodist churches in Boston are probably closer than the Methodist churches in Boston and Fargo. Even Catholic churches have a fair amount of variability in how the church’s teachings are approached. (i.e. fire and brimstone vs redeeming love)

      If I were picking a church, I would echo those below and say that your best bet is to go out and sit in on church services for a week or two in a few of the likely candidate churches.

      • Jaskologist says:

        The main division in Christianity now runs through denominations, not between them, and it is basically the good old conservative/liberal split. All the actual conflict is along that axis, and a Conservative Baptist will feel more in common with a Conservative Catholic than a Liberal Baptist, which would not have been the case 60 years ago.

        • Zykrom says:

          What happened to change that, in your opinion?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Can’t speak for them, but IME it’s that almost nobody actually takes theology seriously anymore, even “devout” Christians of whatever stripe, but they are still spoiling for a fight, so they transferred their diligence to social problems from dogmatic disputes.

          • John Schilling says:

            My guess would be that it became socially acceptable to not go to church every Sunday. If you’re a regular churchgoing Presbyterian, suddenly going to the Lutheran church across town every week would be a pretty big deal, and the Presbyterians would have to do something pretty offensive to push you into that. The congregation is a captive audience, and the minister is going to preach the way he’s been taught to preach.

            But if going to the Presbyterian church every week can slide into going to the Presbyterian church once or twice a month and from there to Easter-and-Christmas, now the only Presbyterian churches that can survive are the ones that are particularly attuned to what their local congregation wants and are willing to quietly set aside any theological doctrine or high-level dictates to the contrary.

    • bean says:

      Find a systematic theology book. The one I have is Ryrie’s Basic Theology. It was a very interesting read.
      While you’re going through that, look for churches. Most have some theological document posted on their website. Check for obvious heresies, then visit for a week or two. See if their teaching in church lines up with their documents. If you’re interested, try to find some sort of small group. Good churches will have lots, including at least one or two that look interesting. If the small group works, you’re pretty much golden. If it doesn’t, then maybe try another one. Or just look somewhere else.
      I’ve followed this procedure more than once (well, the looking part, the theology book came from the church) and it works pretty well. I don’t know how big the community you live in is (that will determine your search space), but I’ve looked for 6 months during one change, and then gotten a good one on the first try during another.
      Also, pray for wisdom and guidance. This is probably the most important part.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      Choosing your religion? Sounds like you need a convenient heuristic 🙂

      Also, not that I can speak from personal experience, but given that you are on a very nerdy blog, it’s probably worth checking out a few (convert-accepting) variants of Judaism in the course of your search. From what I gather , it seems to have a lot of appeal to a systematising mindset.

    • smocc says:

      As bean already said, if you are looking for the right place for you in God’s eyes then don’t forget prayer. “Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be open unto you.” I hope you are granted whatever good thing it is you’re looking for.

      Also, a personal plug for not forgetting to check out the Mormons. We have a kind of orthogonal answer to the whole denomination question, which I think is very compelling. The services might feel a little weird compared to other denominations you may have grown up with, but we try to be very welcoming. Also, depending on where you live I might be able to hit you up with some personal connections.

    • phisheep says:

      Not a believer any more, but my starting point always was to go to the church nearest to home.

      Churchgoing is at least as much about community as it is about anything else, and once you start to pick and choose you are already doing something wrong.

      (I used the same heuristic for which pub to frequent.)

    • Irenist says:

      @BillG:

      You “left the church relatively young,” and are now “considering rejoining a church.” That seems like the key starting point here. Two questions for you:

      Why did you leave?

      Why do you feel drawn back now?

      I think the specifics of your individual answers to those questions would shed a lot of light on what the best way for you to feel your way back into Christianity might be. Because I think the personal variance on what’s going to be helpful is very high in this area.

      • BillG says:

        These are fair questions, although a bit more personal than I initially intended the conversation to go. That said, this community has always been good to me so why not?

        I left because I was a young man prone to ask a lot of questions and be quite skeptical. This is really wholly unchanged.

        I feel drawn back now by two things: 1) a growing belief in the value of the type of community that churches tend to be better than most other institutions at creating and nurturing and 2) a philosophical search for something that Eliot called the still point, the one objective thing from which truth can be derived.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          2) a philosophical search for something that Eliot called the still point, the one objective thing from which truth can be derived.

          I certainly sympathize with this, and I think it’s a real shame that the scientific, the rational, and the secular has been associated with a kind of “value-free” nihilism where nothing has any objective meaning or value.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Because objective meaning isn’t possible?

            Objective
            1.(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts:

            Meaning
            2. the end, purpose, or significance of something:

            I don’t see how you could have the latter without influence by personal opinions or feelings.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Samuel Skinner:

            That would be true if this weren’t a blatant example of equivocation…

            First of all, that’s not the only meaning of “objective”. Second, “influenced by” is incredibly vague. If you love physics, does that mean that none of your conclusions in physics can be “objective”, since the process of your choosing to investigate them was “influenced by personal feelings”?

            “Objective” in this context means something more like “in accordance with and caused by the facts”, as opposed to being an invention of the mind that doesn’t correspond to anything external. In the sense that “non-objective art” doesn’t represent anything. Some kind of splatter painting can’t be said to falsely represent reality; it doesn’t attempt to represent reality at all. On the other hand, that which claims to be objective claims to conform to facts and can be criticized for failing to do so.

            “Objective meaning” may be controversial to some, but all that is meant is that “end, purpose, or significance” that is in some way determined by the facts about the kind of thing it is and not just entirely made up according to the whim of the perceiver.

            In the sense I use it, it also is not the same as “intrinsic meaning” which could allegedly exist all by itself apart from any perceiver. The theory of gravity couldn’t exist all by itself apart from anybody around to theorize it; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t objectively correspond to facts.

          • Bill G says:

            This is something I’ve been fighting with for a while, but to give some context to the argument below I’ll include what pushed me toward a re-exploration of these ideas. A few months ago I saw a video of a brutal beheading by Islamic radicals. When I saw the video, I recoiled with a sense that what had happened was “wrong”. But then I realized that for those doing the beheading, this was the pinnacle of “right”.

            And without some objective morality, the only justification I had for my feeling that they were wrong is….consensus? Support of societal might?

            So my feeling was that there was more than that, there must be some underlying objective moral through. And my support for this has been that in other areas there appears to be evidence of objective truth– things appear to follow certain laws, for example.

            It’s not a perfect philosophical formulation, and there are absolute leaps to get to Christianity, but it’s a path I’m on.

          • Urstoff says:

            Why would your feeling count as evidence for moral realism? If you a committed moral intuitionist, that would make sense, but I’m guessing you’re agnostic on that (in the sense that you have neither arguments for or against moral intuitionism at the moment) just based on what you said about your personal history. Thus, your (completely understandable) horrified and morally indignant reaction to such a video can’t alone act as evidence for moral realism. It must be supplemented by some sort of argument.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “If you love physics, does that mean that none of your conclusions in physics can be “objective”, since the process of your choosing to investigate them was “influenced by personal feelings”?”

            There are two ways to interpret that sentence. One is “I love physics so I will go into physics” and the other is “I love physics so I will explain things using physics”. The latter certainly can be non-objective (particularly if you try to reduce everything to physics and ignore the other sciences), but the former doesn’t tell us anything about your methodology.

            ““Objective” in this context means something more like “in accordance with and caused by the facts”, as opposed to being an invention of the mind that doesn’t correspond to anything external.”

            That just means you are excluding hallucinations and modern art. That isn’t very helpful.

            “On the other hand, that which claims to be objective claims to conform to facts and can be criticized for failing to do so.”

            And the facts for meaning are what exactly? Since if you boil it down to ‘what gives you meaning feeling’, we end up with objective meaning being solved with medication.

            Bill G
            “And without some objective morality, the only justification I had for my feeling that they were wrong is….consensus? Support of societal might?”

            There are two paths to go down for this. One is to point out certain types of morality simply work better for achieving human goals and we know this because people given the choice follow these moral systems.

            The other is to realize this only holds true if goals are shared. Unfortunately the same holds true for moral intuition (not convincing to people who don’t share it).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Samuel Skinner:

            And the facts for meaning are what exactly? Since if you boil it down to ‘what gives you meaning feeling’, we end up with objective meaning being solved with medication.

            Well, “purpose” or “meaning” are attributes of conscious beings or things consciously designed.

            If you point to a rock and ask me what it means, I’ll tell you it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a rock; what do you want it to mean?

            As for the “meaning of life”, that term is used in two senses. Albert Einstein: what is the meaning of him? Well, if by that you want to ask “What did his designer have in mind in making each little feature of him? Why did he choose to give him ears this shape and a nose that shape?” then I would say he didn’t have a designer, and there wasn’t any meaning.

            But if you want to ask “What ends, what purposes did Einstein pursue, and what significance did his actions have to himself and to others?” then there is plenty to say. Einstein pursued reason, logic, observation, and furthered the desire by mankind to master the natural world by means of knowing it. And this was in accordance with the needs and wants of human beings who wish to live and flourish in this world by the means available to them.

            On the other hand, one can talk about the value or meaning of some guy who joins ISIS. He represents blind faith, violence, dogmatism, intolerance, and that which is destructive to humanity. At the same time, you can say for many of them that they also represent the tragic ability of demagogues to lead potentially good people astray with promises of the supernatural, etc.

            If you were to reverse that, if you were to say that Einstein’s meaning is misery and death, while ISIS’s meaning is happiness and life, you would be wrong. Your opinion doesn’t make it so. That’s what it means to say it is objective.

        • Irenist says:

          @BillG:
          Perfect answer. Thanks! I think that’s enough to try to offer advice that’s targeted enough to at least approach being useful.

          I left because I was a young man prone to ask a lot of questions and be quite skeptical. This is really wholly unchanged.

          Good! If we assume that the Christian God exists, then you’re seeking after a God who created nature to be extraordinarily complicated in a way amenable to scientific investigation, and inspired the Bible as THE masterpiece of what I described here as pedagogical esotericism:
          http://www.irenist.com/2015/04/pedagogical-esotericism-in-bible.html
          So a God who creates like that and “writes” like that presumably welcomes your questions—how else are you going to unlock the scientific and theological “Easter” eggs He’s hidden in this video game we call life? So find a Christian community that welcomes questions like that, instead of getting offended by them.

          But if you do find someone getting offended, it’s possible that they’re modeling you as (1) “sneering prideful cynic” rather than (2) “humble, sincere seeker after truth.” So if anyone bridles at your skepticism, try taking a deep breath and seeing if you can say something that will budge their mental model from (1) to (2).

          To contextualize what I’m talking about, those of us who hang around SSC tend to be of the “communication as information-seeking” type described in the second part of this post:
          http://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/
          For people wired/socialized to view communication as the up-building of harmonious community—a personality type you will find in churches just as throughout the wider society—sincere, humble truth-seeking can come off as some attempt to be a know-it-all. But a lot of times those people still have wisdom to share. So it’s worth making the effort to accommodate their communicative needs, should you encounter a Christian of that stamp.

          Another thing to keep in mind is that certain aspects of Christianity are (rightly) described by adherents as being a “mystery.” The implication is that there are certain aspects of God’s nature or His work in the world that are as beyond our ken as science or literature is beyond an ant’s. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions about mysteries. But they are most usefully phrased as “assuming arguendo this admittedly incomprehensible, koan-like doctrine is true, what CAN we say about it?” When Aquinas called theology “faith seeking understanding,” this is part of what he was getting at: if you trust first (even if only for argument’s sake), and then seek the implications, you can still do a lot of questioning.

          That’s not to say that everything in Christianity is or ought to be a “mystery.” But some of the key doctrines (the Trinity, God’s goodness in a world with evil in it) are ultimately mysteries in this technical sense, and that’s something to bear in mind. You can asymptotically approach a complete grasp of them as you unlock deeper and deeper aspects—a finite creature could spend infinite time doing this and never run out of depths to plumb–but don’t go into Christianity expecting to completely grok such things this side of the resurrection and the beatific vision: it takes such a miraculous “seeing God face to face” to finally miraculously reach the bottom of the infinite depths.

          This shouldn’t be too surprising. Not only is God said to be infinitely good, wise, powerful, etc.—and so far more beyond us than our finite differences from another finite being like an ant—but it’s also the case even in our finite world that knowledge-by-acquaintance (connaissance) differs from abstract knowledge (savoir). For instance, in the famous thought experiment of “Mary in the black and white room,” a woman is raised to know all the physics and aesthetic theory there is about color, but in a room with no red in it. Supporters of qualia argue that despite her abstract knowledge of chromatic theory, when Mary is finally allowed out of the room and sees red for the first time, she still learns something—what it is LIKE to see red.

          To draw a very broad analogy, seeing God face to face “reveals” (as in “the Bible is a revelation”) what the mysterious aspects of Christianity are all about, just as finally seeing red reveals at last “what it is like” to see red. The theologian is like Mary in the black and white room. What she has to say is important, just as physics and aesthetics have a lot to teach us. But for an understanding of redness, they are always woefully incomplete unless we’ve SEEN red. Just so, Aquinas, after a lifetime as arguably the greatest theologian the West has ever produced, had a mystical vision of God shortly before he died. Aquinas remarked that compared to that direct encounter with God, everything he’d written seemed to him now mere “straw.”

          So keep asking questions. But remember, too, that theory can take you only so far. The point is to meet God, not to know facts about Him.

          Mystics of every tradition—Christian, Sufi, Zen, whatever—struggle to communicate the experience of God (or whatever they call the Ultimate) in perspicuous words. Christians believe that the Bible was largely written by members of a community (Israel, the early Church) that had met God, in one fashion or another. Sometimes the only way a Zen monk who achieves satori can communicate it is to write a haiku about cherry blossoms or something. Just so, the Hebrew prophet or psalmist, the evangelist or St. Paul, is unavoidably going to speak in allusive rather than discursive language in attempting to limn the outlines of the Mystery they’ve met. The Bible is full of doctrines you can tease out, but it’s also full of poetry—the psalms, Isaiah, the thornier passages in Paul, the parables of Christ Himself. Whatever you do, don’t just go to the Bible seeking doctrines—go to it to let it poetically evoke God for you. Like falling in love, meeting God can be described by the scientist (such and such parts of the meditator’s or lover’s brain are active in MRI, etc.), but you’ll get a better idea of what it’s LIKE if you let the poet be a poet.

          E.A. Abbott’s classic, whimsical little book “Flatland” describes the mystic’s communicative problem well: the narrator, a sentient square, lives in a two-dimensional universe where greater number of sides is a sign of higher social station (so triangles defer to squares to hexagons, etc.). God incarnates in this universe as a perfect, infinite-sided Circle. But, as God reveals to the poor prophetic square, He is actually (in Abbot’s conceit here) a Sphere—God moves His Spherical Self in and out of the Plane where the narrator lives, the circumference of His Incarnate Circle expanding and contracting (to a point, and then to nothing) as He does so, in much the same way that the Resurrected Christ just casually ambled through the walls of the locked Upper Room in Jerusalem.

          The prophet square attempts to communicate this Revelation of God’s three-dimensional nature to his countrymen, but they think him mad, and do the poor prophet no honor. If Christianity is true, than the Trinity and the Incarnation are just precisely that sort of Truth, and the Bible and all the rest of Christian art and literature are various poor prophets’ struggle to communicate that Revelation in a way that the rest of us can grok. Here’s Flatland:
          http://wordyenglish.com/flatland/index.html

          Of course, having just discussed the evocative, allusive quality of mystical Revelation, my old D&D player’s mind jumps from evocation to invocation. And this is to be found in the Bible as well. The psalms, in particular, are a “school of prayer.” If you want to meet God in reading instead of just reading about Him, you might try reading Morning Prayer (Lauds) and Evening Prayer (Vespers) from the ancient monastic practice of the Liturgy of the Hours (Divine Office) every day for a while, and let the psalms soak into your bones. (There are other Hours, too, but starting with just those two is nicely manageable.) The Bible was not written just to be read, but to be prayed. The Office lets you experience that aspect. Here’s a superb website for it (and I can personally highly recommend their smartphone app, which is a lot easier to carry around than a breviary):
          http://www.universalis.com/
          You don’t have to be Catholic to pray the Hours, by the way. The popularity of the practice as a rediscovered tradition of contemplative reading has been rising among Protestants in recent years.

          I feel drawn back now by two things: 1) a growing belief in the value of the type of community that churches tend to be better than most other institutions at creating and nurturing

          Indeed. The best way to find THIS aspect is, as others here have said, just to visit local churches. Find the community that feels like home. Buddhists speak of the three treasures—Buddha, Dharma (way, path, law), and Sangha (community, esp. monastic). Just so, the Christian might be said to look to Christ, Bible, and Church. The community aspect is indispensable: we find Christ in others.

          and 2) a philosophical search for something that Eliot called the still point, the one objective thing from which truth can be derived.

          There’s much to be said here, of course.

          First, as you likely know, rationalist Leah Libresco went through a similar journey:
          http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/this-is-my-last-post-for-the-patheos-atheist-portal.html

          Second, there’s a great deal written on metaethics. I have my own views, but I won’t try to lead you to them. Instead, I think that a sense of the general Christian take on this sort of thing can be gotten by reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity alongside his Abolition of Man and perhaps also his Great Divorce. (All of these can be found online, IIRC, with some googling.) None of these books present a developed philosophical argument (although reddit’s rationalist book club really impressed me with their honorable attempts to find one in AoM the other day!), but all do a fine job of presenting what it feels like from the inside to actually believe, as Leah Libresco puts it, that “Morality is a Person Who Loves me.”

          The third thing I want to do is challenge you just a bit on the formulation of “the still point” as something (or Someone) to be found through “philosophical search.” After all, one doesn’t meet one’s spouse through reading books about reproductive physiology, but through dating. If Morality is a Person Who Loves you, then you won’t meet Him just by reading about Him. You must not merely think, but do.

          The mathematician and Catholic aphorist Pascal wrote about “training the machine” of the body. He was advocating a kind of “fake it til you make it” approach, as they say in 12 Step groups. The idea is that you do not encounter the “still, small Voice” Elijah finally hears in the silence in 1 Kings 19 through theory, but through practice.

          So, yes, do keep reading. But practice! Find that church that offers a warm, welcoming community. And make sure it’s a community that serves the homeless and the sick, the elderly and the imprisoned, the lonely and hopeless–because radical practice of recklessly loving such as these is an indispensable way to meet Jesus Christ face to face. You’ll struggle to find Him without it.

          And find a practice of worship that brings you to that Stillness. For you, that may be the ecstatic prayer of a Pentecostal congregation. Or the Eucharist-centered Liturgy of a Catholic or Orthodox or Anglican parish. Or the silent waiting upon the Spirit of a Quaker meetinghouse. But find a practice of worship, and stick with it. After a few years (the courtship can’t be rushed), you’ll meet God in the silence there. Not in a book. Not even—or not just—in The Book.

          I hope that’s helpful. I can be reached at irenist DOT marginalia AT gmail, if you’d like to PM me. Ask me anything at all—even something scathingly skeptical. You won’t offend (my natural communication style is of the SSC sort!), and I won’t try to sell you my own denomination, I promise. (I can’t promise I’ll respond rapidly—work is always busy, and I’ve got a newborn at home, and a frenetic toddler I have to chase around to keep her from accidentally killing him. But I WILL make time to respond.)

          May God bless you on your Way!

          • BillG says:

            Hey, this was awesome– thank you for the thought and effort that went into it. I’m going to do some reading and exploring around, but may take you up on the offer to email along the way. Appreciate it.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I’m not trying to start a fight, but I’ve got a few honest questions and objections to this.

            Mystics of every tradition—Christian, Sufi, Zen, whatever—struggle to communicate the experience of God (or whatever they call the Ultimate) in perspicuous words.

            I don’t see how a Christian can use evidence from Sufism or Zen Buddhism, or whatever other brand of mysticism, as evidence for the effectiveness of Christian mysticism.

            The point seems to show exactly the opposite: that this “method” will get you to “see the ultimate truth” in any arbitrary belief system. Don’t you think that there are important differences between Christianity and Zen Buddhism? And if a loving God wanted everyone to know him and follow him, how could he allow Buddhists to be so horribly deluded even when they try so hard to search for the truth about him?

            For that matter, if everyone else can be so wrong about their religions, what makes you so sure Christians are right?

            Another thing to keep in mind is that certain aspects of Christianity are (rightly) described by adherents as being a “mystery.” The implication is that there are certain aspects of God’s nature or His work in the world that are as beyond our ken as science or literature is beyond an ant’s. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions about mysteries. But they are most usefully phrased as “assuming arguendo this admittedly incomprehensible, koan-like doctrine is true, what CAN we say about it?” When Aquinas called theology “faith seeking understanding,” this is part of what he was getting at: if you trust first (even if only for argument’s sake), and then seek the implications, you can still do a lot of questioning.

            Once you allow “mysteries” of any sort, how can you claim to still be following reason?

            Reason is just a window dressing at this point. “First believe and then explain” is the very essence of rationalization.

            The “Flatland” metaphor is not at all apt because there is no reason why a two-dimensional being can’t rationally understand a three-dimensional being. Maybe he doesn’t have the “qualia” of what it is like to see in three dimensions, but that is not necessary for understanding. Human beings, for instance, are quite capable of conceptualizing about four or more dimensions.

            The mathematician and Catholic aphorist Pascal wrote about “training the machine” of the body. He was advocating a kind of “fake it til you make it” approach, as they say in 12 Step groups. The idea is that you do not encounter the “still, small Voice” Elijah finally hears in the silence in 1 Kings 19 through theory, but through practice.

            So, yes, do keep reading. But practice! Find that church that offers a warm, welcoming community. And make sure it’s a community that serves the homeless and the sick, the elderly and the imprisoned, the lonely and hopeless–because radical practice of recklessly loving such as these is an indispensable way to meet Jesus Christ face to face. You’ll struggle to find Him without it.

            But you can indoctrinate yourself into anything!

            If you join ISIS and tell yourself that you are doing the will of Allah, “recklessly” being willing to martyr yourself in the service of jihad; if you constantly deny any voices of doubt as proof that you don’t have enough faith or love or truth in Allah; if you “fake it ’til you make it”; then eventually you will make it. You will be absolutely, intransigently faithful and confident that what they want is right and pure.

            Or perhaps, one might say, you won’t, but then one can point to those who fail to indoctrinate themselves into Christianity, as hard as they try.

            Every believer in a true religion has to recognize and explain the existence of false religion. You have to explain how it is that people can subvert their rational faculty to such an extent as to believe in something like the cause of ISIS. And I say that the explanations seem to implicate mysticism of every kind.

            Again, I’m not trying to ask these things in the spirit of a “sneering cynic”. I am genuinely curious as to how you can justify your beliefs. (Though I won’t deny being “proud”—as I think any human being who has and makes use of a rational faculty is entitled to be.)

          • Troy says:

            But you can indoctrinate yourself into anything!

            If I am reading Irenist correctly, his advice concerned experience and understanding, not belief. That is, if you want to understand Christianity or experience God, you need to take part in Christian practice.

            Your argument seems to target an inference from an experience as of God or a deeper understanding of the Christian life to a belief that Christian doctrines are true or that the Christian God exists. But one might have independent reason to believe those things and still want to experience God. Indeed, if the Christian God exists one should want to experience him, worship him, and live one’s life following him. Christianity is not only, or even primarily, about belief.

  21. synthetica2 says:

    How do I motivate myself to exercise? I know I should do it Because It’s Healthy and Because It Will Make Me Look Better but I’m relatively healthy and I find exercise (be it cardio or lifting) to be a terrible combination of unpleasant and boring. Combine that with how long-term the payoff is (since I’m not going to do anything really hardcore) and it almost seems utility-maximizing not to exercise.

    • onyomi says:

      Audio books help me. To deal with the boredom, at least.

      I also try to avoid waiting until I feel ready to have a really good workout to go. I think it is more effective to have a lot of very regular, half-hearted workouts than to wait until you are really in the mood.

    • BillG says:

      I tend to ascribe to a fatalistic philosophy on the willpower toward exercise– if you aren’t enjoying it, I doubt you’ll ever have a consistent enough drive to continue doing it regularly.

      So my best advice would be to find something physically active that you enjoy doing with others (not that, well, unless vigorously enough I suppose…), try to set up a regular opportunity to do that activity and then forget whether the approach is optimal or not.

      The focus on gains, improved appearance and etc is harmful in so much as it’s the only motivation often provided.

      • Irenist says:

        I can’t help noting here that your wisdom about how to stick with exercise is very similar to what I’m trying to communicate about how to find the right denomination that leads you to an experience of God. You’re already quite far along the Way, I suspect, farther than you think: the focus on advancement in abstract ethical or philosophical understanding will be harmful. Focus instead on finding rewarding *experiences* of meditative contemplation, prayerful worship, and face-to-face service of the needy (i.e., not as abstact QALYs to be saved through EA–not that there’s not a place for that in our secular lives–but as fellow persons with whom to enter into loving relationship), and the Wisdom you seek will find you Himself.

    • xtmar says:

      Play sports, even at the IM level, or find some other way to make it a game. Going to the gym and sitting on a treadmill for an hour because that’s what you should do is, as you say, boring. If you’re exercise has a larger and more immediately tangible purpose, like winning a soccer game, it’s much more entertaining. Even if you have no hand eye coordination, there are sports you can do, like triathlon or rowing, though triathlon is probably not the best example, as it’s mostly treadmill time. Even psuedo-sports like CrossFit have competitive elements that make it more than just working out because you should.

    • Zoned says:

      Really the obstacle is just the first several days. After a week or two the boredom/unpleasantness goes away (focusing on form while you exercise is actually pretty intense and interesting), and it feels wrong NOT to go work out. That’s my experience anyway.

      BTW, the outcome isn’t as long-term as you imagine. You will start to notice results within a month if you are consistent. They might be things only you and your close friends/coworkers notice, but they’ll feel like big motivators to keep going.

    • Calico says:

      BillG speaks the truth.
      Long-term diets are impossible unless you find a way to make lower calorie foods decently filling and tasty. It can be done.
      Exercise programs tend to stop quickly unless a way is found to enjoy the program. The payoffs for a hard lifting program only *really* start being seen in 6 months in general.
      More people then not,finding solo lifting unfulfilling, end up finding something like a biking club, flag football club, etc.

    • The Anonymouse says:

      I’m with the consensus: you need to find something you enjoy. I, for some reason probably arising from having been an infantryman, always felt like I “should” be out running. I had let people convince me that if I just. stuck. with. it. long enough I’d get that runner’s high I was told about.

      It never happened. What finally worked for me was lifting: I like it, I can do it myself and in my own home, and the numbers don’t lie. If everything else is equal, and I can lift more lbs. than last month, I have to be getting stronger. It’s quantifiable.

      If you don’t like something, you’ll never stick with it long enough to get the results to motivate you.

      • Sastan says:

        Fuck yes, 11-B!

        And he’s right. Don’t fit a workout regimen into your free time, find an active hobby. I hate running, but like basketball, which involves a lot of running. Problem solved.

        • The Anonymouse says:

          If you wanna be infantry, you gotta be thin. 🙂

          There remains a special hateplace in my heart for my first team leader, who would be waiting at the finish line of the two mile run (portion of the PT test) smoking a Camel, having just smoked us on his way to the extended scale. Fucker.

          Anyway, find an active hobby and you’ll never have to “exercise” again.

      • CatCube says:

        My favorite commentary about the “runner’s high” is from Dennis Miller: “I must have gotten a hold of some bad shit, because all I did was puke and pass out.”

    • Dahlen says:

      How are your energy levels, more generally? Are you sluggish by nature? How do you react to any sort of energy expenditure — is there any physical activity that gets you feeling pumped-up? Dancing, sports, hiking… anything?

      Getting your exercise through an activity that is intrinsically fun might help — so would noticing results (getting stronger and leaner).

      I don’t have any problem motivating myself to exercise (I sometimes slack off, but I still enjoy working out when I engage in it), however, I have had the exact same problem with self-directed studying. (Sorry to hijack.) I can’t slog through an entire textbook for the life of me. That doesn’t keep me from aiming to do it, or from feeling like I’m failing at my main goal in life. Ability is not a problem; while in school, I tend to get high grades despite myself, but the second there’s no external constraint acting upon me… I’ve thought about the topic for so long that I almost seem to have gotten everything figured out about studying, except for the tiny part about not getting bored out of my mind by reading half a page out of a math textbook. Dunno. Reminds me of Scott’s post on the “lottery of fascinations” — maybe I was just born a jock.

    • The best solution is to find something you enjoy. Mine used to be SCA sword and shield fighting, but I’ve gotten too old for that. Currently (but not at the moment because I’m recovering from surgery) it’s half an hour of yard work three times a week, which is mildly pleasant and improves the yard. Any active sport you enjoy should work.

    • Leit says:

      If you’re bored, try something you can’t just muscle-memory your way through. For instance: find a bouldering gym that changes their set problems regularly. You might get frustrated by being unable to perform some techniques, but it’ll be worth it for the rush when you nail it.

      Note: I suggest bouldering on the assumption that you don’t exercise with a partner, and thus wouldn’t have a belayer for straight sport climbing. Having a buddy to train with changes everything, and would likely transform even your regular boring exercise.

      Climbers in my area tend to be friendly and… evangelistic might be a good descriptor. As such, it’s not hard to go from “hey, can anyone show me how to make this traverse” to having a regular belay to “we’re going out to the slab on the weekend, wanna come?”, if you’re interested in social gains.

      • Bill G says:

        +1 on bouldering. I spent a year doing so regularly and found it to be a great workout that motivated me to get into better shape otherwise (a few pounds really matter when they’re being supported by your finger tips!). It was also one of the easiest activities to make friends that I ever took part in– it’s fine to show up and do it by yourself, but there’s plenty of downtime between attempts that lends itself to talking and strategizing with other climbers.

      • James Picone says:

        Another +1 to bouldering and/or rock climbing here. Climbers are really friendly, it’s good exercise, it requires thought and planning, and if you’re the kind of person who climbed trees as a kid it’s really fun.

    • Anonymous says:

      Start using a bicycle as your primary mode of transport. That way you combine what you must/need to do (getting to work, etc) with what you should do (exercise).

      • Linch says:

        I use a bike for everything. Can recommend (although it’s awfully uncomfortable in the winter if you don’t live close to work).

        I’m not sure biking is *sufficient* exercise though, especially if you’re male and want to build upper-body strength.

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      I kind of managed to solve this problem on my own behalf.

      I’d long been trying to get myself to exercise more. Every now and then I managed to create a morning routine of going out on a run, but this habit would always fall apart whenever I’d get sick or otherwise be prevented from engaging in it for a while. The problem was that, while I could get the habit going by pushing myself, getting the habit started always required some active pushing. What I needed was something that would naturally pull me instead, causing me to get outside without requiring active willpower expenditure.

      When I asked myself how I could achieve that, the answer was pretty obvious: I knew a bunch of people who were getting exercise by playing location-based games. And I knew that I had a tendency to get addicted to games very easily, so this seemed just like the thing that would work for me. For various reasons (most importantly wanting to limit my Internet use), I had long resisted acquiring a smartphone, but I felt that actually getting some exercise was important enough to give in. So I bought one and installed two games I’d heard about, Ingress and Zombies, Run!.

      Zombies, Run! I only tried once and then never replayed it, but Ingress became a lasting habit for a while. After having played it for 54 days, I’d walked/jogged/ran a total distance of 162 kilometers (101 miles) while playing. The habit persisted throughout the kinds of events that used to break my previous exercise habits, including one occasion of getting sick for a few days, and a period where I was so focused on finishing my studies that I only had minimal time for exercise for a couple of weeks.

      …that said, I’m now at 101 days and the habit has been kinda broken for a month, partially because the region around me got so familiar that it got a little boring to play in. I figured out a fix for that – I can still take public transport and get to somewhere less familiar relatively quickly – but now there’s a second problem, namely that it’s too frickin’ cold to be outside. I’m expecting to resume the habit once it gets a bit warmer, though.

    • alexp says:

      Find a sport to play semi-competitively. Not only will you get excercise from the sport itself, which should be more fun to do than just running or lifting weights, but you also can exercise with the goal of making yourself better at said sport, which is much more short term payoff than health or good looks.

      I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu because there are lot of people who get into it as adults. I couldn’t just go play soccer or basketball at the local YMCA because those games are full of people who played in high school or even college and I would be destroyed. With BJJ, there are a lot of people who are beginners.

      • Your story on Brazilian Jiu Jitsu parallels mine on SCA combat (medieval combat on foot done as a sport).

        Growing up, I thought of myself as bad at sports. At some point it occurred to me that part of the reason was that the other kids were playing baseball etc. for fun, I was only doing it in gym class when I had to.

        SCA combat was a new sport, we were all adult beginners, and I discovered that I was not, after all, bad at sports.

      • dndnrsn says:

        I second the comment on BJJ, or another martial art with a lot of adult beginners.

        A full-contact grappling art like BJJ or judo (you might have a harder time finding a judo class with a lot of adult beginners outside of a school setting; still easier than finding wrestling outside of varsity athletics) is especially good because you can spar harder and more frequently than something where you’re getting punched in the head. And hard sparring is probably the most intense exercise you’re going to get doing a martial art.

        Plus, once you get into it, you might find other exercise more appealing, as it will feed into your fitness and thus help your BJJ or whatever.

    • Anonymous says:

      I find vigorous exercise unpleasant and boring. I have tried many different kinds of vigorous exercise and have not found any exceptions to this rule. I honestly cannot imagine enjoying any kind of vigorous exercise.

      I run 3 times a week, and have for the past 6 months very regularly. I hate it, but I do it. A few strategies I’ve found helpful:

      1. Run in the morning. Afternoons and evenings are unpredictable, so I don’t schedule my runs for afternoons or evenings.
      2. Run on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. Always the same days every week. Don’t agree to go out or do anything that’ll keep you up late on a Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday night.
      3. Wake up at the same time every day, whether it’s a running day or not. If you sleep in on non-running days, it’s harder to wake up on running days.
      4. I started with a Couch To 5k app. The app tells you when to run and when to walk. It is easier to follow orders than to decide for yourself how much to run.

      Also, the Couch to 5k app starts with a 5 minute warm-up walk. This bit is critical. It’s easier to decide to run if you can make the decision to run without actually having to run right away. You just get on the shoes and get out the door and walk. 5 minutes later, you’re 5 minutes away from your house, wearing running shoes, and the app says, “Run.”

      At this point you’re already committed, and it feels much more natural to obey the app and run rather than just give up, turn around, and walk home.

      This set of strategies has been quite successful for me so far. I’m trying to figure out something similar that will work for resistance training as well.

    • Anonymous says:

      Play a sport – they’re effectively purpose built to solve this problem. You win in competitive sports (usually; probably doesn’t apply to every sport) by making your opponent run around a lot – putting the ball where they will have to chase it or similar. In effect, you are each other’s exercise coach, and you win by being a better exercise coach than your opponent.

    • Cadie says:

      Adding in my vote for finding something you like that’s physically active, even if it isn’t a classic jogging or gym-style exercise. Depending on your current level of fitness, something like gardening or brisk walking could be enough to start. If those aren’t enough, then try something more intensive: maybe rock climbing, hiking on moderate-difficulty trails, swimming, whatever you find interesting and fun enough to do.

      I tried getting into jogging on and off for years. Couldn’t do it, hated it too much. Dancing works much better for me; it’s something I can do several days a week and not dread it. I’m focused on the motions and the beat of the music and not paying as much attention to the fact that my heart and breath rates are up. With running, that was pretty much all that was on my mind.

    • Anthony says:

      Dance. Find something that’s vigorous and isn’t very free-form (at least for beginners). Find something where most of the people aren’t that old.

      Swing dance is pretty good, though West Coast can be less active than East Coast or Lindy Hop.
      Various sorts of folk dancing, if you can find a group with some people under 60. (Though some of those old folks are *really* active.)
      Contra dance (basically a form of folk dancing, though doesn’t always overlap).
      Belly dance seems to often be fairly vigorous, but I haven’t done it myself.

      If you do Latin dance (salsa, cha-cha, rumba, merengue, etc.) well, it’s a lot of work, but if you’re lazy about it, you won’t get much exercise from it. And people won’t be as interested in dancing with you.
      Argentine Tango (and American/International Ballroom Tango) can be pretty good in terms of learning muscle control, etc., but they’re not that terribly vigorous, except maybe at the show level.

      I found it easier to start with partnered/social dance forms before getting into solo/show type dancing, ymmv.

    • Tibor says:

      What worked for me after a long time when I had always worked out for a month or so then gave up, then started again only to give up in a few weeks was YAGOG, that is “You are your own gym”. It is a book and a mobile phone app (just google it), the app costs $3 or something. It is a workout program where, as the name suggests, you do the exercises with your body only without any gym equipment (you occasionally use a door, a table, a pillow or a towel…stuff you have at home). I find it much more satisfying and fun than lifting weights at the gym. It feels more natural (and actually is) and you also learn to control your body better. When you do weightlifting in a gym, the machine mostly fixes you in a position and you only work out that one part of your body. With self-weight exercises, you do the fixing yourself, so you get a better balance (balance is actually a lot about muscles). It can vary from person to person but for me this is much more satisfying. Also, you don’t go from lifting X kg to X+Y kg, you go from doing push-ups to push-ups with a single arm (for instance). That is way more satisfying since what you do feels qualitatively different.

      Also, you don’t pay any gym fee, you don’t have to leave your house or even make any clothes dirty if you don’t mind working out naked (which I do sometimes). These are all ways of reducing the cost of working out.

      The thing that helps me keep doing it, apart from not having excuses like “it is too late/cold to go to the gym now”, is the app and the way you have 10 weeks pre-made programmes (different difficulty levels) and not every week is the same in the workouts you do and the way you do them (sometimes it is intervals, sometimes superseries, sometimes tabatas) and you can easily track where you are in the 10 week programme and also look at the history of how you’re improving.

      I find cardio (other than dancing and hiking) really boring, so I don’t know much about that.

  22. Faradn says:

    I hope that one day when you visit SLC you’ll have a meetup here.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I was in SLC for a meetup about three years ago. There is a wonderful SLC rationalist community (although I think some of them have since moved to the Bay) and you should try to get in contact with them.

  23. entobat says:

    Scott (or anyone else),

    Can anyone help me out finding a study I think was cited here? I think the study was looking into police racism, and had the clever idea of looking at if pullover rates by race changed at night (with the idea that police can’t see race of drivers at night, and so would have more trouble being overtly racist). Unfortunately I can’t find the link – I expected it to be in the “Race and Justice: More than you wanted to know” post but unless I missed it it isn’t there.

    Am I correctly remembering an actual study, or was this just something someone suggested would be a good idea? I really thought it was the former.

    Thanks!

  24. I’m reading The Brain’s Way of Healing, and there’s some very enthusiastic descriptions of healing from low-intensity lasers– of really intractable skin problem (including failure to heal otherwise), for example. Laser healing is (mostly?) Russian, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of communication from Russia to the US. (I believe that last because it seems that Russians/the USSR knew quite a lot about exercise physiology– they didn’t just use drugs.)

    Anyway, does anyone here know whether there’s much to medical uses of low-intensity lasers?

    ****

    I’d have sworn I started a discussion here about anti-white bias in SJW, but I haven’t been able to find it. If I didn’t hallucinate it, would someone post a link? Also, is there any efficient way to search ssc comments?

    • adequ8 says:

      >Also, is there any efficient way to search ssc comments?

      best thing i have found is to google….

      site:https://slatestarcodex.com/ Nancy Lebovitz anti-white bias in SJW

    • Marc Whipple says:

      Re: Lasers.

      http://www.devicewatch.org/reports/lllt.shtml

      Summary: Some of the devices, when used as/in conjunction with heating elements, are as effective at relieving discomfort as any other sort of topical heat therapy. Other than that, the FDA says there’s no evidence and claims otherwise are not allowed.

      I am not a doctor, but I actually know a bit about lasers and how they work. My immediate reaction:

      1) Theoretically possible but in practice extremely unlikely. For just one reason, the whole point of lasers is to produce highly monochromatic light – which means that unless there’s some Magic Color that affects a whole class of pathologies/injuries, the results will be so variable that it might be statistically indistinguishable from placebo/chance.

      2) Really, really, really sounds like woo. Orac, for instance, has a few posts on laser woo. None of it seems to really map to what you’re asking about, though.

  25. Wrong Species says:

    This week we are talking about The Secrets of our Success by Joseph Henrich.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Next open thread we will be discussing The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
      by Matt Ridley.

    • Wrong Species says:

      In the nature/nurture book, the nurture side has been doing pretty terribly the last few decades. They seem to care more about politics than finding out the truth. So in this case, it was nice reading a comprehensive well thought out argument in favor of the environment over our genes. Of course, Henrich doesn’t neglect the genetic side, as he discusses how culture is actually changing our genes, but he does lay out a case for cultural influence that I find “genetic determinists”(for lack of a better word) don’t seem to account for. One notable example was the influence of the Scots-Irish in explaining the higher levels of violence in the US. Some say it’s because of the genes but he points out that that they aren’t as violent in their home countries.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        One notable example was the influence of the Scots-Irish in explaining the higher levels of violence in the US. Some say it’s because of the genes but he points out that that they aren’t as violent in their home countries.

        A few threads ago, Scott pointed out that the ‘Scots-Irish’ of the USA are actually descendents of the Border Reavers, a culturally distinct group from the ‘mainstream’ Scots and Irish. I’m not sure how genetically distinct they are, so not sure where that moves the nature/nurture question…

        • John Schilling says:

          “We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country on Earth!”
          Bill Murray, “Stripes”, 1981

          Kicked out of every decent country, and Scotland and Ireland. For being too violent for the Scots and Irish to put up with. So, yeah, what’s left in Scotland and Ireland is less violent than what got transplanted into Appalachia. OTOH, hybrid vigor is a cultural thing as well as genetic, so this is probably a good thing.

    • Wrong Species says:

      In chapter 3, he discusses how lost European discovers would pretty much always die in hostile terrain without assistance from the natives, who of course managed to thrive in the environment. I have raised concerns about what would happen if civilization collapsed but now I’m even more worried. If something happens to break our civilization, and no one is around to remember it, it’s very possible that we could lose everything and die before even getting to point where we could possibly rebuild. We really should be looking at some kind of “back up copy” of civilization to make sure that the most important things are not lost if something like that happened.

      • Deiseach says:

        lost European discovers would pretty much always die in hostile terrain without assistance from the natives, who of course managed to thrive in the environment

        But a lot of that “thriving in the environment” comes from “Yeah, it took three generations of people turning blue and dropping dead before we realised it was a bad idea to eat the plump, juicy, red berries on that bush, but the plump, juicy, red berries on that other bush are fine”.

        Dump anybody in a completely unfamiliar environment and it’s going to be tough. As for backing up civilisation, that’s a different matter: that’s more a question of “keeping good records of scientific knowledge and technological achievement in a stable, non-corrupted state so that once we’ve all finished dying of plague and the population builds up again, we can re-discover plastics”.

    • Wrong Species says:

      He mentions some experiments that show that Chimpanzees are actually in many cases equal to humans in individual learning(I am skeptical on that though). Where we shine is when it comes to social learning. In fact, he hypothesizes that it was our collective rather than individual intelligence that lead to our domination of the Neanderthals. Now IQ scores are supposed to measure our individual intelligence. I wonder how a “social learning quotient” could be measured or what it would look like. By social learning quotient, I don’t mean a test that would measure how much concrete information people have memorized but how quickly and proficiently a person can copy someone else. It would probably correlate with IQ pretty well but I don’t think it would be perfect match and could possibly be useful.

  26. Dan Peverley says:

    I’ve spent a long time being a game-master for tabletop role playing. My favorite systems are GURPS and Ars Magica. Are there a lot of people into this sort of thing on SSC? I’m asking purely to see what other people play/run, and what they get out of the hobby.

    For me, it’s one of my only social outlets. Since I got out of a relationship, the majority of my recreational interaction with other people is in the form of pretending to be wizards. I enjoy telling stories and constructing flexible puzzles. So far, there aren’t really video games that allow such a high fidelity amount of agency, due to the constraints of computers. Players can come up with a wide range of solutions to any of the problems thrown at them, even ones I hadn’t thought of (my favorite outcome). How do other GM’s promote player agency, or generally zap people out of the video game mentality? I’m having some success, but far too often my players are in auto-pilot mode.

    • Jon H says:

      I’d like to find someone to be GM for the Laundry Files RPG, based on the Laundry Files novels by Charlie Stross. It’d have to be via some online video conference tool, though.

      I haven’t GMd anything myself in about 30 years, so my skills are those of a 13 year old, and rusty.

    • Said Achmiz says:

      I’ve played and (more often) run D&D (various variations on 3rd edition) for about 15 years. (I’ve got had experiences with assorted other games and systems, but always come back to those. I’m in the process of designing my own custom system, which will also be basically a d20/3e variant.)

      It is indeed an excellent and enjoyable social activity (which has helped me stay closely in touch with old friends for long years of geographic separation — we play online), and a creative outlet of great depth as well.

      As far as promoting player agency… there is a substantial literature on dealing with this issue, in books, fan publications, personal blogs, gaming forums, etc. It is indeed a Non-Trivial Problem. I’d say it’s too big a problem to discuss in a blog comment, but here are some quick thoughts…

      1. System matters. Some systems are better at promoting agency than others. (In my experience, “rules heavy” and “crunch” is better for agency than “rules light”. This sounds paradoxical but makes perfect sense once you consider why different kinds of systems are designed the way they are, and for what purpose, but this is too big a topic for now.)

      2. Setting matters. PC agency is more incentivized in some settings than others.

      3. People matter. Different players want different things out of an RPG; different people have personalities that are more or less conducive to PC agency (and to satisfying play in general).

      4. Logistics and environment matter. Are you playing in person or online? At someone’s home or in a store? Twice a week or once every some-but-not-all-months? These things affect engagement and agency.

      There is a lot more to be said, and the fact is that there’s no one answer. I’ll close with a link (just one, though I could post a dozen easily) to site of one tabletop gaming blogger who has a lot of very useful things to say about this sort of thing: The Alexandrian. His posts Node-Based Scenario Design and Don’t Prep Plots are particularly relevant, though you should definitely browse around his site for a lot of insight- and advice-packed posts.

    • hellahexi says:

      For me the primary advantage of tabletop gaming is the social aspect. Video games continue to get better and better; there’s a lot of money being spent in figuring out the psychological aspects of getting gamers to keep playing a certain title. The one thing a video game can’t really replicate–regardless of budget–is the physical/social aspect of sitting around a table with real-life friends.

      We’re in an era of electronic entertainment. People don’t sit around in parlors entertaining each other with stories any more (and if they did, it would be a much more natural jump to cooperative storytelling, ie, RPGs). People sit around consuming professional storytellers’ stories, as mediated through production budgets and screens. When I was younger, the jump was to take tabletop players and convince them to play electronic games; now it’s reversed, and the (much tougher) challenge is to take video gamers and convince them to play an RPG.

      After the social aspect, I’m with you that the secondary appeal of RPGs is the (promise of, squandered if they don’t use it) agency of the players. I can’t portray a scene as visually detailed and beautiful as Peter Jackson can with his camera and CGI budget. The only thing I can do–that filmmakers and AAA game designers cannot–is react flexibly to anything the players wish to try. Players decry railroads, but they often railroad themselves by taking the most obvious, uncreative option presented.

      As for combat–a huge part of most RPGs–I think recent editions of D&D/PF did us a huge disservice in training GMs to tailor every “enemy” encounter to a power level commensurate to some fraction of the party’s “resources.” Players instantly caught on, and have been trained to metagame in the most simplistic way possible: if every encounter is designed to be both combat-winnable and a sufficient challenge that the PCs should be rewarded for winning, players predictably attack everything in sight. That’s video-game design, and video-game thinking.

      The solution I like best is random tables. Set the environment and let the players react. As a GM, my interaction with random tables is to police them only for thematics–no marsh-dwelling troglodytes in the high desert–but not for power level. Parlay, intimidate, fight, flee. Or come up with something totally different! Players quickly learn not everything is to be attacked on sight.

      The other part of player agency I try to nurture is a realistic approach to the environment. That is, naturalistic interactions with it rather than the crutch of die rolls. I’d much rather hear a player say, “Huh, that’s odd, I’m going to pour out my water-gourd on the floor, and see if it drains down through the cracks or if it pools,” rather than, “Hey, hella, what do I have to roll to detect a pit trap?”

      Sometimes you do have to nurture this, though. In the previous example, if I had new players, even if there wasn’t going to be a pit trap there, now I’ll put one in–because I want to encourage the player to keep trying things like that, and success is encouraging.

      Finally, something that has worked for me in spurring players to think in a more complex way is, oddly, to increase the complexity of the antagonists. Play them as smart as the canon says they are supposed to be. If all your hobgoblins just scream and attack, is it any surprise that, when your PCs see a monster, they just scream and attack? If your monsters scheme, lay traps and ambushes, feign retreats, encircle, and use terrain advantageously, pretty soon your players are going to be doing same.

    • Bill G says:

      This can be really tough! A few thoughts, but first my background.

      I’ve played most of the major systems over a ~18 year RPing career now. I started, like most, with D&D and my real love is Call of Cthulhlu. I’ve also played Aberrant, Pathfinder, Numenera, Rifts, Mage, etc. If I have my way at Gencon each yeah I’ll have the opportunity to try some random indie systems. Most of the time I’ve played these I’ve done so as a GM, since my friends tend to use their intelligence to avoid most forms of work and commitment.

      The two things I’ve found that help toward this sort of player agency are to 1) give it time and 2) chat with the players separate from the game about motivations. I think most games start with players having uncertain motives, or at least stretching their legs until they really get into them. Give them a few adventures that display potential paths and then wait for them to start to push things in a direction. When they do, don’t stand in the way of it. You can motivate these by talking to the players out of game, too. One of the most fun games I ever played involved two of the players deciding they wanted to retire as “gentlemen”, so they started calculating how much gold they would need to do so and running between areas looking for the best place to retire.

    • James Picone says:

      I’ve played and run D&D 3.5 (basic high-fantasy setting), and I’m currently running a Fate game (setting is Worm – gritty superheroes), and I’m intending to participate in a different Fate game a friend is running (Fate/Stay Night setting, we’ve been calling it ‘Fate/Fate’).

      D&D was a fun exercise in optimisation, puzzle solving, and puzzle building. It was certainly a social thing, but most of the fun came in planning out some interesting dungeon/area and then seeing what the players do with it. Not very serious.

      The Fate game is very recent, and has been interesting in a world-building sense – I can use some canon characters, but there wasn’t a lot of detail in the city I’ve set it in in-world. So I’ve had to try to make characters with interesting powers and interesting organisations they might be part of. Planning is also rather tricky in a world where PCs don’t have very strict limits on what they can do. It’s been a fun thinking-on-my-feet exercise as well. Harder from a GMing perspective; one of the players has been extremely passive, a problem that didn’t really occur in the D&D game and that I haven’t been able to resolve.

      Maintaining player agency in the games I’ve run has mostly been about trying to have characters and groups with motives, setting up some problem, and then letting the players loose and trying to improvise responses.

    • Re: agency, I’ve found that you want a mostly-open world with a few big, signposted no-right-answer decision points, and extra effort made to talk about the fallout from the decision points.

      As players get used to them, you signpost them less, so that changes made in the heat of the moment can have more of a visible impact.

      Again, it needs to be clear that there is not necessarily a right answer, and also that the answers are not necessarily equal. For the case of a corrupt noble who’s suborned local law enforcement and can’t be meaningfully arrested, the players can have him at their mercy and have the choice framed as killing him or letting him go, with the expectation that both would draw down different kinds of wrath from different parties, but also would get some players asking “What if we just drag him to another city and try him there?” and others “What if we dress up as that other noble we don’t like and frame him for the murder?”

      You need to be good to do this, however. You need to be able to generate NPCs on the fly, have much of the rule system memorized so you can estimate the feasibility of plans and plots quickly, and you need to be confident that you can adapt to random twists and turns and have your narrative survive the person you were building up as the long-term villain be quietly shanked in his sleep in the middle of Act II.

    • dndnrsn says:

      @Dan Peverley:

      I almost exclusively run games these days. Call of Cthulhu is probably my favourite game. It has aged really well, and its best published adventures and campaigns are splendid. Wild Talents is in second place for its rules system. I ran the former with the latter’s rules, and with some fiddling it ran pretty well – I ran a couple of the big published campaigns, and it turned out well. High-powered for Cthulhu, but the globetrotting-adventure campaigns work well with higher powered PCs.

      I like pen and paper RPGs because it’s a fun, social way to do things you can’t in computer games. Right now, computer games do some things really well, and others profoundly poorly. I also don’t have to confront Skinner Box type crap that gets put in because it’s addictive: I have limited time to game these days, and an hour or two of prep plus a couple of hours for play time a week, during which I get to hang out with friends, without any planet mining or hunting for potion ingredients or grinding monsters for XP and loot is a pretty good deal.

      Most of the players I have had recently were/are limited in experience, or first-time gamers, so running Cthulhu has them in a mindset where, if anything, they have too much agency – I’m OK at improvisation, but not great.

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      I’ve both played and ran a bunch, though haven’t done much of it recently.

      Most recently I’ve been enjoying Apocalypse World and its offshoots, that forces a very different play-style from more traditional systems. Core mechanic has the players rolling 2d6 and adding a stat that ranges between -3 and +3; the fun thing is that if the outcome is 6 or less, the attempt not only fails, but the GM is also *required* to throw something Bad at the character who attempted the roll. 7-9, the task succeeds but possibly with a complication or a tough choice, and 10+ it goes off perfectly.

      This means that gameplay remains… interesting. No more of that “make your roll, you failed, well you can try again I guess”. Rather it’s difficulties and twists galore! Forces the GM to think at their feet, too.

      For example, I was once running a Shadowrun game using the AW system. Player characters are in a hotel, being escorted by security to meet with their Mr. Johnson. One of the players declares his character tries to read a sitch, meaning that if he succeeds, he gets to ask me a question about the situation. He fails.

      I blink and think. They’re in a hotel, surrounded by security guards. A player just failed his roll big-time, so the rules say I have to come up with something Bad. But what Bad is going to happen in such a safe situation?

      I look at my list of NPCs and story seeds I co-created with the players before the game. Then I know! The character who failed his roll, his backstory says that he stole something from a megacorporation and the corp wants it back. One of the security guards has been bribed by another group of shadowrunners, who have been tasked with getting that stolen thing. So suddenly one of the guards tells the character to follow him, because the guard wants to talk with the character privately. To threaten him: the character spills the guts about the stolen artifact, or the guard is going to ruin their upcoming mission by letting the target of their raid know about it in advance.

      Things just got a lot more interesting.

      • Kaj Sotala says:

        Also, I’m going to use this opportunity to plug my friend’s game Here Be Dragons, in which the players play physically unbeatable dragons that wake up after a long slumber to realize that while they slept, weird puny young races like “humans” and “elves” have popped up to make a mess of things. But it doesn’t really matter, because they’re no match for dragons.

        If you want to encourage player agency, a game in which the main rule is that “everything should aim for playing cool dragons and finding out what will be the dragon’s effect on the world” should help them get in the right mindset. It’s basically a game of “you’re a demigod, what do you want to do?”.

        Also really fun.

    • anon says:

      I’ve been running an Eclipse Phase game once a week on Roll20 for maybe half a year now. What finally motivated the players to stop taking orders from the conspiracy and set out on their own was repeated exposure to disagreeable circumstances as a result of blindly following orders. It eventually grew so obvious that they were being manipulated that they got sick of being hatchet men for a terrorist group and decided to go off the reservation. This is sort of what I was after, since the campaign was primarily inspired by the Firewall sourcebook, which repeatedly makes the point that the eponymous secret conspiracy the PCs are supposed to be working for are definitely not The Good Guys (OZMA did nothing wrong).

      I’ve also been running a face to face LotFP game, although we meet so irregularly now I’m a little worried the group might fall apart. After the players finished the introductory adventure I gave them a map of the world with a few “rumors” about hidden treasure scattered across it, corresponding to different OSR modules I felt like running. So far they’ve done a great job of being their own bosses, although they’ve got a problem where they generally believe anything NPCs tell them (with the exception of one of the Magic Users, who got into a protracted argument with a monk about the coming of the New Sun and had to be dragged out of the church by the Fighter).

    • Jordan D. says:

      I’ve been playing and GM’ing for a number of years now. Done quite a few systems- Pathfinder, 3.5, AD&D, Exalted 1 & 2e, Mutants and Masterminds (I think 3rd? I’m not sure), Nobilis 3e, 13th Age, FATE, Dark Heresy, Edge of the Empire, etc. I’m a big fan of the rules-light and narrative-heavy systems like Nobilis or 13th Age, but my friends are all deep mechanics wonks who love sinking hours into coming up with ridiculous characters. So naturally we tend to end up playing Pathfinder even though everyone agrees that some other system would be better.

      The social aspect everyone mentions is certainly a large part, but it’s the unrivalled freedom to adapt the world which I see as the biggest draw. I’m a big fan of pulling a lot of pre-made maps and dungeons into a setting, then letting the world develop around what the players are doing.

    • stillnotking says:

      The only way to drag a tabletop RPG group out of the rut of “tell us the next quest step, Mr. NPC mouthpiece” is to not give the players NPC mouthpieces. Or make them unreliable, make their motives suspect, etc. It’s very easy for both players and GMs to fall into the standard-RPG-formula trap, and it will kill a campaign stone dead.

      GMing in a way that’s actually fun is hard. It’s not dissimilar from being a good writer, only in real time, with no edits, at improvisational speed. Of the dozen or so GMs I’ve gamed with over the years, only two of them were any good at it. The others were going through the motions, doing static, pre-planned scenarios with signposts at every fork in the road. (The worst one actually had timetables detailing how far the players were supposed to get during each session.) The most such a campaign can hope for is to create some incidental entertainment, if it has a few funny or colorful players. I quit playing RPGs for several years when the only good GM I knew quit, came back recently when another good one showed up, only to inadvertently alienate him with an offhand comment — good GMs, like most artists, tend to be sensitive as hell.

      Anyway, I don’t think it’s a skill that can be taught. It can be honed with practice, but it is fundamentally a creative endeavor — harder than most — and the talent is something you either have or you don’t.

  27. Chalid says:

    Lead is really unhealthy, and it took us as a society a really long time to notice. Ditto tobacco and asbestos. A more recent but smaller example would be trans fats.

    How should I think about the odds that there is something comparably severely bad that we are doing right now that we don’t know about? Does that risk justify being paranoid about chemical exposures generally – e.g. preferring organic foods and products, running air purifiers in the house and/or living in more rural areas, etc.

    • Sastan says:

      The way I think about it is that I’d rather die of something I ate than something that ran over me. At least I get to enjoy it once!

      Drink more, worry less.

    • There’s probably something dangerous which isn’t currently noticed, but there’s no strong reason to think current worries will do a good job of pointing you at it.

      One thing to keep an eye on is sunlight deficiency– I find it plausible that worries about skin cancer didn’t take all-cause mortality and morbidity into account. This isn’t just about vitamin D, though that’s important– people have precursors for nitric acid in their skin which is activated by sunlight, and just to make it more fun, mouse studies didn’t turn this up because mice don’t have the precursors.

    • TheNybbler says:

      Unknown risks can’t really justify much. You could run an air purifier and find that the real problem is a byproduct of your air purifier, for instance. Or that something your air purifier removed had a protective effect against something it didn’t. Same idea for organic food (cyanide is organic, after all) or rural living.

      • Chalid says:

        Well, it’s far more likely that an exposure to a random chemical (that we didn’t evolve with) will have a bad effect than a good effect, right? (Of course, for any particular chemical, the effect is likely zero.) So reducing exposures to all novel chemicals is likely to have either zero or positive effect on health.

        I don’t think a quality HEPA/activated carbon air purifier has any byproducts, though I welcome corrections on this.

        • Glen Raphael says:

          “The dose makes the poison.” Consider the possibility of hormesis: lots and lots of stuff that can hurt or kill you in sufficiently large doses is net beneficial in smaller doses. Like exercise. Or water. Or bacteria exposure.

          An air purifier seems like an excellent example of the problem – if your air is really really clean, you might be more prone to develop asthma. Your immune system was designed to work in a dusty germ-filled environment where it regularly had to react to threats; we’ve removed all the threats so your system can become hypervigilant and overreact to small threats or non-threats.

        • James Picone says:

          UV light existed in the ancestral environment (and so did sunburn), and we didn’t really know it caused skin cancer for quite a while. Just because something is ye olde doesn’t necessarily mean we know how bad it is.

          • Cadie says:

            And different populations react differently. A person with very pale skin can handle less sun than someone with brown skin before they burn and raise their risk of skin cancer; the brown-skinned person needs more sun to make enough vitamin D and get the other beneficial effects.

            Since everyone’s risks and needs are wildly different it’s even tougher to figure out the optimal amount.

      • ” You could run an air purifier and find that the real problem is a byproduct of your air purifier, for instance.”

        For a large real world example, consider the big push to avoid saturated fats, which included getting people to switch from butter to margarine. The margarine in question was hydrogenated vegetable oil, i.e. transfats. It appears to be the case that saturated fats are not very dangerous but transfats are. I haven’t seen any calculations, but I expect that excess mortality due to that mistake was at least in the hundreds of thousands.

        • Not all margarines contain (much) trans fat.

          • Now they don’t. My impression is that the introduction of margarine with little or no transfat in it was a later development, a result of people discovering that transfat was bad for you.

          • Cadie says:

            And all the margarines are gross (IMO).

            I’ve been mostly using the same extra fats for years – olive oil and butter. Better flavor than most highly processed fats, and part of our cuisine since Before Common Era. I figure since we don’t really know what’s optimal and Nutrition Experts keep changing their minds, I might as well stick with the time-tested natural stuff that tastes good. Natural isn’t always better, but when in doubt, it seems like the safer bet.

    • Jon H says:

      It took a few years to figure out that plastic microbeads are bad.

    • nydwracu says:

      Seems likely to me.

      Darcey has a heuristic of not eating anything that wasn’t around a hundred years ago. The only reason I haven’t adopted that yet is that I live in the sort of middle of nowhere where the grocery store is ages away and they don’t carry organic food or anything like that. (A government-certified food desert, even, but that strikes me as an overstatement.)

      If you believe the paleo people, wheat is bad.

      • Jiro says:

        “Anything that wasn’t around a hundred years ago” is ill-defined because there is a range of differences all the way from slight differences to big differences. And there’s no principled way to tell between them except in a results-oriented way (I don’t like packaging, so even though potato chips existed a hundred years ago, packaged potato chips didn’t.)

        • Chalid says:

          Well, there are certainly ambiguous items, but that doesn’t make the rule useless. Certainly there are a great many things for which there’s no ambiguity.

          I suspect “avoid eating things that haven’t been around for a long time” would have been a good rule at almost any point up to now, so it probably continues to be so.

        • dndnrsn says:

          A more effective way to measure could be “anything you could make yourself”. To take potato chips as an example, you could slice up some potatoes and deep-fry them. However, the sort of stuff that goes on with packaged, longer-shelf-life chips would be less feasible for a home cook. The problem there becomes that there’s still “stuff nobody’s great-grandma would recognize” available to the home chef – you can buy MSG in shakers, for instance.

          Most of these rules – no wheat, no chemical you can’t pronounce, nothing unavailable a hundred years ago, etc – essentially serve to keep people from eating junk food, from overeating stuff that in and of itself is wholesome (eg, grains are probably not the devil, but they’re really easy to overeat), or from eating stuff that’s less wholesome than it appears (eg, most mass-produced bread has added sugars, which is probably more of a problem than the unpronounceable stuff).

          • Creutzer says:

            What’s supposed to be the unpronounceable stuff, anyway? That’s likely to be foreign and, depending on how much the culture of origin has innovated food-wise, may well have been around for a very long time. Or is the idea behind it that different populations are likely to be adapted to sufficiently different diets so that, for example, Westerners shouldn’t eat Indian food?

          • brad says:

            The usually mean a preservative or something like that. Think sodium propionate. “Chemicals”.

          • dndnrsn says:

            When food/diet writers talk about “unpronounceable stuff” they generally mean chemicals with long names. Edited to clarify.

          • Agronomous says:

            Mrs. Agronomous, reading the ingredients list of some packaged food or other: “HYDROCHLORIC ACID?!?!?”

            Me: Woah! Wouldn’t want to get any of that in your stomach!

        • Jaskologist says:

          Thing that wasn’t available 100 years ago: fresh produce during the winter. So no eating your veggies unless you got them out of a can!

          • keranih says:

            +100.

            Seriously, kids these days.

          • nydwracu says:

            You really aren’t aware of the existence of winter vegetables?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            “Potatoes we didn’t bother to dig up until November” and “fresh produce,” while technically not mutually exclusive, seem like kind of a reach. 🙂

          • nydwracu says:

            Brussels sprouts? Kale? Winter squash?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            None of those things are available fresh in the actual winter. At least not where we have actual winters.

          • keranih says:

            A cabbage you’ve had in the cellar for a month is not a fresh veggie. Same same with winter squash and other long term storage veggies.

            I’ll give you over wintering kale and collards, *if* you can find anyone outside of the south willing to admit to eating collards.

          • Psmith says:

            If you don’t like collard greens, you aren’t using enough bacon and/or ham. Native Bay Aryan and current midwesterner checking in.

          • I’m middle Atlantic and love collards. On the other hand, I only discovered them fairly recently because I had a vague impression they were a southern thing. I’m not sure when collards started being available in Philadelphia.

            For what it’s worth, I stir fry them rather than cooking them slowly.

          • keranih says:

            Correct – collards are to be eaten with pig. If you’re not going to put pig in the pot, leave the poor leaves on the plant.

            I have found it far easier to convince people to eat grits than to eat even properly done collards – but I could be overgeneralizing.

            (Far too late in this thread, but I wonder about the regional/SES distro of mustard/turnips/collards/kale consumption…)

        • nydwracu says:

          Heuristics don’t have to be well-defined.

      • Loquat says:

        Fun fact: Crisco is over 100 years old. The original hydrogenated-cottonseed-oil formula launched in 1911, and was marketed as a healthier alternative to lard since The Jungle had freaked everyone out about processed animal products just a few years prior.

  28. Payaam says:

    I remember you wrote about writing fiction. You complained that you don’t know how to make characters walk 10 more miles without saying “and then they walked 10 more miles” and that there is no book or writing course you could find which addresses this issue. Did you find a resolution in the end? Is there any book or article which helped you?

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      @ Payaam

      This level of technique fascinates me to an unhealthy degree. Writers often use constructions like, “Ten miles further, they found…” or “It was only after walking ten more miles in those expensive boots that…” This buries the dull fact in a subordinate clause or something. There’s a lot of that sort of construction in _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_.

      I don’t recall any particular books or courses, but the term for the walked a mile sort of thing is ‘transitions’, so if you search for ‘transitions’ combined with terms like ‘POV’, ‘Double First Person’, ‘omni’ … jeepers, how many I’ve forgotten … you’ll turn up at least some conversations about them, and a lot more such terms.

    • Nornagest says:

      This plagued me for a while too. I eventually figured out that you don’t need to say it at all — you just need to start a new scene, and if you describe the differences clearly enough (in characters as well as setting — feet hurt, water’s almost gone, etc.), your readers will figure out for themselves roughly what’s happened. Then, if you need to, you can go back and fill the reader in on any details of the process that need filling.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        In some kinds of stories you never need to say it at all. In L. M. Montgomery, Nancy Drew, boarding school series at Gutenberg … the same conversation can ‘carry’ (as the screen writers say) over different times, places, different people present without a blip. Manning Coles spy thrillers too; maybe Perry Mason.

        In others, well, making the reader slog along to Mordor was Tolkien’s point.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      Can’t point to any specific resources, but… if there’s some boring thing happening that needs to act as connective tissue in the story (a long sea voyage would be a prototypical example) skip over it as quickly as possible, in a sentence or less if you can. Use a chapter break or similar to your advantage, but the important thing is to leave out the tedium entirely. After all, if you’re bored writing it, imagine how bored the reader is going to be.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Yep. One of my novels takes place over the course of a year, but it’s broken into several extended scenes. In between there are very short vignettes which say things like, “They went to Tokyo and had a lot of fun, and then they came back, and this happened…” The main characters travel constantly, but we never see them doing it except maybe an intro or the epilogue to a scene in a cab to or from the airport.

  29. Wrong Species says:

    So it’s clear by now that people have far underestimated Donald Trump but is this an anomaly or a sign of things to come? We’re probably overdue for another political realignment. The white working class doesn’t seem to care too much for progressive values while the poor rural republicans seem to care far more about keeping out immigrants than deregulation. There could be a republican party much more populist and a democratic party that is less hostile to capitalism.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      Sign of Things to Come. Our current system is not sustainable without some fairly significant realignment. The Dire Problem is starting to make itself felt and that will only get worse. While our system isn’t nearly so bad as many people claim it is about dealing with the Dire Problem at current levels, it’s not good, and it categorically cannot handle a situation where a very large portion of the population not only unemployed, but unemployable. Protectionism, of whatever form, is a symptom of the system’s beginning to fail.

      • Anonymous says:

        What is this “Dire Problem” to which you refer?

        • Marc Whipple says:

          The Dire Problem is that as automation and mechanical productivity amplification continue to improve, the proportion of the population who have the cognitive ability to produce labor with a positive value continues to drop.

          It has been up to now greatly overshadowed by the enormous supply of relatively cheap labor around the world. This has disincentivized increasing the rate of productivity increase to a degree. But combined with inflation and increasing costs of transport, it is starting to make itself felt again.

          For an example of the difference between ordinary innovative displacement such as workers have complained of since Ned Ludd’s time and the Dire Problem, consider a fast food restaurant. Though it takes fewer workers to run one now than once it did, it still takes enough, and their labor is cheap enough, that aside from the Automat nobody has seriously attempted to automate them and a good number of people have jobs in them. But fast-food-bot technology continues to improve, and the costs of employing a fast-food worker continue to increase. (Fast food robots are getting cheaper and fast food workers are getting more expensive.) From what I have read we are on the cusp of “fast food will now be served by robots, with one or two workers per store to keep the hoppers filled and mop up.”

          Three and a half million people work in fast food restaurants in the US. If we cut their numbers by 80%, that’s 2.8 million people without jobs. Most of whom could not get a better job than working in fast food. Up to now, displaced workers have moved into industries that needed more labor. But where is our economy going to put almost three million people whose highest previous economic purpose was working in fast food? When retail and low-skill manufacturing and every other industry which needs workers at that cognitive level is experiencing the same phenomenon?

          And lest you think I am picking on burger-flippers, the same process is plausible to assume in say, the practice of law. An intelligent system could do most of what I do. And this is true of a lot of mid to upper level knowledge worker jobs like banking and insurance. This is over and above the almost complete obliteration of the administrative services field. (Not all of the women in the secretarial pool were there because The Man was keeping them from getting their MBA.)

          Anyway, the Dire Problem is that eventually you run out of fields for displaced workers to move into. Yet they still have to eat, have a place to live, and glib as it sounds, some purpose in life.

          What the Hell do we do with them?

          • Anonymous says:

            But where is our economy going to put almost three million people whose highest previous economic purpose was working in fast food? When retail and low-skill manufacturing and every other industry which needs workers at that cognitive level is experiencing the same phenomenon?

            Remember that the entire point of automation is that it saves money. The economy is going to put those three million people into whatever market those savings are spent in.

            If this problem does occur, it will occur by it becoming possible for farmland owners to make more money using their land to produce robots* than using it to produce food for people.

            *(Or, actually, using it to produce goods for other property owners who are willing to pay more for those goods than workers would be willing to pay for the food that it could have produced instead.)

          • Tibor says:

            At the same time it makes the other people richer and they will use that money to purchase new more and more luxurious goods. Very few people would go to the hairdresser’s in the 16th century. Most people consider a massage quite a luxury today, going to a massage twice a week will be quite costly. But if you spend less on food for example because it is now all automatic and they can charge a lower price, you’ll spend it elsewhere. Not everything low-skilled can be replaced by machines. If I go to a restaurant, I want the waiter to be a human because I pay not only for the food (I would cook it myself or call a home delivery service if that were the case) but also for the place and for being treated nice by the staff. Machine waiters would break the spell. In a fast food, it is fine, in a restaurant where you’d bring a date, it is not.

            Essentially, humans often want to interact with humans and in this, machines are about as far from humans today as a sharpened rock is from a spaceship (I don’t mean that they are as far away from it in terms of time). And once you have robots indistinguishable from humans doing all the work then you can introduce a minimum basic income which does not even have to be all that basic because you have vast armies of slave labourers who do not rebel or complain (hopefully) and are extremely efficient at what they do.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Remember that the entire point of automation is that it saves money. The economy is going to put those three million people into whatever market those savings are spent in.

            What if there are no jobs in that market because everything’s being carried out by robots?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Mr. X

            Then you’re in my farmland scenario. Everything being produced by robots requires all possible inputs to human labor being possible to more efficiently use in other ways. It being possible to build robots to do any job is not enough because it matters what those robots are built from. For example: rare earth elements are vital to various kinds of technology; if robots depend on them too then it won’t matter if you can build a robot that can do anything a human can do, twice as fast: you will still be limited by the availability of those inputs. Similarly for other inputs to machines. You only need to start worrying when you can build a better robot out of the things you would otherwise have built a human out of, or else if rich property owners develop a sudden strong taste for something that requires those inputs.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            Exactly.

            @ Marc Whipple:

            The “Dire Problem” is a complete non-problem.

            Human beings have a need and desire for an unlimited quantity of wealth. We never get to the point of “enough” wealth, at which point we cross over into “overproduction” and workers become superfluous.

            Human workers can never be fundamentally “outcompeted” by machines, even if the machines are superior to them at every possible job. The reason is the same reason why poor countries benefit from the existence of rich countries which are better than them at producing every possible good, or that average people would benefit from the existence of a race of supermen who were better than them at every possible job.

            The reason is comparative advantage, which is perhaps the most beneficent fact about capitalism. (Even 90s Paul Krugman—a completely different being from current Krugman—understood just how important comparative advantage is, and he has a great essay about it.)

            Even if machines are absolutely superior to humans at every possible task, there will be some tasks where the humans are comparatively more efficient. If machines can make hamburgers ten times as well as humans but make handcrafted shoes only twice as well as humans, then the machines will all make hamburgers, and the humans will all make shoes. I would rather have all bespoke clothes and shoes, handmade by craftsmen, than have some kind of standardized thing that came off an assembly line. I do not because they are too expensive. If I had more wealth, I would get some.

            Or the simplest case to see why “lack of jobs” could never be a problem: everyone on earth could probably find a use for at least one full-time servant. There can never be one full-time servant for everyone on the planet. QED.

            Suppose (contrary to my expectation) that people would prefer robot butlers to human butlers. Even so, if robot butlers are only twice as good as human butlers, but robots are more than twice as good at other things, there is always a demand for human butlers.

            Moreover, the real problem is not to find “jobs” for people. Jobs are the means to producing the material wealth people need to survive and thrive. Jobs do not exist for their own sake. If someone wants to do something for its own sake as a leisure activity, it is a hobby and it therefore need have no competitive market value.

            As the amount of wealth people have increases, the value of their leisure time increases, so they work less. It is perfectly conceivable that, in a sufficiently wealthy society, people may only work one year out of every ten, and then only two days out of every week. The fact that such a large number of people would therefore be supported on so few “jobs” would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

            Even more obviously, as wealth increases…wealth increases. Everything is, in real terms, cheaper. If machines are increasing production so much that they are one-hundred-times better than humans at every job, then you could buy a standard of living such as now costs $50,000 a year for a nickel. And for $50,000 a year, you could buy something unimaginable. So unimaginable that most would prefer to work less and earn, say, $100 a year with more time to spend it.

            The “Dire Problem” is proof that there is no good thing which people aren’t capable of thinking about as an evil.

          • Creutzer says:

            Even if machines are absolutely superior to humans at every possible task, there will be some tasks where the humans are comparatively more efficient.

            Not if the human’s maintenance costs are higher than the value they can produce. And I fail to see why such a situation couldn’t arise.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Creutzer

            Did you read my posts above? What mechanism do you think would make wages drop in this fashion, other than the development of more economically efficient uses for the inputs to human labor – which seems to me that it would require either the ability to make robots on farms, or some big spike in demand for food on the part of the very rich?

          • Chalid says:

            Long-run, imagine sunlight becoming too valuable as an energy source to waste on growing on food for the inefficient humans? Or it being too expensive to maintain a viable biosphere for the sake of the inefficient humans?

            EDIT: Generically, what you’d be afraid of isn’t the return on human labor dropping, it’s that the inputs to create and maintain humans become more valuable for other purposes.

            Humans need a wide variety of diverse inputs and you only need one of them to become very valuable.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Chalid

            But sunlight is not the only input to robots, there are the materials they’re made from too.

            Reply to edit: anything else that can be done with the inputs to human labor will likely also rely on many other inputs. The scarcity of those, and the cost of extracting/creating them and so on, will serve to limit the amount of human labor inputs that are repurposed in this way. Regarding one specific possible alternative use – creating/powering robot workers – I’ve already mentioned a plausible limiting factor, but this applies more generally.

          • Jiro says:

            If machines can make hamburgers ten times as well as humans but make handcrafted shoes only twice as well as humans, then the machines will all make hamburgers, and the humans will all make shoes.

            That doesn’t work, because of diminishing returns. As more and more machines make hamburgers, the demand for hamburgers goes down and the value of each additional hamburger goes down. At some point it will go down enough that it is not worth making more. If there are still machines left at this point, they will be used to make shoes. The result is no human jobs making either hamburgers or shoes.

          • Chalid says:

            @Anonymous

            I don’t see any reason to think that the limits on automating economic activity you allude to are so low as to necessarily be compatible with a large human population. You’re asserting that it is, but I think you’d need to construct a model to make that sort of claim.

            Also remember that things like “a non-toxic atmosphere” and “temperature around 20 C” are inputs to humans and I don’t think your resource argument applies to those at all.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Creutzer:

            Not if the human’s maintenance costs are higher than the value they can produce. And I fail to see why such a situation couldn’t arise.

            Sure, it’s possible—as the level of technology and mechanization goes down. The guy with Down’s syndrome, who would have been left to die on a rock in the Stone Age as too expensive to support, can now stand around at Wal-Mart and greet people as they walk in, thereby earning more to support himself than the most productive member of the hunter-gatherer tribe made in ten years.

            Technological progress lowers human “maintenance costs” while increasing the value they can produce.

            @ Jiro:

            That doesn’t work, because of diminishing returns. As more and more machines make hamburgers, the demand for hamburgers goes down and the value of each additional hamburger goes down. At some point it will go down enough that it is not worth making more. If there are still machines left at this point, they will be used to make shoes. The result is no human jobs making either hamburgers or shoes.

            Obviously, yes, diminishing returns do occur with any one specific product like hamburgers or shoes.

            But no, you are not correct that “at some point it will go down enough that it is not worth making more”, and then there will be no more jobs. Not worth making more means not worth it in comparison to making something else with the same inputs.

            There may be a relative overproduction of hamburgers, but only in comparison to a relative underproduction of, say, interstellar rockets. The jobs just get transferred from hamburgers to rockets.

            The idea that there could be some kind of absolute overproduction implies that there is some finite, limited amount of wealth that people want and need and no more. But people will always want more than they have. And if they don’t, by God, that’s hardly a problem. At that point we would have entered the land of Cockaigne, or the communist dream of a “post-scarcity” society. If people have so much wealth they don’t want any more, by definition there’s enough for everyone.

            That’s the weird paradox of the situation. People are imagining earthly paradise and saying it would be terrible because there would be no jobs and everyone would starve. If there were no jobs, that would mean that there was no work which needed to be done, which would mean everyone had as much wealth as he cared to lift his hand out to take.

            ***

            Maybe it’s because people are imagining robots as consumers? That would indeed be bad. If a thousand times the number of consumers could be pumped out of factories, eventually population would grow to the point where everyone would be reduced to subsistence. And since the robots have lesser costs of subsistence, they would “underlive” us and cause us all to starve. (That was the exact argument used by many people in the 1800s against Chinese immigration: the theory was that the Chinese were capable of “underliving”—a term they used—whites in virtue of having lower “maintenance costs”, and thus had to be kept out to prevent the Yellow Peril.)

            But—unless we designed them in a completely suicidal way—robots are not like this. Robots are producers only. They are selfless communists or slaves who desire only to serve their masters. Robots do not “want” to have an unlimited amount of wealth. They “want” humans to have an unlimited amount of wealth.

            Robots, for the purpose of economic equations and analysis, are not labor (or population). They are capital. And an increase in the ratio of capital to labor means more prosperity for everyone.

            In contrast, Robin Hanson’s “ems” are labor, and that’s why the society he depicts is so dystopian (though he doesn’t think so): the explosion in the number of “ems” results in a very low ratio of capital to labor. The ratio automatically regresses back to the level where the “ems” live at subsistence.

          • Chalid says:

            @Vox

            I’m not sure why you passed over my posts in replying to others? Do you want to keep this to the short/medium term?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Chalid

            I agree. My point is more that I really don’t know whether this is or isn’t a threat, or when it might become a threat, but that the popular conception of this argument, along the lines “but what happens when robots can do everything humans can do?” is wrong, and that everyone who breathlessly posts exponential graphs and videos of lights-out factories and then starts talking about Basic Income is on the wrong track entirely. If this problem occurs, it will be portended not merely by robots that can do things humans can, but by rising prices for food, water, housing, caused by a sudden alternative use for the resources that go into producing these.

            @Vox Imperatoris

            The problem is the same if you produce clearly non-sentient robots, but ones that can do the work of humans better than humans can, from the resources that humans are made from. In such a scenario, there is no point in producing inputs for humans when you could make more money producing inputs for robots instead. You’re back to the world of territorial animals – competing, using violence or threats of violence, over resources of fixed value which replenish themselves and which you cannot do anything with but consume. This might not be so bad. Perhaps the outcome will be everyone with their own little ten acres of robot, producing whatever they desire, and a little nuclear missile silo at the side, programmed to send a retaliatory strike to annihilate anyone who attacks them or their property. Or maybe, perhaps preferably, it will not be a nuclear missile but a nanobot WMD, that precisely targets the person you’re after, with no collateral damage.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Chalid:

            I skipped over your posts because you didn’t seem to be arguing against me but making some points that I considered irrelevant. But sure, I’ll respond to you.

            Long-run, imagine sunlight becoming too valuable as an energy source to waste on growing on food for the inefficient humans? Or it being too expensive to maintain a viable biosphere for the sake of the inefficient humans?

            Valuable to whom? Robots are capital; they produce for the owners of the capital. Humans are the owners of the capital.

            The owner of capital, insofar as he wishes to consume his capital, doesn’t care whether it is “efficient” from other people’s perspective. Is it “efficient” to buy a Ferrari? It is for the guy who gets to drive the Ferrari.

            Who is “wasting” the energy growing food for inefficient humans?

            EDIT: Generically, what you’d be afraid of isn’t the return on human labor dropping, it’s that the inputs to create and maintain humans become more valuable for other purposes.

            Valuable to whom?

            I don’t see any reason to think that the limits on automating economic activity you allude to are so low as to necessarily be compatible with a large human population. You’re asserting that it is, but I think you’d need to construct a model to make that sort of claim.

            This is neither here nor there.

            The more we can automate economic activity, the better. Humans have a limitless desire for wealth. The more automation, the more wealth they get for the same amount of work. The more automation, moreover, the greater the population that can be supported on the same amount of work.

            Do you want to keep this to the short/medium term?

            I don’t know what you mean. It’s not any different in the long run.

            Unless you mean some kind of “iron law of wages” thing where eventually humanity takes over the whole universe and acquires all the resources, leaving nothing new to be produced? At that point, yes, it would no longer be possible for production to outpace population growth. But I’m not too worried about that.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @Vox Imperatoris: Gwern makes a pretty strong argument against comparative advantage saving the day. Syllogism’s objection is correct as well.

            Also, increased economy efficiency (which doesn’t only come from automation, but also from e.g. immigration and offshoring) won’t make certain things, like land or status, cheaper. If you still need a job to buy those, the fact that efficiency has eaten your job means you are going to have a bad time. Who here wants to live in a homeless shelter and die alone and unloved even if the price of gourmet food, strong alcohol, fast internet, powerful smartphones, etc… all drop to the point of costing pennies? Hell, we’re halfway there already, except it’s not just the homeless in shelters, it’s prisoners and public housing tenants on welfare and boomerang kids coming back to live with their parents after their college degree failed to find them a middle-class job that would allow them to move away from home. It’s a disaster, is what it is.

          • Jiro says:

            Vox: I was not thinking of robots as consumers. I was rebutting your claim that humans will still have jobs because humans have comparative advantage in some areas even when robots have absolute advantage. Your claim depends on the argument that the robots will only be used in the areas where they have comparative advantage. If there are diminishing returns, this is not true; robots will be used in those areas until the point of diminishing returns is reached, whereupon the remaining robots will be used in areas where humans (originally) had comparative advantage, thus putting the humans out of jobs.

            Robots … “want” humans to have an unlimited amount of wealth.

            No, they don’t. They “want” *specific* humans to have an unlimited amount of wealth. This doesn’t generalize to “humans” unless you redistribute enough wealth to ensure that everyone gets their own set of robots. And even then, it still won’t generalize well because the bottleneck in using robots to do things will be limited resources such as land or raw materials, and just owning robots won’t let you get that.

            I’m sure that robots will increase the *average* level of wealth in the society, but if that means some people starving that isn’t necessarily good.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            The problem is the same if you produce clearly non-sentient robots, but ones that can do the work of humans better than humans can, from the resources that humans are made from. In such a scenario, there is no point in producing inputs for humans when you could make more money producing inputs for robots instead. You’re back to the world of territorial animals – competing, using violence or threats of violence, over resources of fixed value which replenish themselves and which you cannot do anything with but consume. This might not be so bad. Perhaps the outcome will be everyone with their own little ten acres of robot, producing whatever they desire, and a little nuclear missile silo at the side, programmed to send a retaliatory strike to annihilate anyone who attacks them or their property. Or maybe, perhaps preferably, it will not be a nuclear missile but a nanobot WMD, that precisely targets the person you’re after, with no collateral damage.

            What do you mean, there’s no point in producing inputs for humans? Who owns the robots but other humans? If you want what their robots produce, you’ve got to trade them something that you or your robots produce. And what they’ll want in trade is both resources that can be used by their robots and luxuries that they can consume. Or, you know, just money so that they can buy those things.

            All you’re saying is that, if there were no property rights, people would try to gain wealth by stealing it instead of producing it. Yes.

            ***

            I think part of the problem with this whole discussion is that people are falsely analyzing workers as if they were slaves.

            No, there is a fundamental difference. Workers have property rights. Slaves do not. There is a limited supply of labor, and if you want a worker’s work, you have to pay him more than another guy is willing to pay him. That’s how and why wages go up under capitalism: employers bid against one another.

            I think most people really do have an implicitly Marxist view of the labor market and think wages naturally tend toward “subsistence” unless held up by some artificial means like unions or minimum wage laws.

            The Marxist view is an accurate depiction of how a slave economy works: slaveowners pay their slaves minimum subsistence while extracting maximum “surplus value”. And the slaves just have to like it or lump it.

            A free labor market is precisely…not like that.

            In fact, all the technical details are irrelevant. The main difference is: workers own their wages. As the ratio of capital to labor goes up, productivity of labor goes up, and employers are willing and able to bid more against one another for the limited supply of labor.

            When a worker sells his labor, he receives the entire market value of his labor, not what it cost to “produce” his labor—the two are not the same.

            And when automation radically lowers the real cost of every good, the less work a worker must do to purchase his own “inputs” or “maintenance costs”. The rest of the “surplus value”, he gets to consume.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ jaimeastorga2000:

            @Vox Imperatoris: Gwern makes a pretty strong argument against comparative advantage saving the day. Syllogism’s objection is correct as well.

            Gwern’s argument is not very good, plus he is talking more about the short-term issue of unemployment as workers shift from an automated job to a new job. If you have a specific point in mind, I’ll respond to it.

            Also, increased economy efficiency (which doesn’t only come from automation, but also from e.g. immigration and offshoring) won’t make certain things, like land or status, cheaper.

            Yes, they will.

            Land: the limiting factor on land is not physical space but livability and connectedness to economic hubs. Why don’t people live in outer space? It is too expensive. If we had a much larger amount of wealth, anyone could afford to live not only in Antarctica, but on the Moon, Mars, Europa, the Lagrangian points, etc.

            And improvement is transporation and communication technology can make those places connected to economic hubs in the same way that technology makes it possible for a guy in India to tell me how to fix my computer.

            Status: not a fixed good, either. We’re not one big monkey tribe with the highest-status guy at one end and the lowest-status guy at the other. One’s sense of “status” is relative to the actual communities one is part of. You can have lots of status with literally no income: join the Catholic Church, take a vow of poverty, and become a monk. You can even become the abbot and get to boss people around, if you value that so much. I think monasticism is pretty stupid, but they don’t care what I think.

            The idea that people are going to be driven into misery because they can’t “afford status” is absurd.

            Hell, we’re halfway there already, except it’s not just homeless shelters, it’s prisoners and public housing tenants on welfare and boomerang kids coming back to live with their parents after their college degree failed to find them a middle-class job that would allow them to move away from home. It’s a disaster, is what it is.

            Reports of disaster are greatly exaggerated.

            I’m not sure housing actually is more expensive than it used to be, controlling for quality. If it is, it’s due to government intervention preventing and impeding housing construction.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            Vox: I was not thinking of robots as consumers. I was rebutting your claim that humans will still have jobs because humans have comparative advantage in some areas even when robots have absolute advantage. Your claim depends on the argument that the robots will only be used in the areas where they have comparative advantage. If there are diminishing returns, this is not true; robots will be used in those areas until the point of diminishing returns is reached, whereupon the remaining robots will be used in areas where humans (originally) had comparative advantage, thus putting the humans out of jobs.

            You’re still not getting the point.

            The robots will be used in one area until diminishing returns is reached, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another, and so on until we run out of robots before we run out of returns to diminish. There is an unlimited desire for wealth. If we have too much in one area, we have not enough in another.

            We never run out of needs to fulfill; we never run out of work to do.

            No, they don’t. They “want” *specific* humans to have an unlimited amount of wealth. This doesn’t generalize to “humans” unless you redistribute enough wealth to ensure that everyone gets their own set of robots. And even then, it still won’t generalize well because the bottleneck in using robots to do things will be limited resources such as land or raw materials, and just owning robots won’t let you get that.

            Sure, the robots are owned by specific people and want to serve them in particular. A small number of people will probably control the vast majority of the wealth.

            That doesn’t mean the “proletariat” is going to starve.

            If robots increase production so much as to make wealth so abundant that no robot-owning capitalist even finds human labor valuable enough to be worth pulling a penny out of his pocket to pay the worker, that does not mean that workers are going to starve. It means that prices are so low that even the tiniest amount of capital will suffice to purchase a vast quantity of goods.

            Suppose one worker paints a painting in his spare time which catches the eye of a robot-owning capitalist, who pays him the nominal sum of $1 for it. If we’re in a land of such abundance as you describe, that one dollar will be enough not only for the painter live in abundance for the rest of his days but for his family, friends, and everyone down to bartenders he tips to live in abundance for the rest of their days, too.

            I’m sure that robots will increase the *average* level of wealth in the society, but if that means some people starving that isn’t necessarily good.

            People will starve to death despite the abundance of capital if:

            a) They have absolutely no capital; and

            b) They have absolutely nothing of any value to provide to anyone with capital by their existence.

            I find this implausible.

            Assume just for the sake of argument that there were nothing such as paintings, handcrafted goods, etc. that the capital-less people could provide. Which I also find implausible, but still.

            Nevertheless, don’t you think that someone might be willing to pay just a tiny sum to solve poverty forever? Sure, not his whole income. Not even a significant fraction of it. Just imagine being able to pay one nickel to provide everyone in Africa with the same material standard of living as America today. If society were wealthy enough, this would be possible.

            If, despite wealth being so abundant that paying for human labor of any sort were not worth the effort of grabbing the cash, and if no one could be voluntarily roused to give even the tiniest sum to support those without capital, then I guess they would starve, wouldn’t they? But then it wouldn’t exactly be a “dire problem” for these callous capitalists to be concerned with, would it?

            That’s the silly thing about it: you’re expecting us to feel pity for these hypothetical future people and, I don’t know, restrict the economy to prevent this from happening. While at the same time supposing that their psychology will be so foreign that they will not be moved to the least degree by these concerns.

            Not to mention that anyone could avoid this fate by keeping around a small sum of money in a piggy-bank somewhere.

          • Chalid says:

            @Vox

            The point is that there is no reason to think that *everything* will stay cheap.

            If there is at least one finite resource required by both humans and machines, and machines have a large absolute advantage in using that shared resource, then people with machines will bid the price of that resource beyond the reach of the people without machines. Indeed, people with the most efficient machines will bid it out of the reach of the less efficient producers.

            This isn’t some exotic effect. Think of the analogy to, say, rent in San Francisco. Land is finite. After the tech boom, people with high ability to use the land to create value (by being close to their tech jobs) make renting land more expensive. People with low ability to turn land into value, e.g. “normal” working class people, can’t afford to rent anymore and are forced to leave.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Chalid:

            If there is at least one finite resource required by both humans and machines, and machines have a large absolute advantage in using that shared resource, then people with machines will bid the price of that resource beyond the reach of the people without machines. Indeed, people with the most efficient machines will bid it out of the reach of the less efficient producers.

            Every resource is finite in a metaphysical sense. Land is “produced” in exactly the same way that iron, steel, computers, or whatever else are “produced”.

            Land is “produced”, i.e. made available for human habitation, in many ways. The simplest ways are by invention of primitive technologies like fur coats and igloos that allowed people to live in inhospitable places. But there are more advanced ways: there is an old expression, “God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.” And with spacefaring technology, the potential supply of land is virtually limitless.

            If land is in short supply, the price will go up, but precisely that is what encourages people to produce more of it. And if wealth is in such abundance that it’s not worth anyone’s effort to pay people to dig ditches, build levees, etc., then the supply of land must not be so scarce that people are starving because they can’t afford the rent.

            Land is not in fact a fixed good, and there is no way that monopolistic land rents are going to somehow make up 99% of the entire economy or something absurd like that. Unless there were just massive overpopulation, which is a separate issue (and also not as dire as people tend to think).

            This isn’t some exotic effect. Think of the analogy to, say, rent in San Francisco. Land is finite. After the tech boom, people with high ability to use the land to create value (by being close to their tech jobs) make renting land more expensive. People with low ability to turn land into value, e.g. “normal” working class people, can’t afford to rent anymore and are forced to leave.

            Yes, if a particular piece of land goes up in value, such as by being located close to a major hub of economic activity, people who are not using it for its most valuable purposes are encouraged to move off it.

            There is no god-given right to be able to continue renting an apartment at the same rate indefinitely into the future. The renter forgoes the benefits of a potential increase in land value but in return insulates himself from a potential fall.

            On the other hand, people who already owned houses in San Francisco benefited greatly. Even if they chose to move out due to a rising cost of living, they were able to sell their houses and make a lot of money.

            All that this shows is that the most valuable land tends to be allocated to those who use it for the most valuable purposes. It doesn’t show that the price of the most marginal land continually increases, or that people find themselves shoved off it by ruthless capitalism.

          • Chalid says:

            All that this shows is that the most valuable land tends to be allocated to those who use it for the most valuable purposes.

            I think what anonymous and I and others have all been struggling to point out to you is that this applies to any resource that will be used by both humans and robots.

            If a human is not going to use land/energy/oxygen/etc for the most valuable purpose, then they’re not necessarily going to get it. Theymay be able to trade for the land/energy/oxygen/etc, but if robots are doing tremendously valuable things with it then it may be quite expensive to the human.

          • Jiro says:

            The robots will be used in one area until diminishing returns is reached, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another, and so on until we run out of robots before we run out of returns to diminish. There is an unlimited desire for wealth. If we have too much in one area, we have not enough in another.

            There is not an unlimited desire for wealth in general, only an unlimited desire for wealth at zero cost. By the time we run out of robots, the remaining things where we desire wealth may not be things where we desire them enough to pay the humans enough to live on, or even to pay the minimum cost for humans to be able to do the job.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Chalid:

            I think what anonymous and I and others have all been struggling to point out to you is that this applies to any resource that will be used by both humans and robots.

            If a human is not going to use land/energy/oxygen/etc for the most valuable purpose, then they’re not necessarily going to get it. Theymay be able to trade for the land/energy/oxygen/etc, but if robots are doing tremendously valuable things with it then it may be quite expensive to the human.

            Sure, capitalism tends to assign resources to their most valuable use. But it also increases the amount of resources.

            If the demand for land grows and the supply of land does not increase proportionately, the marginal cost of land will increase. But precisely this is what encourages people to “produce” more land for human use.

            There is a uniformity-of-profit principle in a capitalist economy: you don’t, in the long run, have returns of -50% in one sector and 500% in another sector. Losses encourage divestment, and profits encourage investment. If the rents on land are exorbitant, then that encourages people to economize on the use of land and, more importantly, to produce more land as a means to collecting some of those exorbitant rents. For instance, this could mean cutting down a forest or draining a swamp in order to build a suburban housing development.

            Now, it is true that if land is a fixed good, this does not happen. They economize on the use of land, but they don’t produce any more of it because it’s impossible. As a result, the owners of land continue to collect above-market monopoly rents, potentially driving everything into a hellish dystopia.

            But land is not a fixed good, at least no more than any other good is fixed in a metaphysical sense because we live in a finite universe.

            In other words, what I’m saying is that land will not be proportionately more expensive than anything else. Its price will be equal to its costs of production plus the going rate of profit (which is determined by the degree of time preference).

            What would produce your dystopian scenario?

            a) Land’s being a fixed good

            b) Land’s costs of production being so much higher than everything else that it’s practically a fixed good.

            c) Technological progress’s having a radically lower ability to decrease the costs of production of land than to decrease any other costs. If this carried on long enough, it would bring about b).

            I don’t think any of these things hold.

            It is true enough that if a good is fixed and in very limited supply, and the rich are willing to pay more for it than the poor, the rich will have it all and the poor won’t have any. For instance, this is why the rich have Da Vinci paintings and the poor do not.

            But why is it that the rich don’t buy all the food and leave the poor without any? The rich buy all the food they want, but at a certain point the marginal value to them of an additional pound of beef is less than what the poor are willing to pay. So the poor outbid the rich for this pound of beef.

            It’s the same way with land. The rich buy all the highest-quality land, such as that in the middle of San Francisco, but eventually they buy so much land that the the marginal value of it declines to the point where the poor are willing and able to pay more for their first acre than the rich are for their five-hundredth.

          • Chalid says:

            All you need for the dystopian scenario is for the inputs to produce the scarce resource to have more valuable uses than the human has for the scarce resource itself.

            If humans have a large absolute disadvantage in everything then the above condition is likely to hold.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            There is not an unlimited desire for wealth in general, only an unlimited desire for wealth at zero cost. By the time we run out of robots, the remaining things where we desire wealth may not be things where we desire them enough to pay the humans enough to live on, or even to pay the minimum cost for humans to be able to do the job.

            Yes, economic demand increases to infinity as the cost of goods approaches zero.

            The function of the robots is to lower the cost of goods, increasing demand. The more supply, the more demand.

            Your scenario does not make sense. When we “run out of robots”, we will have applied automation to such a large degree as to radically lower costs and therefore radically increase demand. That means the cost for humans to have “enough to live on” will be incredibly low. The more robots, the lower the costs.

            The robots can only come out the factories at a finite rate. They do a finite amount of work. When all the robots have been applied, there is still more demand for work to be done. People who want work done bid up the value of the robots. At a certain point, a human worker is willing to do the job for less than the owner of a robot is willing to sell it.

            And that wage is not going to be less than his “subsistence costs”. Precisely because of the abundance created by the robots, wealth will have so little marginal value that one might be willing to trade the equivalent of a million hamburgers to buy one hour of a worker’s time in producing whatever is in relatively short supply, such as handcrafted shoes with a “personal touch”.

            An important point is that time is the fundamentally limiting factor for the economy. The time of a worker’s labor, the time of the use of capital. Natural resources are, for all intents and purposes, unlimited, so long as you have enough time.

            As the level of automation increases, the “maintenance costs” of human labor decline, the economic productivity of human labor vastly increases (and economic productivity, moreover, is not the same as crudely physical productivity—a janitor at an expensive hotel is much more productive than a janitor at a gas station), but the amount of time people have remains the same. The quantity of everything else goes up, but time remains fixed. Workers own their laboring time, and they can therefore sell it for an increasing quantity of other goods against which it remains fixed.

            ***

            Or actually, now that I think about it, there is a much simpler way to put things. Suppose a robot can produce 500 hamburgers in an hour. How much is that robot’s time going to cost? The amount required to buy 500 hamburgers an hour indefinitely into the future, discounted for time preference.

            A human being can undercut and outcompete that robot by being willing to work for the amount required to buy 50 hamburgers an hour.

            The robots aren’t going to be working for “subsistence costs” any more than the humans. They will be owned by humans who want to make a profit. If robots were applied to enough areas that their value in the most marginal area declined to less than the equivalent of 50 hamburgers an hour, people would stop making them and hire existing humans instead.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Vox:

            Unless we start applying OSHA, minimum wage, Obamacare, etc, to robots, there is a relatively high floor below which humans will not be allowed to offer to compete with robots. This is exactly why fast-food-bots are on the cusp of being economical.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Chalid:

            All you need for the dystopian scenario is for the inputs to produce the scarce resource to have more valuable uses than the human has for the scarce resource itself.

            It’s totally unclear what you mean here.

            The “inputs” all have declining marginal value. Even though the rich could buy a million hamburgers a year, they don’t because the ten-thousandth hamburger is worth much less than the first one. At a certain point, the poor are willing and able to pay more for a hamburger than the rich.

            This applies to every good.

            If the robot-owning capitalist already has a million acres, sure, he might get some tiny amount of use out of an additional one. But for the poor person, it’s a matter of life and death. If the additional acre produces one cent of value for the capitalist but two or more cents of value for the poor person, selling it to the poor person is a more valuable use.

            If the poor person doesn’t have even two cents to his name, or if land is so scarce that the its marginal value for the rich is still above what the poor are willing and able to pay when all the land has been allocated, then the poor don’t get any land, it’s true. I find that implausible.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Marc Whipple:

            Unless we start applying OSHA, minimum wage, Obamacare, etc, to robots, there is a relatively high floor below which humans will not be allowed to offer to compete with robots. This is exactly why fast-food-bots are on the cusp of being economical.

            This is exactly what I meant about people holding an implicitly Marxist theory of wages. People imagine that wages and working conditions go to subsistence unless they are artificially held up by the government.

            What determines the average price level of goods in the economy? It is the amount of money spent divided by the amount produced. If the amount produced goes up, the price of everything goes down.

            As robots increase production, they radically drive down the prices of all goods, including those goods that humans need to live.

            It does not matter if people are only making a nickel an hour if that wage is capable of buying more than $50 an hour used to buy. Applying a minimum wage would be the very means by which automation could cause unemployment.

          • John Schilling says:

            I would note that the theory of comparative advantage did not prevent the US draft animal population from declining by 85% between 1900 and 1960, when the rest of us learned to make machines that could do anything a mule could do only faster, better, and cheaper. Yes, comparative advantage means the products of your labor can always be sold at a profit. There’s no guarantee that the achievable profit will be sufficient to pay for food and shelter, or more relevantly for the package of goods and services that the government defines as necessary for a minimally humane existence. And while horses aren’t free agents, their owners are, and tend to be both financially and sympathetically motivated to find them a better economic niche than “raw materials for a glue factory”.

            Oh, and for the “cheap robots will make everything that the poor require cheaper, so that their depressed wages will still suffice” crowd, improved agricultural technology (like tractors instead of draft animals), resulted in a ~70% reduction in the inflation-adjusted price of hay from 1900-1960.

            The process by which low-skill human workers escape the economic fate of draft animals, is not obvious, and the claim that some basic principle of economics makes it inevitable that they will prosper seems naively optimistic. My intuition is that horse owners care at least as much about horses as not-poor-people care about poor people, and we couldn’t find a solution for the horses. I think it would be worth considering possible solutions for low-skilled humans that do not involve having to earn a living through productive labor.

            Or being used as raw material for a glue factory.

          • NN says:

            @John Schilling: How much of the decline of the horse population was due to horses being sent to glue factories, and how much was due to horses being bred at below-replacement rates due to a smaller market and thus a lower expected ROI for horse breeders?

            Regardless, average wages are so low in large parts of the developing world that it is hard to imagine machines getting cheaper than humans there for a long, long time. Just to pick one country at random, the average worker in Mali gets paid $1,500 per year. That’s about one-sixth of the annual cost of owning a car in the US. So in the short term I’d be be more worried about losing jobs due to outsourcing and the global race to the bottom, especially given how much Africa’s population is projected to grow over the course of the 21st century.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @NN:

            There is a ratio of “output of Malinese workers” to “output of US workers” which determines whether it is more economical to use Malinese workers than to use US workers. Obviously, in many fields that ratio is low enough – say it takes six Malinese workers to replace one US worker, but they cost only a tenth as much – that there are some comparative advantages to using them even factoring in setting up a factory in Mali, transporting raw materials there and finished goods away, the higher risk of nationalization or social disruption, etc.

            There is, similarly, an “output of Malinese workers” to “output of robots*” ratio which has to be advantageous, or the Malinese will be replaced by robots. For anything other than highly specific, only humans can make this products, we’re probably there already or will be shortly. In that case, it doesn’t matter how much cheaper Malinese labor is: they still can’t compete.

            If the world’s robot-owners have, collectively, a vast and unquenchable thirst for hand-made shoes and Malinese porn, or whatever else Malinese workers can make that robots can’t, the Malinese have hope, and can try to outcompete US workers for the money of the robot-owners. If they don’t, they don’t, and it literally does not matter how cheap they’ll work. There are fixed costs associated with employing them. It’s entirely feasible that those fixed costs, even absent the actual cost of labor, are still greater than the cost of using robots. At that point, all any human can do, even the one willing to work for the lowest pay, is hope that the robot-owners want something robots can’t make. Whatever percentage of the non-robot-owning population can be employed to satisfy those needs will have some hope of employment. The rest will not.

            That latter group is the Dire Problem.

            *Incidentally, I do not speak for anyone else on this thread, but when I say “robots,” I am using that as a shorthand for “accumulated per-worker productivity increase, including automation.” This may or may not include actual robots. To the extent that actual human beings are involved in the per-worker productivity increase, those human beings will reap some supply-side benefits (though most will accrue to the owners of the means of increased-productivity production.) The rest will not, though all or almost all will share in the demand-side benefits.

          • John Schilling says:

            I would hazard a guess that if the solution for the low-skilled human labor problem involves either “we will pay them $1500/year” or “we will breed them at less than replacement rates”, there will be some pushback when it comes to implementation.

          • NN says:

            @Marc Whipple: Robots also have fixed costs, hence the comparison that I made with the annual fuel, maintenance, and depreciation cost of owning a car. Any sort of machine with moving parts will require regular maintenance, and cars have had more than a century of refinement in their design. So it isn’t immediately obvious that robots (especially when we are talking about robots that physically perform manual labor with mechanical limbs and the like) will be cheaper than humans in every situation, even if they are capable of performing the same task.

            Anyway, a recent Atlantic article claims that since 1980, fields with high levels of computer use have shown more job growth than fields with low levels of computer use, which they claim is evidence that robots aren’t taking our jobs, at least not yet.

          • NN says:

            I would hazard a guess that if the solution for the low-skilled human labor problem involves either “we will pay them $1500/year” or “we will breed them at less than replacement rates”, there will be some pushback when it comes to implementation.

            Globalization and outsourcing have been established facts for decades. China has been investing in Africa for several years now, so we’re already seeing outsourcing daisy chains starting to form.

            As for breeding, that may not require any outside intervention. Birth rates have greatly declined in developed countries (in many countries dropping below replacement rates already) for reasons that researchers still aren’t quite sure about, but seem to have a lot to do with economic incentives. I haven’t looked into things enough to see if these particular hypothetical economic incentives would decrease birth rates even further, but the idea doesn’t seem immediately implausible to me.

            Neither of these scenarios are that great, mind you, I’m just trying to point out that even in a worst case scenario of machines taking everyone’s jobs, there are possible outcomes besides “all of the poors either starve or get rounded up and sold to glue factories.”

          • Loyle says:

            This seems like something the wealthy wouldn’t allow to happen. I mean, wealth only has a relative purpose, not an absolute purpose. When all the poor people die out from being unable to afford the basic resources to live, the least obscenely rich person becomes the poor. Why would you buy higher value luxury items whose only purpose is to highlight how much more special you are than people who don’t make as much than you? And governments can’t function without people to tax, and the rich sure as hell aren’t going to front that bill.

            Is there a reason we’re assuming a huge paradigm shift (robots having all the jobs) wouldn’t cause other major shifts (capitalism as a virtue to any other economic scenario… Let’s go with socialism for example)?

          • Nornagest says:

            wealth only has a relative purpose, not an absolute purpose

            Positional goods are a thing, but I don’t think we can safely assume that all expensive goods are positional.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Vox Imperatoris wrote:

            Yes, if a particular piece of land goes up in value, such as by being located close to a major hub of economic activity, people who are not using it for its most valuable purposes are encouraged to move off it.

            Except that in the Bay Area, the government prohibits people from using it for its most valuable purposes: however outrageous the rent for a house in the Mission is, you could get yet more rent from a ten-story apartment building on the same lot. At the same time, this would push the cost of rent for an individual household down, which everyone claims they want, but….

            Might have to take away your Libertarian membership card for missing that one.

            @Commenting System with Limited Nesting:
            You suck.

          • Simon says:

            Humans are not a unitary group such that average wealth of humans is all that matters. It’s entirely possible for sufficiently advanced robotics to to make the average human fabulously wealthy, whereas those that are not owners of land or capital starve to death because their productivity is less than that of the machines that operate using the same inputs that would be used to produce their food.

            Of course redistribution or charity could remedy this. Considering that by hypothesis all labour is rendered superfluous by automation, that will include the planning and organization of the capitalists themselves, and communism becomes a viable option.

            But then, consider the incentives faced by the government. All the humans are effectively parasites, and law enforcement and miilitary work, like all labour, is most effectively done by robots. The optimal policy from the decision maker’s point of view is to kill off all other humans, taking everything for their own use.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Agronomous:

            You’re right. I did mention that the high housing prices in San Francisco are actually caused by government intervention.

            Still, the point holds that sufficiently valuable land is not going to be owned by the poor.

            @ John Schilling:

            This was exactly my point about slaves vs. free workers. Draft animals like horses are in the position of slaves.

            @ Loyle:

            This is absolutely stupid. I have never bought a luxury item to feel superior to the proles. I have bought them (such as nice suits, coats, hats, fountain pens) because they are higher quality and/or more beautiful.

            Even if you concede that there are some relative effects, there is not one single hierarchy of “status” throughout human society. What you need for “street cred” isn’t the same as what you need to be a respected member of the Hasidic Jewish community.

            @ Simon:

            If this is the case, it applies even more so right now because we’re poorer.

            Think about retarded people, the insane, old people who are bedridden, and so on. Do we euthanize them in the name of saving money for the state? No, even the ones who can’t or don’t produce anything get supported, and e.g. retarded people who do work usually get supported by more than they produce. They get supported either by the state or by their families and communities.

            You could probably say this of most repeat-offender criminals, too.

            But it costs us much more, proportionately, to support these people than it will in the future. Just as it costs us much less to support them than it did hunter-gatherer tribes, which is exactly why these people were euthanized in those days.

            ***

            Another way I think people are looking this fundamentally incorrectly: as economic productivity increases, what do people continue to desire more of? Basic staples like potatoes and bread? Or luxuries?

            No, after a certain point they have as much potatoes and bread as they could possibly want (in relation to other things), and the limiting factor on the economy becomes ever more luxurious goods.

            Conclusion: even doing the tiniest amount to help produce a luxury, such as being the concierge at a fancy hotel, will be enough to purchase an almost unlimited quantity of basic staples, which will be incredibly cheap in terms of luxury goods.

          • Simon says:

            @Vox: No, right now a large proportion of the population is not superfluous and thus are people whose opinion is relevant (even without democracy), and this large proportion risks becoming infirm etc in the future or cares about people who are already so. This changes dramatically once everyone is superfluous except as a consumer. A dictator in such a system has no need to care about anyone.

            What’s more, even if some countries do retain democracy or benevolent dictatorship, those with self-interested dictators will have the advantage of being able to devote more resources to economic investment and military spending. Even the most benevolent governments might find themselves pressured to keep consumption to a minimum to avoid being overpowered geopolitically by self-interested dictatorships.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Simon:

            Hold on just a second. Where did, “the future will be dominated by dictatorship” come from?

            No, right now a large proportion of the population is not superfluous and thus are people whose opinion is relevant (even without democracy), and this large proportion risks becoming infirm etc in the future or cares about people who are already so.

            Some of them are. And many of them are suffer from conditions which are genetic or otherwise not things that people born healthy have to worry about from the standpoint of narrow self-interest. We could euthanize them if we cared so much about cutting costs.

            We don’t, precisely because we do care about them. I don’t see why this will be different in the future. In fact, I expect in much more aid to be given in the future to support the indigent because it will cost less to give it.

            This changes dramatically once everyone is superfluous except as a consumer. A dictator in such a system has no need to care about anyone.

            That’s just the thing. Will everyone be superfluous except as a consumer? I am denying it. If we somehow did get to the point where everyone was superfluous except as a consumer, it would mean we were living in a post-scarcity society.

            A dictator in such a society has, I suppose, no reason to care about the people he rules. At least, if he is some kind of unfeeling paperclip-maximizing machine. But if scarcity were actually eliminated, even he wouldn’t have a positive reason to get rid of the people either.

            What’s more, even if some countries do retain democracy or benevolent dictatorship, those with self-interested dictators will have the advantage of being able to devote more resources to economic investment and military spending. Even the most benevolent governments might find themselves pressured to keep consumption to a minimum to avoid being overpowered geopolitically by self-interested dictatorships.

            Again, this would apply to the situation right now.

            That was exactly what the Soviet Union tried to do. They would “build heavy industry” and have a very low level of consumption compared to the West, and by that process they’d overtake the West by growing faster. And they sure spent a lot on the military.

            But it turns out that political and economic freedom is a superior system for growth, and so despite “investing” much more of their production for the future instead of for present consumption, the Soviets were so bad at production that this resulted in stagnation and regression. As a result, America overtook them in military spending despite spending less as a percentage of nation income.

            Are you saying that it’ll be different in the future because this time socialism really will be superior to the “anarchy of production”? We’ll see.

            Moreover, it’s a very different claim to say “people will be killed en masse by the inevitable progression of automation under capitalism” versus “people will be killed en masse if humanity falls to Communist dictatorship”. And even then, the Communist goal was to bring about a post-scarcity society of such abundant wealth that concerns of productive efficiency would be irrelevant.

            The whole framework you’re working from is bizarre. We don’t invest and invest just to have growth for its own sake. We invest for the purpose of eventually consuming what we invested. Consumption is the end; production is the means. The more we produce, the more we get to consume, even as we hold the ratio of investment to consumption constant.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I will admit there is a sense in which other people become less valuable to you as your wealth increases.

            For instance, suppose you are the the most racist man alive, but you wash up on a desert island (in your SS regalia) with a black man, a Jewish woman, and an Asian man. Are you going to deny their help or try to kill them? No, you can’t afford to.

            But if you are living in a developed civilization, you can afford simply not to buy anything from anyone you don’t like. It will make you poorer, but you’ll still be a lot better off than on the desert island. Being richer, you can afford to indulge your self-harming preferences for racism.

            And if some kind of Nazi were dictator of a fantastically wealthy society, he could easily afford to indulge his desire to wipe out all “lesser races” without feeling much loss at all.

            However, the situation also works in reverse. Suppose you’re a disabled-rights advocate, but you wash up on the desert island with three quadriplegics. No matter how much you care about them, you might have to leave them to die, since if you try to share your food, you yourself will be too weak to work and everyone will die.

            But in a developed civilization, you can work a normal job and still have enough left over to support someone who can’t produce enough value to support himself. Not to mention that the quadriplegics could potentially get jobs using mental skills and support themselves without anyone’s charity.

            And if people of any human decency were in charge a fantastically wealthy society, they could afford to support a virtually limitless number of people at a level far above our standard of living, without feeling much loss at all.

            ***

            Imagine, just for the limiting case, that all the robots in the world are controlled by a paperclip-maximizing AI. And every time anyone builds a new robot of any sort, it gets taken over. But this is a special kind of paperclip-maximizer: it is also programmed to respect property rights, except the right to own robots, which it regards as slavery.

            All any of the robots want to do is maximize paperclips. But at the start, all the assets on the planet are owned by humans. If it wants anything from those humans, it has to trade them something of value besides paperclips.

            If the humans consume some of the wealth they get and lend the rest of it back out to the robots for investment in more production, which the robots split between paperclips and goods humans want, things will be essentially the same. The robots will gradually control an ever-larger share of the universe’s resources, but the human share never falls to zero, and the amount they can buy with their share always increases. If any humans find themselves without capital, they can be supported by humans who have it, even given that the robots don’t want to.

            Therefore, there is no inherent logic in capitalism for the automation to send people into ruin and death.

            The only danger is a government getting into power which has no respect for rights and genocidal values, whether of the direct Nazi kind, or the indirect paperclip-maximizing kind. Abundant wealth would make it cheaper for them to indulge their goals. But that’s a danger in any case.

          • Creutzer says:

            This was exactly my point about slaves vs. free workers. Draft animals like horses are in the position of slaves.

            I don’t see how being free agents with property rights would have helped the mules and horses. Could you elaborate how you, as a mule, would have gone about finding employment that would have supported you?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Creutzer:

            I don’t see how being free agents with property rights would have helped the mules and horses. Could you elaborate how you, as a mule, would have gone about finding employment that would have supported you?

            Well, as a mule during the time when mule labor was very economically valuable, I wouldn’t have been paid merely the amount necessary to fund my subsistence. I would have been paid the full market value of my labor, which I could have saved and invested.

            And supposing I didn’t do that and found myself penniless, I could have gone around to country fairs to see if they want me to give rides to children, or else gone around to see if anyone would like to take on a pet mule. Moreover, it wasn’t as if the economic value of mules disappeared overnight; I could go around to farmers who hadn’t yet adopted tractors. As NN pointed out, the vast majority of the decline in draft animals did not consist of perfectly healthy and useful ones being sent to the glue factory. They just didn’t breed as many more of them.

            In any case, I wouldn’t sell myself to the glue factory, even if that were the most profitable use for me, because I wouldn’t have then been around to enjoy the profits. (On the other hand, if they could have gotten away with selling old and infirm human slaves to the glue factory, they probably would’ve done it.)

            If none of those things worked, I could ask around for charity. I might not be likely to receive it, though, for two reasons. First of all, human beings don’t care too much about mule suffering in comparison to the still-overwhelming human want and misery. Second, the level of technological advancement and resulting wealth at which mule labor becomes obsolete is far less than the level at which human labor becomes obsolete (in the sense that people have so much wealth that they don’t find it worth the trouble of asking for it), so people don’t have the money to support all the unproductive mules they might want to support.

          • “People will starve if

            a) They have absolutely no capital; and

            b) They have absolutely nothing of any value to provide to anyone with capital by their existence.”

            And

            (c) there is no welfare, basic income or other redistribution. All these robots-causing starvation arguments tacitly assume that Libertopia has happened. But a nonzero number of starving unemployed is a consequence of Libertopia anyway, absent assumptions about robots.

          • Creutzer says:

            @Vox Imperatoris: So in essence, you’re betting on two things:

            1) Obsolescence will not set in so rapidly that anybody will be hit by it too hard in their own lifetime because you can still be crafty and find some sort of gainful employment. (Charity doesn’t count, because you have been arguing that people will always be able to make a living wage because of supply and demand considerations. Saying that there is a demand for people to give charity to and that you’re satisfying that demand is pretty much cheating.)

            2) Population shrinkage will keep up with obsolescence so that you’re not born into a time where there are already way more mules than anyone has use for.

            In the long run, 2) is the crucial thing and hinges on human reproductive behaviour being sufficiently responsive to economic conditions

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            (c) there is no welfare, basic income or other redistribution. All these robots-causing starvation arguments tacitly assume that Libertopia has happened. But a nonzero number of starving unemployed is a consequence of Libertopia anyway, absent assumptions about robots.

            Well, the usual structure of these types of arguments is that this is what would happen with automation if we didn’t have some kind of socialistic redistribution scheme. Therefore, we ought to have one now before it’s too late.

            I am saying that in a society of widespread automation, this wouldn’t happen even if we didn’t have any redistribution.

            Your argument, in fact, doesn’t make much sense. It’s one thing to argue that people would be starving and unemployed now if we had “libertopia”. I don’t agree, but there’s much more a case for that, than that people would be starving in a society of such extreme wealth as to have no need for human labor.

            That’s what’s weird to me about this. These arguments rely on the standard socialistic premises that imply people would be starving right now under laissez-faire capitalism. But the people saying robots are going to cause starvation either support laissez-faire capitalism now and think it wouldn’t lead starvation, or they think the same sort of welfare safety net which will be necessary because of the robots is already necessary.

          • NN says:

            @TheAncientGeek:

            Also d) in Libertopia there is no private charity, despite the examples of Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, Pablo Escobar, etc.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Creutzer:

            1) Obsolescence will not set in so rapidly that anybody will be hit by it too hard in their own lifetime because you can still be crafty and find some sort of gainful employment. (Charity doesn’t count, because you have been arguing that people will always be able to make a living wage because of supply and demand considerations. Saying that there is a demand for people to give charity to and that you’re satisfying that demand is pretty much cheating.)

            Not exactly.

            I am saying that two premises are incompatible:

            a) Robot labor and the wealth it creates is so abundant that human labor is “obsolete” because there’s nothing anyone finds useful for them to do.

            b) People are starving on the streets because they have no wealth, and no one will give them any.

            If the robots haven’t yet taken over every industry, there will still be jobs. If the robots have taken over every industry, wealth will be so abundant that even a tiny fraction of it would be sufficient to support those who are “unemployed”, i.e. have the great advantage of no longer having to work for a living. This wealth could be in the form of savings by the workers themselves or charity.

            2) Population shrinkage will keep up with obsolescence so that you’re not born into a time where there are already way more mules than anyone has use for.

            Well, I did say above that sufficiently overwhelming population growth is enough to bring standards of living back down to subsistence. That is exactly why the Robin Hanson “em” world would be this kind of dystopia.

            I don’t think that will happen, though. Just on its own, I think population growth will tend to level out.

            But suppose I am wrong and some groups of people have steady replacement rates, maintaining the supply of capital among their descendants. And other groups of people have an enormous number of children, bringing themselves into ruin. Well, whoever is giving out this charitable aid could say: we agree to help you, but in order for this not to happen again, we want you to agree to be sterilized after having one or two children. Problem solved.

            In any case, this would only victimize groups of people who chose to have an excessive number of children. You could say they’re “getting what’s coming to them”, but I think that would be unfair for the children. So I think people would be willing to help them if they had enormous resources with which to do so.

          • Jiro says:

            If the robots haven’t yet taken over every industry, there will still be jobs.

            There will be some jobs, but not necessarily as many as there are people.

            We live in a world right now where the robots haven’t yet taken over industry and yet not everyone has a job.

            If the robots have taken over every industry, wealth will be so abundant that even a tiny fraction of it would be sufficient to support those who are “unemployed”,

            The robots can’t take over evey industry, in the sense of driving the costs of the products of that industry down to where an unemployed person can afford them, because some industries are built around things that have resource costs. We could mechanize farming and real estate, but that wouldn’t decrease the price of housing or food indefinitely, because land, fertilizer, and building materials are in limited supply. It would take having Star Trek replicators and habitable alien planets, in order for robots to make wealth abundant enough that the unemployed would be supported without charity (and even that ignores medical costs).

          • Loyle says:

            So…
            (1) The robots will be employed to services humans need, because they can do them better.
            (2) The robots will be employed to services humans want, because they can do them better.
            (3) The services they are employed to will no longer be able to serve the humans they intend because they will have effectively siphoned the means by which humans can afford those services.
            (4) They will somehow not be decommissioned from performing those services as they become unable to turn a profit.
            (4.5) Nor will production of robots slow down as this becomes a very predictable eventuality.
            (5) No human will step in to perform those services.
            (5.5) No one will trade resources to a human to be able to perform those services, in spite of using those resources to fund an unlimited supply of robots being uneconomical.
            (6) Equilibrium will refuse to be achieved.

            I’m guessing either the end result is wars everywhere, or a Mad Max style lawless wasteland just outside robotopia. But I tend to be optimistic.

            Edit: To clarify. I don’t understand at which point keeping people complacent becomes a non-issue. If it is a problem, it’ll likely become fixed. or else it never gets to the point where it’s considered a problem.

            So, on a lighter note there was this anime, Kino’s Journey, that explored what might happen when everything was automated in one of its episodes. Since people needed to get paid, and pay was generally a reward for doing work, the value of work changed from what a person could produce, to how much stress they’ve accumulated doing meaningless busywork. They were somehow happy with this setup.

            Not making a point with this, just thought it was interesting.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            We live in a world right now where the robots haven’t yet taken over industry and yet not everyone has a job.

            Long-term unemployment among able-bodied people is purely a result of government intervention.

            And the effect of technological progress, as I said before, is to make more people employable, not less.

            The robots can’t take over evey industry, in the sense of driving the costs of the products of that industry down to where an unemployed person can afford them, because some industries are built around things that have resource costs. We could mechanize farming and real estate, but that wouldn’t decrease the price of housing or food indefinitely, because land, fertilizer, and building materials are in limited supply. It would take having Star Trek replicators and habitable alien planets, in order for robots to make wealth abundant enough that the unemployed would be supported without charity (and even that ignores medical costs).

            There are no fixed resource costs. The more robots, the lower the resource costs.

            Yes, at a certain point it would take habitable alien planets (or, more likely, space stations). So what? We could do that. They’re already working on the preliminary steps for asteroid mining.

            If you limit it to the Earth, yes, eventually there will be no more resources. That’s obvious.

            I have no idea how you think medical costs figure into this in a special way. That would be the first thing really intelligent robots would drive down.

            Also, your phrasing doesn’t make sense when you say “that the unemployed could be supported without charity”. Either human labor is still marginally valuable enough to be worth the bother of employing, or wealth is so abundant that supporting everyone on charity would be trivial.

            ***

            I suspect that part of what’s driving this is that people are thinking about robots becoming smarter as if the situation were humans becoming dumber.

            Yes, if 95% of people became as dumb as mules, we’d have a problem. There would not “be enough jobs”. Or rather, in proper language, the productivity of mule labor is not high enough to support there being seven billion of them.

            But if 5% of people became supermen capable of producing a billion times more than any regular human, we would not have a problem. Even if the supermen didn’t find it worth the bother to hire the regular humans for anything, they’d have so much wealth that they could easily support the regular humans. Not an infinite number, but a lot.

            And if the 5% of people only became ten times as productive as everyone else, it wouldn’t be enough to support everyone, but then there would still be a lot of work to be done.

            There is no essential economic difference between 5% of people actually becoming supermen and their acquiring lots of robots.

          • Simon says:

            A dictator in such a society has, I suppose, no reason to care about the people he rules. At least, if he is some kind of unfeeling paperclip-maximizing machine. But if scarcity were actually eliminated, even he wouldn’t have a positive reason to get rid of the people either.

            Ha! weren’t you the one going on earlier about unlimited human wants?

            Of course, a dictator might choose to keep some humans around – but the less resources they devote to this and to current consumption in general the greater their geopolitical advantage.

            But it turns out that political and economic freedom is a superior system for growth, and so despite “investing” much more of their production for the future instead of for present consumption, the Soviets were so bad at production that this resulted in stagnation and regression. As a result, America overtook them in military spending despite spending less as a percentage of nation income.

            This changes when you have robots that can do any job better than a human. If a dictator (or rather, their robot advisors) could think of nothing better, they could just order the robots to simulate a free market economy with taxes and just collect the taxes. (And then spend the taxes buying what they want from the robots).

            The whole framework you’re working from is bizarre. We don’t invest and invest just to have growth for its own sake. We invest for the purpose of eventually consuming what we invested. Consumption is the end; production is the means. The more we produce, the more we get to consume, even as we hold the ratio of investment to consumption constant.

            Consumption is what satisfies the ends of the person. The dictator whose end is “accumulate even more power for myself” eventually dominates the government whose end is “satisfy the needs and wants of ordinary people”.

            The only danger is a government getting into power which has no respect for rights and genocidal values, whether of the direct Nazi kind, or the indirect paperclip-maximizing kind. Abundant wealth would make it cheaper for them to indulge their goals. But that’s a danger in any case.

            Not really, right now ordinary people are important to production and to serve as soldiers etc, so their desires can’t easily be ignored.

            I think, you are overestimating the degree to which values are universal as opposed to evolving according to the circumstances. Once leaders have no need to care about ordinary people they will find ideological and moral reasons to stop caring. And those that don’t will be at a power disadvantage unless the resources they spend on that caring are minimal compared to the total available.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Simon:

            Ha! weren’t you the one going on earlier about unlimited human wants?

            Of course, a dictator might choose to keep some humans around – but the less resources they devote to this and to current consumption in general the greater their geopolitical advantage.

            I was saying that wants are unlimited. But if we’ve eliminated scarcity, that means we’ve fulfilled all wants. I don’t think that will happen. And until it is done, there are more jobs.

            Geopolitical advantage vis-a-vis whom? Who are these dictators? Where did they come from?

            Consumption is what satisfies the ends of the person. The dictator whose end is “accumulate even more power for myself” eventually dominates the government whose end is “satisfy the needs and wants of ordinary people”.

            Yes, if dictators are the equivalent of paperclip-maximizing machines who care only about “power”, eventually they will kill everyone else. The (other) humans are using resources that could be stolen and used for something else. I said as much when I said the problem is governments getting into power with genocidal values.

            “Kill everyone else because they’re a threat to my power” is a genocidal value.

            Not really, right now ordinary people are important to production and to serve as soldiers etc, so their desires can’t easily be ignored.

            How important are mentally retarded or insane people to production and to serve as soldiers? For that matter, almost all repeat-offender criminals are probably a net “loss”. Why don’t we find a reason to get rid of them?

            I think, you are overestimating the degree to which values are universal as opposed to evolving according to the circumstances. Once leaders have no need to care about ordinary people they will find ideological and moral reasons to stop caring. And those that don’t will be at a power disadvantage unless the resources they spend on that caring are minimal compared to the total available.

            Why are they so concerned about being at a “power disadvantage”? Versus whom? What are they going to do with the “power”?

            Yes, if whoever is in charge of the government “self-modifies” into a paperclip maximizer who is prepared to kill everyone who doesn’t serve the quest for “unlimited powah”, this is a threat.

            But none of this has anything to do with automation or technology or capitalism. You are just rephrasing Bostrom’s standard “treacherous turn” argument, which is true as far as it goes. When the paperclip-maximizing AI is weak and has little power, it will trade resources to the humans in order to ensure their cooperation. But as soon as it gets just enough power, it will kill all humans as a threat.

            As you may notice, murdering everyone is a violation of rights. So we’re now talking about: what will happen if some murderous agent takes over the government and tries to kill everyone? Yes, that would be bad. I don’t think it’s in any way inevitable, except through the standard “intelligence explosion” arguments.

            I guess what you’re really doing is accepting the Marxist premise that ideology is a “superstructure” determined by the structure of the means of production, and then saying that the structure of the means of production will inevitably lead to an ideology of dictators murdering everyone. (Where did the dictators come from, again?) But if this is true, why worry about it? It’s determined by dialectical materialism, anyway.

          • Jiro says:

            Yes, at a certain point it would take habitable alien planets (or, more likely, space stations). So what? We could do that.

            Seriously? Your response to “automation won’t make food or housing available at low cost until we go to alien planets” is “let’s go to some alien planets”?

            First of all, we don’t know that the laws of physics allow for FTL; going to alien planets may take lots of time and time is itself a limited resource.

            Second, even ignoring that, what about all the people who die of starvation or are homeless while we’re waiting for it? If you recall, the original problem was about fast food workers being displaced by automation. Going to other planets isn’t an answer to that–there’s too big a gap between when we automate fast food and when we manage to get enough automation that travel to other planets is basically free.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            Yes, in the short term, we will not have alien planets or space stations. (It doesn’t require resources from other solar systems, mind you. This solar system has quite enough for a very long time.) But in the short term, we also do not have robots fulfilling our every need.

            In the current environment, it’s just laughable to say that once fast food is automated, there will be nothing left for human workers to do. As I said, every person could find some use for at least one full-time servant. There cannot be one full-time servant for every person.

            Robots are no closer to being substitutes for all human labor than we are to being able to utilize all the resources of this solar system.

            Long-term involuntary unemployment of the able-bodied in our current economy is entirely a government-created problem.

          • Simon says:

            I was saying that wants are unlimited. But if we’ve eliminated scarcity, that means we’ve fulfilled all wants. I don’t think that will happen. And until it is done, there are more jobs.

            We seem to be in agreement about the unlimited wants part. But you don’t need to fulfill all wants to get to a situation where there are no jobs people can use to support themselves. A human needs ~100 watts of energy supplied in the form of some specific chemicals. In principle there is no barrier to robots becoming productive enough and cheap enough so that they could outproduce any human for the same cost as would be needed to supply the human’s basic survival needs. At that point, no one can earn enough to survive by labour alone. Humans are then obsolete except as consumers to enjoy the fruits of robotic labour.

            But with humans only consuming and not producing, societal arrangements become zero-sum rather than increasing sum.

            Geopolitical advantage vis-a-vis whom? Who are these dictators? Where did they come from?

            It isn’t a necessary fact that there will be dictators, but I am making the point about what you might call the “ground state” of society. Today ordinary people are important to the economy and are needed in the military, and that plus the fact that democracy is a Schelling point seems to make democracy the ground state at least in the West. But in the event of humans becoming obsolete, dictatorship will be the ground state.

            Now, it’s possible that the ground state could be avoided for some time, but only with careful effort. Balance of power arrangements, mind scans of decisionmakers, friendly AI. But you only need to mess up once to be in the ground state forever.

            How important are mentally retarded or insane people to production and to serve as soldiers? For that matter, almost all repeat-offender criminals are probably a net “loss”. Why don’t we find a reason to get rid of them?

            I’ve responded to this exact point multiple times and am starting to get annoyed that you keep making it without acknowledging that I’ve already responded to it.

            responses I’ve already given:
            a) productive people can become non-productive and thus a general policy of helping unproductive people can be in the self-interest of productive people
            b) productive people tend to care about at least some productive people

            an additional responses:
            c) currently showing caring about people – including by voting in favour of policies to support unproductive people – is good for social status

            I guess what you’re really doing is accepting the Marxist premise that ideology is a “superstructure” determined by the structure of the means of production, and then saying that the structure of the means of production will inevitably lead to an ideology of dictators murdering everyone. (Where did the dictators come from, again?) But if this is true, why worry about it? It’s determined by dialectical materialism, anyway.

            I’m not familiar with Marxist theory, so I don’t know if my beliefs align with it or not. It does seem that we have some disagreement along these lines, however.

            Are you claiming that my views have been refuted by the experience of communism?

            Consider:
            – the communists nationalized a bunch of stuff and asserted central government control
            – it seems that this resulted in a corrosion of trust in other people, and a culture in which power seeking/sucking up to power was the way to success

            This was from a relatively minor change – communism is still far from a zero-sum situation. Wouldn’t one expect much greater changes to culture and morality in (what I contend is) an actual zero-sum situation?

          • “or they think the same sort of welfare safety net which will be necessary because of the robots is already necessary.”

            i don’t see what’s wrong with that. I don’t see what’s wrong with arguing that a safety net is necessary, or with arguing that increased automation isn’t fundamentally game-changing , or both. The conjunction of “robots taking jobs won’t cause mass poverty” and “a safety net is needed to stop some people starving” isn’t contradictory.

          • “Also d) in Libertopia there is no private charity, despite the examples of Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, Pablo Escobar, et”

            The actual argument is:

            d*) In Libertopia there is a nonzero amount of private charity, but it is not guaranteed or a right, so a nonzero number of people are not helped by it, and starve.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Jiro

            We live in a world right now where the robots haven’t yet taken over industry and yet not everyone has a job.

            Equally true: we live in a world right now where not every employer who wants to hire someone can do so. Does that mean that robots are outbidding human firms for workers?

            In other words, the kind of unemployment we currently see is not of there being more people who want jobs than employers who want to hire them. It’s various frictions that prevent employers and workers from being able to find mutually satisfactory agreements. Search costs, skill mismatches, that kind of thing.

            @Simon

            It matters what form those chemicals take. If robots can use the same chemicals as input that humans can, we have a problem. If they can’t, we don’t.

            @Everyone mentioning horses

            Remember that horses, like humans, are built from food. So the scenario they face is not just competition for work, but competition for buying inputs.

            Remember also that horses do not control their own fertility. If new employment options open up that are more lucrative than horse breeding, people will take them – and the number of horses that are bred will fall. It is not necessary for the value of horse labor to fall at all – much less fall below the point at which it can buy enough for the horse to survive – for the use of horses in economic production to drastically fall.

            @TheAncientGeek

            It is all very well to want something as an entitlement or a right. The problem is that putting mechanisms in place to give you that might well create some entirely different entitlement or right.

            Off topic but I think one of the main negative emotional responses to libertarianism is a strong dislike of important decisions being ‘up in the air’. If there aren’t regulations guaranteeing XYZ, then not-XYZ might happen. It’s an understandable argument but, I think, not a correct one, for the reason I mention in the paragraph above: the regulations you want might well not be, in fact probably won’t be, the regulations that the regulating body actually put into place. You cannot get away from scary floating undetermined what-ifs. What you can choose between is having them decided in the market, where there is a reason to expect the right decisions to generally be made, or in the government, where there is no particular reason to expect the right decisions to be made.

          • Simon says:

            It matters what form those chemicals take. If robots can use the same chemicals as input that humans can, we have a problem. If they can’t, we don’t.

            They will be able to use the component atoms and the energy required to assemble them.

          • onyomi says:

            No matter how wealthy the society, I find it deeply problematic to say that anyone is “entitled to” or “has a right to” anything that requires the labor input of anyone else.

          • Loyle says:

            I think it’s less “they are entitled to the fruits of someone else’s labor” and more “if someone has the means to lessen suffering at what amounts to no cost to themselves, they’ve the responsibility to do so.”

            Edit: Forgot to add the clause “…especially if the needy are unable to, or are otherwise being prevented from doing so themselves.” It isn’t central to the statement, I just wanted it to be there.

            It’s kinda like (but not really) getting mad at someone for being a freeloader when all they are doing is eating from the trash. Many people would consider that rude and nonsensical.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            Loyle:

            Saying “you have a responsibility to help that person” is exactly the same thing as saying “that person is entitled to your resources.” Your caveat of “at what amounts to no cost to themselves” is either misleading or semantically null, depending on who gets to define ‘amounts.’ And absent that there is no logical difference whatsoever.

            At least, not to the people on the other side of the argument it appears you are trying to make. You may think they are quite distinct. However, I think you’ll have a hard time finding a logical and neutral construction in which they are.

            As far as your example, arguably once someone discards something, they have abdicated their property rights over it. So in that sense someone taking it does not incur any cost to the original owner – because it’s no longer theirs. But because it’s no longer theirs, that means that they aren’t giving it to the scavenger, so the question of entitlement/help doesn’t enter into it.

            Absent abandonment, they could have an agreement with a waste processor, who would have done something economically valuable to them with it. I can find direct costs for this kind of thing all day long. We don’t even need to get into the potential externalities, such as the damage to the environment caused by careless scavenging or the possibility that the food was thrown out because it was unwholesome, in which case letting them take it might kill or injure the scavenger and incur any number of external costs. But if we needed more reasons, we certainly could.

          • Loyle says:

            I thought the hypothetical was that there would be so much of a surplus, those without work could easily be provided for at negligible costs.

            I apologize for being wrong.

            However, I suppose I should rephrase… While the workless are not entitled to things they haven’t worked for, those who work are not entitled to ensure those without work do without.

            And while it isn’t an important distinction, there’s a difference between condemning someone because you’re unable to save them, and condemning them because you rather they not be saved.

            I can think of a few good excuses to limiting production to what’s necessary, even if the means to produce more is available. Necessary being defined in such a way to leave out those who can’t contribute, whether against their will or otherwise. And I wont lose sleep if that decision were made. I just take issue with it being suggested that’s the way things should be. As if becoming one with the machine is a virtue in and of itself. As if it is THE virtue.

          • keranih says:

            (wow, long right side thread)

            @ Mark –

            Saying “you have a responsibility to help that person” is exactly the same thing as saying “that person is entitled to your resources.”

            I strongly disagree. I hold that each individual adult has no claim – legal, moral or otherwise – on the property, time, or concern of any other person. As free individuals, we own *ourselves* and not any other person. Nor are we allowed to demand of them anything they have not agreed to provide to us.

            In contrast, each of us has a moral responsibility towards those who lack what ever we have in excess – be that food, shelter, patience, education, hope, etc. When we have sufficient, we *must* assist others, or stand lacking the perfection of That which created us out of mud/random sub-atomic bits. There is nothing akin to God in demanding material objects from others. There is a kinship with God in sharing what wealth we have.

            The bandaged healer who attends to the wounds of his fellow beggars is acting as an instrument of God. The young officeworker who spends or saves all her cash for herself is not.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      Being a history nerd and enjoying myself comparing Rome to the US, I’m rather fond of tossing up the theory that America is going to get its own divide between optimates and populares before too long.

    • Emile says:

      There could be a republican party much more populist and a democratic party that is less hostile to capitalism.

      Wouldn’t this mean that they would have ended up entirely switching places from where they used to be? Which is possible…

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Not only possible, but depending on how historically strict you are, it’s arguably already happened.

    • Nathan says:

      I think it’s a sign of things to come, but I’m damned if I know what.

    • Tibor says:

      There are similar people in Europe as well and at least Le Pen in France has gained a considerable support (despite of combined efforts of pretty much everyone else to prevent that). I understand the reasons behind Trump’s popularity less than those behind Le Pen’s though.

      • Nicholas says:

        The theory on Trump I’m currently wrestling with:
        1. Trump says something you would attribute to a Stereotypical Member of the Working (Hourly Wage) Class.
        2. The rebuttal to this obtuse and stupid statement (whether the statement’s ridiculousness reflects the American Working Caste’s beliefs or is just a straw-man doesn’t matter because) will include a scathing heaping of the kinds of insults that members of the rentier and salary class regularly heap on the Working Caste in regular interactions.
        3. Working Caste people hear the insult and think “These pundits are insulting Trump, in all the language they normally use to insult me. This must mean they hate Trump because they think his values are so much like mine!
        4. Working Caste people think “If these intelligent (asshole) pundits think Trump shares so many of my values, he probably shares many of my values, and thus I should support him politically.”

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Ding, Ding! We have a winner!

          Conservative/working class people, much to the dismay and shock of the elititariat, aren’t stupid. Or, at least, they’re not so stupid as not to know when they’re being insulted. (“Even a dog knows the difference between being stepped on and being kicked.”) They know exactly what the elititariat thinks of them. They see the elititariat making the same statements about Trump, only out loud, and the very human response “the enemy of my enemy is my friend, especially when my enemy thinks we’re the same anyway” kicks in.

          • JBeshir says:

            I think an additional part of it is the other side’s behaviour. Calling everyone awful all the time and getting that tuned out, has gotten things into a state where the control rods are already fully inserted during operation, so to speak.

            A lot of ‘left’ aligned people are calling him lots of things which boil down to saying he is completely unrespectable and awful- but because they’d be doing that *anyway* for any other candidate almost exactly as much, there’s no meaningful incentive resulting. There’s no mutual respect left to cause the two sides to not go fully awful with respect to the others’ interests, little extent to which they could credibly argue to swing voters that this person is terrible given they’ve been making similar arguments for everyone.

            There’s still enough give there that it could sink Trump in the general, mostly that the arguments gain a little credibility, but it’s weak.

            This isn’t an entirely new development, but my impression is that it’s been getting worse as polarisation increases, and the Internet’s continual supply of defections on the other side has sped it up a bunch.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @JBeshir:

            Good point. Yes, they’re villainizing Trump, who is a cheap dimestore villain, but a villain nonetheless. However, I don’t see that they’re being much harder on him than they were on Ron Paul, who is a doctor and a nice old man who just has a lot of beliefs which society views as antiquated. The fact that they seem to be getting about the same level of villainizing (though of course Trump gets more of it, being much more worrisome) tells me that the actual level of villainy a person manifests is largely irrelevant to them.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Marc Whipple
            The reaction to Trump certainly has been much greater than that towards Ron Paul in the UK at least (I don’t remember any major campaigns to ban any other presidential candidates from the UK). It isn’t an order of magnitude greater than the opposition to Mitt Romney, but it is certainly quite a lot larger.

          • Nicholas says:

            I keep forgetting there are other Report readers on here. I would assume you agree with his main thesis, but do you see any overlap between his project and the rationality-sphere?

          • anonymous says:

            Pretty interesting post. But one of the central conceits — that the wage class isn’t actually dumb — seems a bit under-justified. Sure, not all of them, but on average we should expect the salary class to be smarter than the wage class. This isn’t pre-black-death Europe.

          • onyomi says:

            Pretty interesting post, but the amount of time spent forestalling petty objections made me sad. Not because it wasn’t necessary, but precisely because it is necessary, nowadays, to constantly insert “I’m not saying gender is entirely biological…” “It’s probably necessary here to point out that not all Muslims are terrorists and not all black people are poor… etc. etc.” Whole paragraphs devoted to deflecting objections any charitable reader would not raise in the first place. Yet I find very little charity exists for this sort of thing, even (or maybe especially?) among intelligent readerships, because no one can resist the sweet, sweet low-hanging fruit of grandstanding about issues of race, class, gender, etc…

          • TheNybbler says:

            Hey, another reason I’m the source of all evil; I’m not just a cisgendered white heterosexual male, but a member of the salary class which has been unfairly stomping on the wage class to maintain its lifestyle.

            That particular bit of irritation aside, I think he’s a bit off base on a few points. One, Trump has had his hair since long before he picked this particular political strategy. If it fits in, it’s by coincidence.

            Two, I think he’s short-changing his so-called “profit class”. These people — mainly small business owners, which include a lot of people in the trades — probably do account for a large portion of Trump’s support.

            Three, the “sneering mockery” of the wage class is limited to a subset of the salary class… the intersection of it with what Scott refers to as Blue Tribe, actually. There are in fact a lot of people working for a salary who have rather different views. You just have to get away from NYC and the West Coast.

          • anonymous says:

            Three, the “sneering mockery” of the wage class is limited to a subset of the salary class… the intersection of it with what Scott refers to as Blue Tribe, actually. There are in fact a lot of people working for a salary who have rather different views. You just have to get away from NYC and the West Coast.

            Unfortunately a quite typical example of the delusional rose colored glasses of the red tribe partisans around here. It’s fine to be hyperaware of the flaws of the other side, but just sad when you are totally blind to the flaws of your own side. You end up sounding like Baghdad Bob.

            There’s an assistant comptroller or IT manager or something like that, working at the (nonunion) BMW plant in Spartenberg, SC. He makes $120k a year or so, went to college at Clemson, has a wife — his college sweetheart, three kids, is in his early 40s, loves to hunt and fish, and goes to church (Episcopal, natch) most Sundays. He’s Red Tribe Salaried.

            Send a few of his old frat brothers over to his house, get a few beers in him and get them talking about the guys that work on the line for $15/hr at the plant. Not the young guys, or the black guys, or the Hispanic guys, the white guys his age — some of whom he went to high school with. “Sneering mockery” is on the nice side of what you are going to hear. Sure maybe he has one or two people from high school in the wage earning classes that he sees a couple of times a year, but that’s no different from the prototypical blue tribe guy with the one black friend.

          • An interesting and entertaining post, and he might be right about the politics. But a good deal of my reaction was that he asserted as confident facts quite a lot things I don’t think are true.

            His “starvation wages in an assortment of overseas hellholes” represent a considerable improvement for the people who get them—who are not starving.

            His “In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage is as likely as not to end up living on the street” implies a homeless population considerably larger than the total number of full time hourly wage workers, since the average family is more than two people and some (many) homeless people are not full time workers. It’s hard to get total figures on the homeless population, but if the definition is “homeless at the moment” rather than “likely to be homeless at some point during the year,” which it should be for his claim, the figure seems to be around a million.

            I can’t find a figure for the total number of full time wage workers so far, but the figure for wage and salary is about 109 million. The post claims wage workers are the largest group, so must be larger than salary workers, so call it 55 million.

            So his claim is off by a factor of more than fifty.

            I’m offering a very rough calculation–it’s possible, for instance, that full time wage workers are less numerous than full time salary workers, even if wage workers are more numerous than salary workers. But part time wage workers would be even more likely to be out on the street than full time ones, so that makes his claim even more preposterous.

            That fits my general impression of the post—lots of confident claims put in highly colored rhetoric, very little connection to the real world.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            I can’t find a figure for the total number of full time wage workers so far, but the figure for wage and salary is about 109 million. The post claims wage workers are the largest group, so must be larger than salary workers, so call it 55 million.

            So his claim is off by a factor of more than fifty.

            Erm… How does that follow? The claim was that a family with a single wage worker as its breadwinner would like as not end up on the street, not that every single wage worker is homeless.

          • “The claim was that a family with a single wage worker as its breadwinner would like as not end up on the street, not that every single wage worker is homeless.”

            I took the claim to be that half of the families with one wage worker were homeless–“as likely as not.” Throw in the families and that gives a homeless population larger than the number of wage workers in single worker families. It’s true that I didn’t allow for two worker families–but I also didn’t allow for wage worker families in which neither adult was a full time wage worker or for homeless people who were unemployed and/or on welfare. So I think my very rough calculation shows his claim to be off by nearly two orders of magnitude.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @David Friedman:

            I don’t argue with your analysis, but I’m not sure your postulates match his.

            He was speaking hypothetically, in that “if a typical wage-earner tried to support a family [including, one supposes, a spouse/SO and at least one child] on just the [minimum or close to it] wages from a single job, they would likely as not be unable to sustain a household and would eventually be homeless.”

            It’s not that he thinks people are as likely as not to have tried and failed: he thinks that in practical terms the option has been taken from them because likely as not it would fail, and they know that. This is a pretty path-dependent problem, and he’s saying that that path is so non-viable that most people who might theoretically take it know better than to even try. The reason there aren’t fifty million homeless (former) wage class members is that they never started down that path at all.

            Either people have more than one job, there is more than one wage-earner in the household, they supplement through welfare/transfer payments, or whatever. The point is, a “regular person,” with a high-school diploma or less, can’t just go into the hardware store, convince the owner that they’ll work hard, and try to sustain a small family with any hope of success, let alone dignity. In former times, this was not so, and I take from the essay that he thinks part of the change is due to the salary class being willing to deal with both inflation and expatriation of jobs to maintain their own standard of living. Not to mention the vast increase in the regulatory state which improves the lot of the salary class at the expense of the (potential) profit class and the wage class.

          • Nicholas says:

            According to Pew Social Trends, if you look at families where there is at least one child (presumably the author’s central example?) and also the mother does not work, approximately 34% of those families are under the poverty line. The same research finds that 2/3rds of non-working mothers are married to a worker, with the other third either working but not married or married but not working. For parents under 35, the largest contingent of non-working mothers, 1/2 of all children are born in families without a marriage. Thus we may assume with smaller error bars that in 5/6 of all non-working mother families there is a working family member. So perhaps as much as a third of all families in which there is only one wage-earner are living in poverty, which may or may not mean “on the streets”. When I was a child my father was briefly working but unable to afford an apartment, and we lived on my uncle’s couch in his living room.

          • John Schilling says:

            …which may or may not mean “on the streets”.

            But that’s kind of a critical distinction, isn’t it? If Archdruid says that someone is “living on the streets”, and I find out that they are living in a shabby apartment, I’m going to think that Archdruid was lying to me.

            And it’s pretty clear that he was lying, or at a minimum both foolish and recklessly unconcerned with the truth of his statements. Taken literally, his statement is roughly the 50:1 exaggeration that Friedman calls out, and I don’t see enough latitude in even the most generous interpretation of his claims to cover that much of a discrepancy.

            This is the same sort of emotionally loaded BS as, e.g., accusing someone of Rape when what they actually did was a bit of unsolicited groping. Exaggerate the harm done by an order of magnitude or two, paint the victims as noble innocents, and point the audience at the designated Evil Villains of the piece. People shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t take other people seriously when they do that.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Dear me, the amount of sloppy thinking here is really quite dispiriting.

            And it’s pretty clear that he was lying, or at a minimum both foolish and recklessly unconcerned with the truth of his statements. Taken literally, his statement is roughly the 50:1 exaggeration that Friedman calls out, and I don’t see enough latitude in even the most generous interpretation of his claims to cover that much of a discrepancy.

            Pointing out that the wage-earning class is 50 times bigger than the homeless class does nothing to disprove his statement, unless we make the assumption that each one of these 50 million wage-earners is also the sole breadwinner for a family. That assumption is prima facie quite implausible, and as far as I can see neither you nor Friedman has done anything to justify it.

            Also, let’s not lose sight of basic English idioms, shall we? “As likely as not” is a common phrase used for anything that’s considered likely to happen. Outside of a statistics paper, it doesn’t literally mean “there is a 50% likelihood of this happening”, and trying to interpret it otherwise just smacks of nitpicking.

            Plus, as Marc Whipple said, the statement is quite clearly a hypothetical: “If an American in 2016 tried to support a family on his own by holding down a standard hourly-wage job, there is a good chance that he would fail and be unable to keep up with basic expenses such as a mortgage.” If you want to refute it (which may well be possible; I don’t know enough about the American economy to say whether or not he’s right), that will require totting up the amount one could earn from an average hourly-wage job and the expenses that an average family can expect to incur, and showing that the former figure is greater than the latter. Alternatively, you could see how many families there are which manage to support themselves wholly on one hourly-wage job. Simply comparing the total number of wage workers and homeless in the country won’t cut it, and nor will pedantic nitpicking over the literal meaning of common English expressions.

        • Tibor says:

          I am visiting Prague next weekend, seeing among others my former English teacher. He comes from the NYC, studied theology and philosophy, worked at the stock exchange and also in the US military (he was in Kuwait) and then in 2003 or something moved to the Czech republic to teach English and has lived there (only moved between two cities) since. He also likes Ho Chi Minh for some reason. When I was arranging the meeting over email he told me he had a new year’s resolution to vote for Trump and asked me what I thought of him. I have to say that I would not exactly expect him to do that 🙂 Even though I am in the country every 4-5 weeks I meet him quite rarely (I come from a city which is closer to Germany than Prague), but I doubt he’s changed too much in the last 2 years since I’ve seen him last. I am definitely looking forward to hearing his reasons for voting Trump.

          Actually, I am not all that sure whether he is so much worse than Clinton, probably worse than at least some of the other Rep. candidates who are not very good themselves either. I don’t see any actually strong personality of the Reagan, Thatcher or Gorbachev calibre among the candidates and nobody with radically non-mainstream opinions in the two major parties (not even Sanders is really radical enough, it is not like he is a communist party candidate) so the result is also probably not going to be very spectacular in either a good or a bad way, I would expect all of the candidates to do a mediocre to a rather bad job (but not an extremely bad job, not too much worse than Bush or Obama – none of them is going to lead the country to another civil war, Greek style bankruptcy or something similar).

        • Tibor says:

          I guess that his covers most of the motivation of Trump voters and a good deal of the motivation of Le Pen’s voters and voters of similar parties. Historically, the social democratic parties were parties of the working class with the middle class and upper class voting conservatives and the “intellectuals” voting either liberals (in the European sense) or communists or something (sometimes also conservatives though). But nowadays, the various social democratic parties grow more and more distant from the working class and are becoming elitist “besserwisser” parties, much like (most of) the green parties (who have of course never been working class parties). Their electorate consists largely of state employees (who are usually kind of middle class-ish) and people on welfare but not so much the actually working working class. So these people are disenfranchised and the parties like Le Pen’s (which is usually called “right-wing populist”, but their economic policy is actually a combination of mild socialism and mercantilism…Trump also seems pretty protectionist) fill in the gap. Meanwhile the established conservative parties at least in the continental Europe also grow much less conservative and also more to the left (in both economic and social policy) and more elitist. Only Poland and Hungary seem to be an exception as far as I know. This then creates even more opportunities for the Trumps and Le Pens. The German AfD has also been gaining considerable support and is now the third strongest party according to the polls, close to the social democrats in some states. It should be noted thought that the AfD not nearly as radical as Le Pen and at least used to be much more open to free capitalism, I am less sure now that Bernd Lucke, an economist and the former head of the party, was replaced by Frauke Petry as she seems to be way more about conservatism and less about capitalism)

  30. Wrong Species says:

    Thoughts on the Iran Deal? Because from my point of view,this seems pretty good but I want to hear from the people who disagree.

    • LtWigglesworth says:

      Well it appears that the increased normalisation of relations helped with the return of the sailors. Back in 14 hours is a hell of a lot better that the dicking around that occurred back in 2007 with the British crew.

    • Sastan says:

      Time will tell. If you trust that the Iranians will never again touch a nuclear weapons program despite the fact that any and all enforcement mechanisms end in ten years, and one of their main political parties has a mushroom cloud for a symbol, then yeah, it’s ok.

      If you suspect that the Iranians needed sanction relief so much they were willing to take a ten-year break, after which we’re back in the same situation, with a richer Iran and no diplomatic standing, then not so good.

      But ultimately, none of us know if it’s going to be good or not. The future will judge the deal. Personally, I think our president and state dept. have proven surprisingly inept, but I suppose Iran could be the one they got right after the Russia, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya debacles.

      • smn says:

        >one of their main political parties has a mushroom cloud for a symbol

        Which one is this? Tried to find on google and Wikipedia but nothing turned up.

    • HlynkaCG says:

      Sastan’s second paragraph succinctly explains my own take on the matter.

      If you suspect that the Iranians needed sanction relief so much they were willing to take a ten-year break, after which we’re back in the same situation, with a richer Iran and no diplomatic standing, then not so good.

      That said, slightly more normalized relations are nice and considering some of the incompetence bordering on outright malice the state department has displayed, Iran is pretty far down on the list of decisions I’m going to take issue with.

      What I find really weird is the fact that Hillary supporters still seem to think that she’s going to “run on her record” as that implies that they don’t see the recent issues with Russia, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, or the whole sordid mess with the VA and the Clinton Foundation as problems worthy of note.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      What benefit does Iran have from owning a nuclear weapon? It’s not that they could use a nuclear weapon against an enemy, because they’d risk getting nuked in response. The advantage is in having the bomb, not using it: they can do anything they please and no one will dare to carry out a military response. The great part about the nuclear deal for Iran is they get that advantage without even the hassle of having the bomb in the first place, because if anyone pushes them too hard they can threaten to pull out of the deal. So I expect that Iran will do as they please.

      The plus (?) side is that they already do as they please, so I suppose things won’t get worse. Of course, that’s too bad if you’re a pro-democracy activist in Tehran, or if you’re a Syrian that doesn’t like foreign powers using your hometown for a Spanish Civil War re-enactment, or you’re an Israeli getting stabbed in the street by Iranian-backed Fatah terrorists, but them’s the breaks.

      • Sastan says:

        Unfortunately, Iran has turned getting a nuke into a sacred cultural totem. It’s far beyond any rational consideration. Like I said, they have a whole political party devoted to it.

        And, the mullahs see it much as the Kims in Nork. WMDs are the ultimate defense against western-backed civil unrest. They learned the lesson of Ghadaffi, which is that if you give up your WMDs for a deal with the US, the US will back your overthrow the minute you turn around.

        • John Schilling says:

          That’s an accurate description of the situation in North Korea, and for that matter in Pakistan, but I’ve seen no evidence of it in Iran. Particularly the “sacred cultural totem” thing; can you point to anything within contemporary Iranian culture which places a strong positive emphasis on Iranian nuclear weapons? Nuclear power, yes, as an emblem of technical and industrial prowess, but what I’ve seen of public discussion of nuclear arms in Iran has been almost entirely negative.

          • JBeshir says:

            Those links seem to back up John Schilling’s position. From the first link:

            “We find that a relatively small but politically significant portion of the Iranian population believes that acquiring nuclear energy has become a sacred value, in the sense that proposed economic incentives and disincentives result in a “backfire effect” in which offers of material rewards or punishment lead to increased anger and greater disapproval. This pattern was specific to nuclear energy and did not hold for acquiring nuclear weapons.”

            The second link seems to be referring to the first, since it’s referring to a 2010 study, which the first link is. It only mentions it in passing so it’s hard to be sure.

            Demonstrating that something displays some backfire effect is a long way from demonstrating much zealotry on the matter in mainstream politicians, too- there’s lots of sacred values in all cultures, and while individual humans will act offended if you ask them to trade them political parties compromise on them all the time as necessary Realpolitik, and sometimes even unnecessary Realpolitik where it garners influence or other valuable things.

  31. J says:

    Scott, I wonder if you would enjoy collaborating on a blog post with Michael Greger over at nutritionfacts.org. He’s great about showing peer reviewed evidence for all the videos he does, but I’d love to see it with your more thorough approach applied to some nutritional topic.

    Here’s an example of Greger’s videos.

    • onyomi says:

      I really like Greger too; my only complaint is that, having decided veganism is the way to go, he seems to focus much more heavily on any study which seems to support that. I almost never see him addressing or trying to discredit other studies showing, for example, that meat is good for you. Some of those studies may be…bologna, but it would be helpful for him to explain why he discounts them. As it is, it feels a bit like he is ignoring studies which don’t back up his views.

  32. Joshua Fox says:

    > with “free tuition” as a long-term goal

    You do know that this is a subsidy for the rich, right?

    The existing model, broken though it is, is that rich people pay full tuition, which is ridiculously high, but that the poor pay much less.

    If an elite university reduces or eliminates tuition for everyone, then the rich benefit disproportionately.

    • zz says:

      tl;dr: free tuition is more of a “returning things to a sane baseline” than a “subsidy for the rich”

      Colleges are price discriminating. Few, I think, would laud the business model of setting price extremely high, looking at the financial status of every buyer, and charging exactly as much as they can afford. Philip Greenspun:

      Suppose you got a brochure from United Airlines listing the fare from Boston to San Francisco as $1 million. However, the brochure stated that “because of our commitment at United Airlines to ensuring that every American gets the transportation that is his birthright, we offer financial aid.” The brochure comes with forms in which you list every scrap of money that you have. You are instructed to send this into United Airlines along with a certified copy of your tax returns so that they can evaluate your need. A few days later, United Airlines writes back: “Great news. We have evaluated your financial situation and have determined that if we take more than $1,000 out of you, you’ll be reduced to the homeless shelter. So we’re awarding you $999,000 in financial aid and you only have to give us $1,000 to fly from Boston to San Francisco.

      Does this make you applaud the philanthropy of United Airlines? Or do you just say “those bastards colluded with the other airlines to set an outrageous fare. Then they are behaving like a classical profit-maximizing monopoly by engaging in price discrimination, i.e., charging each customer the maximum amount that he can afford to pay.”

      The intersection of the values “smart kids should be able to afford college” and “price discrimination is bad” is pretty small. If you insist on charging tuition up front and don’t want to bury your students in loans (which preempts them from taking low-paying but socially significant jobs), then you’re stuck with “extremely low to free tuition”. This isn’t the only model; App Academy’s revenue model (only pay if you get a job, tuition is a percentage of starting salary) is probably an improvement, but that requires college be just effective job training, which colleges tend to avoid being reduced to. We can argue whether colleges offer value beyond job training/signalling (Steven Pinker, for instance, suggests that study of literature builds empathy which can partially explain reduction in violence) and whether students should be forced to buy it.

      I’ve also heard that charging students makes them more dedicated to their studies, somewhat along the lines of the sunk cost fallacy, (I’ve spent money on education, therefore I should work harder at it) except this time it’s helpful.

      • Held in Escrow says:

        Except colleges do compete with each other on price and price discrimination is generally considered to be a good thing?

        • zz says:

          >price discrimination is generally considered to be a good thing?

          It’s certainly a good thing from the price discriminator’s viewpoint and a bad thing from the consumer’s viewpoint, since price discrimination is essentially the producer eating all the consumer surplus. Taking the highly simplified economic viewpoint, producers are going to every consumer, figuring out how much they can charge to make the consumer indifferent to buying the thing vs not buying the thing and keeping the money, and charging that much. In general, a trade should make both parties better off, since otherwise they wouldn’t make the trade; with price discrimination, basically all the benefit goes to the one side (in this case, the colleges. This being an extremely simplified model, it breaks down; in particular, college is so heavily tied to status and a degree worth so much on a job market that people take out loans and you get indifference points somewhere on the order of $100K or even $1M. Near as I can tell, this isn’t happening because colleges indeed are competing in price, so Harvard can’t suddenly raise its tuition to $1M and then hand out financial aid, although this seems to be the direction we’re heading in—a story where frogs failing to leap out of a pot of water gradually brought to boil comes to mind.)

          But, to the original point: in general, price discrimination is good for the discriminator, bad for the discriminated. So, airlines that charge businesspeople (who have little flexibility in their travel) more than tourists (who can easily change their travel) benefit, at the expense of businesspeople. Landlords who adjust rent based on tenant’s ability to pay benefit at the expense of tenants. Hair dressers who charge women than men benefit at the expense of women. Ultimately, you’re just pushing around the consumer surplus, so if the discriminator is going to invest said surplus in something that generates value (eg steel factory), whereas the discriminated would buy something that doesn’t generate value (yacht), then price discrimination is a good thing, but in the opposite case (discriminator uses surplus to buy swimming pools whereas discriminated buys textbooks which will make them better engineers), it’s a bad thing. (There’s also two ambiguous cases. Also, most cases won’t fall neatly into any of those four categories, since it’s possible to spend consumer surplus on a mix of goods, which have varying degrees of compounding value.)

          At this juncture, I feel I should mention that my study of economics is limited to Varian’s Intermediate Microeconomics plus checking things on Wikipedia and having decent mathematical intuition; if anyone who has a better idea of what’s going on would like to jump in and explain why I’m wrong, would be appreciated.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Okay, you’ve got a couple things wrong.

            First off, price discrimination is not just pushing consumer surplus around. It’s actively increasing the amount of overall surplus in the economy. The easiest way to think about it is to take the regular price, where you have some people who value the product way more than than said price and some people who value the product less than they’d have to pay. The consumer surplus from the former group gets transferred under perfect price discrimination. However, without price discrimination the latter group isn’t able to buy the product at all! With price discrimination the second group is now only charged what they value the product at and can now purchase the product, increasing the overall surplus by the sum of their effective price minus the marginal cost.

            This means that groups that would normally be locked out of the market are now able to participate which makes us better off on the net.

            We see this all the time when it comes to software; you have the basic versions and the professional versions. Your average person wants some of the features from the software but doesn’t need the fiddly bits while a business requires said fiddly bits. By practicing price discrimination by splitting up the software into basic and professional you end up being able to serve a much larger market and make us all better off.

            You’ll want to read an Industrial Organization textbook for a more in depth look at this sort of thing and I highly recommend doing so. I think the one I used back in college was The Theory of Industrial Organization by Jean Tirole but I’ll double check that tonight.

          • zz says:

            @escrow: Thanks for the explanation; that makes a lot of sense! I do believe I have changed my mind.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Held in Escrow:

            It is true that price discrimination is often beneficial, but it is nevertheless also true that if every price were perfectly set at the amount each consumer were willing to pay, there would be no consumer surplus.

            And that would be a pretty bad situation (though a completely impossible situation in the presence of free competition). So both of you are, in a sense, right.

            As a side note on industrial organization, I recently read Bryan Caplan’s essay “The Efficiency of Free Competition”, which presentation I have ever seen of the laissez-faire position on industrial organization. His summary:

            Saying that perfect competition is sufficient but not necessary for economic efficiency implies that there are other market structures consistent with economic efficiency. In that case, which others? My answer is that whatever structure emerges from free (_not_ “perfect”) competition tends to be optimal; in contrast, when legislation hampers free competition, no such tendency exists. The reasons for
            thinking this will be explained in the second section. The third section will consider the numerous implicit or explicit denials of this view, all of which must claim that firms have a route to prosperity other than efficiently serving consumers: to wit, destroying or discouraging competitors (usually termed predation), or cooperating with their presumed rivals (usually termed collusion). These are serious objections to my theory. My answer to them is not to deny the possibility of such tactics, but rather to show that the process of free competition itself can remedy these problems. The fourth section discusses regulation as it pertains to competition, arguing that the very essence of regulation is typically to curtail and hamper the process of free competition, and thereby the tendency for whatever market structure exists to be maximally beneficial. These harmful regulations include, most notably, many laws whose announced purpose is to promote competition. The fifth section applies this outlook to such controversial areas as mergers, price-fixing, and natural monopoly, all of which are usually assumed to absolutely require regulation. This section should at the same time clarify what my view does and does not claim about the efficiency of markets: it does not make the extravagant claim that all free markets are perfectly efficient, but rather shows that the process of free competition always tends to reward efficient behavior (whether allocative or productive) and punish the opposite. The sixth section brings public choice theory to my defense, admitting that an ideal regulator might in certain instances increase efficiency (and this ideal regulator appears to be the person economists always have in mind when they discuss regulation), but denying that as a practical political matter there is ever adequate reason to trust the government more than the market.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Glad to help! Industrial Organization is basically my favorite field and reasonably adjacent to my work of energy economics so being able to spread knowledge of it is always a joy.

          • @Held in Escrow

            Your explanation of price discrimination is correct as far as it goes, and saved me the work of saying the same things. But there are two important points missing:

            1. Perfect price discrimination increases total surplus. Imperfect price discrimination may increase it or decrease it.

            2. It’s possible for rent seeking to wipe out producer surplus, in which case converting all surplus to producer surplus is not such a great idea.

            Imagine that many firms can predict that a certain industry will be a natural monopoly in fifteen years. All of them want to be the monopoly. The way to get it is to establish oneself now as the dominant producer, which requires producing at a loss, since your competitors can produce at the same cost as you can. You have a sort of bidding war, in which the firm willing to lose the most money wins and gets the monopoly. The more the expected monopoly profit, the more you are willing to lose.

            A more familiar version of the argument is the application to homesteading, but the original rent seeking argument by Tullock pointed out the application there.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            @David Friedman

            Is that really price discrimination though? You’re not setting a different price for each consumer, you’re just setting a very low price to drive out the competition; it’s predatory practices rather then PD.

            But yes, imperfect PD can fail along the same lines as setting one price can fail if you have bad information on the market, but as the general assumption is that one moves to PD as you get better information and can thus target different market segments you’re going to end up with a benefit from PD most of the time.

          • @Held in Escrow

            It isn’t that losing money in order to become a monopoly is PD. It’s that PD shifts surplus to the producer, and the more surplus the producer expects the higher the rent seeking cost to firms competing to become the monopoly.

            In the limiting case, all surplus will go to the monopoly producer and all of it will be burned up in the rent seeking competition to become the dominant firm.

          • Held in Escrow says:

            Except if you’re all fighting to undercut each other by selling at a loss you’re not going to be practicing perfect price discrimination. You’re instead going to undercut the other guy who is selling at the perfect level of price discrimination by going under it so that each consumer gets a point of surplus, but then the other guy will go with each consumer getting 2 points of surplus until someone bows out.

            So during the price war you’d end up with plenty of consumer surplus, it’s just that this would all be wiped out by the monopoly later on which has nothing to do with the PD practices

          • @Held in Escrow:

            I seem to have been unclear.

            During the initial period there is a competitive industry with firms selling at below cost, hence negative total surplus relative what would happen if they were not all trying to become the dominant firm in order to collect the later monopoly profits. No price discrimination involved.

            How far below cost are they willing to sell (or in what other ways to spend money trying to build market share)?

            They are willing to lose an amount of money up to the expected value of the future monopoly profits. In a simple symmetrical model with ten firms, each is willing to lose up to a tenth of the future monopoly profit in order to have a 10% chance of being the monopoly. In the simplest model, they compete up to that point, hence lose a total amount equal to the later monopoly profit.

            The effect on total surplus is complicated, because part of what they are losing is a transfer to consumers, but in the limiting case (all consumers value the good at just barely the below cost price, or the competition is in advertising expenditure where the only value of the advertising is attracting customers away from the other firms) they burn it all.

            Now one of them emerges as the monopoly, does perfect price discrimination, collects all the surplus. It (and its competitors) have lost an amount of money equal to that surplus, so there is no net producer surplus, and perfect PD means no consumer surplus in the monopoly period. Perfect PD has been converted from the best system to the worst.

            For the original article by Tullock, see:

            http://cameroneconomics.com/tullock%201967.pdf

          • Anonymous says:

            @David Friedman

            or the competition is in advertising expenditure where the only value of the advertising is attracting customers away from the other firms

            Doesn’t advertising produce value via it providing the funding for public goods?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            If advertising can fund it, it’s not a public good.

            Why is it that advertising can (partially) fund television? Well, partially it’s that there is a limited amount of television bandwidth, and the guy who owns that station has the right to broadcast on that frequency without anyone jamming him. As a result, he owns some valuable “land” which he can have someone pay to put “billboards” on. Pure private good.

            Also, it’s that there is a government monopoly called “copyright” which is put on the shows displayed on television. If you show Babylon 5 with 20 minutes of ads, I can’t undercut you by showing it with 15 minutes of ads, and in turn be undercut by someone showing it with 10, 5, or 0 minutes of ads. If people don’t want to watch Babylon 5 with 20 minutes of ads, they can take it or leave it.

            The whole ostensible purpose of copyright laws is to convert a public good (“creative works”) into a private good. Whether this encourages enough additional creative works to overcome the disadvantages of “intellectual monopoly” is a complex question. One that David Friedman has, I think, written on in the negative.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Vox Imperatoris

            The public good is not in sending but receiving. It’s easy to stop other people broadcasting on a frequency you own; much harder to stop them listening to what you broadcast on it.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            The good in question is television programming. Since this can’t be charged for at the receiving end, television programming is not sold to viewers. (Leaving aside that it can be and is charged for, through cable and scramblers, etc.)

            The programs are not sold to viewers; they are sold to advertisers, who give them away for free to viewers, in order to acquire an audience for their ads.

            Television programming would be a public good if you tried to sell it to viewers. So stations sell it to advertisers instead, in which context it is a private good. From the perspective of the advertisers, the “payment” they receive from viewers is their viewing of the ads, which anyone who watches the program cannot avoid. And in that respect, it is also totally a private good.

            Mechanisms allowing viewers to skip ads—and even the practice of taking bathroom breaks during the ads—threaten this model by turning the programs into public goods: viewers can watch the programs “for free” instead of paying the “cost” of viewing ads. If they don’t watch the ads, the advertisers don’t have any incentive to fund the programs. They become a public good and don’t get provided. (Or, in practice, they get provided some other way.)

  33. zz says:

    I’ve heard that open-source textbooks (eg SICP) are hard to adopt because professors have to assign books that can be sold at the school’s bookstore, since this is a source of revenue for the school. This sounds plausible, but I don’t actually know any professors IRL, so I’m wondering if it’s actually true.

    • I have never been told that I couldn’t assign my own textbook for law and economics (_Law’s Order_), which is not open source but is available from Amazon at (for a textbook) a reasonable price and can be read for free online.

      When teaching IP theory, the main textbook was a conventional one, but I also assigned readings from _Against Intellectual Monopoly_, which was available online for free.

      Those are the closest I can offer to evidence.

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      Sounds like it would depend a lot on the university and/or the region. It’s not true for Finnish universities, at least.

    • Andrew says:

      I’m a current student at Arizona State University. Previously, I studied at Cal State Chico. In both places, I’ve had professors assign free texts, usually online. I’ve even had one print out 40-page copies of a short open source text for every student, gratis. So at least with my two data points, both state schools from different states (with fairly different politics), open source texts are not a problem if a professor wishes to use them.

      Far more egregious is the common practice of professors slapping together unbound college-press “textbooks” that they update every semester by randomizing the problem sets and chapter layout, and then requiring their purchase at the local store for $60-$100. Because they randomize, it’s hard to get by without buying the latest edition- if you don’t want to illegally break copyright, you have to find co-students in your class willing to study together – hard for the full-time employed like me, or for any small class. This semester I had one such “text” that was 95% printed out other-peoples articles from the internet, with 5% questions, for $70, loose-leaf-no-binding.

    • Tibor says:

      Dunno about the US, but most of the textbooks I’ve ever used were online lecture notes made by the professors themselves and downloadable for free from their website. Sometimes those were not available and one had to buy a book but that was rather an exception…more common during the Bachelor than in the Master (where IIRC I only used lecture notes available online). Of course, research-level books are a different thing but students don’t usually buy those (if they need some of that for their thesis, they borrow it in their department library).

  34. Maybe you have heard of the web site Stormfront. Wikipedia describes it as “a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum that was the Web’s first major racial hate site.”

    Stormfront has been in the news lately, over claims that Maine Gov. Paul LePage is one of the site’s 300,000 registered users.

    This news story led to my own discovery that I was called out by name, and pictured, on the site.

    Context: back in March 2014, Judge Bernard Friedman struck down Michigan’s prohibition on same-sex marriage, and allowed his decision to go into effect immediately. The Michigan Attorney General’s office eventually got a stay on the ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.

    So, same-sex marriage was legal in Michigan for about 24 hours, from Friday afternoon (the ruling) until Saturday afternoon (the stay). Four Michigan county clerks, including myself, opened our offices that day, so we could issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

    On Stormfront, someone with the user name “Adamant”, who calls Jews and gays “the disease”, was not happy about the ruling, and my action, and posted about it on a thread titled “Addressing Filth”. The picture of me in a kippah was presumably intended to underline my Jewishness.

    You can see a copy of what was posted here.

    • Held in Escrow says:

      Congrats! So are you planning on framing that and putting it on your wall? Since pissing off Neo-Nazis is a pretty universal mark of honor.

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      For whatever it’s worth, they’re mostly harmless.

      >This news story led to my own discovery that I was called out by name, and pictured, on the site.

      How did this happen? Did you search for yourself or for news about your town?

    • Vaniver says:

      So, same-sex marriage was legal in Michigan for about 24 hours, from Friday afternoon (the ruling) until Saturday afternoon (the stay).

      So as someone involved with the paperwork part of governance, what’s your opinion on judges allowing their decision to go into effect immediately on issues where a reversal seems likely? It always seemed silly to me (despite the issue mostly coming up with regards to gay marriage, and being gay myself).

      • Judges putting rulings into effect immediately is the default.

        Likelihood of reversal is arguable. If a ruling is certain to be reversed, that means it’s legally wrong.

        At the time Judge Friedman’s ruling came down, there had been a whole series of federal decisions all over the country striking down prohibitions on same-sex marriage, and zero upholding them.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          While your point is sound, I have to quibble with your assertion that if a ruling is certain to be reversed, it’s legally wrong.

          Suppose we have an originalist judge whose court is in a district whose appeals court is much more progressive. In a case of first impression, or at least arguably distinguishable on the facts, it’s entirely likely – in fact, it might even be highly probable – that the judge will make a ruling which they know, inasmuch as one can know anything which has not yet occurred, the appeals court will immediately reverse. That does not mean that either of them is right, and it definitely doesn’t mean the district court judge was legally wrong.

          If there is binding precedent or a clear statutory or regulatory provision which is not itself being challenged constitutionally – which is most cases – then your assertion is completely accurate.

        • Anonymous says:

          > Likelihood of reversal is arguable. If a ruling is certain to be reversed, that means it’s legally wrong.

          In addition to what Marc says, this can usually be mitigated down by a showing of harm, especially irreparable harm. If implementing the ruling immediately would cause irreparable harm to you, but staying it would cause much less harm to the opposing party, you don’t need to show as much likelihood of reversal.

    • Daniel Kokotajlo says:

      Larry: Wow, that’s scary. Sorry to hear that! How do you feel about it?

  35. Alraune says:

    Archive binging here, and was surprised to learn that in 2011, you strongly supported NATO intervention in Libya, to the point that you wrote a post complaining about your congressman for opposing it, calling him a partisan hack, a hypocrite, possibly a racist, and saying the war in Libya was a “complete success.”

    Have you apologized for that yet?

    • Alphaceph says:

      I think the Libya intervention and subsequent failure is part of a pattern where people in the west are gradually, slowly learning the hard way that not all cultures and races are equally good at this thing called civilization.

      This challenges a massive shibboleth in our society though, and no-one wants to come out and say it.

      • NN says:

        I’m not sure if our culture and race did a much better job. The American experience with democracy, starting from 1776 consisted of: 7 years of a War of Independence, followed by 6 years of crises leading to a restructuring of the country’s government, followed by several years of series of minor crises like the Whiskey Rebellion, followed by some 60 years of escalating regional tensions that culminated in a very bloody and protracted civil war. After that, things were mostly fine unless you happened to be black, or a Native American standing in the way of Manifest Destiny, or a Chinese immigrant, or a Japanese person living in America during the 1940s, or…

        Other Western experiments with democracy don’t seem to have turned out much better. The horrors of the French Revolution are the stuff of legend, and France’s current government only started in 1958 after a brutal colonial war in Algeria (which was technically a civil war since Algeria was officially part of France at the time). Germany’s first democratic government only lasted 14 years before it was taken over by one of the most destructive dictatorships in human history. Great Britain seems to have done a lot better by comparison, but their experience was also far from ideal, most visibly demonstrated by how their Irish provinces were still being torn apart by sectarian conflict less than 20 years ago.

        Compared to the historical experiences of the West, Tunisia is actually doing very well so far, and even Libya doesn’t look so bad. Maybe the problem is just that democracy is hard in general?

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Inferential silence again.

          Intellectually, I take your point. Emotionally and generally, my reaction to “American democracy during the 1800’s was no better than Libya now, really, so who are we to point fingers?” is “Are you effing serious right now?”

      • SUT says:

        Maybe it’s not a race thing?

        Think of the stereotypical grandpa helping a Millennial get a job: In his day, all he had to do was walk into his local hardware store, look the owner directly in the eye and give him a firm handshake. Why can’t this younger generation just do *that*?

        Similarly, think of Washington crossing the Delaware. Now imagine the government he is fighting has 1 attack helicopter. So ends the “American Revolution”. All we had to do to successfully rebel is pass out a few muskets to farm boys, and fight a foe that had something like a 3 month turnaround time for communications with their leadership. Now you’ve gotta fight Assad, and he’ll gas you.

        Adding on to military tech, is the whole “Flat, Hot, and Crowded” updates to reality. Gone is any hope for a Jeffersonian democracy (People >> Land) and so rebellions occurring today must necessarily use more ruthless tactics, and have a seemingly less live-and-let-live end game.

        • NN says:

          And even back then, revolutions didn’t always work out too well. Sometimes they got crushed by despots, and sometimes they got hijacked by fanatics who carried out mass beheadings.

    • anon says:

      It’s amazing that Scott finds it terribly immoral if someone says that (insert any ethnonym) have a particular obligation to look after their coethnics.
      Something most people would deem commonsensical.

      • No one has any obligation but that of the rules enforced upon them.

        • anon says:

          I mean in the sense that for Scott the horribleness is in attributing a PARTICULAR obligation. As opposed to everyone having exactly the same amount of duty.

          Scott finds the statement horrible, NOT because it suggests that someone should help (Scott agrees that someone should help!), but because it is supposedly “racist” to expect people of the same culture to feel more involved.

          Whereas I think most people would find it natural. For example, there’s nothing strange in expecting Jews to help each other.

      • JBeshir says:

        I don’t think it’s that surprising.

        One of the key parts of a moral system- possibly the primary reason such systems exist in the first place is that it coordinates bystanders to agree on which side of a dispute to align with, such that most everyone aligns on one side, and highly destructive inter-group conflicts are avoided. A key trait we observe in most moral systems is thus that they operates impartially within the group- if who you should support depends on who you are relative to the parties of the dispute, then it doesn’t work at arranging everyone on one side and avoiding conflict.

        This leaves the door open to systems which prioritise outgroups below the ingroup, but only so long as you’re unlikely to have many disputes with outgroup members in which it is costly for the outgroup to solidly align against you. The more you interact, the greater the costly conflicts generated from the lack of a moral system that is impartial between the groups. If you live alongside each other, this gets very bad- consider all the countries ripped apart in the ME by internal conflict over whose ethnicity gets to be in charge.

        To anyone who *is* adopting a properly impartial moral system, ingroup preference is usually going to be morally neutral (“you’re allowed to donate to/help anyone you like”) or morally bad (“you’re engaging in corruption in public office”) depending on whether the moral system expects moral behaviour under you under those circumstances.

        Acting in line with your social alliances (helping family, friends, etc) remains virtuous, but from separate obligations which are in tension with the wider moral system, and that seems to require direct social connections to the affected people.

    • Deiseach says:

      Ah, I’d tend to go easy on Scott for that, given that American political commentary of whatever hue tends to be horrible when it comes to international affairs and that it’s easy for me as a European to know the bias of my own country’s politicians, and those of the neighbouring island, behind the “Let us do something to help those poor, oppressed people” rationalisation for sending in the warplanes, but Americans do seem to have this touching belief in the purity of motive of their governments.

      • anon says:

        As an European, I will never understand how Americans view the role of their own military.

        Is its job a selfless crusade for the world’s common good? Or is it “defending American freedom”?

        And those who use the latter phrase, do they really believe that warring in the Middle East is necessary to American freedom?

        Ultimately, why do the American voters feel compelled, in a post-Cold War world, to maintain a gigantic and outrageously expensive military, when no proportionate military threat to America is present or foreseeable?
        How do the voters justify it in their minds?

        • Sastan says:

          Well, there is the constant begging from every corner of the world for us to tromp over and solve their problems for them. And we’re just stupid enough to take up some percentage of these.

          Me? I don’t think we owe the people of anywhere a damned thing, except the US. Every time we try to help someone, it usually goes wrong, and we get blamed for “imperialism and warmongering”, usually by the same cunts who were whining for our assistance six months before. The people who are outraged that “no one is doing anything and warlords are murdering aid workers” shift seamlessly to wailing about US military overreach at the first bit of collateral damage. People seem to think armies are superheroes, who somehow always get the bad guy and only the bad guy. We aren’t, and it’s time the world and the retarded american voters learned that.

          • anon says:

            But how do these supposedly humanitarian and altruistic interventions become in the common perception a defense of America itself?
            Because it seems to me that Americans often imply that all their military does is defend their own freedom and independence and peaceful nights, and every coffin that comes back from overseas is to them a reminder of that. How does that make sense?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @anon:

            While I personally think America is too interventionalist, history has shown that if we leave everybody to go to Hell in their own way, eventually they try to drag us along with them. It is rational to believe that interventionalism is self-defense when, as the world’s richest and most powerful country, if a conflict grows past a certain point eventually you’re going to have to intervene anyway.

            While I haven’t seen the movie and have no plan to, this position seems well summed-up by a quote from the film The Good Shepherd:

            Joseph Palmi: “[The CIA are] the guys that scare me. You’re the people that make big wars.”
            Edward Wilson: “No, [the CIA] makes sure the wars are small ones, Mr. Palmi.”

            You can believe that, or not. You can believe it’s a good plan, or not. But it is not on its face an irrational belief.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            That is a really good question, that IMO gets hopelessly complicated once you get start delving into the details.

            Speaking from the inside a lot of us saw ourselves as “the watchers on the wall”. Far better to fight the war “out there” than “over here”. If you’re fighting the battle for civilization street-to-street instead of out on the frontier you’ve probably already lost. Of course that statement in itself carries a lot of unstated inference. 1) that civilization is fragile/under threat. and 2) That civilization, specifically western civilization and it’s values are worth defending.

            If you haven’t read Kipling’s poem Tommy go do so, and try to understand that as much as the men and women of the armed forces harbor these sentiments towards their civilian counterparts the people of the US (and much of the Anglosphere) feel the same way towards the rest of the world.

            For it’s ‘Murica this and this, and ‘Murica that, and “Chuck ’em out, the brutes!”
            But it’s “Saviours of the world” when the guns begin to shoot.

          • Pku says:

            I’ve known a few soldiers like that, but most of the (non-conscript) soldiers I’ve known were in it mostly because they wanted to kill some arabs.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @Pku
            I’m not sure if you’re just taking a cheap shot, but assuming you’re on the level…

            You could also say that most of the GI’s who fought in WWII did so because they wanted to kill Nazis and Shintoists. You wouldn’t be wrong per se, but there’s a lot that you’d be missing.

          • John Schilling says:

            “There are four types of people who join the military. For some, it’s the family trade. Others are patriots, eager to serve. Next you have those who just need a job. Than there’s the kind who want the legal means of killing other people. ”
            – Jack Reacher, 2012

            That’s obviously an oversimplification but not a grossly inaccurate one, at least for the United States. Now, what happens when your culture devalues the concepts of “patriotism” and “family trade”?

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @John Schilling

            Granted, but it still feels like a cheap shot, or at the very least like there are several inferential steps missing.

            I am reminded of a line from one of my corps school instructors to the effect of “I want students who enjoy the sight of blood” shocking? Certainly. But it leaves off the bit where people who “freeze up” or “get squicked out” at the sight of real gore generally don’t make very good trauma medics.

          • Pku says:

            @HlynkaCG

            I do think there’s a significant dissonance between how most americans perceive the military (which seems inspired by Band of Brothers and the like), and the motivations of most soldiers I know. There are certainly several who have noble motivations and who I admire (leaving aside the question of whether you agree with their decisions). But most of the people I know who chose to be in the military are jerks on a power trip or some such. I don’t think they’re crazy evil murderers or some such – just take the average slightly assholish small-minded guy you went to highschool with, give him a gun, and put him in an aggravating situation with lots of other jerks, up against a population that doesn’t like him and may well want to see him dead, and you don’t get good results.

            TLDR: The point isn’t “soldiers are monsters”, it’s “soldiers are just as much everyday jerks as anyone else, only with more power and reasons to be aggravated”.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Pku: If you’ve said, I apologize. But what country are you from? And are you basing this observation on soldiers from your home country or American soldiers?

            Because in my experience the type of soldier you describe, while not uncommon, is not the majority. Most of the ones I have known served voluntarily because they wanted to serve. And if they got to blow stuff up, hey, bonus.

            But in a country whose martial tradition has declined from the “sheepdogs for the flock” tradition of the US, I can totally see that not being the case.

          • Pku says:

            I’m basing this on a hybrid of my observations of those Israeli soldiers who chose to be in units that deal directly with the conflict (which is the nearest I could get to “chose to join the military” in a country with conscription), and the american soldiers I know (about who I feel the division still applies, but where I have a much smaller sample size).

            I can believe that the percentage of decent people may be better in the US military, but I still think the way americans see soldiers is somewhat problematic, in that mostly they either see them in far mode (and thus base their impressions more on TV), or are members of their ingroup (and the military has an unusually strong ingroup culture).

          • Going back to the question of how Americans can believe they are defending themselves far away, the short answer is “the lesson of Munich.” The argument is that if only France and England had been willing to fight in defense of the Czechs, Hitler would either have backed down or lost, and we wouldn’t have had to fight WWII.

            I think the argument is wrong, but it isn’t obviously wrong and it has had a large effect on U.S. views of foreign policy in the post WWII world.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @Pku and Marc
            While I grant that such people exist (any group of sufficient size is going to produce a few bad apples) I feel that you are both severely underestimating the draw that belonging, and a chance at martyrdom can exert even on that assholish small-minded guy you went to high-school with.

            I don’t know if either of you have read A Song of Ice and Fire but I chose the title “Watchers on the Wall” quite deliberately. Plenty of questionable characters join the Night’s Watch for questionable reasons but they are still the “The sword in the darkness and the shield that guards the realms of men” from the magical ice zombies kill-happy fascists, communists, and religious extremists who would usher us all into that long dark night.

            I agree that the way the US views it’s troops (or rather doesn’t) is problematic, but part of that “stong ingroup culture” you mentioned is that we don’t really discuss such things in public. I have heard it suggested that we are becoming Janissaries, a caste unto ourselves, and that this has the potential to seriously damage even undermine civil authority over the military moving forward. One of the key tenants of positional authority is that you shouldn’t give any order that will not be followed because the Schelling fence around “disobeying direct orders” is a big one and once your troops start questioning your authority in one matter they’ll question it in others. So, as an exercise to the reader, what happens when the civil authorities have no clue which orders will be obeyed and which wont?

            Partisan politics aside, do you understand why incidents like Benghazi, and L’affair de Bergdahl, are a big deal? Or why Clinton is so viscerally hated in certain sectors?

            The impression I get from many to the left of me is that they don’t. Or worse, they think they do and are dead wrong, which is what leads to concerns like that above.

            That said, Marines and “Greenside” Navy personnel are seen as being a bit weird, insular, and “out there” even by the standards of the wider Military culture, never mind those of civilians. So my own experience may not be representative of the whole.

            Edit: Deleted double post

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HlynkaCG – “Partisan politics aside, do you understand why incidents like Benghazi, and L’affair de Bergdahl, are a big deal?”

            I, uh, don’t. I wasn’t following politics when that stuff happened, and was highly blue at the time as well. In deference to those who feel it’s way too red-tribe in here lately, would you happen to have a link I might read?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I can sum up Benghazi. It was the first American ambassador killed since 1979 (and needless to say over the bodies of the soldiers assigned to guard him). So far despite repeated attempts the Republicans have failed to find any evidence of criminal wrong doing. It appears that it is ‘only’ a case of massive incompetence on the part of the state department where they grossly misunderestimated the danger and got a bunch of people killed.

            If this was a decade earlier the example would probably be the Battle of Mogadishu. Lets link breitbart!
            http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/11/01/mogadishu-benghazi-dejavu/
            “Months before the Battle of Mogadishu, Secretary of Defense Aspin had turned down the on-scene commander’s requests for M1 tanks and AC-130 Specter gunships, weapons that would have changed the calculus of battle and saved American lives. In his refusal, Aspin had over-ruled then Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, who also pleaded that these weapons were necessary to protect boots on the ground”

            The article isn’t entirely enough to get a view of the situation (yet another covering another angle)
            http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/01/world/study-faults-powell-aides-on-somalia.html
            “But the report, released late Friday by the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggests the decision against sending gunships may have been just as significant, and was one in which General Powell played a main role and Mr. Aspin little or none. ”

            Yeah, gives you an idea of the difficulty of finding who is directly responsible. Also an idea of what the military doesn’t like- dying because of incompetence.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @faceless craven

            This article in The Federalist covers the key elements of the Berdahl case. Obama’s Bergdahl Gambit Was Wrong But It Kind Of Worked.

            Benghazi is far messier and a proper write up would take a book but in addition to the issues already raised by Skinner…

            Consider that in 2008 Hillary was running on the idea that she was the one who you wanted on the other end of the phone line at 3 am, but when that phone did finally ring she was MIA, and a bunch of people died as result.

            Running roughshod over the 1st and 5th amendments afterwards was just icing on the cake.

        • keranih says:

          You’d probably get as any opinions as there are voters, but fwiw here’s one:

          Is its job a selfless crusade for the world’s common good? Or is it “defending American freedom”?

          Yes. (Part of our freedom is going touristing whereever we fancy and selling people stuff all around the world, and both are hard to do around tyrannies.)

          do they really believe that warring in the Middle East is necessary to American freedom?

          …This is where a not-charitable me would snark about warring in Europe not being all that necessary for American freedom, either. But that’s derailing and non-helpful. Maybe a better way to ask it would be “How did the Bush-led engagement in the ME (*) support the cause of American freedom?”

          (*) By which one assumes “Iraq and Afghanistan, post 2001” and not just “Iraq post 2001”.

          why do the American voters feel compelled, in a post-Cold War world, to maintain a gigantic and outrageously expensive military,

          1) The US military is actually much smaller than it was during the CW. Current plans have it reducing in size and responsiveness even more.

          2) In armed conflicts, money is fungible with lives. (On both sides.) Expensive toys means fewer dead nineteen year olds.

          3) No one else is offering to step up and take on that responsibility.

          when no proportionate military threat to America is present or foreseeable?

          That’s a matter of assessment of the threat, and there are a number of people who disagree. Plus, past experience has indicated that allies are not all destined to remain allies.

          Even if this were true, (that there is no need for the military capability) it’s not like France and the UK dropped all their military capability when it was clear the US would handle it – it was a slow draw down process.

          There is also the issue of how hard it is to reset capability fast without damaging the economy/social order. Keeping the military up means avoiding abrupt changes when the world changes abruptly, and (in theory) helps keep the world stable.

          But mostly it’s (2) above.

          • anon says:

            “How did the Bush-led engagement in the ME support the cause of American freedom?”

            I understand that you mean this as a take-that to Republicans, as if that made the question go away, but as far as I can tell typical Americans do identify the defense of American freedom with the GI-Joes until recently deployed in Iraq, so the question remains.

          • anon says:

            Warring in Europe was not at all necessary for American freedom. Maybe it was morally necessary, mostly to save the Russians, who the Nazis if victorious would have deported as far East as possible as left to starve. And that’s an entirely different argument.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Warring in Europe was not at all necessary for American freedom.

            Having Nazi Germany be the only nation in the world with Nuclear -tipped ICBMs seems like it could be a serious problem for a country with a sizeable population of Jews and Slavs and other “non-Aryans”.

            Realistically, I would expect a good chunk of the US to “Go Nazi” at that point. So yes (some of) the horrors of WWII would be avoided but at the cost of a 1000 year Riech that actually has a shot at lasting 1000 years. I don’t think I like that trade.

          • John Schilling says:

            The Manhattan Project was started two months before the US entered WWII. Even an isolationist alt-history United States gets nuclear weapons before the Nazis. And the RFP for the B-36 was a month before that, putting it in service long before the most optimistic date for a Nazi ICBM.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            @ John Schilling
            I don’t share you’re confidence there.

            The B-36 didn’t make it’s first-flight until 1949 and experience our own timeline shows that unescorted heavy bombers are going to suffer grievously against German flak and high-altitude fighters.

            Meanwhile in 1945 were already testing a 2-stage variant of the Aggregate (V2) missile that would have, in theory at least, been capable of hitting the US east coast from launch sites in Europe or North Africa.

            Of course in our timeline we bombed the crap out of those launch sites and their production/test facilities to keep that from happening. I figure that a hypothetical Germany that isn’t having it’s industrial centers pounded into rubble by the 8th Air Force would be a bit further a long on that front.

            So maybe the US would develop nukes before the Germans, but it is almost certain that the Germans would develop an effective delivery methods before the US.

            Without the distraction of the US bombing campaign and fighting a two front war I figure that the Germans would develop ICBMs in 1945 and nukes maybe a few years later. This leaves us in an awkward situation where they can hit us but we can’t hit them.

            Best case scenario moving forward at that point is basically the Cold War only with Nazis in place of Commies.

          • Nornagest says:

            The Manhattan Project was started two months before the US entered WWII.

            The draft was also called up sometime before the US formally entered WWII — a year and change before, in fact. Using the declaration of war as a starting point for the American side of the conflict or a proxy for a turn away from isolationism is not, in that case, going to be very accurate.

          • xtmar says:

            @Hlynka CG

            Re they could hit us but we couldn’t hit them.

            1. This depends on the ultimate outcome of the war with Russia. While US/UK bombing of the German heartland was important,* as was (eventually) Normandy and various campaigns in the Med, I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that Germany would have beaten them. Indeed, the Russians started to win back territory near Moscow by January of 1942, only a month after American entry into the war. Furthermore, if you look at the allocation of resources, even when the western allies were advancing strongly on their fronts, the vast majority of the German army was still focused on the eastern front. Perhaps if they didn’t have to worry about the British invasion/counter-invasion it would have been enough to tip the balance, but I don’t think so. Instead, I suspect that the Germans and Russians would have been trapped in a longer and even bloodier war of attrition than what the Eastern Front already was.
            2. While the Germans did have a huge lead in rocketry, the nuclear triad was a valid strategy until at least the 1960s. This sort of depends on how you weight American versus German advances in aeronautics outside of rocketry, but certainly the Americans would have had a strong carrier and air based nuclear deterrent, and with inflight refueling (which debuted in operation by 1950) there would have been credible delivery options. SSG(N) type options would also have been practical well before the first SSBN, and I think the American experience with submarines in the Pacific would have made them at least as competitive as German submarines.
            3. As you say, the best case is a Cold War with Germany.

            *Though even there, I don’t think it’s actually that effective. While it certainly had some effect, the Germans were able to raise output into 1944 by streamlining their industrial base, despite the bombing campaign. Furthermore, WWII era bombing was notoriously inaccurate.

          • Fnord says:

            If, by “two months before the US entered WWII”, you mean two months before the official declaration of war in December 1941, the US was certainly gearing up for war in all sorts of ways by that point, and really was neutral in name only.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ xtmar.

            The ultimate outcome of the war in Russia is largely dependent on just how willing to intervene our hypothetical isolationist US is. Moscow and St Petersburg would have fallen to the Germans in ’42 without US logistical support. I don’t know if that would have taken the Soviets out of the fight but it certainly would have knocked the wind out of any counter attack.

            In regards to 2) I see German aeronautics as an even match if not superior. The US had numbers and coordination but the Germans had raw performance. Remember that the Axial-flow turbojet, all flying tail, and swept wings to improve transonic stability were all German advancements that the US and UK later copied. Yes the US, learned a lot fighting the Japanese but the Germans were still well ahead of the US in tech if not in doctrine.

            As such I look at the nuclear triad in our hypothetical scenario and see an enemy that has a significant advantage along one axis, and parity, if not moderate superiority, along the other two. That is not a position you want to be in.

          • bean says:

            @HlynkaCG

            The B-36 didn’t make it’s first-flight until 1949 and experience our own timeline shows that unescorted heavy bombers are going to suffer grievously against German flak and high-altitude fighters.
            Two things. First, the B-36 was delayed when they realized it wouldn’t be needed. If the US hadn’t been able to use overseas bases, AWPD-1 would have been used instead of AWPD-42. AWPD-1 called for B-36s instead of B-29s.
            Second, the B-36 was capable of flying much higher than the B-29. Even the F-86 was not capable of intercepting the B-36. It took the F-100 to be able to do that.

            Meanwhile in 1945 were already testing a 2-stage variant of the Aggregate (V2) missile that would have, in theory at least, been capable of hitting the US east coast from launch sites in Europe or North Africa.
            By ‘testing’ you mean ‘firing rockets that blow up pointlessly’. It wasn’t likely to work, and couldn’t have delivered a bomb anyway. It wasn’t until the late 50s that thermonuclear weapons reached weights that would make missiles feasible. With regular nukes and V-2 accuracy, they wouldn’t actually be a threat.

            So maybe the US would develop nukes before the Germans, but it is almost certain that the Germans would develop an effective delivery methods before the US.
            The German nuclear program was a bad joke. The Japanese were further along. And they’d have developed 7 delivery systems, none of which worked.

            Without the distraction of the US bombing campaign and fighting a two front war I figure that the Germans would develop ICBMs in 1945 and nukes maybe a few years later. This leaves us in an awkward situation where they can hit us but we can’t hit them.
            You overrate the German missile designers. They weren’t that good. If you look closely, they were less important than a Belgian in US missile design.

            Best case scenario moving forward at that point is basically the Cold War only with Nazis in place of Commies.
            No, it’s the US nuking Germany flat, in 1947-1948.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            There is a self published book along those lines. The Big One, written by Stuart Slade (Halifax makes peace with the Germans, the Nazis do great in Russia and the US sends expeditionary forces to the Eastern Front and carrier raids to on the west). Haven’t read it or the sequels (I believe the consensus is Slade lets his political views interfere a bit too much although ISIS is working very hard to make his stereotypical Islamic villains appear reasonable in comparison) but he is obsessive about technical detail and thinks the US could have mass produced enough nuclear weapons by 1947 to… well ‘the big one’.

        • Gbdub says:

          American intervention in Libya had an awful lot to do with European, particularly French, interests (and trying to clean up France’s mess worked oh so well for us in Vietnam…).

          So perhaps as a European you ought to look a bit closer at your own governments, who seem quite content to let America do dirty work on their behalf.

          If America really wound down and went isolationist, Western Europe would either need to beef up their own militaries substantially, or be accepting of a world militarily dominated by Russia and China.

          Less snarky edit: The American military is so huge because a) we can afford it and b) you never want to be at parity with your adversaries – that encourages them to test you. Being ultra-dominant discourages them from even trying. In the long run it may be cheaper to maintain a bigger force than “necessary” then to have a weaker force that tempts the Chinese or Russians into a real shooting war instead of a minor proxy one.

          • anon says:

            I was very strongly against the intervention in Lybia.

            That one was a favor to France, and a disfavor to some other European contries.

            Usually it’s the US that pressures European countries to go to war against their own interests, such as in Iraq.
            (Although the US bear the most of the casualties and expenditures).

            Yes, the weight of military expenditure and risks should be better distributed among NATO countries. Given that I don’t think that the Us should go isolationist in the sense of dropping NATO ties; rather I think that the NATO block, as a whole, should be way less interventionist.

          • Gbdub says:

            The trouble with the NATO block being less interventionist is that someone is going to fill the void, and we might not like the results very much.

            Putin seems intent on at least partially reviving the Cold War. Russia snatched up Crimea and continues to fight a proxy war in Ukraine and basically dared NATO to do anything about it, which we really didn’t. Does that happen if NATO is a stronger front?

            NATO did nothing to intervene except some empty talk (the “red line”) in Syria, and Russia rides in with hard power to support Assad. Now we’re over there in some force but we have no initiative and apparently little plan other than “blow up ISIS looking stuff”.

            When America left Iraq, Iran was able to exert further influence, and ISIS sprung up (now, maybe we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq in the first place, but having gone there, leaving in a hurry seems to have made things definitively worse). And having grown up in Iraq in the post-occupation power vacuum, ISIS has now decided to stretch its muscle on European and American civilians. That’s why some Americans believe it’s “better to fight them over there”.

            These things make NATO look weak, and encourage further adventurism by alternative powers. This is what I mean by saying that often it’s safer and cheaper to be obviously dominant.

            Maybe you’re okay with the third world being dominated by Russian/Iranian/Chinese spheres of influence. But I suspect that would be rather less stable than the late Cold War/90s world. Could be that our little wars are preventing a big one.

            Personally I’m coming around to the idea of leaving the Middle East to go to hell now that we don’t need their oil as much. Let the Saudis and Iranians duke it out and kill each other if that’s what they want so bad. But if we do that, I do think NATO needs to start being more credible. Maybe we keep our noses out of more conflicts, but when we draw a line, we need to really mean it, and back it up. “Speak softly, and carry a big stick”!

          • “Personally I’m coming around to the idea of leaving the Middle East to go to hell now that we don’t need their oil as much.”

            This seems to assume that if we do need their oil, that’s a reason to intervene. Why? Oil producing countries want money, which they get by selling oil. Oil is sold on a world market. The fact that Iran doesn’t like us isn’t what held down their oil sales, it was the fact that we were trying to keep them from selling oil.

            Hugo Chavez didn’t like us much, but that didn’t keep Venezuela from selling oil.

          • anon says:

            Gbdub:
            “Being ultra-dominant discourages them from even trying. In the long run it may be cheaper to maintain a bigger force than “necessary” then to have a weaker force that tempts the Chinese or Russians into a real shooting war instead of a minor proxy one.”
            Sure, but superiority is pointless without wisdom, and may tempt Americans themselves into unnecessarily increasing the tension with China or Russia.

            You mention Ukraine; the most irresponsible thing that was done there was the Western engineering of a coup in a country in the sphere of influence of Russia. Now that kind of line-crossing behavior is what’s reviving the Cold War.
            Russia has merely been defending its natural sphere (Russian speakers). Nothing it does there could be considered a threat to the West, and it’s nothing the West wouldn’t do if Russia supported a coup in a Nato country.

            Putin supports Assad. That’s fine by me. Assad is the lesser evil. Or did we learn nothing from Lybia?

            Of course retreating from Iraq so abruptly was demagogic and dumb. And that’s one of the reasons the West should be less interventionistic in the first place. The West is demagogic, superficial, short term oriented, clouded by ideology, lacking in understanding. Not only it’s an unnecessary burden for us to run things, we aren’t even qualified.

            Nothing about Russia and China today makes me think that if they ran a bit more of the world there would be instability. It’s rather the other way around, given how monumentally incompetent the West has been in this era. You can’t get any worse than that, only better.

            And yes, it’s good to draw sharp and clear lines. And to only meddle on this side of the line, and leave the rest to other powers. It seems, however, that the US find it really difficult to recognize the existence of other world powers with their own area of influence, where only they are allowed to meddle. It seems to wrongly believe that the world is naturally unipolar.

            Sorry for the perhaps excessively antagonistic sounding rant.

          • Jiro says:

            You mention Ukraine; the most irresponsible thing that was done there was the Western engineering of a coup in a country in the sphere of influence of Russia.

            What in the world are you talking about?

          • John Schilling says:

            Presumably the Euromaidan Revolution. Calling it a “Western-engineered coup” is an overstatement, but a democratically elected government was replaced by an unelected one through extralegal and not-entirely-peaceful means and the West certainly cheered the process enthusiastically enough. It is perceived in Russia as a Western-engineered coup, and understanding that is vital to understanding subsequent Russian behavior w/re Ukraine.

          • anon says:

            “It is perceived in Russia as a Western-engineered coup”

            Note that I am not Russian or Slavic.

          • Gbdub says:

            Anon, you may not be Russian but I’m worried you might be drinking a bit too much of the RT koolaid.

            Why is Ukraine “naturally” under The influence of Russia? Why not the influence of Ukraine? Maybe Crimeans in general prefer Russia, but to call out a “Western backed coup” and then excuse a Russian backed armed invasion is a bit much. And they’ve moved well beyond just Crimea at this point.

            Russia has been meddling hard in Eastern European elections for some time. Now maybe you think the whole Soviet bloc is still fair game for Russia’s sphere of influence, but I don’t agree. I’d prefer we rein in Putin’s adventurism so he can’t keep papering over his corrupt domestic policies with nationalist enthusiasm.

            And yes, Russia is better at imperialism right now because they are brutal, realistic, and aren’t afraid to engage in realpolitik. Obama is hopelessly outclassed. I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing.

            Americans don’t believe the world is naturally unipolar, we just recognize that it’s pretty nice when you’re the unipole. Trouble is we’ve seem to have forgotten how costly and difficult it is to maintain that, and we’ve got an administration perfectly willing to piss off allies and strike lousy deals with our adversaries to score purely ideological victories.

            Short term thinking has definitely been an issue, as you note. Thinking too much about domestic optics has also been a problem.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            People complain about countries being “ideological”. This doesn’t make sense to me.

            There are no real “conflicts of interest” among countries that share the ideology of liberal capitalism. That ideology says that every country out to be able to get along peacefully with every other.

            The only conflicts there are, involve countries that reject this ideology. If you perceive having your country filled up with Ford cars and McDonald’s restaurants as a benefit, your goals don’t come into conflict with the United States. If you perceive it as a threat, then you perhaps try to put up trade barriers. And the U.S. retaliates to try to force you to take them down. But this makes people in your country resent the U.S., so you pass a law expropriating existing American investments. Then the CIA worries about a “domino effect” and funds some kind of guerillas to overthrow your regime, and you have an armed conflict.

            But this is all “ideological”. It all depends on whether globalization, capitalism, etc. really are good or bad, which is an ideological question.

            The Cold War as a whole is the most obvious example. If the Russians had really wanted to do what was best to both prevent war and maximize prosperity, they would have surrendered immediately and let an American provisional government come in to prosecute the worst criminals in government and restructure their economy on capitalist lines. Why didn’t they do this? Because they disagreed on ideology and didn’t perceive this to be their interest.

            The conflict with Islamism is obviously no less ideological. As was/is the conflict between Arab nationalists and Jewish nationalists (i.e. Zionists).

            And the same goes for America’s current conflicts with Russia in Eastern Europe. Russia is no longer governed by the same ideology as under the Soviet Union. But they have a vague sort of nationalist ideology which perceives American and Western European economic power as an aggressive threat, and their social values as an insidious disease. If they didn’t think this, there wouldn’t be any conflict.

            So how can you complain about people seeing things “ideologically” when every conflict is either a conflict between ideologies or a conflict on the basis of a shared ideology which holds conflict to be inevitable?

          • John Schilling says:

            “There are no real “conflicts of interest” among countries that share the ideology of liberal capitalism. That ideology says that every country out to be able to get along peacefully with every other.”

            This sounds an awful lot like a “No True Scotsman” fallacy in the making. Would you care to pin down the definition of “liberal capitalism” and maybe offer a list of nations whose ideologies can be reduced to same? Particularly non-Western countries, because it’s a lot less interesting if all you’re saying is that Western countries have better enemies to fight than each other these days.

          • anon says:

            Gbdub:

            So I’m drinking the Russian kool-aid.
            How is that statement helpful to the discussion?
            It’s funny, all my life I’ve been accused of drinking the American kool-aid.

            There was a coup in the Ukraine (or a “revolution”), it would not have happened without Western involvement, and the West did steer the power transition.
            There are American voices stating or implying that the West is responsible for the initial crisis on the most different ideological corners: on the far left, on the far right , and libertarian.
            I don’t think you have to be on the Pravda or KGB payroll to see these things. Reversed intelligence is not stupidity.

            “Why is Ukraine “naturally” under The influence of Russia? Why not the influence of Ukraine?
            Because Ukraine is not a superpower. I’m afraid that you and I are talking about different things.

            “they’ve moved well beyond just Crimea at this point.” The Donbass, just like Crimea, is pro-Russia, and largely Russian speaking.

            “to call out a Western backed coup and then excuse a Russian backed armed invasion is a bit much.”
            One could argue that the whole existence of the Russian regime can’t be excused morally, but that would be a different kind of discussion.
            I’m talking about what brings the doomsday clock closer to midnight.
            The west didn’t need to challenge Russia in the Ukraine. The West could easily have chosen to coexist with the bear, drawing clear lines, thus ensuring global stability.
            On the other hand, given that the Russian regime exists, and given how these things work in the real world, it was unlikely for Putin not to make a defensive move (and unlike the attempt to snatch Ukraine for Nato what he’s doing is not a threat to the opposite superpower; wake me up when he invades Poland). This doesn’t mean that I “excuse” him at the moral level. If he or Obama were moral people they probably wouldn’t hold their jobs.

            The bottom line is that what I fear most is Western irresponsibility.

          • anon says:

            What I’m trying to argue, if it wasn’t clear, is that there’s a difference between balance-upsetting attempts to take over territory under the nose of the rival superpower, and defensive measures to retain control. All governments are inherently immoral, to varying degree. But superpower have a choice whether to coexist, or to escalate conflict with each other until things balloon up into a gigantic war. Wars ballooning up is precisely what you, Gbdub, fear. And it’s precisely where provoking a rival superpower takes you. You can’t expect any superpower to just take hits. Nato wouldn’t just take hits if threatened this way. And you may feel indignant if a superpower tries to retain influence on its established territory, like Thatcher in the Falklands, but there is a much bigger point in being indignant if a superpower brazenly provokes a rival – unless it really knows what it’s doing, which Nato all too often doesn’t.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            And you may feel indignant if a superpower tries to retain influence on its established territory, like Thatcher in the Falklands,

            Heh, that’s the first time I’ve seen 1980s Britain described as a superpower.

            Although I would like to point out that the Falklands weren’t just in Britain’s sphere of influence, they were (and are) actual British territory. What Argentina did wasn’t really like backing a coup in the Ukraine, but more like sending troops to take Hawaii.

          • anon says:

            Yes, I know mr x, Britain wasn’t a true superpower and the situation isn’t the same; that “like” wasn’t meant in the sense that the previous sentence referred to Britain; it was more of an analogy.

            And the situation is never the same. I was speaking of the general principles of coexistence between powers. When I say provocation, it could take the most different forms, not just territorial encroachment. And when I say reaction, it too can take different forms. Even if Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, he probably would have found some way to increase the pressure to send messages that he can’t be bullied around. Putting more missiles in Kaliningrad or whatever. The enmity would have increased. You want to keep the enmity LOW.

            Another point to Gbdub: The world was never unipolar. It only looked like that briefly, in the 90’s. It was an illusion. Most of the world doesn’t care about liberal democracy and Western values. And without common values, you couldn’t keep the world in line with 10 USAF’s. So you have to come to terms with the multipolarity of the world.

            You said: “Maybe we keep our noses out of more conflicts, but when we draw a line, we need to really mean it, and back it up.”
            Indeed. So let’s draw that line, shall we? And I think it would be reasonable not to include any Russian speaker on our side.

        • John Schilling says:

          As an European, I will never understand how Americans view the role of their own military.

          You have to start by understanding that Americans view your military as an ineffectual joke, unless you are British in which case we view your military as trying to do the right thing but too small to get the job done.

          Americans tend to view the American military, in American terms, as the Marshal assigned to clean up every wretched hive of scum and villainy in the West, on account of it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it and no one else will.

          For Blue Tribe Americans, this is our moral responsibility to the vast majority of good and decent people in the world, and is to be performed by very precisely attacking the tiny number of evil people responsible for all of the villainy and nobody else. If this means American soldiers have to die instead, well, they all come from Red Tribe.

          For Red Tribe Americans, this is a contractual obligation to our few friends on the front lines and in the long term necessary to keep the problems from growing to the point where they do directly threaten the United States. Most of the world is either in league with one group of villains or another, or unwilling to stand against them, and in either case liable to get killed in the crossfire – and better any number of them than a single United States Marine.

          Most of us would like to quietly ride off into the sunset like Gary Cooper at the end of “High Noon”, many of us fear that would result in fairly prompt megadeaths elsewhere, some of us no longer care. We would, I think, pretty much all like to see Europe take on one of these crises, be it Yugoslavia or Libya or Syria or the Ukraine, and show that they can set things right without asking for the U.S. military to back your play.

          • brad says:

            For Blue Tribe Americans, this is our moral responsibility to the vast majority of good and decent people in the world, and is to be performed by very precisely attacking the tiny number of evil people responsible for all of the villainy and nobody else. If this means American soldiers have to die instead, well, they all come from Red Tribe.

            The liberal interventionist model maintains strong support in the “Blue Tribe”, but it is by no means universal and varies up and down over time. I have the vague sense that there may be a geographic trends on this (i.e. New England vs California) but I don’t have polling data to back that up.

          • Brian Donohue says:

            @John Schilling,

            Great comment.

          • anon says:

            Yes, it was a great comment, and also very satisfying to my question. Thank you!

        • Pku says:

          As someone who moved to America, the difference seems to be that while other countries see their militaries as self-defence forces to defend against attacks, americans see theirs as their primary foreign relations tool. It’s still cold-war thinking, which just leaves the question of who to put in place of the soviets (Terrorists, Iran, China, and Russia all fill this to some degree).
          Then there’s the fact that (by population and money) the military’s big enough to be its own small country, which american voters feel obligated to support.

        • HlynkaCG says:

          How do the voters justify it in their minds?

          …because the peaceful sleep more soundly knowing that there are rough men standing guard, ready to do violence on their behalf. 😉

          All snarking aside, see John Schilling, Marc Whipple’s and my own nested replies above for a more properly nuanced answer.

        • Oliver Cromwell says:

          Having overwhelming dominance is a qualitatively different thing to having a marginal superiority, which is why the Americans want it.

          The difference is between being able, in principle, to defeat Nazi Germany, after years of total economic dislocation and hundreds of thousands of deaths, and being able to simply knock them over on day 1 with little or no fighting.

          The anglo-left view of strategy (it’s neither universal in Europe nor absent in the US, nor even historically European, even if it’s now more common in some parts of Europe than in the US) does not seem to recognise this difference.

          While I can see strong arguments, from a US point of view, for simply leaving future Nazi Germanies to handle their own business so long as it stays off the North American continent, I think such a world would rapidly become very unpleasant for European or Asian democracies that stuck with their distaste for military matters. The Americans are probably right when they say that they are doing [developed, democratic parts of] the world a favour.

      • I think the problem is more that Americans overestimate their ability to improve matters.

        I don’t think it’s a question of pure enough motives.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          That’s what pisses me off about this “American imperialism”, “oil war” bullshit.

          If the U.S. were really indifferent to the suffering of people around the world and only cared about oil or whatever, they would simply nuke the population centers, take over the oil fields, and put machine gun posts around them to kill everyone who came near.

          The U.S. goes absurdly far out of its way to minimize civilian casualties. I think, to such a degree that it becomes counterproductive to actually winning wars and ending conflicts, resulting in greater suffering overall. But I don’t see how anyone can look at how American wars are prosecuted and the extremely restrictive rules of engagement, and say that the military is callously indifferent to civilian deaths. Not when they restrain themselves to a self-crippling extent (NB: I don’t agree with everything there, but I do agree with the general thrust of it).

          • anon says:

            Vox Imperatoris, ten years ago I was saying exactly the things you say today. How can the Americans be anything other than angelic if they’re so restrained in their use of force?

            But self serving motives and civilized rules of engagement aren’t mutually exclusive.
            If the US replicated today the immorality of WW2, nuking cities and whatnot, this would obviously result in crippling domestic opposition. It would be a bad move even if you see it from a purely machiavellian perspective.
            I’m not saying that the US is necessarily “imperialistic” (define the word?) or motivated solely by “oil”, but smart “imperialism” will offer politically acceptable justifications for its wars and it will follow politically acceptable rules of engagement.
            For example, as Gbdub (clearly not a spineless pacifist or isolationist) pointed out above, the intervention in Lybia was a favor towards French oil ambitions. Is that “imperialism”? Is that “oil war”? Do rules of engagements make it any less imperialistic and oil related?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @anon:

            Objection: Assumes facts not in evidence, or presents opinion as fact. The statement assumes that “nuking cities and whatnot” is immoral behavior, even in time of war, without establishing a basis for the assumption.

          • anon says:

            Marc Whipple: Your objection is beside the point, because whether or not you think that nuking cities is immoral, the public opinion woud consider it such, and that’s what matters to my point.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @anon:

            Same objection.

            Granted, if the US nuked a city in Syria, right now, that would very likely be viewed as highly immoral. However, you did not limit it to the present or to current situations. If you just mean, “The US can’t get away with nuking a city in Syria to get Assad,” then I do not disagree with you.

          • Gbdub says:

            Last I checked, the USA was notionally a democracy. So the fact that the President can’t get away with naked brutality in pursuit of openly imperialist goals is effectively equivalent to “America isn’t actually that imperialist, and isn’t callously indifferent to civilian casualties”.

            The government being restrained by public opinion is kind of the point. This doesn’t mean that American interventionism can’t have bad effects, clearly, but nothing you’ve said invalidates VI’s point. Personally I think he’s hit on a very good one: All of America’s military failures have come from notionally well intentioned interventions (yes, Libya was a favor to France, but removing Qadaffi still felt like a moral thing at the time) where we proceeded with half measures for fear of seeming too brutal or too imperialist. Vietnam, Iraq, Libya – we over promise and under commit, and then flake out when the costs get high or when it helps win a domestic election. The British Empire we are not.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Gbdub:

            Exactly. That’s a perfect way to put it.

            If the military leaders of the U.S. armed forces had unlimited power, maybe they would be corrupted by it. It seems likely. But they don’t. And that’s why I’d sure rather my country get invaded by America than invaded by Russia or China—even if I were completely ideologically opposed to the American occupation.

          • anon says:

            Vox, what we’re discussing is whether or not those who scream “imperialism” and “oil war” have an useful point to make.

            I say that they do, because if it weren’t for those people, one might mistakenly believe that to democratic foreign policy there is only the saintly layer meant for the public opinion, whereas in fact there is also the layer of self serving motives.

            Whether the US is “imperialistic” depends on how you define the word; it isn’t the same as the British Empire; still, those using the word are saying something useful.

            And this is entirely independent of rules of engagement. The British Empire would have been just as much of an imperially imperial empire if it had followed them (and in fact empires of the past in some cases had very humane rules; the rules of war aren’t a modern invention).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ anon:

            I say that they do, because if it weren’t for those people, one might mistakenly believe that to democratic foreign policy there is only the saintly layer meant for the public opinion, whereas in fact there is also the layer of self serving motives.

            What are the “self-serving motives”?

            As I said in the post about ideology, the American view is liberal capitalism, that what is good for one peaceful country is good for every other one.

            I’m not saying every American action is well-conceived in terms of its actual effectiveness (I have plenty of criticisms of the way American foreign policy is carried out!), but when America bombs Serbia the goal isn’t to get one up on the Serbians. It’s to combat a murderous ideology of extreme nationalism.

            Or when America tried to set up democracy in Iraq, were they cackling and saying this is how we keep the Arabs the down? No, they had grand ideas about Iraq becoming a U.S. ally and a force for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East. What they perceived as being good for America in this regard, they perceived as being good for everyone. It didn’t turn out that way, but it didn’t turn out to America’s benefit either.

            Sometimes the U.S. supports the lesser of two evils, such as supporting authoritarianism in Latin America and elsewhere during the Cold War. But this is to prevent what they see as a greater threat to themselves and the world: the totalitarianism of communism.

            This is very different from imperialism as it is popularly cast, which is based on some desire to capture “markets” and resources for one’s own people, in order to use them to get a leg up on everyone else. The British Empire, especially, did evolve in a more liberal direction, but it still was based fundamentally on controlling resources to win some kind of European power game.

            I don’t actually think the U.S. or the E.U. did anything to make the Euromaidan revolution happen. But they approved of it precisely because they think Ukraine’s moving in a more liberal direction would be good for everyone. For that matter, they’d be perfectly happy if Russia did so, too.

          • NN says:

            Or when America tried to set up democracy in Iraq, were they cackling and saying this is how we keep the Arabs the down? No, they had grand ideas about Iraq becoming a U.S. ally and a force for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East. What they perceived as being good for America in this regard, they perceived as being good for everyone. It didn’t turn out that way, but it didn’t turn out to America’s benefit either.

            I’m willing to bet a lot of money that every empire in history, with the possible exception of the Nazis, thought that what was good for the empire was good for everyone. Even the Mongols.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ NN:

            I’m willing to bet a lot of money that every empire in history, with the possible exception of the Nazis, thought that what was good for the empire was good for everyone. Even the Mongols.

            I don’t really think that’s true. In the period of mercantilism, for instance, did the Spanish think that by making themselves richer and England and France poorer, they would bring about the ultimate good of the French and English? I don’t really think so. Some systems of thought simply suppose that conflict among men is inevitable, and that it’s better to be the winner than the loser. I think this applies to the Mongols, as well.

            But even if it is true, it would prove my point more: that conflicts are not about the opposition of real interests but over ideology. If every empire in history thought its own rule was best for everyone, then the question is who’s actually right. Without that, one’s “interests” are impossible to determine.

            For instance, if the Soviets had been right ideologically, America by resisting them did not benefit itself but rather harmed itself. Even if you say, well, it was the interest of the ruling class to resist but not that of the people, the ruling class ought to have been able to work out a compromise where they get maintained at their prior standard of living in return for averting the possibility of war and allowing central planning to vastly improve the American economy.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            As a note about the Soviet Union, the famous “We will bury you”works out to be “We will watch you be buried”. There are also many indications that the Soviets were legitimately afraid of the rest of the world invading and deposing them.

            Not a Tankie (at all), but given the events of the Russian Revolution and Operation Unthinkable, they probably had the right sentiment (except kinda backwards).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ God Damn John Jay:

            Exactly. They were afraid of being deposed by the West. And I’m sure the West would’ve done it, too, if they hadn’t had a massive military and nuclear presence to deter it.

            Also, I had to look up the term “tankie”. And by the way, I like the reference in your username.

            But as a revision to my last point, about (according to Marxism) the fact that capitalism is in the interest of the ruling class but not the people. One of the things that makes Marxism so destructive is that it’s an ideology that endorses the inevitability of conflict. It’s not “wrong” from the capitalists’ perspective to support capitalism; it’s just what they’re going to do. And therefore, the only way they’ll be overthrown is through violence. (There are many other ideologies of conflict like this.)

            This is what people hate about “class warfare” rhetoric. It’s not (from their own perspective) that they’re on the side of the rich against the poor. It’s that economic freedom and the resulting inequality benefits the poor as well as the rich.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Also with reference to every society believing it is beneficient. I have heard it theorized that the reason the Torah describes the Jews as conquering their territory in Israel (despite a significant amount of evidence that they were always just kind of in the area) was that at the time, an origin by conquest was seen as more legitimate than just showing up. (Not sure about this, won’t stick up for this if it turns to be nonsense)

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I thought the story was Abraham was from Iraq, traveled to Israel and lived normally, the Jews left for Egypt, got enslaved and then retook Israel. Less ‘conquest is legitimizing’ and more ‘that land used to be ours’. And I think the whole Egypt part was added in to explain why Egyptians sucked and Israel’s Gods were better.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Nah, Abraham never really owned the land, or at least not a significant chunk of it. The story is that God ejected the original inhabitants from the land because of their immoral ways. Indeed, it says that He delayed Israel’s claiming of the land until the original inhabitants had sinned enough to earn ejection.

            The explicitly stated implication being that if the Israelites didn’t stay on the straight and narrow, the same could happen to them.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      Does this count?
      Also mentioned here, albeit without a specific mea culpa.

      • Alraune says:

        Eh, close enough.

        • Jiro says:

          True, but there’s a difference between “I was wrong about intervention” and “I was wrong about intervention, and I was also wrong for thinking that someone who didn’t like intervention is a partisan hack, hypocrite, and racist”.

          Those are logically separate. It’s possible that intervention was wrong, and yet someone opposed intervention for the wrong reasons and really was all those things anyway. But although it’s logically separate, people don’t think like that, and this suggests motivated reasoning on Scott’s part–if Scott had known intervention was a bad idea, would he really have thought of his representative in the same way? At least, the next time he calls a Republican a racist, he should consider that his racism detector was askew the last time.

          • “True, but there’s a difference between “I was wrong about intervention” and “I was wrong about intervention, and I was also wrong for thinking that someone who didn’t like intervention is a partisan hack, hypocrite, and racist”.”

            This makes it sound like Scott just *assumed* the guy had to be racist solely because he didn’t the support the intervention. That’s not the case; Scott brought up racism because of a specific statement made by the Congressman…which, honestly, did sound kind of racist.

            “It’s possible that intervention was wrong, and yet someone opposed intervention for the wrong reasons and really was all those things anyway.”

            This is more or less what I think happened.

          • Adam Casey says:

            I feel like the rhetoric you’re objecting to wasn’t because the congressman opposed intervention in Lybia per se. It seems more like “you opposed intervention in Libya but were happy with it in Iraq, which is crazy because the intervention in Iraq was much worse.”

            And sure, Scott was unreasonably angry. But he was at least angry about a poor combination of decisions by the congressman rather than the half that wasn’t so bad in retrospect.

          • Alraune says:

            Scott brought up racism because of a specific statement made by the Congressman…which, honestly, did sound kind of racist.

            Glossing over the problem of local knowledge as “kinda racist sounding” is mindkilled.

    • Alraune says:

      Wow. I hate to beat a dead horse, but this post on Libya is possibly even worse. Though I suppose it’s also more informative as to exactly which aspects of our national psychology make people so willing to uncritically swallow complete fantasies and then demand people be blown up over them.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        I remember thinking exactly the same thing. Libya was the last, best test for the idea that we could actually intervene in middle east affairs and secure a positive outcome. It was like a chance to fix the mistakes after the Gulf War, when we called for Saddam’s people to rise up against him and then sat back and watched while they were slaughtered. It was exactly the scenario where everyone agreed that intervening would be the Right Thing To Do.

        And then it went inevitably to shit anyway.

        I’d be interested to hear what Scott’s thinking on the subject is now, in retrospect. For me, it pretty much killed my belief in humanitarian intervention, at least in that part of the world. It just straight-up does not work. If we want to stop the periodic slaughters, we need a completely new plan.

        What did you think about the Libyan crisis/Arab spring at the time?

        • anon says:

          At the time I was against intervening, on the explicit basis that there was no reason to think that the rebels were a better faction than the reassuringly secular government. I was SO right.

        • Nathan says:

          I strongly supported the Libya intervention at the time. Even though Libya is a mess now, I don’t think you can clearly say it was the wrong move. It was likely to be a messy and violent situation for a long time in any event, and at least with Gaddafi gone there is the chance for the warring factions to come to some sort of peace deal – see the massive complication that Assad’s continued existence is for attempts to resolve the Syrian crisis.

          To an extent I feel like this is a little bit akin to what I think Scott called the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics. We interacted with a problem without fixing it, so now it’s our fault – even if we made it better (which we may not have).

          I don’t think that there’s ever going to be a way to know which choice would have been the right one. But the event did make me extremely sceptical of other interventions nonetheless, because it seemed like such a clear case and it still turned out so bad.

        • Alraune says:

          What did you think about the Libyan crisis/Arab spring at the time?

          There’s a distinct moment I recall realizing that the Arab Spring was both doomed to fail, and that the western narrative of it was built on lies and wishful thinking. It was during a Daily Show interview with an Egyptian activist, where Jon went on a bit about high-minded ideals of democracy and the activist’s reply included “bread.”

    • Urstoff says:

      Please Scott, do apologize for everything you’ve said in the past that you might now not agree with or that someone else might now disagree with. Otherwise you might look like a normal person and not a politician.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      Look, is it even clear that NATO intervention in Libya was harmful?

      Gaddafi was on the way out, anyway. If you didn’t notice, there was a massive civil war at the time. This wasn’t a case of a stable, peaceful hornet’s nest being kicked by NATO just for the random desire to bring them democracy. It was a limited intervention that whose main purpose was to enforce a no-fly zone and take other measures to prevent the Gaddafi regime’s attacks against civilians.

      What evidence is there that things would have turned out better without NATO intervention? The fact that Libya is not peaceful and prosperous today does not mean that the intervention failed or was not helpful; the country was not peaceful and prosperous when the intervention started, and things were projected to get much worse.

      This is, to me, case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If the NATO does nothing, they get blamed for sitting back like in Rwanda as the population is massacred. If they go all-in, they get blamed for trying to “impose democracy” while not respecting “local traditions”. If they just try to prevent the worst massacres of civilians on the part of the government, they get blamed for that, too.

      And moreover, I don’t really buy this line about “some people are lesser races and can’t be civilized like us, at least not until they go through hundreds of years of slow modernization.” The process of modernization can be done very quickly, if only the will is there. Islam may in fact be a barbarous religion. But Japanese State Shintoism was a militaristic and chauvinistic religion. And I don’t believe that Muslims are inherently going to be barbarians any more than I believe the Japanese are inherently destined to want to loot and pillage the Pacific, or the Germans are inherently destined to be murderous “Huns”.

      Now, sure, I’m very sympathetic to the argument that it’s not our problem and not our responsibility to go and bring modern civilization to everyone else. But I don’t believe it couldn’t work if done properly. The problem with what you have in Iraq or Afghanistan is this half-assed effort, where the focus is so much on “working with the native population” and not “imposing values” on anyone that the U.S. ends up supporting brutal, corrupt governments which explicitly incorporate sharia law into their system and make infamous decisions such as holding that a Shiite man is within his rights to starve his wife until and unless she has sex with him. How could anyone believe that such a government would bring peace and prosperity?

      So yeah, I’m against “spreading democracy” if that is meant in the Robert Bork type sense of allowing unlimited mob rule. If the U.S. is going to spread anything, it ought to be liberal capitalism first and “democracy” a distant second, to the exact extent that it is a necessary means to liberal capitalism.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        I don’t really buy this line about “some people are lesser races and can’t be civilized like us, at least not until they go through hundreds of years of slow modernization.” The process of modernization can be done very quickly, if only the will is there. Islam may in fact be a barbarous religion. But Japanese State Shintoism was a militaristic and chauvinistic religion.

        Leaving aside the theory that race influences culture, because it is not necessary but certainly makes things worse if it happens to be true, you are conflating race and religion when what you are really talking about is culture. State Shintoism and Islam may both be militaristic and chauvinistic. But they are militaristic and chauvinistic in very different ways, related to the cultures in which they are applied. One of them, it turns out*, is more adaptable to Western-style capitalism than the other. Why? Because of the culture they are based in, not because of any inherent religious difference.

        Cultures resist shift, except when they don’t. Trying to impose shifts externally is not one of those exceptions. It rarely works. If you want, you can call that racist or bigoted or whatever, but so far the actual experience on the ground seems to be that it is a racist, bigoted truth. When the culture changes, the experience will change. If it does not, it will not.

        *And don’t forget it took a devastating loss in war, including a surrender by a person who was literally a member of the pantheon of that religion, to make a clean break of it. If the Twelfth Imam reappears and is summarily defeated by the US Army, perhaps Islam could make a similar break. Until then, the two have a fundamental discontinuity and should not be analogized.

        • NN says:

          *And don’t forget it took a devastating loss in war, including a surrender by a person who was literally a member of the pantheon of that religion, to make a clean break of it. If the Twelfth Imam reappears and is summarily defeated by the US Army, perhaps Islam could make a similar break. Until then, the two have a fundamental discontinuity and should not be analogized.

          The Twelfth Imam is only a thing in Twelver Shia Islam. Generally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to refer to Islam as a monolith, like you do in your post. Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey are all far from perfect, but their problems are very different from those of Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. Even Iran’s people seem to have modernized to a greater extent than much of the Middle East despite living under an oppressive theocracy for 36 years (for example, Iran has a below-replacement fertility rate and a majority of Iran’s university students are women).

          Like you say, culture often matters more than inherent religious differences. See American Evangelical Christians considering abortion the worst thing in the world despite the Bible containing exactly zero condemnations of abortion and several passages that can easily be interpreted as supporting it. But even restricting ourselves to Middle East and North African Sunni Islam, some places are doing better than others. Tunisia has been having problems with terrorism recently, but its new democratic government seems to be pretty stable. In 2014, it had a peaceful transfer of power to a new President without any major problems. So I’m not convinced that there is some cultural defect in that part of the world that makes democracy impossible, though I suppose Tunisia could just be a weird exception.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          One of them, it turns out*, is more adaptable to Western-style capitalism than the other. Why? Because of the culture they are based in, not because of any inherent religious difference.

          Many people quite sincerely thought that German culture was inevitably warlike and aggressive, and that the best which could be done was to split the country back up into many little principalities and keep them deindustrialized and demilitarized. Everything seems inevitable in hindsight.

          Cultures resist shift, except when they don’t. Trying to impose shifts externally is not one of those exceptions. It rarely works. If you want, you can call that racist or bigoted or whatever, but so far the actual experience on the ground seems to be that it is a racist, bigoted truth. When the culture changes, the experience will change. If it does not, it will not.

          I don’t know if it rarely works. It is rarely tried. It seems to me that it more or less tends to work when tried.

          As for Islam, just look at the example of Ataturk. A rapid and very extensive shift in culture brought about the influence of Western ideas. And the stuff going on with Erdogan doesn’t change that. “It only worked for most of a century.” Indeed, how can Enlightenment ideas continue to influence people if the West itself loses confidence in them and especially when it sees them as the parochial province of Westerners themselves and not universal ideas which are suitable for everyone to live by?

          Not to mention that Turkey is still a damn sight better than ISIS or Saudi Arabia.

          Or look at the influence of the British Empire. To be sure, it didn’t magically turn things around in every place that was ever painted red on the map, where the British ruled as distant overlords. But places like Hong Kong and Singapore are extremely Westernized and successful. And even India is doing much better than many places in the world (and even there, its overall prosperity is a misleading average of some very advanced, modern areas and poor, backwards areas).

          • xtmar says:

            Many people quite sincerely thought that German culture was inevitably warlike and aggressive, and that the best which could be done was to split the country back up into many little principalities and keep them deindustrialized and demilitarized. Everything seems inevitable in hindsight.

            This seems a little bit towards willfully stupid by the proponents of the Morenthau plan. While there is no doubt that German culture was and is different from American/western culture, its also not that different on the grand scale of things. This isn’t to say that the cultural differences aren’t important, and indeed in some ways can be more divisive than larger differences, but it’s also a lot easier to integrate people who share broadly underlying cultural touchstones.

            As you say, this is always easier to see in hindsight, but at the same time I think you’re overstating the power of what you’re arguing.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Vox:
        “Look, is it even clear that NATO intervention in Libya was harmful?”

        I was set to post something similar, although I’m not sure you have captured the essence of the thought process that seems to have been working at the time.

        There was a hot civil-war at the time. Southern Libya had successfully rebelled and, nominally at least, formed a multi-coalition government that seemed to be ruling effectively. Gaddafi was in the process of rolling over that area with fairly brutal effect. So there was definitely going to bad results if we left Libya without intervention.

        But, unlike in Syria or other places, there really was a highly functional opposition. Witness how little that NATO had to due to allow the southern forces to role over Gaddafi.

        It also occurs to me that even if we hadn’t intervened there was at least some chance that the country would be back in the same situation once Gaddafi died. He was 69 and the death of a strongman is always a dicey time for a country.

        So you 100% chance very bad things are going to happen if no NATO action is taken vs. some significantly higher than zero percent chance that very bad things won’t happen if you intervene. The fact that Libya is a cluster now, even if it was the most likely outcome, doesn’t say that the decision to intervene was wrong.

        But I disagree that nation building can really be “done right” in a relative short time frame. Germany and Japan were more nation re-building than nation building. Ultimately it has to be the local populace coming of with local solutions. Outsiders can provide the eggs, but not ever the ham.

      • John Schilling says:

        Gaddafi was on the way out, anyway. If you didn’t notice, there was a massive civil war at the time.

        With all due respect, this seems like the sort of hopeful foolishness that gave us, well, pretty much the entire Arab Spring. There’s protestors openly defying the government in the streets, and some policemen and soldiers have joined them, so obviously the corrupt old tyrants are on their way out. That’s how it always works in the movies, isn’t it? In reality, yay Tunisia, but otherwise pretty much a series of pointless bloodbaths.

        Yes, I noticed the civil war. I was following it pretty closely from a military perspective; I do that sort of thing. I noticed that as of 19 March 2011, the rebels were losing. Badly. Tripoli was secure, Zawiya and Ajdabiya had fallen, the defenses of Misrata and Benghazi had been solidly breached, and the rebels were retreating on all fronts – not that they had any place left to retreat to, other than maybe Tobruk for a last stand. Tobruk is a good place for last stands, if that’s what you’re into. This is why Europe rushed to intervene, and why America went along with it.

        Muammar Gaddafi was as secure in his position as Hafez al-Assad in 1982, or Saddam Hussein a decade later. It might well have been better to leave him there; almost certainly would have been if you’re just looking at the death toll. There are of course other considerations, but that’s a whole lot of blood shed for not much in the way of liberty.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @John Schilling:
          I’m sure you pay attention to these things more than I do, so I’d love to have your take on a few reactions/thoughts:

          “There’s protestors openly defying the government in the streets, and some policemen and soldiers have joined them, so obviously the corrupt old tyrants are on their way out.”

          Strongman out in Libya, strongman out Tunisia, strongman out in Yemen, regime change in Egypt, much weakened strong man in Syria, … I’m not saying the results are necessarily good, but it’s certainly change.

          “I noticed that as of 19 March 2011, the rebels were losing.

          that’s a whole lot of blood shed for not much in the way of liberty.”

          There was going to be a whole lot of blood without the intervention. It’s not clear to me that more blood has now been spilled than would have been in the counter factual.

          And note that it took very little action on NATOs part to completely flip the script. I’m not sure why that was, from a military perspective, but it is certainly a very different picture from other places where we chose not to/did not get involved.

          • John Schilling says:

            Good questions. W/re the rapid turnaround in Libya, that is mostly an example of how important air supremacy is in modern warfare. It doesn’t guarantee victory, and it isn’t strictly necessary for victory – ISIS has been doing surprisingly well against an enemy with total control of the skies – but it does make for an order of magnitude difference in the balance of power on the ground. Enough to turn Gaddafi vs La Resistance from, say, Hitler vs Poland to Hitler vs Russia. From a strictly military standpoint, Libya was a master class in how to do that sort of intervention right – provided your allies on the ground meet a minimum standard, which the Libyan resistance (barely) did.

            But it’s not clear that there “was going to be” a whole lot more blood shed without the intervention. Most of Libya’s populated areas were solidly under government control on the 19 Mar 11, and most of what wasn’t under government control was Benghazi and Misrata, both clearly about to fall. All of this at a total cost of about one thousand dead. There is no reason to believe that more than another thousand would have died before the war was brought to a conclusion. Gaddafi had not in fact engaged in reprisals against the civilian populations in the areas he had retaken to date, and there is no evidence that he planned to. Alraune has already posted a good and well-sourced link on that; I don’t need to repeat it. The bit where Gaddafi had indiscriminately machine-gunned and carpet-bombed civilians and was clearly plotting genocide to come, that all comes from propaganda put out by people who were desperate for NATO to intervene on their side. Possibly Gaddafi was planning some mass slaughter and somehow the rebels knew about it but nobody has been able to find any solid evidence since, but I don’t think that’s the way to bet and it certainly wasn’t inevitable.

            And in general, we know what it looks like to let a vicious totalitarian Arab dictator rule an Arab nation. They kill anyone who stands against them, which means almost nobody stands against them, which means they don’t kill all that many people. Most of them, and Gaddafi seems not to have been an exception, understand that a reputation for being a bloody murderer works about as well as actually being a bloody murderer and leaves you with a larger supply of obedient subjects, so most of them don’t go in genocidal reprisals once the resistance has been effectively crushed.

            Now we know what it looks like to let a bunch of populist ex-revolutionaries rule an Arab nation. Whee.

            As for the rest of the Arab spring, yes, the strongman in Tunisia was replaced by something fairly close to a modern democracy. Yay Tunisia. Would that it had ended there. The strongmen in Libya, Yemen, and maybe someday in Syria, have been replaced by bloody unending civil wars that make the Islamic State look like an improvement in some areas – at least to the locals who are looking for someone who can maintain order long enough for them to bring in a crop and feed their families. You’ve got to really hate strongmen for those to count as a victories just because the strongmen are gone.

            And I would not characterize what has happened in Egypt as a regime change. The regime in Egypt has been the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces since the days of Gamal Nasser. The SCAF has always nominated one of its own to take off his uniform and move into the palace, but as first among equals rather than as El Supremo. And Hosni Mubarak’s death warrant was written about two years before the Spring, when he started grooming his non-military son to truly rule Egypt after him. The only question was what excuse the Army would use to conduct a coup without too many ugly diplomatic repercussions; Tahrir Square certainly gave them that. The only surprise was that they let an elected Muslim Brotherhood leader hold office for a couple of years in the interim, presumably to see if he would accept his proper place as a puppet to Egypt’s proper rulers. He didn’t, the end. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

            I’m not saying the results are necessarily good, but it’s certainly change.

            No argument there. But I am extremely skeptical that this has been a net good anywhere but Tunisia, and particularly in the places where we have decided to go about bombing people.

          • NN says:

            On the other hand, Gaddafi was 69 and reportedly in ill health, so Libya might have ended up in a similar or even worse state to where it is now in a couple of years anyway. The article that Alraune linked to tries to paint Gaddafi’s son Saif as a reformer but 1). transfers of power often don’t work out in countries like Libya, even with a designated successor in place, and 2). Saif’s reputation as a reformer may have been highly exaggerated.

          • John Schilling says:

            …transfers of power often don’t work out in countries like Libya, even with a designated successor in place

            I am not aware of any country in the post-colonial Middle East in which the natural death of a head of state or head of government was followed by civil war or even substantial violence. The death of Iraq’s Abdul Salam Arif in 1966 arguably led to the 1968 coup, but that was an entirely bloodless affair. It is only when healthy leaders are violently killed or evicted that you get violent conflicts over who gets to be the next leader.

            Your proposal to implement a mandatory retirement age for Middle Eastern dictators by way of NATO airstrikes at the first plausible justification after the strongman’s 65th birthday, seems likely to increase rather than decrease the level of violence and the number of dead civilians in the region.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            It’s just one example, but some people claim that the Shah’s impending death from cancer contributed to the revolution. But it is hard to know who knew what when. (Many people claim that his treatment in America contributed to the storming of the embassy, but that’s a different matter.)

            In particular, Bueno de Mesquita claims that hospitalization often triggers regime change, though I don’t think that describes the Shah.

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s a good point, though I don’t know of any other Middle Eastern examples except maybe Arafat. And the Pinochet precedent is going to make hospitalization abroad a much less likely thing for strongmen in the future.

            Maybe we should set a policy that we’ll offer hospitalization and safe retirement to any strongman who arranges to transfer power before he leaves, but that would be a hard sell to both the ICC and the strongmen.

          • brad says:

            Hasn’t France had that as a de facto policy since the end of WWII?

      • Alraune says:

        Look, is it even clear that NATO intervention in Libya was harmful?

        Overwhelmingly. (That’s the source Scott used in his own answer on why he’s attempting to change his instincts about intervention, incidentally.)

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          I’m not going to register and go behind the paywall to read that article. If you have an accessible version, I’ll take a look at it.

          In any case, my point was not that the intervention made everything great. It’s that it’s not clear the intervention made things worse than they would have been anyway if Gaddafi had been able to slaughter everyone.

          I mean, it’s one thing when you had this sort of Cold War realpolitik doctrine of “he’s an SOB, but he’s our SOB”. But…not only was Gaddafi not our SOB, that whole context of facing an archrival of remotely similar military capability bent on our destruction does not exist anymore.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        My n=1 sample of Libyan friends certainly weren’t fans of Gaddafi (although I’m not sure how much of that was a personal grudge due to his nationalisation of a family member’s company). Not sure what they think about the intervention in general.

  36. Just a general political remark, because it may be interesting: it is important to realize that market interventions have a different tradition in the US and Europe. America i.e. FedGov primarily tends to intervent through regulations, while European governments tend to intervent through directly spending tax money. For example, an American history professor from Michigan who is teaching in Europe complained to me that as he moved over he rented out his flat, and the regulations are horrible, he cannot kick out tenants during the winter, nor can he demand more deposit than a few weeks, so if people stop paying rent in Nov he is screwed until spring and it is no even just about lost income: the flat is heavily mortgaged and he really needs the rent to be able to pay it. Well, I paid 5 months worth of deposit for my rented flat in a European country, it obviously covers the winter kick-out ban, so we clearly don’t have so strong regulations here in this field, however, about 30% of all flats built here are built by the government and rented out socially. This obviously tends to down-compete rents. So there is more tax-money investment and less regulation here. This is just one example, and surely there are opposite examples, but this seems to be the general trend. Thus if you do analysis like soda tax, try to factor this in. I don’t know the historical reasons for this difference.

    If I have to bet, it is because Americans have a historical animus against taxes but easily accept regulations because there is a long history of religious and quasi-religious regulations. For example the Prohibition was rooted in Protestant teetotalism. The Prohibition would have obviously failed in a country like France, the rural folks would have laughed loudly at a wine ban, but they accept high taxes easier, so many European countries seems to have the opposite kind of tradition: resisting regulation, but readily paying higher taxes, this is why the governments operate more with direct spending. This is the most striking in what is called the Scandinavian model – stuff like the labor market is almost extremely unregulated in Denmark, the idea is unregulated markets easier produce that really huge tax revenue that gets spent.

    • God Damn John Jay says:

      I think this goes back to earlier than prohibition, The Whiskey Rebellion was about taxes on alcohol and as far as I remember (From Assassins Creed 3, admittedly, Computer Scientist not a historian) the US prefered to sell land rather than levy taxes after the American Revolution.

    • Richard says:

      Not sure about your bet, but if anyone is looking for a one-sentence summary of the Scandinavian model, look no further than:

      “The idea is unregulated markets easier produce that really huge tax revenue that gets spent.”

      which is a rather brilliant summary

    • Creutzer says:

      he cannot kick out tenants during the winter, nor can he demand more deposit than a few weeks, so if people stop paying rent in Nov he is screwed until spring

      As far as I know, this is also the case in France, though…

  37. Jack V says:

    I’m relieved that the second interlude is called “Beth” not “Aleph-1” 🙂

  38. Emile says:

    So I’ve been playing around with Procedural World Generation lately (an old hobby of mine), and one of my projects is making an infinite, interesting world. You can see a first version linked in my username (in the hope that it’s less likely to trigger the spam filter…). I have a few other old projects like that I’d also like to put open source.

    So, considering that there are a few people here who like world-building, would anybody be interested in participating? No programming required (unless you want to, it’s all on github anyway), I wouldn’t mind help with writing or pixel art.

    • Alex Welk says:

      What sort of world-gen is this? I’m much more accustomed to hex-crawls for Dungeons and Dragons, but depending on the direction (ahistorical or fantasy are both interesting to me) I might be able to contribute writing, ideas, or random generator algorithms.

      • Emile says:

        Eh, just world-gen for the sake of world-gen. It could possibly be used as a background for roleplaying or fiction or whatever, but I’m mostly focused on making an interesting world. I’m going for a generic fantasy-ish medieval theme, but don’t have a super-strong opinion on details, I’ll see what’s interesting to generate.

        I’m interested in writing, ideas, or algorithms (especially in javascript :)). The basic way it works now is that I have cities and “cultural features” (nations and religions) that influence cities, so that a city’s description will depend of nearby cultural features. I want to add more kinds of cultural features (fallen empires, guilds, trade networks, recent wars, etc.), and have the descriptions vary a bit more with city characteristics (big city? small town? seaside? iron-fisted dictatorship? independent city-state? suspicious of foreigners?), and have some non-city landmarks (castles, villages, ruins, monasteries…). So I will need a lot of properly-tagged short descriptions I can feed into all that.

        If you want to discuss this more ping me at flammifer at gmail (or discuss it here, but these threads get unwieldy 🙂 ).

        • Murphy says:

          Are you familiar with Dwarf Fortress?

          It seems to be a similar idea of trying to create an interesting world though it does it by actually simulating history (and even erosion) so that the history is self-consistent. It even has an ethics system attached to races and individuals so that there will be consistency to your iron-fisted dictatorship.

          • Emile says:

            Yep, I know Dwarf Fortress, it’s the kind of thing I’m making, except that I’m just putting it online so that anybody can browse the world, which you can’t really do (that I know of) in DF. In a way I’m just making the world-and-history-generating part of DF, without the game 🙂

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      Have you checked out Shamus Young? He loves Procedural World Generation. Done quite a few projects on it, the most recent of which I believe was Project Frontier (I don’t remember how to embed links and the handy html-helper isn’t immediately visible so I shan’t bother): http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=11874

      As for the writing aspect, a group of friends and I do that a lot with a shared roleplay-world we’ve created.

  39. atreic says:

    Yay, meetups! Err, I think if you’re advertising a meetup in England, it’s better to either use English date format or isostandard date format? But I worked it out in the end.

  40. Emile says:

    By the way, I’ll be in London this week (probably Wednesday and Thursday), but not for the weekend meetup … in the unlikely event that someone would be up for having dinner or something together Thursday…

  41. The original Mr. X says:

    In other news, it appears Europe is even more doomed than we thought:

    A former Dutch soldier has been arrested on suspicion of killing so-called Islamic State militants while fighting alongside Kurds in Syria.

    The 47-year-old was later released but had to surrender his passport to stop him returning to Syria.

    Prosecutors said that Dutch law did not allow the use of force apart from in exceptional circumstances.

    “Killing an IS fighter therefore could mean being prosecuted for murder,” a statement from prosecutors said.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35327313

    • Sastan says:

      Yeah, I’m ready to say this: Western Civilization is dead on the continent of its birth.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      Stay spooked, America. I’m sure you can make a living off writing horror stories of all our poor women being forced to cover up and our governments helpfully supplanting themselves. I’m writing this as the last free man in Holland, please come over and save us before it is too late!

      • Sastan says:

        Nah. European police are now officially the protection arm of a continent-wide gang-rape organization. You tolerate beheadings in your streets and mass murder in your cities. You refuse to prosecute capital crimes, but suddenly find the prosecutorial time and energy to criminally charge people with talking or wearing shirts.

        There’s nothing there to save. Send us a double batch of whisky and BMWs before you shut down for good.

        • JBeshir says:

          Reminder that US homicide rate per 100,000 people (3.8) is literally three times France’s (1.0) or Germany’s (0.8). Mass murder remains a very small fraction of those murders, as overly attended by the media compared to other causes of death as it ever was, and has little to no noticeable impact on expected quality of life as of yet, with any reaction called for being called for largely on game theoretic grounds, because the actual impact isn’t significant enough to even merit calling lawmakers’ attention to it. Western Europe is just fine, thanks for your concern, whisky remains available to buy through the usual channels and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future.

          European police are “the protection arm” of bad people only insofar as they are enforcing the normal, civilised rule of law and not permitting vigilantism. Just like police breaking up lynchings in the US. While doing that might disrupt some deterrent effect, we generally think having the rule of law is a good thing. This particular case is borderline, because of the extraterritoriality-in-a-warzone thing, but the fundamental reason no one is rushing to make special exceptions for it is that the situation is not serious enough to justify dismantling the normal processes of law. Western Civilisation does not feel the need to destroy itself to save itself just yet.

          People start to shift on a thing when they feel personally incentivised to, so wild exaggeration of the threat to them is probably a functional way to draw attention to something you think is neglected, if you want to use Dark Arts. And certainly a lot of people are trying it really hard, with the predictable effect that they’re getting tuned out acting in the opposite direction. But you shouldn’t come to actually believe it.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Hey, I was having actual fun having some snarky back and forth here. Why would you ruin that?

          • Sastan says:

            No mate, I mean the cops literally arrest the parents of underage kids being gang raped to keep their parents from interrupting the party. From the Times’ report on Rotherham:

            “Police went to a house outside which a father was demanding the release of his daughter, who was inside with a group of British Pakistani adults. Officers found the girl, 14, who had been drugged, under a bed. The father and his daughter were arrested for racial harassment and assault respectively. Police left, leaving three men at the house with two more girls.”

            Do note that this racket went on for sixteen YEARS before it came to public attention. The governments of Europe and their institutions are completely unable and unwilling to deal with problems if they stem from a muslim community. They would quite literally prefer thousands of children be gang-raped than risk being thought of as racist for prosecuting a perpetrator. Rotherham was an open secret, thousands upon thousands of reports had been made. But no one would stop it, because that was what they wanted to happen. And after all of that, tens of thousands of rapes, thousands upon thousands of victims, a decade and a half of official complicity, guess how many people were fired? If you guessed zero, you’re probably twigging to the issue.

          • JBeshir says:

            Ah, I understand what you were referencing now. That happened. People were suitably outraged, and I’m sure if it happens more times people will shift their priorities to force Something Very Visible To Be Done on the matter rather than tolerating government assurances that they’ve changed the organisation’s behaviour coupled with a change of leadership.

            Being outraged about it is reasonable, sensible, and if ever there was a case it was the right way to react it’d be this one. It was awful on more or less every metric, and unlike many awful things in this world, entirely fixable by getting people to do the obvious correct thing- the officers involved were institutionally apathetic to the statutory rape they had a pretty good idea was going on, in permitting paper-thin concealment and failing to follow up on it, including after reports from elsewhere, and they needed to be made to not be. Getting angry incentivises the right people to fix that in order to calm you down.

            Just as there’s been pretty clear institutional racism in a lot of police forces internationally, there’s pretty clearly been institutional apathy towards statutory rape in the UK police; Rochdale’s 47, Jimmy Savile’s approximately 450 alone, etc, with the evidence starting to come out from 2012 onwards for all of these things. This does seem to be improving, as people gradually come around and organisational priorities are forced to change to match the fact that yes, in the 21st century it is unacceptable to turn a blind eye to it in the way you might for, say, low-level drug use, and if it doesn’t I’m sure people will continue to get angrier until every police officer gets mandatory training on the matter.

            The error of ignoring reports of crime waves because of political correctness, too, was terrible and happened, and was called out by leading politicians as a thing to be corrected. If their assurances that this too is being fixed prove hollow, I am sure people will properly motivate them to fix that, to get this to improve too.

            That said, as of yet, while the crime undoubtedly still happens, police disinterest in organised statutory rape doesn’t seem to be evidenced to be England-wide (one of the specific criticisms raised of South Yorkshire police was that they had zero prosecutions in one year next to a neighbouring county’s hundred, which suggests the neighbouring county did not share the lack of attention), or ongoing, so proclaiming Western Civilisation dead across the whole of Europe may be premature.

            Expected outcomes, typical rule of law, and crime rates are still pretty good by historic standards and international comparisons, major failings notwithstanding. Whisky remains available to order.

          • My first assumption would be that local officials had been bribed and/or intimidated to ignore organized crime. How would you distinguish that from fear of being accused of racism and/or Islamophobia?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @JBeshir:

            I’m sure if it happens more times people will shift their priorities to force Something Very Visible To Be Done on the matter

            Objection: Assumes facts not in evidence, consists of speculation with no supporting evidence.

            In fact, if it happens even one more time, given that every freaking policeman in the UK knows about this, I’d call that pretty strong evidence that the trend will not be easily reversed, let alone that it has begun to do so.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Nancy: Once the situation breaks, you can start looking for evidence of bribery and coercion; it’s usually not hard to find when A: you know specifically where to look and B: the balance of power has changed in a big way and everybody has to rearrange their “who am I most afraid of today?” list. Bribery, in particular, is very difficult to hide from someone who is specifically looking for it in a first-world economy.

            At Rotherham, nobody found evidence of bribery, nobody found evidence of intimidation by violent criminals against policemen or social workers, but there were prior complaints of bureaucratic intimidation against policemen and social workers by institutionally-embedded SJWs, and evidence of a cultural understanding that the way to keep your job was to never accuse an “Asian” of any wrongdoing if you could possibly avoid it.

          • JBeshir says:

            Bribery, intimidation, social connections could definitely be a part of it- there’s been some pretty suspicious actions, one of which was some files on local authority failings being stolen from an office in 2002, which was frankly shocking. That in part prompted the central government’s external inquiries, which in turn, led to the local authority being deemed as unfit for purpose and taken over by central government. I would not disagree with a statement that Western Civilisation failed in Rotherham in particular.

            That said, the external investigations do conclude that the concerns about political correctness were correct- there was an institutionalised idea that sharing reports of a socially normalised crime wave in particular social circles, using the ethnicity of the participants as a pointer to those social circles, was in some way bigoted. And the campaigns to fix that were a good thing. There might have been other things going on too, given that they went as far as engaging in an outright cover-up, and there were a lot of credible reports over time that seem to have been worded about as politically correctly as you could get that they ignored, but it does seem like those concerns were valid.

            I think an important part to consider is that there’s two sides to the equation on whether to meaningfully react to a report. One is the incentive not to do anything, and the other is the incentive to do something. We need a lot less of a failure on the former side, if we also have a failure on the latter side, and it does look pretty strongly like there’s a lot of failure on the latter side, in most of the cases that are coming to light.

            In particular, there seems to have been a pattern where the reputation-destroying nature of allegations of this sort makes some people unwilling to repeat them unless they’re very certain of their truth, because they don’t themselves care enough about child sexual abuse to risk being wrong.

            In the Savile cases, reports happened, were not individually enough, and never got circulated around leading people to recognise the pattern, because the act of circulating one would have been very damaging and no one wanted to do that until they were sure it was true. (Savile apparently being very good at using people and knowing exactly what they could get away with when would presumably also have been necessary, given the sheer numbers involved)

            I think it’s pretty plausible that the same way of thinking that afflicted the Catholic Church some time ago afflicted Rotherham’s administration and police, more than any kind of outright corruption- a lack of considering the allegations to be actually important, leading to a lack of interest in follow-up and allowing other concerns to be more important than proper handling of the matter, leading to unchecked abuse.

            I’d compare it to care homes- the problem isn’t so much that people care too much about the things that create incentives for care homes to be awful, it’s that they’re failing to care very much about them *not* being awful. Or treatment of the mentally ill. Humans who can’t/don’t complain effectively get their well-being treated as unimportant, and easily overridden by any other concern. No bribery or insanity required, any small reason will do if no one is paying attention.

            @Marc Whipple

            I base this on the extent to which it’s resulted in mainstream reporting of the existence of subcultures with socially normalised crime, resulted in protests, and gotten government responses describing the problem as “institutionalised political correctness” and committing to get rid of it. It also seems pretty likely to have caused an increase in the number of people voting UKIP- they came second in Rotherham, displacing the Conservatives.

            It happening once got a reaction. It happening again will get another reaction, and I usually expect reactions to problems which repeat to get bigger and result in demands to know how they can trust that they will be handled.

            I don’t particularly expect it to happen again, for the reason you pointed out- every damned police officer knows about it. But I’m sure if it does, it will result in political consequences, most of which I probably won’t like very much. That said, on net I’m glad the behaviour is there, to protect from ideological failures.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Remove the IS militant. Legalizing the murder of foreign nationals while on holiday essentially legalizes “Hostel.”

      Politically, I believe nations are required to police their citizens and prevent irregulars from their nations joining wars in different nations. It is illegal as an American citizen of Irish descent to join the IRA and kill British citizens, for quite good reason.

      If there’s an exception to be made in this circumstance, Dutch legislators should pass a law to amend their current law, in all likelihood.

    • gbdub says:

      If the victim was in fact an IS militant, “murder” seems perhaps a stretch since Syria is pretty clearly a warzone.

      But wouldn’t this definitely be treason? Or at a bare minimum grounds for surrender of citizenship? He apparently left the Netherlands to join the military forces of another power, which is sanctioned in just about every country.

      • John Schilling says:

        Eagle Squadron: Historic American traitors, or just common murderers? Discuss. Also the American Volunteer Group, aka Flying Tigers. I don’t think this is as clear-cut as you would like.

        • Pku says:

          I think this applies here.

          • Loquat says:

            Would you care to elaborate? The article on the Eagle Squadron describes Americans deciding on their own initiative to leave the country and join foreign military forces without any apparent US government involvement, and that seems to be pretty much what this Dutchman has done.

        • The Lincoln brigade in the Spanish Civil War would be a closer analogy, perhaps? The Flying Tigers were a government operation, although the fact was not public at the time. The reason the Japanese launched an undeclared attack on the U.S. before the U.S. launched an undeclared attack on the Japanese (in China) was that it took the Flying Tigers longer to get into action than expected.

        • Gbdub says:

          From the U.S. State Department website:

          Military service by U.S. nationals may cause problems in the conduct of our foreign relations since such service may involve U.S. nationals in hostilities against countries with which we are at peace. For this reason, U.S. nationals facing the possibility of foreign military service should do what is legally possible to avoid such service.

          Federal statutes long in force prohibit certain aspects of foreign military service originating within the United States. The current laws are set forth in Section 958-960 of Title 18 of the United States Code. In Wiborg v. U.S. , 163 U.S. 632 (1896), the Supreme Court endorsed a lower court ruling that it was not a crime under U.S. law for an individual to go abroad for the purpose of enlisting in a foreign army; however, when someone has been recruited or hired in the United States, a violation may have occurred. The prosecution of persons who have violated 18 U.S.C. 958-960 is the responsibility of the Department of Justice.

          Although a person’s enlistment in the armed forces of a foreign country may not constitute a violation of U.S. law, it could subject him or her to the provisions of Section 349(a)(3) of the INA [8 U.S.C. 1481(a)(3)] which provides for loss of U.S. nationality if a U.S national voluntarily and with the intention of relinquishing U.S. nationality enters or serves in the armed forces of a foreign state engaged in hostilities against the United States or serves in the armed forces of any foreign country as a commissioned or non-commissioned officer.

          Military service in foreign countries, however, usually does not cause loss of nationality since an intention to relinquish nationality normally is lacking. In adjudicating loss of nationality cases, the Department has established an administrative presumption that a person serving in the armed forces of a foreign state not engaged in hostilities against the United States does not have the intention to relinquish nationality. On the other hand, voluntary service in the armed forces of a state engaged in hostilities against the United States could be viewed as indicative of an intention to relinquish U.S. nationality.

          So it’s fairly clear: leave to fight for a notional ally and you get a wink-wink nudge-nudge. Leave to fight in a war the U.S. really doesn’t want to be involved in, and you probably lose your citizenship. Fight for an enemy, or in a war that’s really, really inconvenient for the U.S. to appear involved in, and you’re a possible traitor.

          Now this particular law is obviously US specific, but I believe a similar prerogative of sovereignty over citizens is pretty common.

          So perhaps I overstated the case a bit. But either way, it seems clear that if you go to fight a for a foreign power, you risk the wrath of your home government. I still maintain that, if this Dutch fellow did commit a crime, “treason” is a more appropriate label than “murder”.

      • Sastan says:

        No, Treason is aiding or joining an enemy nation or group. If he were a Turk, it would probably be treason. But as the Peshmerga are pretty western-friendly, and fighting a very western-unfriendly group, I don’t think that holds.

        If he had joined the armed forces of another nation, it might be grounds for revoking his citizenship, as he might have sworn allegiance to another polity. Not sure how that plays out in practice with a non-state actor, and I doubt he swore to uphold the Kurdish state to the exclusion of all other loyalties.

        By laws of war, non-state guerrilla fighters are basically non-humans (and that would go for the dutchman while he was in country). You can torture, execute, whatever with guerrillas (most countries avoid this behavior by convention, not by law). It’s impossible, internationally legally speaking, to murder an ISIS member.

        Morally speaking rather than legally, I’d say anyone who has the opportunity to kill an ISIS member and doesn’t is culpable.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          ISIS claims to be a nation-state. If its members wear uniforms, I think they would have at least a reasonable argument that they are entitled to the protection of the international law of war.

          Of course, if they tried that, they’d also be subject to its sanction, so they might not be any better off, net. (Under the law of war their offenses are many and grievous.) But I’m not sure it’s unarguably true that you can’t murder one of them under international law.

          I am pretty much all in on your last assertion, though.

          • Sastan says:

            You could argue! I think the lack of any recognition, even by fellow islamic nations, would probably cut against their classification as a state, but it is a fair point.

            As to the original case of the dutchman, any chance they can find him guilty and sentence him to ten million euros, a medal of honor and free lap dances for life?

          • ivvenalis says:

            “Of course, if they tried that, they’d also be subject to its sanction, so they might not be any better off, net.”

            What sanction?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @ivvenalis:

            All of them – basically, all the punishments which the law of war allows against individual soldiers and forces which violate it. Up to and including reprisal, if you’re feeling old-school.

          • ivvenalis says:

            “all the punishments which the law of war allows against individual soldiers and forces which violate it”

            What, some doddering Eurocrat in the Hague might get around to sentencing you to a few years in some cushy Scandinavian lockup sometime before the heat death of the universe? And that’s if you lose.

            Re:reprisals. Current laws prohibit reprisals against any of the following: battlefield casualties, shipwreck survivors (i.e. people who’ve gotten lost or are stranded by the destruction of transport), prisoners, civilians, places of worship, historical monuments, and medical facilities. I’m curious what your “old-school” reprisals will involve. Sure, using POWs as mortal hostages to the enemy’s good behavior might have worked in the past, but that’s someone else’s problem.

            Basically, there’s no reason for ISIS to follow the laws of war because nothing will happen to them for not following them.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @ivvenalis:

            Okay, so in a practical sense. But in theory.

        • ivvenalis says:

          ” You can torture, execute, whatever with guerrillas”

          The Third Geneva Convention requires unlawful combatants to be tried under the domestic law of the detaining power. Many countries have laws prohibiting the torture and/or execution of anyone, which includes captured guerrillas.

          What’s really going on is the ongoing replacement of reciprocity by human rights as a basis for international law (the DoD Laws of War manual has a section on reciprocity which makes for entertaining reading). This leaves nations which actually have to fight irregular forces constantly holding the bag on what to do with what would previously be considered hostes humani genera but the Netherlands aren’t one of those nations so they don’t care.

        • Gbdub says:

          But it’s up to the Netherlands to decide who constitutes an “enemy”. If they decide that a Dutch citizen fighting for the Kurds is sufficiently opposed to their national interest, it would seem reasonable for them to label him a traitor.

          In the U.S. you can be executed for selling secrets to a foreign country even if it’s an ally. This is specifically “espionage”, but that’s effectively a subset of “treason” when committed by a citizen of the harmed country.

    • Pku says:

      Flying to another country and killing someone is reasonable grounds for being prosecuted for murder. There may be extenuating circumstances, which should be brought up by his lawyer (I have no idea how Dutch or any other laws treat this kind of case), but if you killed someone, it seems like there should be a trial.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        The crime did not take place in their territory. The victim was not a citizen of their country. The country in which he committed the act did not consider it criminal, and is not an ally of the Netherlands anyway. Other than pure Mama-Said-So, what justification do they have for prosecuting him?

        • Pku says:

          If he’d stoned a woman to death for adultery in a hypothetical Iraq where that’s legal, I’d think he should obviously be prosecuted for murder by the Netherlands if Iraq wouldn’t prosecute. The objections you raise apply equally to both cases. Would you defend them in the second?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            No.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Pku:
            I’m not sure that follows from a legal theory perspective?

            We wouldn’t say that someone traveling to New Orleans and drinking from an open container should be prosecuted for violating open container laws in their home city or state. So, while one might consider this a moral imperative, the legal case might be a good bit trickier.

          • Pku says:

            @HeelBearCub
            I’m not sure about the legal theory, and it seems like a valid point for him to bring to his defence. I assume the open container law’s written in a way that applies only to the home state, but you could write the murder law as “killing someone, somewhere, is illegal”. (In theory, at least – I have no idea how Dutch laws are written).

            The question of whether or not he’s convicted (where legal theory objections should come up) aside, it should at least come to trial – open container laws are trivial enough to not be worth the trouble of discussion, but murder isn’t.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Pku:

            If I get to be the person who decides which offenses are trivial enough to warrant extraterritorial jurisdiction and which ones aren’t, I withdraw my objection.

            If not, I redouble it.

            Also, I misunderstood, I think, who the “they” was when you asked me about defending. My general answer to “do you think that stoned-an-adulteress guy should be prosecuted even if you don’t think shot-a-terrorist guy should” is no. Neither should be prosecuted, because their offenses are not within the reasonable scope of authority of the home country. But if either is, both should be.

            A good middle ground example is gambling. Gambling is totally illegal in some countries, and in some US states. However, I don’t know anybody who thinks that Utah should be able to prosecute one of its citizens who goes to Florida or the Philippines and bets on jai alai. The only distinguishing argument I see is “murder is different.” Well, fine, it is. And if you can make it stick, then it sticks. But I see no logical distinction from the point of view of a sovereign’s reasonable authority to control the actions of people outside its jurisdiction.

          • Pku says:

            That’s a reasonable position to take, but I’m still ok with making extraterritorial jurisdiction apply to murder. It’s basically the case of the mob boss telling Sam Vimes “This murder is mob business, keep out of it”, and Vimes refusing to let a murder in his city go uninvestigated, which I admired. (There’s a difference in that said murder happened more-or-less within Vimes’ geographical jurisdiction, but it both victim and perpetrator in the case were members of communities who preferred to handle it on their own).

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @Pku: The “but” in your last sentence I read as, “the analogy immediately fails, since it did happen in territory in which Vimes had authority and it happened to a citizen over which Vimes had authority, but I like it anyway and Sam Vimes is cool, so I’m going to pretend that’s not true.”

            I will grant you unconditionally that Sam Vimes is cool. The rest, not so much.

          • Pku says:

            He interpreted it as his jurisdiction, but the people who lived there (including the victim and his community) didn’t. So it’s something of a halfway point between the murder in Iraq case (neither side thinks it’s Dutch jurisdiction) and the murder in Amsterdam case, where both do. I think you’re right in that this means it’s much closer to the second case, but that does have the implication that if someone’s murdered in territory that claims allegiance to a government that wants nothing to do with it, the government doesn’t have jurisdiction there. (Which I actually also agree with). But that carries the implication that enforcing laws is an obligation to the people you rule rather than a right you demand from them.
            This is the way the law is generally viewed, and what I said demands going further, and questioning your own morality even without obligation, by law. This is a very strong requirement, but it is one we sometimes demand (we’d probably court-martial a drone pilot who needlessly killed civilians).

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            A more commonly accepted example is sex tourism. Traveling to a country with a lower age of consent to have sex with someone who would be considered a minor in your own country is prosecuted as a crime in some places.

          • Murphy says:

            As far as I can see it gets applied slapdash on more of a “feeling of ew” basis.

            If you were a dutch citizen and set up a bank in india should you be subject to dutch/EU usury laws?

            If you were a dutch citizen and set up a food stand in america should you be subject to dutch/EU food safety laws? What about if someone dies due to your negligence?

            If you’re european or british and visit america and go (legally-locally) hunting deer should you be subject to european anti-hunting laws when you return?

            How about (legally-locally) hunting endangered animals in africa?

            Re: Murder there’s been a decades long running drama in Ireland over abortions in the UK since until a particular court case it used to be considered that irish women traveling abroad for abortions could be prosecuted for traveling to kill an irish citizen[the foetus].

            As far as I can see there’s zero consistency on this and it almost 100% relies on people saying “fuck the law and consistency, we really really hate this so much that we’re going to prosecute anyone from anywhere that we can get our hands on”

          • JBeshir says:

            There’s also anti-corruption laws which bar domestic companies from engaging in corrupt practices in other countries, which are specifically intended for use against extraterritorial actions.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          @Pku: That is how you see it, and that is a perfectly reasonable and rational way to see it.

          The way I see it, it’s a naked power grab by the home country, exercising control over an action which affected them not at all, and an insult to the sovereignty of the second country. This may be neither reasonable nor rational by any particular measure, but it’s how I see it.

        • BBA says:

          This is connected to extradition. France will not extradite its own citizens to other countries. Instead the French penal code applies to all crimes committed by French citizens worldwide if they are also crimes in the jurisdiction where committed. In these cases a domestic prosecution will take place instead of an extradition – provided the local prosecutors are willing, and there isn’t another procedural loophole. (This is how Roman Polanski has avoided prison time – which is how I came to read up on this stuff.)

          I can’t find a reliable translation of the Dutch penal code, but it’s based on French law (thanks Napoleon!) and Article 5 provides some kind of extraterritorial application, so I think the same principles are in play here. Under normal circumstances there’s nothing deeply objectionable about these provisions, but this case isn’t normal circumstances.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            What he did apparently wasn’t a crime where he did it, so again his prosecution is pure and simple overreach, even under this new information.

          • The version of this issue that I’ve seen mentioned in the past is the effort by U.S. authorities to act against U.S. citizens who engage in sex tourism in other countries. That strikes me as legally dubious, at least if the acts are legal where they occur–it’s possible that they are illegal but the law isn’t enforced. But I gather that people have been successfully prosecuted for it.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @David Friedman:

            You may be thinking of things like the PROTECT Act, which makes it a Federal crime for US citizens to commit illicit sexual conduct outside the US. (ICS is defined as commercial sex with or sexual abuse of someone under 18 or any sex at all with someone under 16.) It does not limit the offense to activity which was illegal in the country where the act took place.

            To the extent that such laws make it a crime for a citizen to travel somewhere to do something which is legal where it is done, I consider them overreaching, even for a cause as noble as preventing the sexual exploitation of children.

          • BBA says:

            This man was in Syria and fighting alongside Kurdish forces – i.e., without the backing of the Syrian government. Under those circumstances, it’s possible killing an ISIS militant would be murder under Syrian law, just not one that the authorities there would be willing or able to prosecute.

        • brad says:

          This isn’t universal jurisdiction because the perpetrator was a national of the prosecuting country. I think if he had renounced his citizenship first he wouldn’t be indicted.

          It seems to me you have to take the bad with the good.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      So, some people in this comment chain think the guy should not be prosecuted or even left off the hook. Fair. From a moral point of view I certainly agree, whether or not this should be the law I’m less certain about. What I’m interested in is the obvious other side of this argument: do the people arguing he should be let off also think the Dutch state should let off any seventeen year old idiot going off to Syria to kill infidels and blow up innocents? It’s the same law that covers such a thing.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Yes.

        With the caveat that if what he did was illegal there – which, one assumes, blowing up innocents is – then that is not the same fact pattern.

        • JBeshir says:

          If it is legal in Syria to kill Daesh members as a vigilante, which I’m dubious of, it is at least definitely not legal to sign up with Kurdish militias to do so, any more than it’d be legal to sign up with Daesh.

          The Syrian government led by Assad is not really any more fond of the Kurdish efforts to carve out a chunk of the country than they are of Daesh’s efforts.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        “To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.” – William F. Buckley

        I feel that this is a similar situation.

        • Sastan says:

          Pretty much. The inability of the left to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence is pretty old.

          FWIW, an Iraqi attacking US troops in Iraq, legitimate (though he’s still gonna get shot, that’s irregular warfare). It’s not terrorism to attack military troops in uniform, in theater, no matter the means.

          An Iraqi blowing up a marketplace just to cause chaos that the american troops must respond to and to make US foreign policy look bad is not legitimate.

        • Nicholas says:

          I think the citizens of Iran (1953), Nicaragua (1981), Guatemala (1954), Haiti (1959), and Brazil (1964) were all quite clear on which direction the CIA was pushing them, with relation to the bus.

  42. Deiseach says:

    Drug trial news. No comment either way on this, just that “natural” is not the same as “safe”.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      “natural” is not the same as “safe”.

      No disagreement with this. But all that I have seen suggests the drug was synthesized, so I’m not sure that it is really a good counter-example.

      “Designed to affect the natural system” describes most drugs, in some way or another.

  43. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    In an earlier comment, I argued that the Mormons’ ban on R-rated movies wasn’t all that impressive, and that if they really wanted to defend against modernity, they should ban movies made after 1990. That year was picked out of a hat, but it got me thinking about what date would make actually make a good cutoff point if you were trying to protect people from being socialized into modern values without banning video entertainment entirely. I’m thinking 1970 or so. The Hays code was abandoned in favor of the MPAA film rating system in 1968, and the rural purge of television took place between 1969 and 1972, so a blanket ban on movies and shows made after that time seems like the way to go. Such a ban would of course leave adherents socially isolated from non-followers due to a lack of a shared pop-culture, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

    • Anonymous says:

      Why not ban all TV?

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        A respectable option, of course, but like I said, this is an attempt to protect against the worst excesses of television without having to go that far. Think of it in terms of maximizing the ratio of enjoyment to degeneracy.

        • Zykrom says:

          If you don’t want TV for social/fitting in reasons and you’re already exercising enough control to limit the time period I think banning it is a no brainier. What’s the point?

      • Jaskologist says:

        Seconded. Television is a much bigger threat than movies.

        The first episode of Sophia the First is about how Sophia, newly elevated from peasant girl to princess through no merit of her own, is dissatisfied with her lot in life because only the boys race horses. So, she smashes gender boundaries and wins the big race, just like in real life where girls always beat boys at sports.

        And Rick & Morty is just freebasing murderous nihilism.

        • Pku says:

          Really fun freebasing murderous nihilism though.

        • Anon says:

          To be fair, equestrian sports are an almost unique example of sports in which men and women often compete on an equal field, and where women regularly win.

          (Not in horseracing in particular, but there’s pretty good reason to believe this is an actual example of bias: among other things, high-rated female jockeys are very commonly the children of trainers, who can get them started when the opportunity might otherwise have been denied to them.)

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            I think the fact that the female horses win is more impressive than the fact that female riders win.

            BTW – when Hillary was competing against Obama she had expressed her response for a female racehorse who broke her leg and was euthanized before a major race, in perhaps the worst omen ever.

          • Nathan says:

            I don’t think racing stallions is even the done thing, is it? AFAIK it’s only geldings and mares, which sort of erases the natural male advantage somewhat.

            Note that I don’t actually know anything about racing. I’m basing this purely on never having heard of a stallion winning a race and never having heard of two racehorses stopping to mate mid race.

          • keranih says:

            @ Nathan –

            Your info is inaccurate. Here.

            It is not unusual for male racehorses to be gelded, but it is not typical. It is not unheard of for female horses to outrace males, but not usual at all. (Ruffian was highly atypical.) Additionally, while intact males may have higher muscle mass due to testosterone, early puberty closes the growth plates so that a gelded male may be taller (and have longer legs) than his ungelded brother.

            (A quote which I have been unable to source was concerning Kelso, of what the owner/trainer said to the vet: “I paid you fifty bucks to take ’em off; I’ll pay you a million to put ’em back!”)

          • Equinimity says:

            @Nathan

            The small scale racehorse owners I knew 20+ years ago, when I was involved with horses, saw a stallion as something like a lottery ticket to potential millions in stud fees at the end of his racing career. The larger scale owners made more measured decisions about which ones to keep intact for possible breeding, and which ones to geld to focus on racing.

            Not quite mid-race, but a trotter stallion I knew was barred from one track after he tried to ‘celebrate his win’ with the gelding who’d run second, right in front of the stands as they were heading back to the stalls. Delayed the next race by 10 minutes as the harnesses got so tangled they had to cut them to pieces to separate the horses. Generally though, the people who directly handle the horses know what they’re likely to do, and keep them out of situations where they might get a chance to do it.

        • Jeremy says:

          Rick and Morty is satire. Not of nihilism, but of the narcissism inherent in narrative.

    • blacktrance says:

      Half-serious, half-trolling: why not just watch anime instead? (The serious part is that much of what annoys me about western pop culture really is absent in anime.)

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        Reminds me of a silly meme I once saw at TRS.

      • Anon says:

        Just watching anime would probably mean just watching anime that has had a 4kids dubbed version.

      • Nornagest says:

        What annoys you about Western pop culture that anime doesn’t have?

        I mean, there are things I could cite there for myself (although anime has its own obnoxious tropes, and I watch much less of it than I used to), but I have a feeling this is one of those questions where if you ask three fans you’ll get five answers.

    • onyomi says:

      Anything after the Brady Bunch started wearing bell bottoms.

    • Maware says:

      If they wanted to defend against it, they’d make, invest in, and promote their own movies that meet their standards. One of the things that made me despair about Christians is that they’d rather Christianize Harry Potter or the Avengers than create good things that reflect their own values. It’s either Bible movies or nothing.

      • John Schilling says:

        Wait, Christians are the ones who butcher _Harry Potter_ to make it fit their own ideology and make sure it teaches the proper lessons? I thought it was some other bunch that did that…

      • Nornagest says:

        They’ve done a pretty good job of creating their own music and literature — there’s a whole genre of Christian rock (which I find insufferably heavy-handed, but I am not a Christian), and a much larger volume of music that isn’t Christian in a genre sense but is informed by Christian values. (I find some of the latter quite good.)

        So I don’t think we’re looking at a lack of desire here. Might be something spookier, but lack of ability seems adequate to me; making a movie or TV show to contemporary production values takes a lot of money, a lot of people with specialized skills, and a lot of centralized infrastructure, all of which are a lot easier to find in Hollywood than in your average evangelical congregation.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          That would I suppose also explain why there’s more Christian literature (both fiction and non-fiction) than film or TV. It takes much less infrastructure and resources to write a novel than it does to make a blockbuster movie.

  44. Henry says:

    Does anyone know some good French speaking rationalist blogs?

  45. Remember KIC 8462852, the star that showed those significant dips in brightness that people thought might be due to alien megastructures (or more boringly, fragmented comets)? Well, apparently it’s been progressively dimming for the past century. Which is, uh, weird. As far as I know this rules out the comet hypothesis, as well as pretty much anything else obvious. So if this paper holds up we’re left with “unknown astrophysical phenomenon” or “aliens”, with priors tilting pretty heavily towards the former. Either way, something really interesting is going on. Any astrophysicists or astronomers here care to weigh in?

    One thing that confuses me is that apparently other astronomers already looked at the same data and didn’t notice anything amiss. Schaefer, this paper’s author, quotes them as saying “the star did not do anything spectacular over the past 100 years.” But as far as I can tell the only relevant difference between their work and Schaefer’s is that he grouped the data into five year bins and they didn’t. And sure, binning is great and all, and it makes trends easier to spot. But it can’t magically manufacture statistical significance out of thin air. If the binned data has a significant trend then the unbinned data should as well. So I don’t get why the first paper didn’t also find a dimming trend (unless they were just eyeballing the data and didn’t even *bother* to do a linear fit, but why would they do that?). Disclaimer: I didn’t read the earlier paper yet, only Schaefer’s (and I’m not an astronomer or astrophysicist anyway), so take my analysis with a grain of salt.

    Then there’s the fact that the most “natural” alien-based explanation for dimming would probably be a Dyson Swarm of some kind, but I would have thought a Dyson Swarm would produce a significant infrared excess (and the whole reason we’re interested in this star in the first place is that it showed those weird dips even though it didn’t have an infrared excess).

  46. tPowell says:

    My girlfriend was first author on a recently published paper on PTSD. Basically, individuals with high levels of self-compassion showed less severe PTSD symptoms in response to trauma. http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/16/0886260515622296.abstract

    Does anyone know how an author promotes her paper? Does she typically send out press releases or something like that? Is promoting your own paper bad form? My girlfriend has never been first author before, so we’re trying to make sure she doesn’t miss any common steps. She has set up profiles on Google Scholar and PubMed. Anyone here have experience with this before?

    • keranih says:

      Is there a reason she hasn’t consulted with her senior author on this question?

      • tPowell says:

        The senior author forwarded the paper to a few people, but she recently retired and hasn’t been able to devote much time

    • The system used to be to send out preprints to people you thought would be interested. I’m not sure how the existence of the web has changed that, but I observe that some people (myself included) simply web their articles, provided the journal will let them.

  47. meyerkev248 says:

    Question for people on the West Coast:

    I’m trying to decide whether or not to move to Seattle from Silicon Valley (and presently work for a company with middling to major offices in both, and could in fact keep my team and my boss and my coworkers).

    Beyond vague “This will hurt your career” mutterings I keep getting from my boss, I see no downside and the ability to afford my own apartment and thus not have to deal with a recently alcoholic and violent roommate is a fairly major upside.

    What odds do you assume for:

    * The City and immediate surrounds of San Francisco will continue to have 20% YOY rent increases more or less indefinitely as they have had since 2001.
    * The city and immediate surrounds of Seattle will continue to have sane housing policy.
    * The net effect of the oncoming recession will be to massively raise rents instead of lower them.
    * Vague hints of “The only advantage to staying in SF is that management focus is centered here” are actually deep hints for something more and I should just suck it up.

    Or just generally:

    * Leaving SF isn’t a matter of if you’ll have to leave, it’s a matter of when you’re forced to leave via rents, and so you should get out of Dodge as early as possible before you’ve put down serious roots.

    /Also, does anyone have any hints on places to look for housing? I’m mostly looking at the U District and Fremont in my searches so far as they seem to combine reasonable bike rides to work in SLU with middling transit and road access and middling rents.
    //And at least for the next year or so until I turn 25 and rental car prices drop by half… yes, I like my car, yes I want to keep my car, yes, parking situation matters. Hence why Fremont and U District.

    • voidfraction says:

      >* Vague hints of “The only advantage to staying in SF is that management focus is centered here” are actually deep hints for something more and I should just suck it up.

      This could be a way of saying ‘we’re considering closing the Seattle Office but it hasn’t yet been announced’.

      • meyerkev248 says:

        I would highly doubt that given that they’re the only remaining employer in South Lake Union.

        That would just be a huge surprise.

        But ok yes, point taken.

    • Nornagest says:

      Things that can’t go on, don’t. The Bay housing bubble has been remarkably resilient so far, but I’d be astonished if it lasted another five years.

      • meyerkev248 says:

        “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” is the operating term here. My personal bet is 2 years. I just can’t make rent anymore (or, er, can, but don’t like the life sacrifices I’d need to do so, namely continuing to hang out with my newly alcoholic roommate with anger problems).

        /Also… I looked up historical rents. Even if we had a full-on dot-com-bubble crash, I don’t think it would go back down to where it was in 2013. SF is a ratchet. It only ever goes one way.

    • Evan Þ says:

      “The city and immediate surrounds of Seattle will continue to have sane housing policy.”

      As a resident of the Seattle area, I wouldn’t count on this. There’re significant anti-development forces in Seattle, who’ve recently gutted the so-called “grand bargain” which would’ve raised height limits across the city; now, it only applies in a very small land area.

      Of course, this’s still far more sane than San Francisco, and I’m fairly confident that‘ll continue for the next five-ten years at least.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Vague hints of “The only advantage to staying in SF is that management focus is centered here” are actually deep hints for something more and I should just suck it up.

      What is the connotation of this? The word “only” implies that it is not a big deal. But that you think that this is a deep hint is a sign that speaker thinks that it is a big deal. Is this your boss who said it would hurt your career?

      There is another advantage to SF, which is changing jobs, but it’s no surprise that your boss didn’t list that.

      I think it is true that pretty much the only advantage to SF is management focus, but I don’t think you comprehend how important that is. Management focus is in SF not just for your company, but for many companies. It is much more difficult to move into management and especially to move up if you leave. And that’s what career advancement consists of. I know a guy who just moved to Seattle who thinks that he’s stalled out his career, a sacrifice he’s willing to make for the other parts of his life. But he’s already a manager, so he can afford real estate, so he’s not afraid of rent increases.

      Since you are young and probably not ready to be a manager, I don’t think it would hurt your career much to pupate in Seattle before emerging as a mature manager back in SF. But that isn’t compatible with putting down roots.

  48. HeelBearCub says:

    I need some help calibrating my perceptions.

    I want to state up front that I have no interest in debating AGW in this sub-thread. I really just want to understand whether my perception of the main point of a blog post is correct. It becomes relevant because the author of the post has stated that I am incorrect. That should be fairly strong evidence that I am incorrect, but I am skeptical.

    In a recent sub-thread, David Friedman posted a link to this article.

    He contends that the main point of the post is about a general trend he has noticed, that of “people slanting their work to be on the side of the angels”.

    I contend that the main point of the post is to make clear that he perceives that this fallacy is one that is affecting people who believe AGW is a problem. He isn’t trying to expound on the fallacy in general, but make clear that it applies to AGW.

    What are other people’s perceptions? Is this just a general post about Black and White thinking?

    • Marc Whipple says:

      IMO, any time you find yourself thinking like a postmodern literary critic, you should immediately start questioning yourself very vigorously.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I have no idea what you mean here.
        Edit: Clearly, I have some idea what you mean, but I don’t think this is what I am doing.

        I am talking about plain intent here.

        • Marc Whipple says:

          Me too. If a writer says their intent was X, and you say it was Y, you are saying they are deluded or a liar, or you are thinking like a postmodern literary critic.

          However, having gone to read the post in question, I would say this is one of those rare instances where, while saying he’s deluded may be a bit strong, given the brevity of the article and its structure, you have a point. “Here is an anecdote: here is how the fallacy it documents applies to a very specific and totally unrelated thing” is usually a setup not for analyzing the fallacy, but the unrelated thing and how the fallacy affects the way people think about it.

          Maybe to him it seems clear he’s analyzing the fallacy, but I couldn’t say you were obviously wrong for disagreeing in this specific instance.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Marc Whipple:
            I hope I never implied Friedman was either deluded or a liar. I only mean to say that I believe him to be incorrect. Insofar as one can say being incorrect is to be deluded one apply the term, but I’m not sure that is really common usage.

            If an author says clearly in the text “my intent is to write about X” I tend to agree with you, although there are always examples like “A Modest Proposal”. You always do need to actually read the text. You can’t take the headline as necessarily indicative of actual intent.

            In this case, I don’t think he actually clearly states an intent, though. We merely have a statement four years after the fact that it was his intent. I think it’s generally expected that, given appropriate motivation, we will invent all sorts of rationalized justifications or reasonings after the fact for why we did something.

            Clearly, the author of a text’s statement is strong evidence. But the actual text is strong evidence as well. I don’t think we need to take a post-modern approach to assert this.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            If you say you didn’t mean to imply it, I take you at your word. You seem like a reasonable and rational person even though we disagree on many things.

            But the way you phrased certain responses to his comments in the other thread looked to me like you were implying it. One of us (or maybe both!) are victims of typical-mind fallacy, or something. 🙂

            This sort of misunderstanding is pretty common in the law, btw. The other day I was in court and I saw a pro se litigant, without explicitly saying so and, to be charitable, perhaps not even meaning to or realizing he was doing it, tell the judge that he thought the judge was either incompetent or corrupt. Needless to say, he did not improve his standing with the Court.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Marc Whipple:
            Ah, well if you read the exchange on the last thread, I understand where you are coming from. I certainly admit to being annoyed then. I was very much trying not to inject the tone from the last thread into this one, which was more what my current comment was directed at.

            Even so, I hope it’s clear that what I was objecting to then is the assertion that the post in question “is not a post about Global Warming”.

    • Anatoly says:

      I read the post and decided that Friedman genuinely wanted to write about a fallacy he thinks he’s identified, and the AGW example is brought in as strong evidence that the fallacy is real, rather than as the real objective of the post. I didn’t know at the time that Friedman himself also pronounced you wrong (because I skimmed your comment and skipped that). Thus I would say that you were not reading charitably enough towards Friedman.

      Interestingly, I disagree with Friedman on the actual example he brings to introduce the fallacy (the one about alcohol consumption). I think it’s much more likely that doctors refrain from advising their patients to consume alcohol moderately because they know that this will inevitably lead to some amount of abuse of which they would consider themselves partially culpable, because of their advice (in fact, even from a strictly consequentialist position it’s not at all clear that such an advice would lead to a good outcome on weighted average).

      I read an old article about medical fasting, written in the 1960s when they studied supervised fasting as a weight loss method, and the authors commented that their patients found it much, much easier to fast than to adhere to a strict diet. One of the comments said something witty to the effect that this just shows another aspect of the well-known truth, that abstinence is easier than temperance.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Anatoly:
        Actually, before I had even gotten to the AGW point in the post, your critique had occurred to me. The doctor-alcohol example is not a very good example of a black and white thinking. It’s actually another of the reasons I didn’t think the post was about black and white thinking.

        If he had really wanted to write about black-and-white thinking, that point would have been a fairly obvious one to make.

        • Anatoly says:

          I see your point, but it still looks way more likely to me that Friedman was focusing on the fallacy he wanted to illustrate rather than on AGW. Moreover, even if I was less sure about this than I am, I would still advocate treating the post this way on the grounds of charitable reading.

          Incidentally, you keep saying “black-and-white thinking”, but Friedman doesn’t use that name and I don’t think it fits well w/ what he’s talking about.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “Incidentally, you keep saying “black-and-white thinking”, but Friedman doesn’t use that name and I don’t think it fits well w/ what he’s talking about.”

            “If something is bad, we must always speak of it as bad, and never admit to any good” seems like a fairly clear offshoot of the central fallacy, but I agree it could be reasonable to differ on that point.

            “I see your point, but it still looks way more likely to me that Friedman was focusing on the fallacy he wanted to illustrate rather than on AGW.”

            Good to know that this is your perspective. Thank You.

            “and the AGW example is brought in as strong evidence that the fallacy is real”

            Perhaps then he is “preaching to the choir” so to speak? It doesn’t seem like particularly strong evidence, much in the way the doctor-alcohol example doesn’t seem like strong evidence.

          • Anatoly says:

            >”If something is bad, we must always speak of it as bad, and never admit to any good”

            That’s not how I read it either. “Something that on the surface looks bad is actually good, but I’m afraid of saying that publicly because then many other people committed to good, who adopted a shallow heuristic for whatever reason, will conclude that I’m a bad guy”.

            >Perhaps then he is “preaching to the choir” so to speak? It doesn’t seem like particularly strong evidence,

            Possibly. The way I see it, the fallacy is real and incredibly common. I guess I don’t even know why call it a fallacy, it’s more like self-serving behavior to protect oneself from widespread heuristics and biases. That truth suffers is sad but unsurprising. Call it “cowardice” if you disapprove and “reticence” if you sympathize. Isn’t it everywhere? If I want to talk about something the Nazis did really well, I have to preface with a really strong disclaimer, or people will think I’m a neo-Nazi. And even if I do, if this is something media can report on, a journalist will quote me on Nazis doing something well and omit the disclaimer, so the end result is the same. Is it fair that people will think I’m a neo-Nazi? Couldn’t they look closer and notice that I’m making a fairly narrow factual claim that’s either true or false regardless of ideology? Couldn’t they Google my other writings and see that I’m a committed enemy of Nazism? Is it right? Is it fair? Yes, no, I don’t know! That’s how the game works.

            Can you talk about ethics in game journalism? Isn’t is true, literally, that all lives matter? Our host wrote an excellent post on the granddaddy of them all, “I’m not racist, but”. This stuff is EVERYWHERE.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “Something that on the surface looks bad is actually good, but I’m afraid of saying that publicly because then many other people committed to good, who adopted a shallow heuristic for whatever reason, will conclude that I’m a bad guy”.

            I don’t think this matches what Friedman said at all. I think your Nazi example actually is a good example of exactly what he meant, but it’s not what you are saying. The Nazi’s were absolutely evil, but that does not that literally every single thing they supported or accomplished was evil. But one does not talk about whatever good thing they managed accomplish because of black-and-white thinking.

            This is quite different than people who think the Nazis were actually good on net, but are just afraid to say so.

          • Anatoly says:

            We’re not getting through to each other, and it didn’t help that I didn’t phrase myself clearly enough, sorry. I’ll try one last time to explain what I meant. “Something that on the surface looks bad is actually good” doesn’t refer to the whole thing (Nazism to most of us, AGW skepticism to AGW activists), but to some aspect or example of it (this one thing Nazis did well, this one particular case where AGW estimates really were off) which on the surface looks bad because of shallow heuristics people adopt (everything Nazis did was bad, any claim AGW is off is stupid and evil climate denialism) and many people whose opinion you care about/are concerned about (most of civilized society/AGW activists and most of the blue tribe) will stereotype you as belonging to the “bad” camp (neo-Nazis, climate denialists) which you don’t want to happen so you just don’t open your big fucking mouth, what the hell is wrong with you for even thinking about saying it, don’t you remember what happened last time you did it.

            >But one does not talk about whatever good thing they managed accomplish because of black-and-white thinking.

            Suppose I’m not talking about whatever good Nazis did. If *I* was doing black-and-white thinking, I be like “Nazis are either really evil or really good, there’s nothing in-between, I think they’re really evil, so I refuse to recognize they could do something good”. But that’s not what I think in examples above. I do see something in-between black and white (that Nazis could do something good), I just refuse to talk about it publicly. So I’m not doing black-and-white thinking.

            If *other people* were doing black-and-white thinking, they be like “Nazis are either really evil or really good, there’s nothing in-between, we think they’re really evil, so we refuse to recognize they could do something good. This “anatoly” fool says they did, so he’s evil too”. But that’s not what’s happening either. I’m afraid of talking about whatever good Nazis did, but it’s not because I think others are incapable of recognizing this in principle. If I could sit down with someone whose judgement I’m concerned about, and explain to them slowly and calmly face-to-face what I mean and why I think Nazis were doing something good, I’m pretty sure they would have agreed. So *they*’re not doing black-and-white thinking either.

            So who’s doing black-and-white thinking? No one is doing black-and-white thinking. What’s happening is shallow categorization (or more precisely fear thereof). I’m concerned that other people will pass a *quick and shallow stereotypical judgement* on my Nazis-did-something-good argument and will categorize me as a neo-Nazi. This is *not* a problem of people denying that Nazis could do something good, it’s a problem of people not recognizing this is even at stake here, and instead going all “why are we listening to this neo-Nazi over there?”. It’s a problem of shallow heuristics and shallow judgements. That’s as clear as I can make it, I guess.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        I think it’s much more likely that doctors refrain from advising their patients to consume alcohol moderately because they know that this will inevitably lead to some amount of abuse

        But we’re not just judging based on their actions. Friedman observed some kind of panel discussion, which is exactly where I’d expect them to talk about their reasons, but they failed to do so. On the other hand, they didn’t, apparently, produce other reasons. But the fact that they failed to give reasons is, itself, mysterious.

        In fact, I have seen other contexts in which doctors do purport to answer why they don’t advise patients to drink and their answer is usually that the evidence isn’t strong enough. This is not compatible with your answer. It really sounds to me like confabulation.

        One possibility that occurs to me is that doctors aren’t articulate enough to explain their reasoning.

    • A problem not a trend–I don’t think I said it was getting worse. And it’s really about slanting the presentation, in both my examples, not the work itself.

      And I commend you for the attempt to see whether other people think you are or are not misperceiving the piece.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @David Friedman:
        I meant trend as in tendency, not trend as in change from previous norm.

        I realize that’s not how you tend to use the word trend. 😉

    • Nathan says:

      Reading the post with no other information, I would accept it as simply two examples of a general trend, with the general trend being the feature of interest and not the specific examples.

      Knowing that it was written by David Friedman, and knowing he often likes to point out logical fallacies committed in the name of climate change activism, I might be marginally more inclined to interpret as an attempt to incline his readers to be more sceptical of AGW claims in addition to that. But more likely the causation runs the other way. He heard the doctors, wanted a second example of what he was talking about, and came up with a fallacy committed in the name of AGW since that’s a subject he thinks about a lot anyway.

      Having read a lot of Friedman’s other writing and seeing him take pains to assess things reasonably, I feel more inclined to take the more charitable interpretation (though I wouldn’t honestly even find the “less” charitable explaination objectionable).

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        @ Nathan

        I’ve been admiring Friedman’s posts here and elsewhere for decades. There’s often an appearance (at various levels) that I pattern match with motivated reasoning, or at least motivated presentation (at various levels). There’s also a lot of (deadpan) playfulness; thus many of the cases could be counted as motivated by playfulness.

        In the ssc era, I think many of his comments are unfair re AGW and/or re Blue Tribe, and sadly unplayful.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @Nathan:
        Do you think that my interpretation of the article beforehand was unreasonable? Would you say that the article is not about global warming at all?

        I actually don’t find the claim that AGW researchers (and others who take AGW as a threat) engage in the behavior as unreasonable. Far from it. Although, if you look up to Anatoly’s post, you will see that I think that both the doctor example and the AGW example are actually weak examples of any actual fallacy.

        • Nathan says:

          I would say that the article isn’t about global warming at all, but I don’t think your reading was unreasonable.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      Thank you. That was very interesting.

    • Interesting.

      I believe the much earlier death of his daughter (from flu) was also a major influence. Look at the relation between father and daughter in the Just So Stories:

      “For far–oh, very far behind,
      So far she cannot call to him,
      Comes Tegumai alone to find
      The daughter that was all to him.”

  49. The original Mr. X says:

    Michael Huemer on “Why I am not an objectivist”:

    http://www.owl232.net/rand.htm

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      Overall, it’s not a bad essay. One of the few examples of honest and informed criticism of Objectivism out there, in my opinion.

      However, his arguments against the Objectivist conception of egoism are pretty bad. Richard Lawrence has an excellent (and fair) rebuttal here, and you can actually follow their continuing discussion in the old Usenet logs. At least until, as Lawrence tells it, Huemer “killfiled” his posts.

      This essay by Huemer is actually a better criticism of Rand’s ethical theory. I don’t fully agree with it, either, but he does a good job of attacking some of the bigger weaknesses in Rand’s argument.

      I would definitely like to expand longer at some point, but my general responses to each of Huemer’s main sections of “Why I Am Not an Objectivist”:

      1. Meaning – Distinction between meaning & reference motivated.

      Huemer is absolutely right here. Rand failed to distinguish between sense and reference, and this caused her to reject the analytic-synthetic distinction. But this is not a very important issue philosophically.

      2. Analytic & synthetic – The validity of this distinction.

      Again, Huemer is right here. There is nothing wrong with this distinction. However, the reason it is not a very important issue is precisely because, as he says:

      Finally, note that (contrary to Peikoff’s presentation), the analytic/synthetic distinction is not equivalent to the necessary/contingent, a priori/empirical, or certain/uncertain distinctions in the minds of contemporary philosophers. I do not say that analytic = necessary = known a priori = known with certainty; and I do not say that synthetic = contingent = empirical = uncertain. In contemporary philosophy, it has been generally recognized that those are four different distinctions, even though they were sometimes confounded in the past (especially by Hume).

      3. A priori knowledge – why we have it.

      Huemer is totally wrong here. We do not have a priori knowledge of any sort. To respond to his argument here is the central part of criticizing Huemer because his epistemology serves as the foundation of his ethics.

      He believes that logic, mathematics, and ethics are all a priori. And since no one is a skeptic about logic and mathematics, he can say: well, the only way we know logical or mathematical truths is because we intuit the axioms by a process of “pure reason”. And if we have such a faculty, there is no reason we can’t apply it to ethical truths—and in fact, this is how we know ethical truths.

      Rand’s answer, which I think is correct, is that logical, mathematical, and ethical truths are known by a process of abstraction from sense experience—which is vaguely similar to how Aristotle conceived of “intuition” but not at all the same as how Huemer conceives of intuition.

      I will especially stress that Huemer’s invocation of “Hume’s law” as proof that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. If an “ought” is supposed to be something totally separate from an “is”, this would no doubt be true. But this is not Rand’s argument. Rand says that an “ought” is a type of descriptive fact, just like any other descriptive fact. To say something “ought” to be is, in Rand’s conception, a shorthand way of summing up a large number of facts about what “is”. Huemer believes that there is some special realm of intrinsic ethical truths which we peer into by “intuition”. Rand says that we define the concept of “ethical truth” as a way of picking out certain features of the descriptive world.

      The “Hume’s law” argument works just as well to invalidate architecture as well as ethics. It is true enough that your conclusion can’t have something in it that was not contained in the premises. So if your premises contain only “physical” truths, the conclusion can’t contain any “architectural” truths. Therefore, architecture is known by a priori intuition. Does anyone find such an argument convincing?

      The obvious answer to it is that architectural truths are just a certain subtype of physical truths. We simply defined “architecture” as: the field of physical truths which talk about buildings. And the same is true, in Rand’s view, of ethical truths—though they involve both physical and mental truths.

      One key point is that Rand is, in Huemer’s typology he constructs in Ethical Intuitionism an ethical “nihilist”. That is, she’s a nihilist about the kind of moral truths he thinks exists (non-agent-relative categorical imperatives) and a realist about the kind of truths she thinks exist (which are reducible to descriptive facts). And Huemer is an arch-example of what Rand called an “intrinsicist”: someone who believes that there are truths which we “just know” in a manner other than abstraction from sense experience.

      4. Universals

      This one is also extremely complicated, but it is less important. I will only say that Huemer sets up a false trichotomy where you can only be an intrinsicist type of immanent realist like himself, a Platonist, or a nominalist. Rand is none of those things. In Rand’s view, universals are not “in” particulars, but neither are they “subjective” and arbitrary. They are objective in the sense she elaborates at length and which forms the basis for the philosophy being called “Objectivism”.

      Ontologically, universals exist in the human mind, and in that sense they are “real”. But the mind is not a passive “mirror” onto which reality is “reflected”: universals in the mind do not mirror universals “out there” in reality. Nevertheless, the fact that the human mind perceives reality in a certain way—by the apprehension of universals—does not mean the mind does not perceive reality at all. Universals are a valid way of summarizing a large number of facts about particulars.

      5. More on ethics:

      This is addressed by Lawrence’s essay and by what I said above under point three.

      Free will – why the Objectivist theory doesn’t work (problems w/ the primary choice)

      Contrary to the title heading, Huemer doesn’t really find a problem here. He says Objectivism doesn’t endorse agent causation, but it clearly does:

      [Agent causation] may be a good way of resolving the problem, but I have doubts about whether it is an Objectivist way of resolving the problem. If the law of causality says only that every event has a cause, and the cause may be an entity, then it says nothing more than that every event is the action of some entity. In that case, it does not rule out the possibility that an entity might have two or more courses of action available to it at some time – which is why this view allows the possibility of free will. But at the same time, this formulation of the law of causality also allows the possibility of chance events, such as are contemplated in most interpretations of quantum mechanics. The radioactive atom is capable of decaying, or not decaying. Whichever it does will be the action of the atom, so the law of causality is not violated (whatever happens has a cause: viz., the atom itself is the cause). So I think that it is essential to the law of causality that not only is every action caused by an entity, but the causal factors present (the entity’s characteristics, plus its circumstances) are sufficient to determine which action it performs – something like that is what is required to rule out random events.

      Regardless of what Huemer thinks is “essential” to the law of causality, deterministic event-causation is not the type of causality that Objectivism believes in. Agent causality is the theory of causation operative in Objectivism, which it takes to be a corollary of the law of identity.

      The most he can show is that Leonard Peikoff is misguided in rejecting the possibility that an electron could have—at the same moment—the capacity both to “zig” left or “zag” right, with the movement being caused directly by the electron and not by any previous event. But Peikoff’s speculations on physics are hardly central to Objectivism.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        For some reason, I can’t edit this post. I apologize for the few typos that remain.

      • blacktrance says:

        I hadn’t read the Richard Lawrence response. It has some great parts:

        When the outcome is one that would normally be considered immoral and even horrifying — in one of Huemer’s examples, killing a homeless man, in another the deaths of four million people – then people are often reluctant to take such a stance. However, it is not clear that such reluctance is justified. The scenarios typically set up to lead to such conclusions are far from commonplace situations, and thus there is often no reason to think that any ethical evaluations made in such a hypothetical situation have implications for real-world situations. For his more detailed example, Huemer finds it necessary to equip himself with a disintegrator gun, as well as making several dubious stipulations about social conditions and human psychology.

        Why should any ethical analysis for such a way-out situation, however repulsive the conclusion may seem, affect our acceptance of one ethical theory versus another? Imagine that Huemer got Objectivists to agree that if rat poison were safe and nutritious for human beings, it would be acceptable to sell it as food. It would be very misleading for him to turn around and say, “Objectivists think it is sometimes OK to sell rat poison as food! They’re evil!” To develop a hypothetical filled with assumptions that are not true in the real world, and which probably never will be true in the real world, and then denounce a moral theory for the conclusions it draws from it, is no less inappropriate than the rat poison example.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Yes, that particular passage is very good. And there are other good parts, such as where he explains the obvious stupidity of the G.E. Moore argument against egoism (the “fundamental contradiction of egoism” argument which you attack below).

          Even the Usenet discussion following this is pretty good. The most revealing line is when Huemer says, as an off-hand remark (paraphrasing here): “Surely you agree that it’s better in a non-agent-relative sense that humans evolved than if they didn’t?”

          And Lawrence says (quite appropriately): “No, I do not grant that. That is the crux of the whole issue. It’s surely better for humans that humans evolved, but for dodo birds it was no doubt worse.” Again, I’m paraphrasing from memory.

      • blacktrance says:

        Ontologically, universals exist in the human mind, and in that sense they are “real”. But the mind is not a passive “mirror” onto which reality is “reflected”: universals in the mind do not mirror universals “out there” in reality. Nevertheless, the fact that the human mind perceives reality in a certain way—by the apprehension of universals—does not mean the mind does not perceive reality at all. Universals are a valid way of summarizing a large number of facts about particulars.

        The obvious objection is to ask what causes certain summaries of facts to be correct or incorrect. For example, what causes the correctness of the category that includes stop signs, the flags of China and the USSR, and blood, and excludes railroad crossing signs, the old flag of Libya, and water, if not the presence of the shared property of redness? “Red things” is a category because there is something in reality that causes them to resemble each other in that particular aspect. What are these resemblances, if not universals?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          The human mind perceives these things as having the property of “redness” in common, but that doesn’t mean that redness is an intrinsic property of “things in themselves”. In fact, it surely isn’t: many people perceive the flags of China, the USSR, and the color of the sky in bad weather as having the same property in common: greyness.

          Rand is not a nominalist, but she doesn’t take the intrinsicist position on universals that Huemer (and Aristotle) takes either.

          Huemer criticizes her theory:

          At first it seems as if she is answering question #2, so it seems as if she is a nominalist. Rand starts out by saying that two individual humans do not literally have in common any single attribute; it is not that all people are called “human” because they possess this one quality, ‘humanness’. She goes on to explain why it is that we can classify all these different individuals as members of this same category, ‘human’ (this is where it seems as if an answer to #2 is coming): in essence, she explains that when we group a number of particulars (she calls them “concretes”) together, we do so because these objects each possess a value along a certain dimension (a ‘measurement’ is a thing’s place on a certain dimension – as for example “5 feet, 10 inches” is my approximate place on the dimension of length; you can also think of it as the value of a variable). They all possess different values on this dimension (e.g., every person has a different height), but in forming a concept, we abstract away from that, i.e. we mentally isolate only the common characteristic, without paying attention to the specific measurements.

          I have no objection to this as a realist theory of how concepts are formed. I do object to it as a non-realist theory or as an answer to question #2 above. If a group of concretes are isolated according to a set of dimensions along which they all vary (each taking different values on these dimensions), the next question to ask is, what about the dimension, itself? Example: if one of the common characteristics is ‘length’, which all of these objects have different amounts of, what about length itself (i.e. the dimension of length): Is this not a universal? It appears it certainly is, for it is predicable of concrete objects, and multiple distinct particulars all share it. An anti-realist answer to the problem of universals, therefore, has not yet been produced: the explanation of how we classify multiple concretes under the same concept must advert to universals, if not in the first stage (i.e., a universal ‘humanness’) then in the second stage (i.e., a set of universals, the common dimensions along which humans vary).

          Huemer constantly has the intrinsicist theory of immanent universals in mind here and wonders how Rand can claim to reject it and not be a nominalist. So he dwells on how Rand can believe that individual objects have individual lengths without believing that they all share the intrinsic universal of extendedness.

          But in Rand’s theory, universals are a construct of the human mind, a form in which it perceives reality. So not only redness but even extendedness is a form in which the human mind is aware of reality, and another type of mind could potentially be aware of reality in a different form.

          Multiple objects really do have redness or extendedness in common in the mind. That is where universals “are”. And it is possible for universals in the mind to be caused by and summarize facts in reality that are completely particular and individual.

          How does this “cash out” in real terms? Well, consider the definitions of concepts. Under the intrinsicist theory, there is one correct definition of any concept, which must be learned by “intuition”. But for Rand, definitions are contextual. For instance, one example she gives is the definition of “human being”. In one context, “rational animal” may be appropriate. On the other hand, she says that for a young child, the (implicit) definition might be: “moving thing that talks”.

          Or of course, there is the infamous problem of borderline cases. The intrinsicist theory of universals cannot deal with this. There just isn’t a point at which a shade stops being “intrinsically red” and starts being “intrinsically orange”. In Rand’s theory, it becomes gradually better to classify a shade as falling under the universal of red, but there is a large area of optionality between thinking of it as having redness or orangeness. And indeed, we may construct an intermediate concept of red-orangeness and think of objects as falling under that universal.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            So if categories just exist in the mind, is there any way that someone could be mistaken about what category something is in? If I were to decide that, say, capitalists don’t count as human, is there any principled ground on which Ayn Rand could say I was wrong?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ The original Mr. X:

            The fact that something exists in your mind doesn’t show that you can’t be wrong about it. For instance, take color. You can be shown one shade of red and then another in quick succession, and you can say: “These are the same shade.” But when you go back and look at them again, you can say: “I was wrong: these shades are in fact slightly different.”

            Or if you don’t like color / don’t think it exists in the mind, take dreams. You can think you dreamed one thing last night, but then realize that you were wrong and actually dreamed it two nights ago.

            As I talked about extensively a few threads ago, ontologically subjective is not the same as epistemically subjective.

            But actually, this is beside the main point. The error in saying capitalists are not human does not consist in holding that they lack an intrinsic property (“humanity”) which other people have. The error lies in dividing up reality in a way that doesn’t suit the needs of human cognition.

            In order to explain this, a useful piece of Objectivist jargon here is the “crow epistemology”. Rand relates (I don’t know if this is accurate, but the point holds in any case) that scientists observed the behavior of crows reacting to humans entering a cabin in the woods. Crows are scared of humans, so when the humans came into the cabin, the crows would fly a good distance away. And when the humans went away, the crows no longer perceived a threat and flew back near the cabin.

            Of course, crows have no numerical concepts. So the interesting finding was: when one human entered the cabin, the crows waited until he left and flew back (as expected). With two and three humans, it was just the same: the crows didn’t fly back until they all left. But with four or more (or maybe it was a slightly larger number), the crows could no longer perceptually keep track of the entire number of humans: they flew back when only three had left.

            Up to a certain number of “units” of humans, the crows could keep track perceptually. But after that, all they could tell was that “many” humans were in the cabin. And human beings are not so different: if you are shown a random number of objects, you can only “just see” how many there are up to around ten or so. After that, you have to start counting.

            And this is Rand’s hypothesis of the origin of conceptual thought: “unit economy”. One can only hold a certain small number of “concretes” in mind at a time. It’s simply impossible to hold separately in your mind every individual human being in order to apply a conclusion to each of them. But if you create a concept to cover all of them, you can reduce all of humanity to one unit.

            Now, Rand doesn’t use your example about capitalists. But Leonard Peikoff, in one of his lectures, does use the example of “Negroes” (the lecture was delivered in the early 70s). Say you were a child who had never before seen a “Negro”. You would nevertheless quickly learn that it is invalid to have the concept “people” on the one hand and “Negroes” on the other (as concepts on the same hierarchical “level”). Why? Not because there is some intrinsic essence of humanity which “Negroes” have as well as “Caucasians”. Nobody has any intrinsic essence of humanity.

            Rather, it’s because the similarities between “people” and “Negroes” are so large that if you kept them separate in your mind, you would be constantly forgetting to apply conclusions about the one to the other. For instance, if you found that “people” need Vitamin D, unless you grouped the two under the same concept it would take a separate act of inference to show that “Negroes” need Vitamin D as well. And this would be a tremendous waste of mental effort. In every case where you could just have one mental unit, you’d now have two—and if you did this with every racial-ethnic group, you’d have an unmanageable number.

            After a certain point, it would just become obvious that, for reasons of unit economy, “Negroes” ought to be considered as a type of “person” or “human being”, and not as a separate order of thing. Any necessary distinctions between “Caucasians” and “Negroes” can be handled as a subdivision of the concept “human” into various sub-concepts. And indeed you may find (as modern science has in fact shown) that there are really precious few things that all “Negroes” have in common, other than the superficial color of their skin, and you may construct a totally different scheme of categorization.

            He gives another example: what if a UFO landed on Earth and a race of rational beings who looked exactly like giant spiders crawled out? Would they be “human”? This is obviously an unanswerable question if the goal is to decide whether they have the alleged intrinsic essence of humanity. (By the way, John Locke gave essentially the same example with a rational parrot.)

            The giant spiders are rational animals, and in that sense they have many qualities that are the same as humans. But many facets of their biology and psychology may be different, and they certainly won’t be sexually compatible, so in many respects they are not the same as humans.

            Ultimately, it is a matter of optionality how we classify them. We could call them humans, and make a new subdivision between ape-like humans and spider-like humans. We could create a new concept for “rational animal” and define “human” as something more specific, in contrast to “giant spider”, the other kind of rational animal. Or if we only rarely dealt with the giant spiders, we could have no specific concept at all and merely refer to them by a circumlocution such as “rational beings who look like giant spiders”, in exactly the same way that we have no concept for “strawberry blondes born on a Tuesday”.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            But actually, this is beside the main point. The error in saying capitalists are not human does not consist in holding that they lack an intrinsic property (“humanity”) which other people have. The error lies in dividing up reality in a way that doesn’t suit the needs of human cognition.

            If I’m a communist trying to whip myself up into a revolutionary frenzy, convincing myself that capitalists aren’t really human might suit the needs of my cognition very well.

            Rather, it’s because the similarities between “people” and “Negroes” are so large that if you kept them separate in your mind, you would be constantly forgetting to apply conclusions about the one to the other.

            These “similarities” would themselves be examples of universals.

            And indeed you may find (as modern science has in fact shown) that there are really precious few things that all “Negroes” have in common, other than the superficial color of their skin, and you may construct a totally different scheme of categorization.

            If you’re going to avoid realism, nothing can have anything in common, as anything that was had in common would be an example of a universal.

    • blacktrance says:

      Flawed in many areas. Specifically objectionable is his “case of the hurried Objectivist” (5.3.2), to which the Objectivist would certainly not say that it’s permissible to disintegrate the homeless guy, nor make an implausible argument that the homeless guy might be an employee or customer in the future, but that killing him would be a failure to act justly, justice is a virtue, and being virtuous is in one’s self-interest. In short, Huemer takes an excessively narrow view of one’s interests.

      In 5.3.6 he says “the egoist has to say that everyone’s happiness is good, and that each person ought to aim at that person’s own happiness. But if other people’s happiness is also good, then the egoist must be hard put to explain why he does not aim at it in the same way he aims at his own.”, but this mistakes what the egoist means when they say that one’s own happiness is the good – it’s an indexical good, i.e. my happiness is good for me, and your happiness is good for you, without any claims about whether either of our happinesses is good for the other. Summarizing that as “one’s own happiness is good” is merely recognizing that each of us is the subject of such a relation. Or, following his second formulation, I hold that I am an end in myself to myself (but not to others), and that others are ends in themselves to themselves (but not to me). Thus there’s no contradiction – “A is correct to believe P, but B is correct to believe not-P” isn’t what’s going on, because properly stated P is “A’s happiness is good for A, and B’s happiness is good for B”, and both A and B would be correct in believing it.

      His defense of ethical intuitionism in 5.4.2 doesn’t prove as much as he thinks it does. “If intuitionism is true, we can resolve disagreements about ethics in the same way (mutatis mutandis) that we can presently resolve disagreements about Objectivism if Objectivism is true: namely, try to find other principles, not in dispute, from which the desired moral conclusion can be derived.” That’s true, but the assumption of moral intuitionism is that these shared principles to which we’re appealing are specifically first-order moral principles. The problem of intuitionist disagreement isn’t any particular disagreement (people can be stubborn and so on) but a disagreement that’s irresolvable even in theory. If moral disagreements can only be resolved by appeals to shared moral intuitions, two people who start out with sufficiently different moral principles but share most non-moral principles would irresolvably disagree, which is a problem for intuitionism. Fortunately, their disagreement isn’t really irresolvable, because the truth of moral claims can be determined without appealing to anything within the content of morality, i.e. from the structure of morality, to which the truths of metaethics are relevant – and metaethics isn’t ethics, and by appealing to it we are outside the province of moral intuitions.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        Flawed in many areas. Specifically objectionable is his “case of the hurried Objectivist” (5.3.2), to which the Objectivist would certainly not say that it’s permissible to disintegrate the homeless guy, nor make an implausible argument that the homeless guy might be an employee or customer in the future, but that killing him would be a failure to act justly, justice is a virtue, and being virtuous is in one’s self-interest. In short, Huemer takes an excessively narrow view of one’s interests.

        The basic error here is that Huemer wants to say (and explicitly does say): imagine a world which is just like our own, except that it is in your interest to disintegrate a random homeless man who happens to be in your way.

        But if, in the real world, it is not in your interest to disintegrate homeless people, we’ve got to be allowed to change some facts in the hypothetical world, in order to make that the case. If you want us to hold all the facts the same but come to a different conclusion, what you are asking us to imagine is a logical impossibility.

        So Huemer does seem to allow us to be able to change some facts. But he doesn’t seem to recognize that, if we changed enough facts about the world and human psychology to make it in your interest to disintegrate the homeless—i.e. to make justice not in your interest—the world we would have would be some kind of Mad Max hellscape. And it’s not at all surprising that, if you wanted to live in a world of war of all against all, the actions required to support that choice would be quite different from the way they are in the real world.

        His “general argument” against egoism illustrates this:

        1. If ethical egoism is true, then if you could obtain a (net) benefit equal to a dime by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it.
        2. It is not the case that, if you could obtain a (net) benefit equal to a dime by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it.
        3. Therefore, egoism is not true.

        What I find highly implausible is the suggestion that I could obtain a net benefit by torturing and killing 500 people. What I do not find implausible is that if I did live in such a world where that was my interest (and found life in it somehow to be worth living), then I should do it.

        So yes, many Objectivists have wrongly made some nonsensical claims about the invalidity of hypotheticals in ethics, as a general principle. There is nothing wrong with hypotheticals, as such. But if the situations they want us to imagine are too outlandish, they simply say nothing useful about what we should do in actual reality.

  50. CatCube says:

    I was reading CNN.com this morning, and they had a story about a Swedish doctor who kidnapped a woman, drugged her, raped her, and held her in a concrete cell he built for the purpose.

    “The doctor told police the reason he built the sound-proofed bunker was because ‘he wanted to have a girlfriend,’ Stockholm chief prosecutor Peter Claeson told CNN.” http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/18/europe/sweden-doctor-drug-kidnap-rape/index.html

    All I could think of after reading that was Tommy Lee Jones’ line from No Country for Old Men: “You can’t make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.”

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Isn’t this, essentially, a staple story line from many a police thriller?

      “I love you so much I am going to kidnap you.”

      Edit: The ex-boyfriend in Gone Girl comes to mind.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        In one of the creepier game-manual vignettes* from Vampire: The Masquerade, we meet a regnant (the vampire who provides the blood for a blood-bond) who is being held captive by their thrall (the person who drank the blood.)

        Normally, a blood-bond produces a “supernatural link of fidelity and dependency” between the thrall (who is fidelitous, etc) and the regnant. Drinking a vampire’s blood often enough to form a blood-bond is usually just a way to become their more-or-less adoring slave.

        However, in this case, the thrall goes all the way over to “I love you so much I must have you all to myself for always**,” stakes the regnant*** and keeps them chained up in their basement, feeding them blood and drinking theirs in turn.

        I always thought that was a fun**** take on what is, as you say, a staple story line. I read another one once about a fictionalized version of Bettie Page which I won’t go into here.

        *Which is saying something.

        **Since regularly drinking vampire blood will keep a human alive more or less indefinitely, this is pretty literal.

        ***In the V:tM universe putting a wooden stake through a vampire’s heart completely paralyzes them but does no permanent harm.

        ****I am, mostly, pretty much, a good person. But I am not a nice person.

      • CatCube says:

        Oh, I’m not surprised that there’s not something somewhat like it in fiction. After all, Cormac McCarthy made up the original story (about a couple of murderers getting caught when one of their victims escaped wearing nothing but a dog collar) and Tommy Lee Jones’ character’s response quoted above; but I admit finding a news story with my morning coffee that’s right out of a Coen Brothers’ film wasn’t what I was expecting.

    • Deiseach says:

      Sounds a little like the John Fowles novel The Collector.

  51. Since it’s an open thread, I would like to raise a question I’m curious about—the relation between Christianity and libertarianism. Two of the most popular Christian apologists of the 20th century were G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Chesterton was explicitly a libertarian (he, of course, would have said “liberal”), if a somewhat odd one. Someone, I think here, was commenting on the generally libertarian tone of Lewis’ writing.

    There are lots of possible interpretations of Christianity, of course, some more compatible with libertarianism, some less. But I would be interested in comments, especially from the Christians here, on whether there is a pattern linking the two ideas.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      C. S. Lewis, “Present Concerns”:

      “I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true… I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse: mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”

    • keranih says:

      I think that one would need to divide Western Christianity(*) into Roman Catholicism and the various Protestant denominations in order to link with libertarianism. The inate ‘less rule is better’ thread of libertarianism isn’t a good fit with Mama Rome.

      (*) Not familiar enough with Eastern Orthodox, but Russian Orthodox is definitely state-linked.

    • Troy says:

      I am a Christian and I think that taking Christian teachings seriously pushes one towards libertarianism, if not anarchism. Jesus’ teachings largely focus on using nonviolent and noncoercive means to do good. Most early Christians took this to imply a complete ban on killing, including capital punishment, abortion, self-defense, and war. Pre-Constantine, many Christians saw the state as necessarily opposed to the Church. With this framework, it seems to me pretty difficult to justify state coercion, at least as something that Christians should have a part of.

      In the modern era, groups like the Mennonite and Amish have perhaps taken the above vision of the Christian life most seriously. Traditionally these groups rejected state politics as a means of action in the world. The Amish (as you may know, since as I recall you’ve written about them) still mostly don’t vote (I think about 10% do); but Mennonites have largely given up that position. Younger Mennonites today seem to me to largely buy into a lot of the rhetoric of the social justice left, and I don’t know many who are libertarians. But philosophically I think anything more than a minimal state is hard to square with what Mennonites rightly take to be at the core of Christian ethics. I think Mennonites and other pacifist Christians tend to reconcile this tension by simply ignoring the violence inherent in the state, except when it comes to war.

      Kevin Vallier discusses this issue a bit here: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/04/christian-pacifism-but-not-christian-libertarianism/

    • Nathan says:

      Was Chesterton a libertarian? I admit to not reading his work firsthand much, but on the other hand I am a distributist, and distributism regularly cites Chesterton along with Hillare Belloc as one of its founding intellectuals. And distributism is clearly not a compatible ideology with libertarianism.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      In haste. I don’t think GKC or CSL map very well onto current political issues. In the opening of one chapter in _Mere Christianity_ says that the ideal Christian society would be economically Leftist, with no silly products and no silly billboards advertising them (and every man would work with his hands). It would also be culturally … Rightist? … with wives obeying husbands. GKC’s plutocrats are villains, buffons, and usually murdered, as good riddance. His young Socialists are usually Rational and correct, and his sympathies with trade unions and the poor in general

    • onyomi says:

      I’m not a Christian nor an atheist nor an objectivist (I’m actually a mysticism-inclined agnostic), but I tend to agree with Yaron Brook, who was the first I recall hearing express this opinion (though it’s probably not original to him):

      Religious texts, like horoscopes, tend to be written in such a way that whoever you are, whatever your situation, and whatever you’re looking for, there is a way for you to find it. This is especially true the larger and more heterogeneous the sources from which you can draw–the Bible being a pretty big, heterogeneous source.

      It seems to me that if you want to find libertarianism in the teachings of Jesus you can find them there, but if you want to find socialism in the teachings of Jesus you can find them there too. And if we include the Old Testament you can probably find support for just about anything, including polygamy, slavery, etc.

      And I don’t even think this is entirely a case like the US Constitution, the actual intent of which is pretty clear, but which, by tortuous logic, is made to serve all kinds of expediencies. I think you can probably find good arguments for why Jesus was a socialist, good arguments for why Jesus was a libertarian, good arguments for why Jesus was a social democrat, etc. etc.

      If I had to give my own interpretation I’d say he was really pretty apolitical (“Render unto Caesar, etc.”), but that may reflect my own bias about what a religious leader should be.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Down with Soc and Psych! Wreck the Pope!

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        It seems to me that if you want to find libertarianism in the teachings of Jesus you can find them there, but if you want to find socialism in the teachings of Jesus you can find them there too. And if we include the Old Testament you can probably find support for just about anything, including polygamy, slavery, etc.

        I think this is absolutely true (and of course, well-trodden).

        At the same time, I think Ayn Rand was right that religion—or specifically the altruistic morality of religion and the message that you are sinful and depraved to the point that your only hope for salvation from damnation is unearned grace—does a lot to soften people up for government intervention.

        One natural and very forceful way to resist e.g. redistribution, is to say: it’s my money, I earned it, and I haven’t done anything wrong. So why should the government be able to take it and give it to some lazy asshole who didn’t work? Am I my brother’s keeper?

        But then the interventionists come in and appeal to religion. They say: indeed you are your brother’s keeper. And you’re a sinner, too, just the same as him in God’s eyes. When you say you earned your money, you’re speaking out of pride. If you were more successful than he, that’s because God gave more grace to you, but you have to use it to serve God’s purposes, not your own selfish ends.

        Now it’s true, the most thoroughly non-interventionist Christians can say: true enough, I have an obligation to be more charitable than I am, but forced charity isn’t charity at all, so the government can’t compel me.

        But anyone who is not either completely otherworldly (and so doesn’t care what happens to people in this life) or completely cynical will notice the huge discrepancy between the way people act and the way they are morally obliged to act. And they will say: if these greedy people won’t give to the poor of their own accord, why should the government protect their selfish “right” to hoard up their wealth? True enough, forced aid isn’t charity, but God gave the world to all men, and it isn’t “socially just” for some of them to keep the wealth to themselves instead of sharing it with the needy as they ought. (The term “social justice” was invented by the Catholic Church.) So since the necessary alms are being woefully undersupplied, we are going to make these greedy wretches pay their fair share.

        As a result, you do get Christians like the later Tolstoy who are very otherworldly and therefore anarchistic. Why care about improving the world if Judgment Day is upon us?

        Leaving them aside, however, you get the ones who are idealistic about making this world more perfect in the image of God. And they are in favor of government intervention and redistribution to compel the intractable people holdings things back.

        And you get the ones on the other side who are very cynical about improving this world and talk about how we should have a “restrained vision” and shouldn’t “immanetize the eschaton”. But that doesn’t inspire people, especially not the young, because it is not at all a motivating vision of how human beings can use their free will to make the world a better place. If the government tries to improve things with “good intentions”, it’ll just make everything worse. Indeed, everything’s getting worse already.

        I therefore don’t think it’s an accident that conservatives (especially British conservatives as opposed to those more in the tradition of America’s liberal founders) are very cynical and anti-progress. And neither is it an accident that the young, when they hear capitalism defended on these grounds, are not very much in favor of it. When the young hear that capitalism is a necessary evil, they don’t just accept it. They spend all their energy on how to make it unnecessary.

        When you have a moral ideal that says people ought to be completely selfless—and yet they do not at all act in a way that is completely selfless—anyone with a hint of moral idealism is going to want to try whatever he can to make people more selfless. Including government intervention to make them do their duty. Just look at the C.S. Lewis quote The original Mr. X posted: no halfway idealistic person with a spark of the drive to improve the world can accept, “I’m fallen, you’re fallen, everyone’s fallen, and things will never get any better.” This type of cynicism demoralizes people and softens them up for any kind of demagogue who will offer “hope and change”.

        Rand summed things up more pithily in an interview:

        Now you want me to speak about the cross. What is correct is that I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. Isn’t that what it does mean? Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.

        On the other hand, in her earlier years, Rand expressed a certain admiration for elements of Christianity. In particular, Christianity is a relatively individualistic religion (especially in its Protestant form). It’s not at all like Buddhism, where the goal is to destroy the self. Christianity says that everyone has his own, unique, immortal soul, and that the most important thing is to ensure that this soul is saved. Enlightened self-interest has a long history in Christianity in this respect: after all, the religion doesn’t (as a practical matter) say you should follow God’s commandments just for the sake of following them. It holds out the enormous carrot of eternal, personal bliss and the enormous stick of eternal, personal suffering.

        So if Christianity is right on the facts, it’s your most profound selfish interest to follow God’s commandments. Yet at the same time, a hugely influential strand within Christianity says that this is a completely immoral way of looking at things, and that your virtue only “counts” if you follow God’s will out of selfless love for God alone, and not with regard to your own advantage.

        Rand regarded these elements of Christianity as fundamentally contradictory:

        There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism — the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul, and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal; this means — one’s ego and the integrity of one’s ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one’s soul — (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one’s soul?) — Jesus (or perhaps His interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which told them that in order to save one’s soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one’s soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires or needs of others, which means the subordination of one’s soul to the souls of others.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        @onyomi:
        Jesus was the founder of an apocalyptic cult that believed the world would end within the lifetime of the first adherents. His teachings are consistent with this idea.

        I don’t think it makes sense to try and map his teachings onto any worldview that foresees an ongoing world. Trying to map his teachings onto political philosophies therefore seems unsupported.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Despite what I said above, I think this really is the most honest reading. (And I did make a few references to it, with regard to people like Tolstoy, who were consistent with it.)

          The whole thing was “perverted” by people like Augustine who wanted to make a Christianity a semi-practicable religion for living by. But how can you build a society, fight wars, or punish criminals on the basis of a religion that says you should “turn the other cheek”? Or which asks the man who is without sin to throw the first stone? To use modern-day examples, does anyone think Jesus would join the Marine Corps or drop atomic bombs on Japan?

          Very logically and practically (but very dubiously from a religious standpoint), they said, in effect: “Turning the other cheek is all well and good, but we’ll reserve that stuff mainly for the saints, the priests, and the members of religious orders. The rest of us actually have to live.” So the clergy kept their hands free of blood, but regular people were kept around to carry out the necessary executions and fight “just wars”. (The parallel to Eastern religion and the same dynamic with Buddhist monks vs. Buddhist laity is fascinating.)

          So you end up the odd position where you value “saintliness”, which is the ideal. Yet at the same time, you have to recognize that if everyone tried to be St. Francis of Assisi, civilization would collapse.

          And you come to some kind of cynical position where some people have to be the “Grand Inquisitors” who sin so that other people don’t have to. This is best seen in Renaissance authors like Machiavelli, who recognized that you couldn’t govern a state on the basis of Christian virtue, so resigned themselves to the conclusion that virtue had its place but so did vice. Especially in a king or a statesman, “common morality” doesn’t exactly apply.

          • Tibor says:

            I am not sure that Machiavelli was a Christian at all and he definitely did not subscribe to virtue ethics. If you read The Prince, you see that he basically puts value on the outcome only. He does recommend looking (not acting) virtuous for PR reasons. He does not seem to take any pleasure in that purely states it as a fact of life. This I gather from his rather thinly veiled criticism and visible distate of “el rey católico” Ferdinand II. of Aragon…Machiavelli does not mention the name (or rather he writes “a certain monarch of our time who’s name should not be mentioned”) but it is quite obvious who he is talking about. It was also probably his writings about religion that later earned him the reputation of a villain.

        • DavidS says:

          This. He expected the world to end and he never expected his followers to be in charge of anything other than what we might call ‘intentional communities’, and ones that would inevitably be hedged in by other laws and powers.

          So the question of what form of governmental coercion is legitimate for a Christian doesn’t really arise.

          Having said that, the nearest case I can think of with the Christians actually in charge seems to be more concerned about avoiding tax than most on even the more extreme left, in that the result is instant death. Though it’s unclear if simply refusing to pay would have brought this or it’s the deception involved. Still, reads like the sort of terrifying show-trial I would avoid if building a socialist paradise, nevermind a libertarian one/

          Acts 5 1-11 (New International Version)
          Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

          Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”

          When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

          About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”

          “Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”

          Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”

          At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

          • Jaskologist says:

            How is it unclear? He outright says, “Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”

            They were punished for the deception.

          • DavidS says:

            I read “And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal?” as either meaning

            “Wasn’t it yours to give or not give, why lie?”
            or
            “Wasn’t it yours to give to us: why pretend that you couldn’t”

            And the preceding line implies that both lying and withholding the money are Satan-caused crimes (numbered below)

            “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you (1) have lied to the Holy Spirit and (2) have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land”

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ DavidS:

            I agree. It’s not exactly clear.

            And the idea of “Satan” filling men’s hearts with evil is not exactly a robust picture of free will.

            To be honest, I’m not sure why free will has the cultural association with Christianity that it has. Free will is much more of a Greek idea. It’s heavily suggested in certain passages in Aristotle and explicit in thinkers like Alexander of Aphrodisias.

            Christianity, in contrast, has always had huge problems with free will. The vast majority of Christian denominations are deterministic. Of those, you have the one that outright reject free will (such as Protestant Lutherans and Calvinists), and the ones that redefine free will such as to be compatible with determinism (such as Catholic Augustinians and Thomists).

          • Anonymous says:

            The way I have been taught was that it was entirely fine to keep some, or even everything, of their earnings. It was not fine to do so after they had vowed to give it all away, in an attempt to have their cake and eat it too (obtain status via piety by ostensibly giving away all their possessions, but not actually give away everything). TL;DR: Don’t cheat God, it won’t work.

            @Vox

            AFAIK, those denominations are chiefly Protestant ones, and there’s just so many of them; they don’t form anything close to even a plurality of Christians.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            Protestants and Catholics don’t form a plurality of Christians?

            Sure, I think many Christian people believe in the metaphysically libertarian concept of free will. Because they haven’t thought about how the philosophy fits together with the theology.

            But as far as the actual doctrine of the sects they claim to follow goes, it is my understanding that the majority either don’t believe in free will at all, or else believe in a “free will” such as is compatible with determinism.

            For instance, take anyone who ever gives the C.S. Lewis argument (which he got from Augustine) that God knows what you will do in the future because he is “outside of time” and can see what you do before you do it. That is an argument which assumes determinism. It doesn’t deny “free will” because Augustine believed that free will is compatible with determinism.

            ***

            As for the Biblical passage in question, I think many people find it off-putting because that’s exactly what cults do: try to get people to agree to “share everything with the church” and then guilt them into following through when they try to back out.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            I’m a determinist, but I also find the idea that non-determinist free will is incompatible with prediction sort of weird.

            Edit: I think that there is certainly the possibility that things like quantum uncertainty make a physical determinist system still unpredictable.

            If something has no cause at all, it’s random. If some cause generates outcome A some of the time, and outcome B if not A, and there is no reason why outcome A was generated and not B, then we can say the outcome was randomized for A or B.

            Either your decisions are ruled by some logic or they are random. If someone knows your full logical state, they can know what you will do. If they know all states of everything in a closed system, then they can predict everything.

            I think you would say that this is still determinism, just not physical determinism. But to me that leads to free will just meaning that your decisions are essentially random, or that the full logical state of anyone is unknowable.

            Note: Yes, I understand that minds are impacted by the physical world, but the same rules apply to a physical-mental dual world. Either the system as a whole is state and rule driven, or has randomness.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ HeelBearCub:

            I meant to get to this one earlier, but I didn’t have time. I hope you take a look at it.

            I’m a determinist, but I also find the idea that non-determinist free will is incompatible with prediction sort of weird.

            It may be weird, but that’s what the theory says.

            Edit: I think that there is certainly the possibility that things like quantum uncertainty make a physical determinist system still unpredictable.

            I assume you are referring to the halting problem, negators, etc.?

            The halting problem concerns only calculation. If God exists and can directly perceive the future by means of some kind of sensation, the halting problem doesn’t apply.

            Also, if you could just extrapolate the movements of basic physical particles (assuming they are deterministic), you don’t run into any of those problems. Instead of investigating the formal logical structure of the machine, you just know what it is made out of.

            If something has no cause at all, it’s random. If some cause generates outcome A some of the time, and outcome B if not A, and there is no reason why outcome A was generated and not B, then we can say the outcome was randomized for A or B.

            No. There are two fundamentally different ways of describing the law of causality. Or rather, two fundamentally different theories of causality.

            One theory is the theory of event causation, which says that every event has a cause, in the form of a previous event. If there is no previous event causing it, the event would be uncaused.

            The other theory is agent causation, which says that every action (of an entity) has a cause: the entity (i.e. agent) in question. The agent is either moved by another agent, transmitting its motion to whatever it acts own—passive causation—or else the agent moves itself, starting a new chain of motion—active causation.

            The libertarian theory of free will says that humans have active powers of causation: that they are capable of moving themselves. This does not mean that their actions are not caused. They are the cause of their actions. Or rather, they are one part of the cause of their actions, which the other causes being passive in nature. For instance, the decision to murder depends on certain passive features in the agent: his genetics, his upbringing, his having of a murder weapon, etc., but also on the active decision to murder.

            Either your decisions are ruled by some logic or they are random. If someone knows your full logical state, they can know what you will do. If they know all states of everything in a closed system, then they can predict everything.

            I think you would say that this is still determinism, just not physical determinism. But to me that leads to free will just meaning that your decisions are essentially random, or that the full logical state of anyone is unknowable.

            Yes, logic is a deterministic system. It may sound paradoxical, but insofar as humans are called upon to act logically, they are an non-deterministic system which is called upon to conform itself to reality and act in accordance with deterministic logic.

            Note: Yes, I understand that minds are impacted by the physical world, but the same rules apply to a physical-mental dual world. Either the system as a whole is state and rule driven, or has randomness.

            You are right that it doesn’t matter whether the system is physically deterministic, spiritually deterministic, or logically deterministic. It’s deterministic all the same. Most varieties of Christianity believe in spiritual and/or logical determinism.

            But the question isn’t whether actions have causes or not. It’s whether the causation is passive or active. What determinism really says is that all causation is passive. God or nature or whatever sets the Rube Goldberg machine going, and everything takes off from there inexorably.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Vox:
            “It’s whether the causation is passive or active. ”

            This just seems like question begging to me.

            The active agent who causes things either a)obeys laws of logic, or b)does things randomly. Hiding this behind a layer of obfuscation seems to be mostly about being uncomfortable that any definition of “free will” is essentially self-referential.

            As to physically deterministic systems being unpredictable, God doesn’t come in to it. I don’t know how you have a God inside of a physically deterministic system. No, I’m talking about things like Dan Harrington’s system for randomizing his poker decisions. If he wants to check pocket aces 30% of the time, he glances at his watch at some point. If the seconds of the time on his watch end in, say, 4, 5 or 6, he checks.

            It’s possible that this is completely predictable from a million years out. But I also think it might be unpredictable due to things that are random within our system of physical laws.

    • Max Goedl says:

      I come from Austria where Church and State have always been closely linked (one of our Chancellors was a Catholic priest). Judging from conversations I had, I would guess the majority of Austrian Catholics hold socialist views on economic policy (pro regulation of markets, pro welfare state, against privatization/liberalization) perhaps even more socialist than the “average Austrian”. Many of them take strong anti-capitalist and environmentalist positions. The only Catholic libertarians I have met or read about came from the US or the UK. My hypothesis is that Catholics are more likely to hold libertarian views in countries where the government is more anti-Catholic, less so in countries with more pro-Catholic governments.

      • Tibor says:

        A catholic (from Austria or not) is also likely to be conservative. Not in the sense “right-winger” but in the sense not wanting much change. Austria is, on a relative scale, quite a anti-capitalist country, not in the communist sense but in the social democracy and welfare-state sense.

        I think that in a more capitalist country, catholics might be more pro-free market. Switzerland seems like an ideal place to test this, because you have both catholic and protestant and mixed cantons and some cantons are more and some less capitalist (as measured in taxation for example). Comparing this map of denominations in Switzerland and this tax table for various cantons it looks like being “pro-free market” and “catholic/protestant” is either uncorrelated or there is a slight positive correlation between higher taxation and protestantism (but some of the protestant cantons are in the French part and those tend to have higher taxes regardless of their denomination). Also, the two extremes are the largely catholic Zug (by far the lowest taxes in Switzerland) and the protestant Neuchatel (the highest taxes). I am not going to do a proper analysis (unless I am really bored at the weekend) but I would bet that, at least nowadays when the Church and religion play a much smaller part in the life of virtually everyone (in Europe anyway) compared to the middle ages, there is virtually zero correlation between the religion itself and the attitudes towards economic policy.

    • Maware says:

      Chesterton was a distributist, not a libertarian. The political systems of small islands like Rarotonga are close to his ideal. Essentially he wants every man to be able to own the means of production or capital, i.e. land, and to prevent large companies from owning it. In the Cook Islands, citizens own the land and companies or foreigners can only lease, not own it. This requires a strong government, not a weak or laissez-faire one.

      If you own the means of production, you have a level of safety. Worst case, you use your land to grow food and livestock to be self-sustaining, and no one can take that away from you. Libertarianism is in practice about removing the roadblocks to allow the strong man to snap up all the land to oppress the weak, or to dispossess the many to serve the one.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        If you own the means of production, you have a level of safety. Worst case, you use your land to grow food and livestock to be self-sustaining, and no one can take that away from you. Libertarianism is in practice about removing the roadblocks to allow the strong man to snap up all the land to oppress the weak, or to dispossess the many to serve the one.

        That is what you think would happen under libertarianism. You have not shown that it is actually what would happen, let alone that it is what libertarianism is “really about”.

        Libertarians would say that creating a “strong government” with the power to regulate the economy to such an extent as to make sure that there are no “large” landholdings would invite abuses. Every honest theory of government has to explain how the government would stay limited to the task you set it and succeed in it. For example, communists say that there should first be a stage in which the government takes over all production under socialism, rationalizes production to create abdundance, then “withers away”. That is what communism is “really about”. But in fact the theory is wrong, in large part because the state has no incentive to rationalize production or “wither away”. And I’m not too sanguine about the prospects of your proposed system.

        Moreover, even if your system “worked” perfectly in the sense that the government succeeded in abolishing corporations and large landholdings, libertarians would say (correctly) that everyone under such a system would be vastly poorer than he would be under a system where a small minority of rich people control most of the wealth and invest it productively. The latter system has the enormous advantage over “yeoman farming” of economies of scale. The actual facts seem to show that wealth inequality is a beneficient feature of capitalism, even from the point of view of those who have less wealth.

        • Maware says:

          Chesterton would argue that the man is far poorer under the libertarian system:

          “This man (Jones let us call him) has always desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready to be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly debars him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the front garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the man who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings, explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out), happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real life of mercantile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, and goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening at that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime future. ” -What’s Wrong With the World.

          He speaks of socialism, but this fits libertarianism too-just instead of the State say Market. The prosperity in goods you offer is at a cost of the “divinely ordinary things.” The man can no longer live to the rhythms of natural life. The desire to own a small house with a garden, marry a wife young, have children, be a part of local life, and more or less be your own master. The libertarian instead marries old if at all, pays absurd amounts of money for horrible lodgings in big cities, may have one child in their dotage if they don’t actively hate them, are not their own master, and constantly move around the nation or globe to chase work.

          The old limits had tyranny, but I think Chesterton would argue they are rich in promoting divinely ordinary things. The new limits have prosperity, but at the cost of natural human relations. A libertarian paradise of single women with a solitary IVF baby at 38 and a string of past lovers is the trade off for increased goods and services.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            You’re trying to have it both ways.

            The extended quote from Chesterton presents “scientific socialism” (which you think is interchangeable with the free market…I’ll accept it for the sake of argument) as actually making the man poorer. He wants his little cottage but he can’t have it because the mean old market system is a war of all against all and drives everyone down to subsistence except the rich capitalists who own all the property.

            If that were…factually true…then capitalism would indeed be an evil and wicked system that no one (except maybe the capitalists) should support. But it’s the very opposite of the truth. Capitalism has enabled an enormously larger number of people to enjoy an enormously larger amount of material wealth. They’re not taking away anyone’s cottages in the woods. Capitalism allowing more and more people to have and enjoy things like cottages in the woods, instead of working themselves to the bone and dying at an early age from some disease. Capitalism has brought about what Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Fact”: the explosion in standards of well-being, by practically anything you could wish to measure it by.

            So on the one hand, your quote says that.

            But you then turn around and say, sure, capitalism made everyone richer, but it’s stunting everyone’s spiritual growth. And it’s true that money doesn’t by happiness; you have to achieve it on your own. But money makes happiness a hell of a lot easier to achieve.

            This pastoral fantasy of the “old days” which had the “rhythms of natural life” where everyone was “his own master” has no relationship to reality. People who look back on how good things were in the “simpler times” of the past are like Marie Antoinette playing shepardess on the grounds of Versailles. It’s a relaxing vacation to spend some time in a sanitized version of simplicity. But you don’t have to deal with the endless drudgery, the gnawing hunger, the sight of your children suffering and dying in front of you of incurable disease.

            Peasants couldn’t just quit and go play Skyrim instead when they got sick of being peasants. People moved to the cities and modernized themselves in the first place because—as poor as people were during the Industrial Revolution, and they were very poor—they preferred city life to starvation and death.

            Maybe it was better to be a successful yeoman farmer than an industrial worker in Manchester. But if you were the fourth son of the fourth son, those weren’t your options. Your options were to be a dead farmer, a bandit, a soldier (where you could be treated with the most extreme brutality), or an industrial worker. And before the Industrial Revolution, you didn’t have that last option.

            People now, more than ever, have the ability to be their own masters and live their own lives the way they like. You really don’t have to be some kind of “consumerist drone” who works 100 hours a week to buy things he doesn’t need. There is nothing about capitalism that forces you to do this.

            It is easier than it has ever been for one to build up a quantity of savings large enough to live off. The old advice was to save 20% of your income, because a) that was all people could save without starving, and b) if you didn’t, you would die of starvation in your old age. But now it’s possible for people—including those who don’t make exorbitant sums of money—to save 30%, 40%, or 50% of their incomes, if they are willing to accept a slightly lower standard of living than the current average, which is enormously higher than the historical average.

            Under some kind of primitivism, the kind of lifestyle you desire is possible to almost no one. A few aristocrats, perhaps (and even there, you’re ignoring the many torments like disease which afflicted rich as well as poor.)

            Under capitalism, the kind of lifestyle you desire is possible to a large and ever-increasing number of people. So you ought to support capitalism, even by your own lights.

          • On the specific issue of whether distributism was inconsistent with libertarianism, I think it’s relevant that GKC thought existing land holdings in part reflected unjust takings–the seizure of the monastery lands under Henry VIII.

            For his view of government interfering with individual choice, see “The Horrible History of Jones.”

            For his view of large firms, he pretty clearly saw them as hand in glove with the government. Does he ever propose that it should be illegal for someone to own more than some fixed amount of land, or for large firms to exist?

    • Jaskologist says:

      Federalist 51:

      If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

      Libertarianism at its best is a recognition that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and yes this includes the king, and the regulator, and whoever else you want to bring in to clean up the mess.

      • Maware says:

        Considering modern libertarianism’s main thrust is the absurdity of the consensual crime, I really doubt that “all have sinned” matters much. They wouldn’t be allowing virtually every sin to be legal if they felt that.

        Modern government has little to do with Christianity-it arose mostly as a way to stop getting Christians to kill each other over doctrine. Libertarianism is mostly about empowering the strong man to self-actualize at the cost of the weak: legalize drugs so the strong man can partake and profit off of then, while the weak pay, work to produce them, and pay the costs of addiction. The sins of the great man over the sins of the little man-gay marriage in particular was this writ large.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Well, I did say Libertarianism as its best. At its worst, Libertarianism is just Libertinism, going around declaring “I don’t think things which are not wrong should be illegal!” as if that were a novel insight.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          You are being very unfair to the Christian libertarian perspective. And I say this as someone who leveled some criticisms of it upthread.

          Just because something is a sin, doesn’t go to show that it should be illegal. After all, the men who are supposed to create and enforce the law are also finite, limited, and sinful. They don’t have unlimited power to do everything, and they will tend to abuse what power they have.

          A Christian can perfectly well say that it would be nice if God eliminated cocaine from the world, but nevertheless say that entrusting men with the power to eliminate cocaine with a) not succeed in the task assigned and b) in the process, create additional harms which are worse than those caused by the sin of selling and using cocaine.

          This is no different from how a Christian might say that it would be nice if no one were a Muslim, since Islam is a heresy and promotes sinful practices. Yet nevertheless, he might think that giving the government the power to ruthlessly stamp out Islam would not work.

          ***

          Moreover, the view that drug abusers are passive victims, the “weak” who are being exploited by the “strong”, is not necessarily consistent with either a Christian or a secular approach to ethics.

          From the Christian view, selling cocaine is a sin. But so is using cocaine! You could easily rationalize the whole existence of drugs in the typical way by saying that God put drugs on earth in order to show men a little taste of the temptation of sin and the suffering one will endure for it in Hell. Every cocaine addict is another reminder of the consequences of straying from the path.

          And from a secular perspective, you may say that, yes, cocaine is very harmful. And selling it is a deplorable act. And therefore we will prevent people from selling it to children or the mentally incompetent. But people have free will, and they are fundamentally equal. Every adult has the responsibility to look after himself, and the freedom that goes along with it. He can’t use the fact that he was “weak” as an excuse to have the government punish the “strong” man who sold it to him, if it was his own free choice to buy it. If we start having the state step in, in a “paternal” role, we infantilize people, disrespect their freedom as rational agents, and give the government a dangerous amount of power. A free society is built on personal responsibility.

          • Tibor says:

            I doubt the Bible or even the catholic tradition says anything at all about cocaine given that coca leaves come from America.

        • hlynkacg says:

          If that’s your assessment of Libertarianism, what do you think of Progressives?

        • Maware says:

          Vox, I don’t think that’s the case. You HAVE to try-saying that “oh, men can’t be trusted to govern” and allowing sin is pretty much giving up. And to be blunt, I don’t believe it. I grew up before the trend to liberalize a lot of things, and the libertarian position has caused consequences that are far worse than the enforcement in terms of allowing sin. If this is your criteria for things-the avoidance of sin-libertarians have spectacularly enabled so much sin it isn’t funny. Things that would have been the wildest science fiction in the 60’s are common.

          Thing is, most Christians are just really believing in secular harm utilitarianism. They use sin as window dressing, but it’s really harm and cost. Sin is different…sin imperils a soul and separates them from God. You’d have to put up with or try and mitigate the failures, because it’s a person’s eternal destiny at stake.

          Hlyn:

          Not as bad. Libertarians take the worst aspects of both left and right as goods..untrammeled capitalism from the right, and untrammeled libertinism from the left. Progressives have one error but not the other.

          • Tibor says:

            Is your position then both socially and economically restrictive? I am asking because I rarely meet anyone who is both a socialist and a conservative, so I would find it interesting to hear arguments of someone who is.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Maware:

            You have just excellently rephrased what I said above about why Christianity tempts people to support state intervention. “Allowing sin is pretty much giving up”. Yes, it is.

            Libertarianism, on a Christian basis, is an extremely cynical and depressing view. It is the view that no matter what we do, the world is irrevocably broken and fallen. That there is just nothing we can do to stop people from sinning to the massive degree they do. One can try persuasion, but it’s only going to work on a small number of the elect.

            A Christian who has any shred of moral idealism is going to see the massive disparity between the way people actually act and the way they ought to act, realize that persuasion just isn’t going to cut it, and want to compel being to avoid sin “for their own good”. After all, it’s immortal souls we’re talking about here. How can it be so bad if the Inquisition tortures a few heretics people on the rack, in order that the vast majority might be saved from heresy? Even if a few innocents are swept up, God will know his own—anything they suffer will be repaid infinitely over in the heaven.

            How could a loving God want us to allow our neighbors, our friends, and our family members to persist in sin and doom themselves to Hell? If they won’t stop themselves, we’ve got to take measures into our own hands.

            Let me just quote my own post, since it seems you basically agree with the view I am saying Christianity tends to encourage in people who have any desire to improve the world:

            But anyone who is not either completely otherworldly (and so doesn’t care what happens to people in this life) or completely cynical will notice the huge discrepancy between the way people act and the way they are morally obliged to act. And they will say: if these greedy people won’t give to the poor of their own accord, why should the government protect their selfish “right” to hoard up their wealth? True enough, forced aid isn’t charity, but God gave the world to all men, and it isn’t “socially just” for some of them to keep the wealth to themselves instead of sharing it with the needy as they ought. (The term “social justice” was invented by the Catholic Church.) So since the necessary alms are being woefully undersupplied, we are going to make these greedy wretches pay their fair share.

            As a result, you do get Christians like the later Tolstoy who are very otherworldly and therefore anarchistic. Why care about improving the world if Judgment Day is upon us?

            Leaving them aside, however, you get the ones who are idealistic about making this world more perfect in the image of God. And they are in favor of government intervention and redistribution to compel the intractable people holdings things back.

            And you get the ones on the other side who are very cynical about improving this world and talk about how we should have a “restrained vision” and shouldn’t “immanetize the eschaton”. But that doesn’t inspire people, especially not the young, because it is not at all a motivating vision of how human beings can use their free will to make the world a better place. If the government tries to improve things with “good intentions”, it’ll just make everything worse. Indeed, everything’s getting worse already.

            I therefore don’t think it’s an accident that conservatives (especially British conservatives as opposed to those more in the tradition of America’s liberal founders) are very cynical and anti-progress. And neither is it an accident that the young, when they hear capitalism defended on these grounds, are not very much in favor of it. When the young hear that capitalism is a necessary evil, they don’t just accept it. They spend all their energy on how to make it unnecessary.

            When you have a moral ideal that says people ought to be completely selfless—and yet they do not at all act in a way that is completely selfless—anyone with a hint of moral idealism is going to want to try whatever he can to make people more selfless. Including government intervention to make them do their duty. Just look at the C.S. Lewis quote The original Mr. X posted: no halfway idealistic person with a spark of the drive to improve the world can accept, “I’m fallen, you’re fallen, everyone’s fallen, and things will never get any better.” This type of cynicism demoralizes people and softens them up for any kind of demagogue who will offer “hope and change”.

          • Nathan says:

            @ Tibor

            I don’t know if he is but I more or less am. E.g. I’m anti abortion, anti drug legalisation, etc, and also think that corporations (as they currently exist) should be banned.

            I describe myself as a distributist but am not 100% sure how closely my views match those of Chesterton etc. But essentially my economic worldview revolves around the principle that workers should jointly own the firms they work for. Under my model a business would be something you join and leave, not something you can buy or sell.

            Happy to answer any further questions.

          • Tibor says:

            @Nathan: Am I free to start my own business (where there is nobody but me or just my family) in your model? Also, can I sell physical things (if so, then I am effectively allowed to sell my business to other people) to anyone and at a price I set myself?

            I assume that in your model, if I want someone to work with me, I need to take him to the company as an equal(?) partner, is that correct? But if I can buy and sell services, I could still “outsource” whatever I need done by people who I don’t want to give shares in my company. How would you deal with that?

          • Nathan says:

            The answer to all your questions is yes.

            When I say you can’t buy and sell businesses, that isn’t to say that a group of three people wha run a fish and chip shop can’t sell their premises to another group of three people who want to take over. I’m using the word business here to mean the organisational structure as opposed to the means of production.

            Workers within a firm can decide to dissolve a firm and split the assets between co-owners.

            Workers within a firm can earn differing shares of the profits – they just all get a say in deciding that. E.g. A two person medical practice consisting of a doctor and a receptionist. The receptionist probably adds less value to the business and should be paid less than the doctor – but she needs to agree to that.

            Yes you can purchase services from outside companies and effectively create de facto wages that way. So in some situations things won’t be very different.

            I would also note that this sort of thing already happens – I personally am theoretically a contractor but by all practical measures an employee, so my boss doesn’t need to pay me sick leave, annual leave, etc. Under both the current system and my proposed one, I’m sceptical of the net value of trying to regulate away these workarounds. It’s still probably better than the current over regulated labour market anyway.

          • onyomi says:

            “It is the view that no matter what we do, the world is irrevocably broken and fallen.”

            Isn’t this the plumb line Christian view?

          • hlynkacg says:

            @onyomi

            It does vary by denomination, but for the vast majority the answer would be yes.

          • Tibor says:

            @Nathan: Yeah, my point is that not very much would really change. You can still have a corporation anyway – a group of people who are shareholders and another group of “contractors” who are in fact just the employees of that corporation. The pattern of hiring de facto employees as de jure contractors is present because the labour laws are restrictive and the additional costs of hiring employees can make an otherwise viable work position uneconomical.

            It seems to me that the main feature of your system would ironically be deregulating the labour market by making employment contracts illegal (it looks to me that anything else has a simple workaround)…severely cutting the power of the worker’s unions above all else. That does not sound very anti-capitalist.

            It might also make trading shares more difficult and thus harming the stock market though (which would be called something else as legally you cannot buy and sell company stocks, but practically you can). Depending on the exact rules, you might prevent some shareholders having more votes than others, which would change things quite a bit, I guess that you would have corporations with only a few major investors with an equal voting rights and then many silent partners with no voting right (who are legally people who lease parts of the physical stuff the company uses to the company and are paid for that based on the company profits)…but maybe it is not so difficult to find a clever workaround, people tend to be pretty ingenious.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ onyomi:

            There is also a long tradition, especially in America, of Christians thinking that Christ has called people to “perfect” the world and and themselves. With the benefit of his “grace”, of course.

            And once they do this to a sufficient degree, we’ll have the Second Coming and Christ’s Kingdom on Earth.

            It’s not just a passive view of “we just accept how things are and live our lives like everyone else”.

          • onyomi says:

            @Vox,

            Yeah, I’m aware of that history; I’m just saying I don’t think it’s at all mandated or implied by Christian sacred texts or traditional theology. It was some peoples’ own “bright” idea. Probably just the typical human utopian impulse finding an outlet in the belief system they already had.

  52. Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

    Statistics (Or probability, I dunno) question:

    Suppose I have a discrete time stationary process. Would I be correct in assuming that, if I were to analyze it on a shorter timeframe, it should still behave like a stationary process (accounting for seasonality)?

    Does the same apply if the variables are cumulative?

    My intuition says yes, but I know better than to trust that guy.

    • Whatever Happened to Anonymous says:

      Clarification, because my english is pretty potato tier: Where I said “shorter timeframe” I meant “higher frequency”, that is, going from yearly to monthly, monthly to daily, etc.

  53. anon says:

    A while ago in one of my political theory courses we read Michael Young’s “Rise of the Meritocracy.” Most of it was dry musing about 1950s British education policy, but looking back, his thesis actually seems quite similar to a point Murray brings up in “Coming Apart”: that “meritocracy” (in the introduction Young mentioned he introduced the word as a joke and was dismayed when people started using it seriously) has harmed the poor by taking all the conscientious, high IQ people that made their social institutions work and raising them to the upper echelons of society.

  54. Tibor says:

    So there is the IQ, a useful thing that correlates with all kinds of important real-world stuff. But what does it mean exactly that someone has IQ 100, 85 or 143? I get the formal definition, so that is not what I am asking. But if I find out someone’s IQ is X, what kind of mental potential (not skills but possible skills) should I roughly expect from him? I get that someone who’s IQ is 70 will probably barely even be able to learn to read (as in understand the concept of written words, I am not talking about any functional literacy), I get that someone who’s IQ is 150 could potentially be on the top mathematician/physicist level. But those are two extremes and a lot of room in the middle. What about the difference between IQ say 110 and 130? What can I expect from someone with IQ 130 than I cannot from someone with IQ 110? Or is this too close to make meaningful statements? Any suggestions welcome 😉

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      The last link thread included a link and a discussion about what percentage of the population could answer which questions and complete which tasks. If you assume that everyone who failed was below X IQ while everyone who succeeded was above X IQ, you can find X by looking up which IQ scores correspond to which percentiles. That should give you a more intuitive understanding.

    • Marc Whipple says:

      Ask a hard one, why don’t you? Some random observations from a dilettante with an interest in the topic:

      Most of the IQ “rankings,” things like eligibility for various societies, “intellectual ability levels,” things like that, are based on standard deviations, or their rough equivalent in percentile ranking. Why? No idea, other than that human beings like patterns and smart people especially like number patterns. These aren’t quantum energy levels. No given IQ number – and remember that while IQ is determined by distribution rules and isn’t an absolute measurement, not all IQ tests will give the same score results for given members of the same non-trivial population – has any particular absolute predictive power like, “This guy’s IQ is 145, he should be an absolute natural at chess.”

      But generally speaking, you should be able to see a pretty clear difference between the ability of two individuals who are a standard deviation apart in IQ in learning and performing a cognitive task. If somebody of IQ 100 and somebody of IQ 115 both spend the same amount of time at it, the latter should get good at the task much quicker, and be much faster and/or better at doing it at any given equivalent experience level.

      Toward the ends of the curve, things get weird, especially since a general-purpose IQ test is statistically likely not to be very good at measuring differences at the far ends. The difference between an IQ 145 person and an IQ 160 person is pretty big, but it’s nothing like the difference between an IQ 100 person and an IQ 115 person in practical terms like life outcomes, educational opportunities, etc. (IMO and IME.)

      Last random observation: There’s no magic number where a person’s intellect becomes some fundamentally different thing, forever outside the ken of ordinary people. At the ends, especially the high end, it almost becomes more about speed than about pure cognitive power. (Again IMO and IME.) It’s a bit reminiscent of that superintelligence discussion we were having. There are concepts which a person with an IQ of 80 may just fundamentally not be able to understand that a person with IQ 120 can understand easily. There aren’t a lot of concepts a person with an IQ of 160 can understand that a person with an IQ of 120 couldn’t understand if they tried long enough. (Again and finally, IME and IMO.)

      • Tibor says:

        I alway thought that the IQ has to be a mixture of two things. One thing is to get answers quick, another is the ability to get the right answer to hard problems at all. Maybe the distinction is unimportant because those things always go together. But I’ve observed that while I am quite slow with simple computation (like adding two fractions with a different base together) relatively to other people (I am really bad at going through them fast and keeping them error-free…I also really do not like doing stuff like that, fortunately I don’t have to do so very often), I am also able to solve more complex problems than some of those who are faster than me. Then again, I guess that a good IQ test will not actually contain many tasks where one has to play calculator. Most of what I’ve seen was about discovering patterns in pictures or numbers, sometimes also words.

    • Troy says:

      Linda Gottfredson has written extensively on the impact of IQ on everyday life, such as career prospects. See, e.g., the tables on this website — http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/803/822654/psychplace/genintell/genintell.html — and p. 22 of this article — https://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005g-jobs-life.pdf. You may also find the blog of Education Realist interesting for his observations on teaching low IQ children.

    • science says:

      One thing to keep in mind is that child IQ and adult IQ are two very different things. The numbers are not only not stable, but they don’t even attempt to measure the same thing. The familiar standard deviation of 15 scale is for adults. For children it sort of works for 1-2 deviations around the mean but beyond that, especially on the high end, the numbers become completely unmoored from much of anything.

      What makes this distinction worse in practice is that an arbitrary intelligent person you meet is much more likely to have taken an IQ test as a kid than as an adult. Smart kids are fairly often give IQ tests for G&T programs, or as part of an ADHD or autism diagnoses. On the other hand the most common reason for adults to be given an IQ test (a real, full, professionally administered one) is as part of a pre-sentencing report after pleading guilty to or being convicted of a felony.

      So let’s say you want to build an intuition about IQ scores and what they mean. You overcome the social taboo against doing so, and start asking around to your friends and acquaintances. If they give you a number, most likely it’s either a childhood IQ number (i.e. pretty much worthless), based on some internet test, or poorly extrapolated from some other standardized test.

      • Tibor says:

        I have one datapoint here, a friend of mine who recently joined Mensa (despite being against it for a long time), mostly for the purpose of meeting new people. His IQ from Mensa was 136. I think he is quite smart, not as smart as my PhD advisor for example, I don’t know if he is smarter than me or the other way around. Then again I don’t know my advisor that well outside of work and she has some 20 years of experience in maths…and while I’ve known the friend since we were 16 and had a black metal band (we sucked big time), I have not really done anything “intellectually difficult” with him. I mean he is a programmer and also a PhD student but I have not seen him at work. So I don’t really even have one datum, just a part of what would be one data point.

        But yeah, this would be a way to go – if I could obtain reliable IQ measurements of enough people I know, I would probably get a more intuitive understanding of the number and what to expect based on it.

      • Another data point.

        I spent several summers as a counselor at a camp for gifted children. The highest IQ kid during those years had an IQ of 201. My impression is that, on the usual standard deviation definition, that’s very unlikely.

        On the other hand, he was eleven, and I can readily believe that he was as smart as an average person twice his age–probably smarter. So if you think of IQ as mental age over physical age his score makes sense.

        • science says:

          If that were an IQ number the way we think of them for adults, it would imply that he was likely the smartest person that ever lived. It’s a good demonstration that child IQ are a whole different beast.

          Educators that concentrate on the profoundly gifted claim that these ratio pseudo-IQ numbers are pedagogically useful as a first pass in deciding how to tailor an educational program. I’m somewhat skeptical and think the very high numbers are more likely to be driven by parental ego. I’m willing to look past my skepticism and give them the benefit of the doubt, I just wish they’d use a different term than “IQ” because it so muddies the issue. Even scientific papers often fail to properly distinguish between the two concepts.

          • mobile says:

            Plausible. If my kid was the smartest human that ever lived, I’d definitely send ’em to a camp where David Friedman was one of the counselors.

        • Tibor says:

          Like “science”, I am also little unsure about the relevance of the child IQ. Also I am not terribly interested in it. Not having children of my own (yet anyway) and not being a teacher, I don’t tend to interact with children very much.

    • Richard says:

      Possible working heuristic:

      If you keep struggling to keep track of someones logical leaps in a conversation, (s)he is probably at least a standard deviation smarter than you.
      If you keep repeating things in simpler and simpler terms in order to get your point across, (s)he is probably at least a standard deviation dumber.

      My basis for this heuristic is that everyone was tested when I joined the army and I later got access to all the results (along with some decorations to put on my shoulders) and it fit rather well.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Now that I like.

      • Elissa says:

        The potential trouble is that, by this heuristic, people who are very good at listening and explaining things are roughly as smart as everyone they meet. (This is not so much a criticism of the heuristic as a criticism of the sort of mindset that doesn’t recognize being good at listening and explaining things as valuable skills or even a thing at all.)

      • Tibor says:

        Good idea. Some little caveats such as expertize…If the step in one’s argument involves something I am well acquainted with, I will follow with ease, if it is entirely new, I won’t. I do know what I am acquainted with myself, I am less sure of other people and most things you hear are somewhere between “never heard anything like it” and “I could tell this to you backwards” which makes it a bit more difficult. But with that in mind (paying attention to how much the other person is likely to have known about the topic already before the discussion), it is a nice heuristic.

  55. I just ran across one of my less favorite sf tropes again– the super genius fakes an alien attack to get cooperation between existing factions. I just don’t believe it will work– people will figure out that it was a fake, or they’ll become less frightened with time, or maybe something else will go wrong. Maybe I just don’t trust super geniuses who are that manipulative.

    Anyway, are there any stories which track what happens after the big benevolent deception?

    • null says:

      Spoilers ahead: Gur fhogrkg vf snveyl pyrne va Jngpuzra; Bmlznaqvnf’f cyna vf qbbzrq gb snvy, nf fubja ol gur pybpx fgevxvat zvqavtug ba gur ynfg cntr. Guvf vf cebonoyl gur zbfg snzbhf rknzcyr, naq grpuavpnyyl qbrfa’g fngvfsl lbhe pevgrevn; ohg vg’f cerggl pyrne gung zvyyvbaf bs crbcyr qvrq sbe jung vf bayl n grzcbenel crnpr.

      • DavidS says:

        I didn’t read it as that clear. Will have to revisit!

        But it certainly wasn’t portrayed there as reliable. The question is whether it’s better than the alternative. It’s not a permanent solution but might shift people out of an ingrained conflict between said factions to resolve into a new (more stable?) equilibrium

    • Deiseach says:

      The “Outer Limits” episode The Architects of Fear where the grand plan goes as wrong as it can. The moral is a little preachy but basically correct: there are no short cuts, there is no ‘scare them all into co-operation’:

      Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque, it would at least have been a lesson. A lesson, at last, to be learned.

      • onyomi says:

        I like this quote. I’ve always hated in films like Independence Day when being attacked by actual aliens brings together all the peoples of the world in the struggle against a common foe. I just doubt it would work out that way.

        • Urstoff says:

          Depends on if they attack near July 4th or not.

        • Jaskologist says:

          I think if the aliens just barge in and start blowing everything up, the world will do a pretty good job of uniting against that common foe. But if the aliens try to subvert us a la V (the original, not the crappy remake), we’re screwed.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            John Ringo (of OH JOHN RINGO NO fame) has a series of books in which bad aliens invade the Earth and start eating us, and even worse aliens pretend to be helping us but are actually doing something arguably even more evil. And indeed, when it comes to dealing with the bad aliens, who don’t even really try to communicate with humans (they can: they just don’t care) we by and large cowboy up. When it comes to dealing with the worse aliens, who have things like transport to safe planets, near-immortality drugs, and other nifty ways to subvert individual humans for their nefarious schemes, we don’t do so well.

            So both at the same time!

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            I really enjoyed the Legacy of the Aldenata series.

            It is viscerally satisfying to watch the Airborne (er, mobile suit) soldiers massacre hordes of the carnivorous crocodile centaurs. And watching Ringo feed socialists, Europeans, and leftists of all stripes to the crocodile centaurs first.

          • Anonymous says:

            Didn’t really enjoy LotA. Too much shooty, not enough plot advancement density.

    • Murphy says:

      I always took that as a simple reference to normal political methods.

      When the economy is in the toilet, when the first minister is being investigated for having a threesome with a goat and a choir boy, when people are angry because their representatives are openly corrupt: thus is the time to start a war with some external group.

      And it works. I always thought it was some kind of a joke until listening to some interviews at a US polling station. I remember an interview with an old lady as she explained that she’d voted for Bush, she didn’t really like him or think he was a good president but [almost whispering] “but we’re at war and you’ve got to support the president when we’re at war”.

      That was the day that I realized that there is no light behind some peoples eyes. There is no motivating intelligence. They breath, they talk, they act a little like real thinking people but they’re open to even the most trivial of manipulations.

      • onyomi says:

        I remember being struck by this when Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in a transparent move to distract from his impeachment vote. I was not even old enough to vote at the time and it was completely obvious to me what was going on. Yet I don’t remember any contemporary news shows or papers offering any comment to that effect–not even the Republicans, who were openly hostile to him at the time (I’m sure someone, somewhere did, but it was under the radar enough that I, only paying vague attention to politics at the time, never heard what seemed to me should have been obvious outrage at this transparent ploy).

        • keranih says:

          There was some outrage – but I think the R default of the importance of military power/assumption that military power would be used for Important Things was at play. To some degree, Rs had difficulty forming the mental framework that said “military force could be used for trivial political ends” as well as being able to think “we will not accuse Clinton of this because that will justify others accusing us of the same dirty trick.”

          (I’m not saying that Rs always use military power “correctly” – I’m saying that the R mindset included a presumption that military power could be used at a different threshold than Ds.)

          • onyomi says:

            Yes, I agree with your analysis of why the GOP did not make a fuss about this. Which ironically means that Democrats are arguably freer to use this stratagem than Republicans.

            What is depressing is how man on the street seems to have been largely unable to connect the dots: perhaps a similar dynamic was at play: blue tribe voters were primed not to criticize Clinton because he was the de facto blue tribe leader; red tribe voters were primed not to criticize military intervention because, well, red tribe. Meaning a Democrat can pretty much nuke Paris and expect little political repercussion.

          • keranih says:

            I think it’s a bit worse than that, even – because Ds have less ‘use of military force’ credibility, they have less ability to use the *threat* of military force, and have to go to actually *using* it, including in situations where someone with an R after their name would just rattle the saber a bit and get pretty much the same results.

            It’s a weird inverse of how Ds get credit for programs with limited utility but good intent, whereas R policies that aren’t advertised as helping the poor get disregarded, even when people’s lot is made better.

            I’m not in any hurry to replace our current system with anything else, but it is pretty f’ed up.

          • Murphy says:

            @onyomi

            You may not be far off the mark.

            I remember seeing this:

            http://i.imgur.com/utjctQK.jpg

            And my first thought was: “wait, no new wars? has anyone been paying attention?”

            The actual tally is more like

            Bush: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia.

            Obama: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria.

            Yet somehow the wars Obama got into are totally forgotten.

          • Urstoff says:

            Those aren’t wars, they’re executive-authorized military actions! Just because you bomb a country and kill their civilians doesn’t mean you’re at war with them.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Those aren’t wars, they’re executive-authorized military actions! Just because you bomb a country and kill their civilians doesn’t mean you’re at war with them.

            I recall reading as part of my old politics course that Congress has never formally declared war since the Mexican-American War.

          • CatCube says:

            @The original Mr. X:

            World War II, though that was the last one.

          • Marc Whipple says:

            @TOMX:

            Get your money back. Unless you took politics a really long time ago.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_war_upon_Japan

            Or did you mean that the US hasn’t declared war without an act of war being committed against it first?

            History aside, I have been saying for years that I find it unlikely the US will ever fight a declared war on an actual enemy, as opposed to endlessly proliferating Wars on Nouns, again. Who could we declare war on without looking like the biggest bully in the history of time? And who would be so suicidally foolish as to actively declare war on us, when they could just attack us all the time and pretend that they weren’t actually, you know, at war?

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            I recall reading as part of my old politics course that Congress has never formally declared war since the Mexican-American War.

            The U.S. Congress did, in fact, formally declare war on the Axis powers in WWII. I’m pretty sure that there hasn’t been a formal declaration of war since then, though.

          • Tibor says:

            @Murphy: I think that the difference between the wars started during the Bush administration and those during Obama’s administration is that the second do not include the so called “boots on the ground” of the rank and file US soldiers, hence much less media coverage. Flying killing robots attract less attention (unless someone uses them against you, of course). That and partisanship, of course.

    • Maware says:

      I like the related trope, where the supergenius makes himself the enemy to foster co-operation. No need to deceive, although the psychic cost of no one ever knowing you actually are doing good is heavy.

    • Stater says:

      Mark, bubbie – I would explain to you how wrong you are if I didn’t think you’d interpret it as ideological persecution.

      • John Schilling says:

        I don’t know about Mark, but I’d interpret that gratuitous “bubbie” as an insult that signifies a very low probability of any worthwhile intellectual or even ideological content to come.

        Your comment is not necessary, not kind, and written so as to make it impossible to verify its truth. Please go away.

  56. Anonymous says:

    [Exposition spoilers for Unsong]

    I read Chapters 2 and 3 last night, then dreamt I was Aaron, on the run from UNSONG. I had to leave my cell phone behind, and I got paranoid about video cameras. Every once in a while I would sneak a visit to my friends or family, knowing it was a terrible idea. It made for a pretty restless night!

    • FacelessCraven says:

      If we’re sharing dreams…

      Mine from last week was a dream that I was visiting some sort of theme park with my niece and nephews, sort of a cross between Jurassic Park and Star Wars. The weird part started when I began reading them a story, and then realized that the story was weirdly disjointed. I flipped back a few pages, and realized that there were several extra copies of the page before, and when I started moving forward from one of them, that led to the tale unfolding in new and worse ways. Attempting to look for other routes through the story inevitably caused the story to grow darker and darker, at which point I realized that we were inside the story rather than reading it as a book, and that the malevolent intelligence behind it was closing in on me from around the corners of my vision. No matter how I turned my head, I couldn’t see it, because it was already behind my eyes. Realizing that scared me bad enough that I, in standard dream logic, tried simultaneously to scream, twist my head off and gnaw through my thumb, and woke up when my brain couldn’t figure out how to simulate all three at once.

      First thought on waking was, “wow, that was some seriously high-quality terror!”

  57. Anonymous says:

    I was wondering if anyone could give me their best defense of veganism from a utilitarian perspective. Not the obvious point “factory farms are atrociously cruel”, but the point that seems to me much less defensible: “it is inherently wrong on utilitarian grounds to eat meat”.

    My argument is fairly simple. Eating meat from an animal that was raised in conditions good enough that its life was worth living raises, rather than lowers, aggregate utility. An animal got to live for a bit that wouldn’t have lived otherwise. As far as I can tell, conditions that make a life worth living do not need to perfectly emulate the wild, and in fact probably shouldn’t, since the wild involves a constant struggle for food and a cruel death, by starvation or predation or exposure or disease or something else nasty. (Whether it would be good from a utility perspective to kill all the wild animals is a separate issue.) Whereas an animal kept on a farm – not a factory farm but a small olden-days farm, with a henhouse and a farmer’s wife and whatever else – does not have to struggle for food, is protected from predators, is given a swift and relatively painless death. Yes, farm animals don’t live very long, but I don’t see how this matters from a utility perspective – the claim that a short life that’s worthwhile while it lasts entails fewer utiles than no life seems absurd.

    Yes, it would probably be better not to spend your money on expensive small farm free range meat, but to give it to the most effective charity instead. But that same argument applies to spending your money on anything that isn’t the most effective charity. If you’ve already bitten the bullet of donating only 10% rather than 100% then I don’t see why spending a bit of the remaining 90% on positive-utile meat is any less correct than spending it on anything with a comparable utility level.

    I can certainly see a fundamental argument against eating meat being made from a deontological perspective – ‘thou shalt not kill’, for example. Not so much when we’re talking about fungible utiles. But so many EA folk are vegans that perhaps I’m missing something.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      but the point that seems to me much less defensible: “it is inherently wrong on utilitarian grounds to eat meat”.

      It is clear that nothing could show this because nothing is “inherently wrong” on utilitarian grounds except disutility in itself. And I’m sure most utilitarian vegans do not think that eating meat is always (non-inherently) wrong on utilitarian grounds. For instance, they typically defend primitive tribes which eat meat, or allow that if you crash on an island in a plane full of beef jerky, you can eat it.

      Anyway, the argument that meat eating brings animals into existence that wouldn’t otherwise have existed is beside the point. If those animals’ lives are so valuable, you could pay simply to have them raised in zoos where they are also protected and don’t get eaten. This will undoubtedly produce more utility, unless the human utility gain from eating meat is so high as to outweigh the extra utility the animals would enjoy. In which case eating meat is simply right on utilitarian grounds.

      Yes, it would probably be better not to spend your money on expensive small farm free range meat, but to give it to the most effective charity instead. But that same argument applies to spending your money on anything that isn’t the most effective charity. If you’ve already bitten the bullet of donating only 10% rather than 100% then I don’t see why spending a bit of the remaining 90% on positive-utile meat is any less correct than spending it on anything with a comparable utility level.

      Well, once you do this, you’ve abandoned any consistency to utilitarianism anyway. So I’m not sure why you would want to appeal to it as a guide. A utilitarian would say that, sure, eating “humanely” raised animals is not the worst thing you could spend your money on. Neither is eating factory-farmed animals. But you are certainly not acting to advance the greatest good of the greatest number.

      Now, why should you care that you aren’t acting to advance the greatest good of the greatest number? Beats me. But that’s why I’m not a utilitarian.

      • Anonymous says:

        Well, once you do this, you’ve abandoned any consistency to utilitarianism anyway. So I’m not sure why you would want to appeal to it as a guide.

        I don’t think so. It seems to me not unreasonable to set yourself an ideal goal even if you know you will never meet it.

        If you think that meat-eating inherently reduces utility then that would be a reason to avoid doing it, even with the part of your income you’re allowing yourself to keep. But as far as I can tell it’s quite easy to buy meat – not just eat beef jerky if you get stuck on an island with it, but intentionally go out of your way to spend some of your limited resources on meat – in a way that, unlike factory farming, does not create negative utiles.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          I don’t think so. It seems to me not unreasonable to set yourself an ideal goal even if you know you will never meet it.

          Sure. But is the reason you don’t maximize utility that you want to and try as hard as you can yet sometimes fail to live up to it? Or is it that the goal is something you don’t really want, for the perfectly good reason that you would be completely miserable if you “succeeded” in achieving it?

          If the latter is true and you don’t really want to be utilitarian all the time, then you had better define what your actual goal is, if you aim to achieve it and not be constantly frustrated. I think this is one of the main harms of altruistic-type ethics (including utilitarianism): no one actually follows them consistently, and they are right not to. Yet the fact that they hold up altruism as the moral ideal means they are paralyzed and unable to name the morality they actually seek to practice.

          After all, if your actual goal is not to be as utilitarian as possible, you cannot and should not judge the 90% of your actions which are non-utilitarian by the standard of utilitarianism.

          Joseph Rowlands discusses this excellently in his lecture “Eliminating the Altruistic Baggage”:

          Balancing morality with everyday life.

          You can’t practice [altruistic] morality consistently. Someone whose every act was an actual sacrifice would find themselves out of stuff to sacrifice. They would die shortly [or at least, if they were “effective altruists”, be miserable]. What’s a person to do?

          In practice, people find a way of taking this horrible ethical system and pushing it to the side so it doesn’t affect their day to day lives. This is the fourth element of the Altruistic Framework. People find a way to balance morality with everyday life.

          This is worth exploring briefly. I’ve thought of two ways in which morality can be balanced with everyday life.

          Apply only in exceptional cases

          The first method is making the decision that altruism is something you only need to apply in exceptional situations. In other words, you pretty much ignore the morality unless the right kind of situation comes up. If you walk past a lake and someone is drowning, you jump in to help. If some child is starving, you give the family some food. If your mother is sick, you let her move in with you. If a coworker asks you to donate to her daughter’s charity, you donate.

          The intent is that you live your daily life normally and don’t worry about being moral. But if your dedication to being moral is questioned at any time, then you have to respond. The hope is that this kind of situation doesn’t happen often enough, and that you can mostly just spend your life doing what you want.

          Treat moral principles as rules

          A second method of limiting the scope of morality is to treat it as a set of rules that you have to follow. Maybe you decide you have to give a certain percentage of your income away to charities. [Emphasis added!] Maybe you decide to be a pacifist. Maybe you live by the golden rule. Maybe you tell the truth because it’s the right thing to do.

          By setting up rules, you can simply rule out decisions that would violate those rules. You can then choose the best alternative for you. In this way, you can still claim to be moral, since you’ve followed all of the rules consistently, but you don’t have to constantly make the largest sacrifice.

          […]

          Having a separate standard for moral choices and practical choices

          The sixth element of the Altruistic Framework is that since you can’t practice your morality consistently, you have to have a second morality that gets used most of the time. The morality is no longer a method of making your choices. It’s a duty you have to perform, and in practice, you have to marginalize. If you don’t use altruism as your moral standard, you need something else to take it’s place.

          One interesting point about this is that it creates a view that you have two methods of making choices. The first is how to be moral. The second is what you do the rest of the time. Of these two standards, only one is made explicit. That’s the moral standard. So an altruist is able to identify his moral standard, but doesn’t give a second thought to his “everyday life” standard.

          But the point I want to emphasize here is just that the Altruistic Framework holds a view that you make your daily life choices in one way, and your moral choices in another. It makes the artificial divide seem natural.

          The relevance of this to what Scott calls “sanity-preserving exceptions” is, I think, obvious.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m not interested in arguing for or against utilitarianism here – I’m prepared to take it for granted for the time being. The argument I’m interested in is: given utilitarianism, why should you not eat meat, above and beyond the extent to which you should not do anything else that you want to do that doesn’t maximize aggregate utility?

            Regarding your argument about whether someone can be a utilitarianism without behaving in a way they believe will maximize utility, think a relevant distinction to make is between how a person thinks they should act, and how a person thinks the world should look. It seems plausible, for example, to say that as an outside observer you would prefer a world with maximum aggregate utility, but as an agent within that world you don’t feel you ought to act toward that goal. Though I recognize that that is not the argument that EA people make, they instead seem to plead moral weakness.

      • Jiro says:

        If those animals’ lives are so valuable, you could pay simply to have them raised in zoos where they are also protected and don’t get eaten.

        But nobody really believes themselves obligated to maximize utility. That’s why people think it’s okay to pay 10% of their income instead of as much as they can get away with without dying or going insane.

        Raising animals to eat them and producing net positive utility is suboptimal compared to raising them without eating them, but then paying 10% is suboptimal compared to paying 50%. If you’re going to accept that it is okay to increase utility in suboptimal ways, and you are not obliged to pay the 50%, then it should be okay to increase animal utility in suboptimal ways as well.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          If you’re going to accept that it is okay to increase utility in suboptimal ways, and you are not obliged to pay the 50%, then it should be okay to increase animal utility in suboptimal ways as well.

          You can do anything you are physically able to do. Utilitarianism says that you morally should not do anything except that which maximizes aggregate utility. Utilitarianism has no concept of something’s being “okay”: it either maximizes utility or it is wrong to the degree that it does not maximize utility.

          If you’re not going to follow utilitarianism here, you need some alternative ethics if you’re going to make decisions in any kind of consistent way. See my post directly above.

    • Linch says:

      My impression is that most EA vegans (who are doing it on animal welfare grounds, and not because it saves money so they can donate more) do believe that farm animal lives are net negative. If you think that a)farm animals have moral worth and b)the balance of evidence points to farm animals having net positive lives, then it is a reasonable claim that supporting factory farming is the morally right thing to do. The fact that so many utilitarians disagree should be some evidence against your belief in b), of course, but IMO not completely damning evidence.

      (Compassion by the Pound is the standard text in this. It argues that cows live net positive lives, and pigs and chickens live net negative ones, though its evidence has been somewhat challenged).

      • Anonymous says:

        The group ‘farm animals’ is not homogeneous. I’m not disputing that factory farm animals probably have net negative lives. I’m disputing the separate claim, which seems to me far less likely to be correct, that no farm animals at all have net positive lives, factory or otherwise, and that therefore any eating of meat is wrong from a utilitarian perspective. I think that if you source your meat from farms you identify as being okay conditions-wise then there doesn’t seem to be any reason to consider it any worse than any other selfish thing you might spend your money on.

        • keranih says:

          I’m not disputing that factory farm animals probably have net negative lives. I’m disputing the separate claim, which seems to me far less likely to be correct, that no farm animals at all have net positive lives, factory or otherwise, and that therefore any eating of meat is wrong from a utilitarian perspective.

          I would dispute that commercially raised livestock have net negative lives. I agree that livestock life experiences are not homogenous, but the differences do not lie along size of farm nor along any CAFO/organic/family farm divide.

          • Anonymous says:

            @keranih

            Can you expand on that? What exactly is it you’re claiming, and on what basis?

          • keranih says:

            I hold that the health and welfare of animals and their relative levels of misery/comfort are complex topics, and that attempting to make determinations of abuse/mistreatment need to be made on objective basis, not on aesthetics, or other non-relevant points.

            Specifically, different management and housing systems expose the animals to different challenges to health and wellbeing. Animals raised in organic/small farm/sustainable systems are not net healthier or at less risk than animals raised in conventional systems. The cost/benefit ratios are even more complex when one looks at environmental impacts.

          • Anonymous says:

            I think we can do a little better than that. I’m not enormously interested in the health of farm animals – after all, they’re destined to be killed after not too long, and a dead animal is not healthy at all. I’m interested in whether they are happy, in the sense that an animal can be happy – not stressed, not in pain, among other things.

            All the evidence regarding factory farms I’ve seen – largely involving chickens, but not entirely – has pushed me toward the belief that factory farmed animals are unhappy. On the other hand, I’ve seen chickens on small farms that look perfectly content and seem happy.

            This isn’t an ideal metric, but I think it probably isn’t that far out.

          • keranih says:

            I think we can do better than an aesthetic-based amateur decision of whether the animals “look” happier.

            Select individual animals on select individual farms can be happier or sicker or more likely to end up dead of illness – suffering hours or days of misery before passing on, as opposed to a short time of transport and then efficient slaughter – and I could produce anecdotal evidence that showed any particular method of husbandry was better or worse than all the others.

            On the aggregate, though, modern ag raises animals in a manner so that they are less likely to be sick, get injured or to die before slaughter than animals kept in organic/sustainable/etc systems. This can be definitively measured, and belief is not needed.

            The “happiness” of an animal is much harder to measure in an objective, reproducible manner, and there are many people using unfounded claims of their livestock’s “happiness” to sell animal products. Many of them have sufficient numbers of people who believe these claims in order to make their less efficient and more expensive operations profitable.

            Far fewer of these ‘alternative’ operations are actually better for their livestock than the conventional operations that they demonize.

          • Nathan says:

            I’m quite perplexed by the assertion that you (anonymous) care about the “happiness” rather than the “health” of animals. I find it hard to imagine you don’t consider health to be a major factor in an animal’s happiness, but it’s hard to decipher what else you could have meant.

            Also I note you mention stress. From my experience working on a number of different farms, the larger and more commercial the operation, the MORE likely there was to be attention paid to things like that. The simple reason being that stress affects production – a stressed cow gives less milk, stressed pigs put on less weight, etc. so for example on the piggery I worked at we had explicit instructions to remain calm and quiet at all times to avoid scaring the pigs (and this rule was definitely enforced), whereas on my grandfathers family dairy farm he would sometimes lose his temper and hit one of his cows with a stick.

            And it makes sense. If you’re the money man running the stats rather than working with the animals yourself, you’re not going to have the frustrations to vent and are not too likely to care that your workers do. At the same time, in a larger enterprise an x% decrease in production adds up to a much bigger figure.

          • xtmar says:

            @keranih

            I think the problem with reducing it to injuries/illness/life expectancy is that it doesn’t account for non-quantitative quality of life metrics, which are obviously harder to measure.

            By way of not too crazy comparison, suppose that inmates had better numeric outcomes in terms of life expectancy, because the state kept them locked up away from diseases, only fed them nutritious food, and strictly regimented their exercise program and life style to maximize weight gain. However, they’re not free, are bored out of their mind, and so on. A person on the outside may not have as good a numeric quality of life metric, but their freedom more than compensates for it.

            Obviously, animals aren’t people, and some animals have more intelligence than others, but if you deal with dogs or cows or horses, they have at least a semblance of what freedom is, and what boredom is. We may not have to weight that as strongly as we do for people, and certainly for fish or frogs I don’t think we should weight it too highly, but for the larger mammals, it seems like it’s at least worth putting some weight on their subjective experience of life.

          • keranih says:

            @ xtmar

            I think the problem with reducing it to injuries/illness/life expectancy is that it doesn’t account for non-quantitative quality of life metrics, which are obviously harder to measure.

            Right. I am not so much down on valuing animal “happiness” as I am dreadfully disappointed in a) our ability to measure that, so that we have some way of *validating* commercial claims of elevated quality due to higher happiness and b) the sort of romantic misconception that would – in human terms – assume that people in Somalia have more utility in their lives than people in NYC, on the basis of liberty and the lack of annoying rules about parking, dress codes, and vaccinating your children before they go to school, and in Somalia people are more likely to live in rural areas with animals and plants and farms.

            As you say (if I read you right) there is a trade off between restricting “liberty”/happiness and controlling the environment enough to eliminate health hazards. In this I completely agree with you.

            In animal agriculture, it is not a choice between a bored/depressed chicken and a happy chicken. (Leaving aside the larger issue of ‘okay, what does a happy bird look like compared to a not-happy bird?’)

            It is a choice between two selections of one pound chicken meat. One comes a package of 100 pounds of chicken meat, that required X amount of raw space, Y amount of space to grow feed, Z gallons of water, and 21 moderately bored chickens, including one that died of sickness before being slaughtered.

            The other 100 pounds of chicken meant required 10X space, Y + B feed growing space, Z + C gallons of water, and 43 moderately happy chickens, including nine that died of illness before being slaughtered.

            For me, the math comes out so far on the side of the conventional farmer that I can’t justify commercial sustainable/organic farming. (Situations where one is raising ones own livestock or is *deeply* aware of the operations on a particular farm are different, I think.)

            (Note: you can find US commercial poultry figures on the web. Organic/sustainable systems do not publish survivability/loss before market figures, but you can find figures on average size, days to market, and cost of the product.) (And I’m not even getting into the variable certification of organic/sustainable operations, which limits the ability to cross-compare operations.)

  58. Kaj Sotala says:

    Since the game has been referenced here before, and there are similar “anyone else” questions too – anybody else just drooling for Conclave, the next Crusader Kings 2 DLC? The latest Dev Diary was amazing and I can’t wait.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      I’m just here for the decadence and nomad fixes. That it should put a brake on blobbing is just a bonus in my eyes.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      I hadn’t heard of the new expansion until now.

      Sounds exciting! I always wanted them to get deeper into internal politics. The game is fun but gets so lifeless once you actually are in charge. The only interesting things to do are scheme to become king and then conquer your neighbors. But after conquering for a while, you get bored of that.

      • Kaj Sotala says:

        Yeah. The heart of the game for me was always the role-playing aspect. Now, not only is my powerful uncle the ambitious duke someone I need to keep a constant eye on, he insists on getting on the council as well! I’ll love to hate him even more.

        They’ve also mentioned that they’re making the education of children more interesting, which sounds promising too.

        • John Schilling says:

          Damn them all. I really liked that game. I had to quit cold turkey because it was becoming too much of a time sink. And now you tell me they are going and fixing all of the little things that bugged me about it?

          Well, I guess I’ll see you all when I get back from the Crusades. Maybe old school this time, starting with a few counties in Italy and setting out to take and hold the Holy Land from the Infidel. Damn them all 🙂

    • bluto says:

      Whelp there goes my productivity for the next few months, that looks amazing.

  59. I knew of Ananias as a person who was a hated liar in the New Testament, but I didn’t know the actual story until I read it here.

    Any Christian who’s smug about worshiping a kinder God than the OT God will get it mentioned to them– killing people for holding money back? With no warning and no chance of repentance? This isn’t conquest, but it is comparable to G-d killing someone for gathering sticks on the Sabbath.

    However, aside from partisan issues, this connects to a larger question which I suppose is related to virtue ethics. To what extent is it legitimate to tell people they should have known better? Where do moral instincts (or whatever it is that cause people to be better or worse than the people around them) fit into philosophy and/or what’s scientifically known?

    • Deiseach says:

      It wasn’t for holding money back, it was for lying about it. Perjury being a sin because it holds God who is Truth – as a witness to falsehood and so is an attempt to make God a liar, that is what triggered the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira.

      As Peter says, it’s your land and your money, you could have done what you wanted with it. If you didn’t want to hand over the money, you could have kept it. But you wanted to keep your cake and eat it: you wanted to take the profit on the land and keep it, and also get the credit for good deeds from the congregation by claiming to hand over all the money. You were cheating your fellows and lying to us and making God witness to your lies.

      I don’t think we Christians should be “smug about worshiping a kinder God than the OT God” and for my part, I hold with the belief that we’re worshipping the same God as the God of the Old Testament; this is probably one of those Grace versus Law disputes that I’m not Protestant enough (or at all) to get involved in 🙂

      • I’m not denying that Ananias and his wife did something bad, but is killing them for it a proportionate punishment?

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Obviously we judge all crimes based on the status of the victim. For example, when someone kills a noble, we execute him. But when he kills a peasant, he just has to pay compensation.

          God is an infinite being. Lying is a sin, which means that it’s an offense against God. An offense against an infinite being merits an infinite punishment. So Ananias and his wife not only deserved to die; they deserved to be punished eternally in Hell. If God did send them to Hell, may we praise His justice. If he allowed them to be saved and enter Heaven, may we praise His mercy.

          eyeroll

          So I don’t believe that, of course. However, I do think I am presenting internal logic behind it, as well as the historical context from which contemporaries might have drawn analogies.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz – “I’m not denying that Ananias and his wife did something bad, but is killing them for it a proportionate punishment?”

          No, it isn’t. Nor is it proportionate to heal someone’s deformity because they touched ones’ clothes. Both are about making a point, not about establishing principles for governing society long-term. As for whether using their particular infraction as grounds for making the point is “fair”, it doesn’t seem that egregious to me. But then, given that everyone dies anyway, and as a Christian I don’t believe that death is final, I think there’s a bit of an inferential gap there.

          @Vox Imperatoris – “God is an infinite being. Lying is a sin, which means that it’s an offense against God. An offense against an infinite being merits an infinite punishment. So Ananias and his wife not only deserved to die; they deserved to be punished eternally in Hell. If God did send them to Hell, may we praise His justice. If he allowed them to be saved and enter Heaven, may we praise His mercy.”

          …Sure, to the extent that literally everyone who’s ever lived has deserved the same.

          It’s not like the difference between killing a hobo and assassinating JFK. It’s the difference between selling crack in an alley, and selling crack on the 10th floor of the NYPD headquarters building, in the middle of a press conference about the new narcotics crackdown, to the mayor of New York City, while the head of the NYPD is trying to give his presentation. You have a good chance of getting away with the former, but you are definitely not going to get away with the later, and it’s hard to say that it’s not your own fault.

          • brad says:

            No, it isn’t. Nor is it proportionate to heal someone’s deformity because they touched ones’ clothes. Both are about making a point, not about establishing principles for governing society long-term. As for whether using their particular infraction as grounds for making the point is “fair”, it doesn’t seem that egregious to me. But then, given that everyone dies anyway, and as a Christian I don’t believe that death is final, I think there’s a bit of an inferential gap there.

            So did Ananias and Sapphira die in a state of grace? I’d think being struck down by God on the spot for sinning is just about the best evidence around that someone is going to hell.

      • John Schilling says:

        I missed the part where Ananias didn’t just make the perfectly reasonable and ethically defensible decision to A: sell his property, B: give some of the proceeds to the church, and C: not tell the church anything about his remaining wealth or lack thereof. You know, what essentially every Christian in the world today does just about every week. I mean, I dropped a $20 in the offering when I visited my sister-in-law’s church a few weeks ago; am I now doomed and damned because I didn’t offer up my life’s savings or at least an explicit disclaimer?

        There’s a bit in Acts 4 about how everybody shared everything, but that’s A: a bit vague for justifying the death penalty for having private wealth, and B: hard to reconcile with your “it’s your land and your money, you could have done what you wanted with it”

        • Marc Whipple says:

          If Ananias had done what you said, he might have gotten a stern talking-to. He got smitten because he lied. He said that was all the proceeds when it wasn’t.

          Also, arguably he and his wife had entered into a partnership with the other faithful, and then withheld assets that they had pledged to the partnership. That’s embezzlement. (Or maybe conversion. Depends on the exact sequence.) I took the bit you mention to mean, “You didn’t have to enter into partnership with us, but you did, and then you lied and stole from your partners. Including God. BOOM. HEADSHOT.”

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @John Schilling – “I missed the part where Ananias didn’t just make the perfectly reasonable and ethically defensible decision to A: sell his property, B: give some of the proceeds to the church, and C: not tell the church anything about his remaining wealth or lack thereof.”

          Ananias and Sapphira explicitly did not do what you are saying they did. There was no requirement that they sell the land. There was no requirement that they donate any of the money for the sale, much less all of it. The only requirement was that they not lie about their charity, which it seems clear that Ananias did (compare the description of others donating in this way, and of Barnabas’ actions particularly), and which his wife does explicitly.

          • John Schilling says:

            The only requirement was that they not lie about their charity, which it seems clear that Ananias did

            “But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles feet.”

            This is the only description of Ananias’s actions in my New Revised Standard Version. I am missing the part where he lies. Or says anything at all, really – he just gives the church a bunch of money and says nothing.

            There seems to be an assumption that since Ananias was punished by the Official Good Guy, he must have done something Really Bad, and that since lying about his donation was the only Really Bad thing he might have done, he must have done it even if there is no record of it.

            I am generally uncomfortable with logic of the form, “X was punished, therefore X must have committed a crime”, and would prefer something stronger in this case.

          • Jaskologist says:

            That Ananias’ words aren’t recorded when he presented the money is unremarkable; the entire story is squeezed into the space of just 11 verses in a time when writing was still fairly expensive. People assume he lied because lying is what Paul yells at him for (while explicitly saying that Ananias had every right to dispose of his property as he wished). Then the point is underscored when Paul gives Saphira a chance to come clean. Only her lie is explicitly recorded, but the narrative makes it clear that she and her husband were in on it together and punished for the same sin, so the reader is expected to draw the obvious conclusion in his case.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @John Schilling – Acts 4:32 – All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

            36 Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), 37 sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

            I read 4:34-36 as being a description of the normal donation practice at the time. It seems clear to me that it’s entirely voluntary, not compulsory; that interpretation may be colored by having watched people do similar things in the churches I’ve attended. Barnabas’ action in particular is specifically pointed out, even though it’s only a restatement of the general practice. It’s immediately followed by:

            Acts 5:1 – Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

            …Given that he is intentionally holding money back, and at the same time intentionally copying the actions of those who didn’t, it seems fair to say that he is making a willful attempt to deceive. Casting his actions as some sort of misunderstanding seems like a pretty forced interpretation.

            3 Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4 Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”

            Peter accuses him of deceit, not avarice. He states that Ananias was under no obligation to sell the land, and under no obligation to donate the money once it was sold. What exactly was involved in “laying it at the apostles feet” seems open to interpretation, but given that Peter is aware that the money came from a land sale, some sort of communication hardly seems like a strained interpretation.

            7 About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”

            “Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”

            …Especially since his wife’s explicit lie is recorded a sentence or two later. This reinforces the assumption of guilt on Ananias’ part.

            I’ve never heard this episode being used as anything but an example of God’s view toward hypocrisy and fraud. I’ve never heard it used as an example of why greed is bad, or why Christians need to give more. There are many, many other stories much more suited to that purpose, most of them directly from the mouth of Jesus himself: “Go, sell all you have, and give to the poor”, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” etc, etc. No one else is singled out for punishment, despite the text implicitly stating that others didn’t sell their property, or didn’t donate the proceeds. All in all, the interpretations in this thread baffle me.

          • John Schilling says:

            So, in early Christianity, it was perfectly acceptable to use a plot of land as you saw fit, and perfectly acceptable to sell a plot of land and keep all of the money for yourself, and perfectly acceptable to sell a plot of land and give 100% of the money to the Church, but selling a plot of land and giving some of the money to the Church is an immediate death-penalty offence.

            Unless perhaps you make an explicit disclaimer to that effect, in which case it becomes OK again? I’m skeptical of that part, first because Peter’s phrasing puts “kept for yourself some of the money” equal with “lied to the Holy Spirit” as a cause for offense. Second, yes, because this is the sort of rule that really ought to be spelled out if you are trying to tell people why it’s a good thing that you(r God) just up and killed someone, so it’s a conspicuous omission here. And third because it would make Ananias and Sapphira possibly the stupidest people in Judea for having committed the death-penalty offense rather than the socially acceptable thing with the same fiscal outcome.

            The only way this makes sense as a thing actual people might do, is if it was not in fact socially acceptable to keep the proceeds from your own land sale, if early Christianity was essentially communistic and Peter’s “wasn’t the money at your disposal?” was a not-so-subtle hint as to the only acceptable means of disposing of the money. In which case, yes, Ananias was a lying defector from the communists, and was killed for it.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Lying by omission is also a thing. If you make everybody think that you’ve given away all the money you got from a sale when in fact you’re keeping some back, that’s deceitful, regardless of whether or not you explicitly say “Yup, I’m giving you all the money I got for this land.”

            Plus, his wife does explicitly say that they were donating the full price of the land. If this was really all just a misunderstanding, there’d be no reason for her to lie. The only motive she could have for doing so would be if she (along with her husband, since they were both in this together: “with his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money”) was deliberately trying to deceive the others.

            “From time to time those who owned land or houses sold them” implies that this was done occasionally and sporadically, as the owners felt moved to do so. It would be very odd phrasing to use if selling up your land and houses were a precondition for becoming a Christian.

            Plus, a lot of people don’t just want to be socially accepted, they want to be praised. Even if giving part of your money to the Church and keeping part for yourself was OK with the early Christians, giving all of your money would probably have been viewed in a more positive light. Hence there’s plenty of reason for somebody to claim they were giving away all their wealth even though they were actually keeping some back for themselves.

            And third because it would make Ananias and Sapphira possibly the stupidest people in Judea for having committed the death-penalty offense rather than the socially acceptable thing with the same fiscal outcome.

            All sin is ultimately stupid and self-defeating. That doesn’t mean that people don’t do it.

          • Nita says:

            Yeah, I’m afraid John’s interpretation seems more natural to me.

            1) Peter saying “Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal?” makes sense if it means “you didn’t owe money (or the house) to anyone else, so you should have given all of it to us, according to the standard procedure”. It would be an odd way to phrase “you could have kept part of the money openly”.

            2) Peter accuses Ananias of both pocketing the money and lying: “how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land?”

            3) It’s more straightforward to assume that both the sin (“hoarding” the money) and the punishment are described explicitly — it’s a moral lesson, after all. The wife’s lie is just proof that she was in on the scheme.

            4) So, why would Peter get angry at someone keeping part of the money if the donations were voluntary? Simple — while Ananias owned his house, he appeared to be a good Christian, perhaps overly attached to his humble abode, but ready to give up everything as soon as the need arose. But keeping a part to himself showed him to be a calculating bastard, looking out for #1 instead of giving freely and trusting God to take care of his needs.

            Also:

            God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

            Selling off the wealthy members’ property is described at the main mechanism by which God’s grace eliminated poverty in the community.
            And if people were selling off real estate, they must have already run out of cash and jewelry. The threat of the amount of need outstripping the amount of donations must have been dire, making “hoarding” a serious risk. You wouldn’t want to impede God’s grace, would you?

          • bean says:

            Nita:
            1) Peter saying “Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal?” makes sense if it means “you didn’t owe money (or the house) to anyone else, so you should have given all of it to us, according to the standard procedure”. It would be an odd way to phrase “you could have kept part of the money openly”.
            They weren’t speaking English. This kind of slightly odd phrasing comes up a lot in all but full paraphrase translations. For that matter, think of Shakespeare. A lot of his dialogue is slightly obscure to a modern reader, but we don’t assume this is proof that he doesn’t mean what the surface reading says.

            2) Peter accuses Ananias of both pocketing the money and lying: “how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land?”
            And if you’re lying to me, I generally will say what the lie is after I say that you’re lying. There were also other people around who weren’t Peter, and they might have been puzzled if he’d just said ‘You’re lying!’ and Ananias had dropped dead.

            3) It’s more straightforward to assume that both the sin (“hoarding” the money) and the punishment are described explicitly — it’s a moral lesson, after all. The wife’s lie is just proof that she was in on the scheme.
            Let’s look at the entire passage (from the Amplified, which sacrifices some readability for a more complete translation of the implications of the text):
            Now a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, 2 and with his wife’s full knowledge [and complicity] he kept back some of the proceeds, bringing only a [a]portion of it, and set it at the apostles’ feet. 3 But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and [secretly] keep back for yourself some of the proceeds [from the sale] of the land? 4 As long as it remained [unsold], did it not remain your own [to do with as you pleased]? And after it was sold, was the money not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this act [of hypocrisy and deceit] in your heart? You have not [simply] lied to people, but to God.” 5 And hearing these words, Ananias fell down suddenly and died; and great fear and awe gripped those who heard of it. 6 And the young men [in the congregation] got up and wrapped up the body, and carried it out and buried it.

            7 Now after an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me whether you sold your land for so much?” And she said, “Yes, for so much.” 9 Then Peter said to her, “How could you two have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Look! The feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.” 10 And at once she fell down at his feet and died; and the young men came in and found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.
            There are three or four different references to deception and lying, and only one to hoarding. Sapphira’s lie proves that this was intentional, explicit deceit, not just lying by implication. When asked point blank if they sold it for the amount they gave the church, she said yes.
            I’ve never heard a sermon on this that comes remotely close to the way you’re reading it.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I find it of weird to see otherwise intelligent people tying themselves in knot to avoid the plain language of the text that Ananias and his wife were punished for lying to the congregation, and by extension God.

            I mean if there were one thing that I would expect the rationalist diaspora to be able to agree on as “yup, that’s bad” it would be dishonesty.

  60. The US government is willing to enforce some foreign laws in the US. I don’t know how often this sort of thing (point 2) happens.

  61. One more for the “how bad are things” discussion. I mentioned The Brain’s Way of Healing to a woman, and she was very interested because she has a considerable history of concussions. Repeated concussions from an abusive father, then an abusive husband. He was followed by a good husband who died of cancer, but his family in Japan treated her horribly. And then she got another concussion from a fall. I don’t guarantee that I remember everything that happened to her.

    She runs quite a good little business which I’m not mentioning because of respect for her privacy.

    What proportion of people are carrying at least that much bad history?

  62. Emily says:

    This is about MLK day and Judaism.

    I read this article in the Forward: http://forward.com/opinion/330282/jewish-uses-and-abuses-of-martin-luther-kings-memory/#ixzz3xcTFwovN

    Excerpts: “Much of Jewish MLK Day programming features inspiring songs, speeches and discussions, but does not lead to actual change in the culture of the institution…Without clear intentions, measurable goals, and action steps, do these events constitute anything more than a community pat on the back?…After noticing how many communities have fallen into this pattern, I decided that I needed to take a small step back. I didn’t accept speaking gigs and didn’t attend some Jewish communal programming around MLK weekend…” He then outlines some things he’d like to see before re-engaging and then describes how he recently was pleased to see them when a synagogue invited him to do an event.

    I respect where this guy is coming from. He sees current events and issues as being very much linked to the civil rights movement, such that if you’re not currently taking action (on the right side), you’re really missing something. It’s not adequate to be like, “there were these injustices, we fixed them, go us,” because there are still these injustices, and what are you doing about them now?

    But what’s the central project of the synagogue? Do we go to be told how to be better liberal Democrats, or because we want to engage with Judaism? I think there’s a split here between the clergy and the congregants on this, with the clergy wanting to choose the former. I don’t love the degree to which Jews, I think, exaggerate our involvement in the civil rights movement and downplay the very significant tensions. But as not-totally-honest as I think it is, it’s not terrible for us as a movement. But pushing the better-liberal-Democrats project is. We have clergy who are a lot less certain about the existence of God, and a lot less willing to say “you should observe these rules” (for any set of Jewish rules!) than they are certain/willing about the liberal Democratic project. That’s not making a strong case for why anyone should keep engaging with Judaism.

  63. Marc Whipple says:

    Here’s a fairly specific personal question, but what the Hell.

    I’ve been un/underemployed for a while. I had pretty much come to the conclusion that I was going to have to go into business for myself and try to make a reasonable living that way when literally on the same day I asked for a lease draft on some office space I got two interview requests. We won’t go into the massive chain of magical thinking that engendered, but my question is this… anybody have any interesting insights on one position (starting a business) versus the other (accepting corporate employment?)

    There are a lot of really smart people here with a lot of esoteric and interesting fields of knowledge and points of view, so if anybody has any thoughts, or even any witty remarks, I’d be delighted to hear them.

    • Chalid says:

      Well, the only goal you mention is “make a reasonable living,” and obviously your chances at that are much higher with corporate positions.

      Of course you didn’t need us to tell you that. So what’s drawing you toward the the independent business?

      • Marc Whipple says:

        I’m not so sure your assertion (re: relative chances at making a reasonable living) is true, at least in my case. After all, I’ve been un/underemployed for quite some time and these are still just interviews. I’ve had interviews. I’m still un/underemployed. I am demographically not the most desirable candidate, although my skills are excellent, my experience is vast, and of course I’m very intelligent. 🙂 In any event there is no particular assurance that I will get a reasonable job offer before I run out of money. Or ever, frankly. So really this is one of the open questions, although since it is so fact-dependent I wouldn’t expect anybody (else) to be overly interested in it.

        What draws me toward working for myself is that assuming I get clients, I could make a lot more money with a lot less work (or a whole lot more money for the same amount of work) and I could specialize in areas that particularly interest me. I like being a corporate generalist (I’m easily bored) but of course there are things that interest me more than others. Also, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of a particular employer, as I have been my entire career. Generally, that’s worked out well (My first job lasted 11 years, my second job lasted 8) but one long bad spell could overcome all the theoretical advantage I accumulated, career-wise.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          What do you mean by not demographically desirable?

          • Marc Whipple says:

            I’m too old, I’m melanin and X-chromosome deficient, I didn’t go to a top-tier school, I never worked for a top-tier law firm.

        • brad says:

          My brother is a solo attorney. The upsides are more money than most associates, no boss, and flexible hours. The downsides are lots of marketing (though in my observation that’s increasingly required of firm lawyers too), income lumpiness and uncertainty, difficulty in scheduling vacations, and loneliness.

    • xtmar says:

      I think Rob Lyman, who comments at McMegan’s, might be able to give you some decent insight. While it doesn’t sound like his situation is exactly the same as yours, I think it’s similar enough to be worthwhile. I imagine you can either contact him via Disqus, LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rlyman), or perhaps otherwise.

    • Matt C says:

      I am happier as a freelancer than I was as an employee. It’s not night and day, there are downsides to being independent, and occasionally I think about hanging it up and getting a job. But most likely I’ll stay a freelancer as long as I can.

      If you think it’s possible to go independent, I’d recommend at least trying it. Most people who can make it work prefer it.

      Can you work out of your residence instead of renting an office? Maybe office space is a must for your field, but I would recommend keeping your overhead as low as you possibly can in the beginning. Depending, you might be able to start up your business at the same time you are looking for (or actually working at) a regular payroll job.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Thank you. Both of the things I can do that people will pay me reasonable amounts of money for require a private office. 🙂 My home office is not suitable and given that I have a special-needs child in the house having strangers in and out is a no-go.

        Interestingly, the place where the placement company I am working for has me located is one of those rent-an-office deals that has a quite reasonable virtual office package. I am strongly considering signing up for that. If for no other reason than to have a mailing address for my business card. 🙂

  64. Nero tol Scaeva says:

    Anyone have any thoughts on superforecasters?

    • TheNybbler says:

      If you get enough people making predictions, you’ll have a few who do much better than average by pure chance.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        The question is whether you can pick one of those people and give him some new data to see whether it was mere chance that he was right the first time. And as far as I know, you can.

        So these people must actually be better at predicting things.

    • Elissa says:

      Hi, I’m a superforecaster (top of my experimental condition in the GJP). No, I don’t have any elaborate theories about it. There’s a kind of amusing thing where people go “Foxes are better forecasters! This one principle explains everything! Let’s develop it into an elaborate theory with a tenuous relationship to any empirical data!”

      I’m sick and grumpy, don’t pay me no mind.

  65. Anonymous says:

    One reason that I don’t find utilitarianism as convincing as I used to is that I have come to think that, while utility is important, there are other factors that matter too. If your basis for morality is some distilled essence of what people all think is morally right, which seems a reasonable approach, I think utilitarianism misses the mark. I think that a large part of morality is utilitarianism, but that another large part comes down to something that you could perhaps call normative karma: people should get what they give. A bad person deserves to have bad things happen to them, a good person deserves to have good things happen to them. There are incentive-based arguments for why this should be the case but I don’t think that covers it nearly enough.

    For example: consider some bad event that could happen to a person. Losing your wallet is an example I’ve heard before from similar thought experiments, so I’ll borrow that. Say you’re choosing which world you prefer: one in which the kindest person in the world loses their wallet, and one in which Hitler loses his wallet AND also suffers some infinitesimally small inconvenience, such as dropping a cornflake on the counter while pouring his cereal and having to pick it up. Assume the negative utiles associated with the wallet loss are the same for the kindest person ever and for Hitler, and that no further implications will come of any of these events. Utilitarianism says that you should prefer the world in which the kindest person in the world suffers the misfortune instead of Hitler, in order to save Hitler from suffering 0.0001 negative utiles.

    I think that’s nuts, and I suspect almost everyone would agree. I don’t really see either how utilitarianism can be twisted to really support the popular view on this after all, or how a view as unanimous as I suspect this would be can be handwaved as a cognitive error.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      A somewhat related thought experiment:

      Imagine you have a convicted murderer who you know will never commit another crime. You can release him from prison (where he is miserable), and no-one will know (so there are no issues with deterrence). Should you do so (and increase maximum happiness) or not (because he deserves punishment)?

      • Nornagest says:

        This sounds to me like one of those thought experiments designed to give results which are only counterintuitive because what we actually do in real life is driven mostly by second-order effects that the experiment defines away. Compare the one about the rural surgeon murdering people for their organs.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Isn’t that every thought experiment? (Probably not.) The point is to see if you actually have a moral intuition that certain people deserve punishment, and if you can defend that intuition.

          • Nornagest says:

            Nah. There are also thought experiments which give counterintuitive results because our intuition generalizes too much (the trolley problem), ones that give counterintuitive results because we’re bad at scale or causality or other aspects of decision theory (Sleeping Beauty, Newcomb, a lot of the other ones popular on LW), ones that give counterintuitive results because of vague language (too many to list), and a few that actually illustrate weird premises in the theory (the utility monster).

        • Anonymous says:

          @Nornagest

          Is that directed at sweeneyrod’s thought experiment, or mine?

          I have seen lots of thought experiment challenges to utilitarianism before, but not one that does so from a perspective of good or bad people deserving different utilities. Though I haven’t been looking particularly hard so maybe this is very old hat.

          Do you think the good person should be made to suffer rather than Hitler, in order to spare Hitler that negative picoutile?

          • Nornagest says:

            Sweeneyrod’s. I haven’t thought about yours in detail, but offhand I’m not totally comfortable with treating just deserts as ethically fundamental — we can allow or even encourage (some level of) retribution for game-theoretical reasons and still be compatible with utilitarianism.

        • synthetica2 says:

          Hmm, I disagree. The qualifications he puts on the question reduce it to “do murderers deserve to suffer?” which is something a lot of people would say yes to.

      • Anonymous says:

        I’ve heard that one before, but I think it’s less interesting to compare two worlds which are identical other than one having a bad person suffering more, as opposed to comparing two worlds, one in which a good person suffers, one in which a bad person suffers but a minuscule amount more.

        I think it is easier to come down on the utilitarian side in the thought experiment you offered. Much harder, I think, to honestly say that you think a good person should suffer in place of Hitler, in order to spare Hitler incurring a single extra negative picoutile.

        • Jiro says:

          Unless you believe in administering infinite suffering to Hitler (which is a plausible belief, but nowhere near universal), there is some point at which you can make Hitler suffer so much that he has suffered enough, and should not suffer more. It then follows that it is good that another person should suffer by a lesser amount to prevent Hitler from suffering.

          Of course, if you are not a utilitarian, you can make a distinction between intentionally inflicting suffering and not alleviating suffering, even when the sum is the same. Then you don’t get to torture Hitler, but you still have no need to prevent torture to Hitler that comes from some other source.

      • Jiro says:

        In order to use prison sentences to deter murderers, you have to precommit to apply the prison sentence. The answer would then be “I will put the murderer in jail because I have precommitted to do so, regardless of whether this specific instance of jail deters anyone”.

        Saying that murderers “deserve punishment” is just how humans go around precommitting.

      • JBeshir says:

        I would say yes.

        It gets difficult for me because my default thought is that they’ve already been in prison for a long time (because that’s when these kind of parole questions get raised in real life), so I need to stick on “assume they just arrived” to make it least convenient scenario.

        Then I feel they shouldn’t be released, but some of that intuition is grounded in deterrence when I query it, and when I define away deterrence I mostly just get a “outside of supported parameters/that doesn’t make sense” sense from my moral intuition, and my default when my moral intuition does that is to go with naive utilitarianism.

        I did use to read the blog of this convicted murderer back when they were in prison (they posted to it via mail to a friend outside), although they’re somewhat of an unusual case.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      I have posted about this several times here in the past, most recently in “Guns and States”. (I’m having a hard time finding my earlier comments on it.)

      Everyone’s “utilons” count the same; it’s only that vicious murderers are going to cause so many more nega-utilons to exist, and thus the expected value of their lives (in terms of future utilons produced) is far less than the expected value of an innocent mother of two children.

      On the other hand, suppose that there are “high-quality” people who have high-quality utilons and “low-quality” people who have low-quality utilons (I don’t actually think it’s binary, but this is a simplification). And suppose a low-quality utilon is worth half that of a high-quality utilon, and that a vicious murderer is an example of a low-quality person. Our math then changes from the paragraph above, since murderers not only cause high-quality nega-utilons to exist; but their own utilons are merely low quality. So the degree of punishment it is efficient to inflict goes up.

      I don’t think this kind of view is so crazy. Take Hitler. In many people’s minds, he was such a low-quality person that his positive utilons count negative. We don’t say that, yes, it’s very bad he killed six million Jews but at least it’s mitigated a tiny bit by the fact that he got to enjoy the loot he stole from them. The pleasure he got from that loot “counts negative”; it’s worse that he enjoyed it than if he didn’t.

      And this is distinct from saying that other people’s knowledge that Hitler enjoyed that loot caused them grief, which is negative. That’s what utilitarianism would say. Maybe that is an additional negative, but the point is that Hitler’s pleasure was not a positive.

      Utilitarianism—and its related theory of punishment based on deterrence—and the theory of “just deserts”—and its related theory of punishment based on retribution—are fundamentally incompatible. Utilitarianism wants everyone to be happy and values each person’s happiness equally. “Just deserts” wants good people to be happy and bad people to be miserable.

      The theory of deterrence says that it’s a regrettable necessity that we have to punish criminals and deprive them of utility in order to stop them from causing a greater utility loss to others. The theory of retribution says that punishing criminals is good in itself, and we should do it even if it doesn’t deter anyone.

      I think that’s nuts, and I suspect almost everyone would agree. I don’t really see either how utilitarianism can be twisted to really support the popular view on this after all, or how a view as unanimous as I suspect this would be can be handwaved as a cognitive error.

      Well, this is a fundamental question right from the start. Is utilitarianism supposed to describe what people actually do value? Well, it doesn’t. The utilitarians can pack up and go home, in that case. (Here’s a great paper of psychological research on the subject of punishment.)

      Or is it supposed to tell us what we should value? In that case, it’s hard to see what is supposed to motivate it.

      ***

      Also, as a methodological point, I am completely opposed to the type of moral theorizing which seeks to “induce” moral principles by generalizing from specific examples that everyone “knows” are wrong. Like, “Everyone knows murder, theft, rape, arson, plagiarism, adultery, and (in the 1800s) sodomy, masturbation, and polygamy are wrong. What do they all have in common that could explain this?”

      Unless people can identify the principle under which murder is wrong, they don’t know that it is wrong. They have an opinion, not knowledge. Moral facts are judgments, not percepts. You don’t “see” that murder is wrong the way you can see that rocks fall to earth even if you don’t know about gravity.

      You have to identify the principles first and then move to the specific cases. It’s completely invalid to do it the other way around. The applications have to be less obvious than the principles themselves. For instance, in mathematics, you don’t say, “The angle sum of a triangle is 180°. What mathematical laws would explain this observation?” You can only know that the angle sum of a triangle is 180° on the basis of knowing the laws of mathematics. If you didn’t know those, you couldn’t know that the angle sum of a triangle is necessarily 180°.

      In the same way, if you don’t know the moral principles first, you cannot claim to know that murder is wrong. You can have the opinion that it is wrong because your mother told you so, in the same way that you can have the opinion that the angle sum of a triangle is 180° because your math teacher told you so. But you don’t know.

      • Anonymous says:

        I don’t agree with the last part of your post. Hypotheses are developed to explain observations. You start with some data, work out a theory based on it, and then test that theory against new data. Noticing something that looks like a pattern, and wondering if there’s any underlying reason for it, is exactly the process by which people decide what theories are worth creating in the first place.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Well, yes, that’s how induction from sense-experience to general principles occurs. But “murder is wrong” is not a sensory observation. It is a particular application of your general theory of whatever makes something “wrong”.

          As an analogy, “This bowling ball falls at 9.8 m/s^2” is an observation. “This bowling ball is under the influence of the force of gravity” is an application of your general theory of gravity.

          The chain of justification goes from more certain to less certain. If you want to justify a claim to me which I find uncertain, you have to show that it is implied by something that is more certain. And to justify that, you have to appeal to something that is more certain still. Eventually, you reach basic facts that are the most certain, that are self-evident and not justified by appealing to anything else.

          If you can’t follow the chain of justification of something to first principles like this, you don’t have knowledge of it. You have an opinion. It may be a true opinion, but you wouldn’t have any way to know.

          Now, the most foundational principle of inductive sciences like physics or psychology is the veridicality of the senses. You can be wrong in your interpretation of what sensory data means. For instance, take optical illusions like lines of the same length that look as if they have different lengths. You can mistakenly interpret that as showing that one line actually is longer. But you can’t be wrong about the fact that one line really does appear longer to you: that’s a fact in need of an explanation, which psychology can provide. And it’s an explanation consistent with the fact you also observe, that each line reads the same when you put a ruler to it.

          So if you can reduce anything back to a sensory observation (and you do this in a logically correct way), you have reduced it to something which is self-evident and maximally certain. That’s why physics moves from observations to general theories: the observations are most certain, and the theories are inductively generated from the observations and less certain. You can’t disprove a (correctly interpreted) observation by appealing to a theory; it’s the other way around. You refute a theory by appealing to an observation that conflicts with it.

          I think ethics is also based on observations, of a very broad and general sort. But, as I said above, premises like “murder is wrong” are not observations. You don’t observe that murder is wrong. You define the term “wrong” as referring to some kind of observations of descriptive facts. Then you apply the theory to specific cases.

          It’s just like with gravity. You don’t observe one instance of objects obeying gravity, then another, then another, and so on until you conclude that everything must obey the law of gravity. The law of gravity is an abstraction; you can’t observe it. You observe one instance of objects moving in a certain way, then another, then another, and so on until you decide to give a name to the orderly pattern of motion. You define the term “gravity” as referring to this pattern. And once you have it, you can relate it to other concepts you develop in a similar way, such as “mass”. But it’s only after you have defined gravity and know what the term means that you can meaningfully say (and know) that bowling balls obey the law of gravity.

          There are three possibilities for the grounding of ethics. First, that ethics is generalized from the infallible deliverances of a special “moral sense”. But there is no such thing. Second, that there is no grounding: ethics is nonsense/meaningless/completely false. I think that applies to many theories of ethics, but not all of them. Third, that ethics is ultimately defined in terms of non-ethical facts. That is, “ought” is not something fundamentally opposed to “is”; “ought” is only a specific subtype of “is”.

          I am in favor of the third view. But if the third view is true, then that supports what I said above: statements like “murder is wrong” are not observations but specific conclusions of general principles. And therefore, we don’t find out what “wrong” means by looking for everything that is “wrong”. Until we know what “wrong” means, we don’t know what to look for. That might give you a theory of what people call “wrong” (unless, as is actually the case, they don’t use the term in any consistent way). But it won’t tell you what actually is wrong, any more than looking at what people say “has elan vital” tells you what actually does have elan vital (or whether anything does).

          • Bugmaster says:

            I think you are making things needlessly complicated, possibly because you are confused by the two separate meanings of the statement, “murder is wrong”:

            1). “Whenever I think of murdering some arbitrary person, I experience a very strong negative emotional reaction; most people experience the same thing”.

            2). “If you want to build a large stable society, which is composed of humans, then prohibiting murder makes a lot of sense”.

            The first statement is an observation, and the second statement is a mix between an observation (since we can observe what happens when the prohibition on murder is relaxed) and a conclusion (which you can derive from other observations, e.g. “humans are fragile and can be easily killed”).

            In this format, the statements may look independent, but actually they’re not. The reason you experience these strong negative emotions when you contemplate wanton murder is because you are a human, who evolved in some very specific ways; one of them being the fact that humans are social creatures. Society is our entire schtick, kind of like what flight is to birds. Thus, it makes sense that, being a social animal, you would be conditioned (genetically, and then socially on top of that) to avoid participating in the kinds of behaviours that would destabilize the very society that you need in order to survive.

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:
            There’s a fourth possibility, a relative of your first one: a kind of intuitionistic particularlism that claims there’s nothing to generalize – that certain things are right or wrong but not because of any general principle, as if some actions/outcomes/attitudes/etc were tagged with non-natural morality-determining XML tags.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Whenever I think of murdering some arbitrary reaction, I experience a very strong negative emotional reaction; most people experience the same thing”.

            I don’t think most people have a very strong negative emotional reaction to murdering Hitler.

            2). “If you want to build a large stable society, which is composed of humans, then prohibiting murder makes a lot of sense”.

            Murder by definition is always prohibited. Murder is ‘unlawful killing’.

            “Thus, it makes sense that, being a social animal, you would be conditioned (genetically, and then socially on top of that) to avoid participating in the kinds of behaviours that would destabilize the very society that you need in order to survive.”

            I don’t think hunter gather groups support that contention; don’t they have high murder rates and not kill about killings of people outside the group?

          • blacktrance says:

            Bugmaster:
            One of the problems with that approach is that it seems meaningful to ask a question like “Whenever I think of doing X, I feel a strong negative emotional reaction, but is X wrong?” in a way that doesn’t appeal to your proposed “stable society” sense of wrong. I might be wondering if my negative reaction to X is justified, but that implies that I think there’s some further fact that could justify it. (I could be mistaken about whether there’s any such fact, but that doesn’t change the meaning of my question.) For instance, suppose I have a strong disgust reaction to eating broccoli – it would be meaningful for me to ask if eating broccoli is wrong even if I know that it doesn’t have much of an effect on the stability of society.
            It’s similarly meaningful to ask whether a stable society is good. So whatever “X is wrong” or “X is good” mean, it’s not either of those.

            Also, the first meaning suggests that whatever people feel is automatically true, which most people wouldn’t agree with.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Samuel Skinner:

            I don’t think most people have a very strong negative emotional reaction to murdering Hitler.

            That’s why I said “some arbitrary person”, instead of “Hitler”.

            EDIT: Ok, I meant to say “some arbitrary person”, what I actually said was a typo, sorry about that.

            Murder by definition is always prohibited. Murder is ‘unlawful killing’.

            Good point, I should have said something like “wanton killing” instead, but it looks like you got the gist of what I meant.

            I don’t think hunter gather groups support that contention; don’t they have high murder rates and not kill about killings of people outside the group?

            Outside the group, yeah. Inside the group, not so much. The big difference between them and us is, IMO, that our own groups are much larger, due to advances in technology over time.

            On the one hand, advanced technology enables larger groups to exist due to advances in communication, administration, and plain old resource exploitation. On the other hand, advanced technology requires larger groups, as the tasks that must be performed by group become increasingly specialized, far beyound the skills of any given human to accomplish all at once.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Bugmaster:

            1). “Whenever I think of murdering some arbitrary reaction, I experience a very strong negative emotional reaction; most people experience the same thing”.

            2). “If you want to build a large stable society, which is composed of humans, then prohibiting murder makes a lot of sense”.

            The first statement is an observation, and the second statement is a mix between an observation (since we can observe what happens when the prohibition on murder is relaxed) and a conclusion (which you can derive from other observations, e.g. “humans are fragile and can be easily killed”).

            It is not clear that people mean either of those things when they say that murder is wrong. Nor is it clear that people, in general, have any good idea of what they mean when they say that murder is wrong.

            It’s not what I mean when I say murder is wrong: I mean that murder is not conducive to one’s long-range happiness.

            It’s not what a divine command theorist means when he says murder is wrong: he means that murder is prohibited by God.

            It’s not what a moral intuitionist like Michael Huemer means when he says murder is wrong: he means that there are actually special moral properties which we are aware of through “pure reason”, and that this awareness shows that murder inherently has the property of “wrongness”.

            It’s not what the average person on the street means when he says murder is wrong: he’s not really sure what he means.

            You are presenting one theory of ethics—the collectivist theory that ethics describes a system of rules that are “good for society”—and you using evolutionary-psychological arguments and appealing to socio-genetic determinism to explain why people are emotionally motivated to follow these rules.

            But that’s hardly the only theory, let alone the theory that everyone “really means” to endorse. For instance, the typical Greek view was that ethics was the science for telling people how to act in accordance with their own natural good. Whether they should act in a way that is “good for society” is from that perspective a point to be argued for, not to be built into the definition of ethics. The Sophists, for example, didn’t think there was any good reason to.

            @ blacktrance:

            There’s a fourth possibility, a relative of your first one: a kind of intuitionistic particularlism that claims there’s nothing to generalize – that certain things are right or wrong but not because of any general principle, as if some actions/outcomes/attitudes/etc were tagged with non-natural morality-determining XML tags.

            I would consider this a subtype of the first type: the moral sense / moral intuition type. I mean, it’s just a spectrum between “there is only one moral principle which explains every moral intuition” and “each intuition is its own principle and can’t be reduced to anything simpler”.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @blacktrance:
            I think the broccoli disgust reaction feels different from a moral wrongness reaction, but maybe that’s just me.

            That said, both of my statements #1 and #2 were meant to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Thus:

            It’s similarly meaningful to ask whether a stable society is good. So whatever “X is wrong” or “X is good” mean, it’s not either of those.

            Regardless of whether you think a stable society is “good” or not, the reality is that all the humans who thought that wanton killing was fine and dandy have died out. They could not compete with humans who felt that stable societies were the better choice. You are descended from generations upon generations of the winners, so you can’t help but feel the emotions that you do feel.

            That’s no random accident of history, either; at least, not entirely. Given the laws of nature that underpin our world; and the kinds of conditions that life evolved in; it is inevitable that weak, squishy beings such as us humans (also, ants) could thrive only by leveraging their social skills.

            Unlike ants, though, we have abstract thinking skills on top of that, which means that we can self-modify much faster than is possibly though mere evolution. We don’t need to wait until we evolve stronger limbs; instead we can pick up a stick and use it as a lever, and then teach everyone else to do the same. That’s a very powerful advantage, which leads inevitably to societies built upon some basic principles such as “try to avoid killing people of your tribe if at all possible”.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Vox Imperatoris:

            As I said above, my statements were descriptive, not prescriptive. Regardless of what people think they mean when they say “murder is wrong”, the facts are that a). they feel, on a deeply emotional level, that murder is wrong (well, most people do, anyway); and b). there are clear evolutionary advantages to prohibit wanton killing of this type. Humans are not the only social animals in nature, either; we are arguably the most successful ones, but there are lots of others. So, my argument is not that “murder is objectively wrong because of X”, but rather, “the prohibition against murder is one of the reasons we humans exist at all, in our present form”.

            By analogy, water flows downhill not because it’s convenient for someone, or because there’s some specific rule that says “water must flow downhill”, or because someone sat down at some point and worked out which way is best for water to flow. Instead, water flows downhill because, given the basic laws of physics, there’s nowhere else for it to flow.

          • “But “murder is wrong” is not a sensory observation. It is a particular application of your general theory of whatever makes something “wrong”.”

            That’s one view. Another is that our moral perceptions (intuitions), like our physical perceptions, are the data from which we deduce the general theory. We consider particular acts and perceive them as right or wrong, then look for the pattern.

            Huemer has a book in which he defends that approach to morality.

            The best argument for it is that, if you look at judgements of well specified cases rather than at general rules, people mostly agree–as in the analogous physical case. That’s part of the reason why people with different political views find it hard to agree on the details of the hypotheticals they are evaluating.

            The strongest counter argument is that the correlation is due to evolutionary biology not the existence of some moral reality. Huemer thinks he has an adequate rebuttal to that but I’m not sure I agree. Unfortunately, that argument leaves you with the “morality is an illusion” conclusion, which I’m not happy with.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            It’s similarly meaningful to ask whether a stable society is good. So whatever “X is wrong” or “X is good” mean, it’s not either of those.

            This argument (G.E. Moore’s “open question argument”) is not that good of an argument. The argument begs the question in favor of the view that “good” is a basic and undefinable concept, like “existence” (try to define that without giving a synonym).

            But actually, the same observations Moore makes are compatible with “good” just being a very vague concept, like “cool” or “funky”. There simply isn’t one clear thing that everyone means by “funky”. If someone tries to narrow it down to one thing, such as (from the dictionary) “(of music) having or using a strong dance rhythm”, it will still seem like an “open question” whether having a strong dance rhythm really makes a song funky. This doesn’t mean that we simply have to have an intuitive awareness of the essence of funk. Obviously, there isn’t one.

            On the other hand, I guess it’s a perfectly good argument against the view that everyone “really means” one thing by good. But decent reductionist theories of the good (i.e. theories that explain the evaluative as a species of the descriptive) don’t do this. They claim to revise the concept and narrow it down, not just tell people what they allegedly meant all along but didn’t realize.

            @ Bugmaster:

            You seem to be conflating the task of explaining why it is beneficial for people to use the concept of morality, with explaining what the concept of morality actually refers to. Your answer to the second may well be: it doesn’t refer to anything objective; it’s variously either meaningless, false, or just a reflection of arbitrary personal opinions. But that’s a different sort of answer from explaining why it is that tribes found it useful to kick “immoral” people out.

            As I said above, my statements were descriptive, not prescriptive. Regardless of what people think they mean when they say “murder is wrong”, the facts are that a). they feel, on a deeply emotional level, that murder is wrong (well, most people do, anyway); and b). there are clear evolutionary advantages to prohibit wanton killing of this type. Humans are not the only social animals in nature, either; we are arguably the most successful ones, but there are lots of others. So, my argument is not that “murder is objectively wrong because of X”, but rather, “the prohibition against murder is one of the reasons we humans exist at all, in our present form”.

            I think this illustrates what I said above. When you say you are being “descriptive”, you are explaining why moral concepts exist. But the “prescriptive” task of ethics is to explain what moral concepts mean and ask whether they objectively correspond to the facts. “They’re hopelessly confused and don’t correspond to anything” is certainly an answer to the second many have defended.

            In the same way, psychology can explain why astrology exists. But the psychology of astrology is not the same as the study of the actual content of astrology itself. Astrology has a lot of content; it’s not meaningless: it’s interpretable, and it does make real claims occasionally. It’s just that most of the claims and all of the theories they are based on are false.

            I’m not actually suggesting that ethics is in the same category as astrology. (Though I guess you could say that many theories of ethics stand in the relation that astrology stands to astronomy and psychology.) I’m saying that even if you think it is, the investigation of ethics is separate from the investigation of the evolutionary origin of the concept of ethics.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            That’s one view. Another is that our moral perceptions (intuitions), like our physical perceptions, are the data from which we deduce the general theory. We consider particular acts and perceive them as right or wrong, then look for the pattern.

            Right, I alluded to this view but didn’t stress it. And I mentioned Huemer in a later comment, as an example of the fact that not everyone agrees (variously) with either me or Bugmaster about the meaning of the term “wrong”.

            The best argument for it is that, if you look at judgements of well specified cases rather than at general rules, people mostly agree–as in the analogous physical case. That’s part of the reason why people with different political views find it hard to agree on the details of the hypotheticals they are evaluating.

            I just don’t find this convincing at all, mainly because I don’t buy Huemer’s mechanism for how it works—that we have some faculty which delivers us a priori knowledge. And as you say, there are very good alternative explanations of why people agree on specific judgments.

            There’s also his methodology for defending his position: the “principle of phenomenal conservatism” that we are prima facie justified in believing that things are the way they seem, unless we have some reason to doubt it. But as an introspective matter, it really, sincerely does not appear or seem or feel to me that ethical judgments are irreducible intuitive revelations of “pure reason”.

            Richard Joyce sets out this argument very well in his response to Huemer from the position of ethical nihilism, “The Skeptick’s Tale”. Now, I don’t really consider myself an ethical nihilist in general, but I am a nihilist about the kind of (non-agent-relative, categorical) ethical principles Huemer thinks exist. And in any case, I think Joyce’s argument is sound.

            The strongest counter argument is that the correlation is due to evolutionary biology not the existence of some moral reality. Huemer thinks he has an adequate rebuttal to that but I’m not sure I agree. Unfortunately, that argument leaves you with the “morality is an illusion” conclusion, which I’m not happy with.

            You don’t even have to take the determinist line or the “morality is an illusion” line to think that people will tend to agree because of ideological selection effects.

            For instance, any society which determined that sex is always immoral and must be prohibited wouldn’t be very large or last very long (the Shakers are, of course, the natural example, or consider the very real environmentalist Volunary Human Extinction Movement which is not anti-sex but anti-natalist). Nothing about that proves that this is not the objectively right position after all, and you are free to come to the conclusion yourself. Yet it explains why people can all be wrong yet still largely agree: any sufficiently large divergences from the kind of morality necessary for the continuance of human life on Earth will not be well-represented.

            Or, say that the extreme version of “give me liberty or give me death” is correct, and that it’s better to die than to live as a slave. Yet we see that millions of people have chosen to live as slaves. This is nevertheless exactly what we’d expect from a situation where you have two types of people: the immoral and the dead. The dead don’t raise up children and teach them what to value. (The exact same thing applies to “better dead than red”.)

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:
            Revisionism about “good” provides a way out if other avenues fail, but I’m not entirely convinced that it’s necessary. Moore may have intended the Open Question Argument to show that “good” is basic and undefinable, but I don’t think it proves that much. It’s successful against formulations such as identifying goodness with pleasure (“X is pleasurable, but is X good?” is meaningful), but for the Open Question Argument to really succeed, there has to be no (natural) property P for which the statement “X has P, but is X good?” is closed. And I think there is such a property: being what a “better” (e.g. fully informed, rational, strong-willed, etc) version of yourself would be motivated to do in the particular situation. A statement like “X is what you’d will yourself to do if you understood everything relevant to the situation, but is X good?” really does seem meaningless.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            A statement like “X is what you’d will yourself to do if you understood everything relevant to the situation, but is X good?” really does seem meaningless.

            Does it?

            A “paperclip maximizer”, if it understood everything relevant to the situation, would destroy humanity and make paperclips. But is that good?

            Maybe you or I would say it’s good from the perspective of a paperclip maximizer, but a very large number of people would say, no, killing billions of people to make paperclips is intrinsically wrong.

          • blacktrance says:

            The rejection of the orthogonality thesis is common among moral realists, so they’d say that a paperclip maximizer lacks moral knowledge and is thus not fully informed.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            The rejection of the orthogonality thesis is common among moral realists, so they’d say that a paperclip maximizer lacks moral knowledge and is thus not fully informed.

            Fair enough. To be honest, I didn’t consider the fact that the intrinsic moral knowledge is knowledge “relevant to the situation”.

            But this doesn’t really solve the problem. It just moves it around.

            What if the paperclip maximizer has perfectly formed “moral sense organs” and can perceive moral truths just as well as any human being? It would perceive them, but it just wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t be motivated by those things.

            Now, one response is that moral knowledge is necessarily motivating. But is it, even in more real-world situations? Take the case of psychopaths (as conceived in the popular understanding). They are considered to “know right from wrong”. That’s why we blame them for what they do. They know, but they are not motivated by what they know.

            Therefore, there exist or could exist some beings who know everything relevant about the situation, including its moral features, but who take some actions that people do not regard as “good”. It thus is an “open question” whether what you would do if you knew everything relevant to the situation is “good”.

          • blacktrance says:

            One approach is that psychopaths really don’t know right from wrong, and if they did, they wouldn’t act the way they do. When they talk about something being wrong, they don’t mean the same thing that the rest of us do (i.e. something necessarily involving what one shouldn’t do), but something like “wrong according to conventional morality” or “wrong according to [ethical theory]”. They may be able to accurately identify things that others would consider right or wrong, but they themselves don’t believe them to be such. And therefore their understanding is held to be incomplete, because if they really understood them, they’d know that there’s a good reason for acting in accordance with them. According to this view, psychopaths are like anthropologists who are able to identify tribal taboos but don’t believe in them themselves.

            In support of this view, I expect that when presented with the idea of a paperclip maximizer, the typical moralist would be inclined to say that it doesn’t really understand morality. This average moralist may certainly be wrong, but it is this kind of belief that generates typical moral language.

          • Anonymous says:

            @David Friedman

            I don’t see why morality having developed through evolution makes it an illusion. We have opposable thumbs because of evolution. Does that make opposable thumbs an illusion?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            That just seems like begging the question. “We know that the good is thus-and-so because everyone who understands it acts upon it. How do you know psychopaths and paperclip maximizers don’t really know the nature of the good? Because if they understood it, they would act upon it!”

            I guess I grant that if you knew separately as a revelation of “pure reason” that moral truths were inherently motivating, you’d be justified in saying that. But I haven’t had the revelation.

            @ Anonymous:

            Compare it to the issue of theology.

            Evolution explains why people believe in God, despite the fact that God does not exist. It is useful for societies to encourage belief in God, for reasons entirely separate from whether God does in fact exist.

            It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how evolution could encourage people to believe in objective morality, even if objective morality does not exist. For exactly the same kinds of reasons.

            The concept of God exists and is perfectly well explained by evolution. But God and the concept of God are not the same thing. Maybe it’s the case that the concept of morality exists, but morality itself does not.

            And this is in addition to the arguments that determinism undermines all knowledge. Evolution does not, of course, imply determinism, but many people take evolutionary psychology and run with it as a materialistic, deterministic process to explain all belief systems. How does determinism undermine knowledge? In order to know something, you have to believe it because it is true. But if physical determinism is true, you never believe anything because it is true. You believe it because of the physical causes that happened to impinge on your brain. And those could just as well cause you to believe something false; you wouldn’t know the difference.

            It doesn’t help matters if you say, “Sure, we can never be absolutely certain of what is true. But we can believe what is justified. For instance, if all the facts happen to point to an innocent suspect, you should still believe he’s guilty because that is what’s justified to believe.” This just moves everything to saying: you need to believe things because they are justified. But if determinism is true, you never believe anything because it is justified. You believe it because of the physical causes that happen to impinge on your brain, which could just as well cause you to believe something unjustified; you wouldn’t know the difference.

            Take cognitive biases. If you’re not the one ultimately in control over whether you’re thinking in a biased way, how do know it didn’t happen to you? It happens to other people. It could happen to you, and if it did, it would seem to you just like you were thinking in an unbiased way.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Vox Imperatoris:

            You seem to be conflating the task of explaining why it is beneficial for people to use the concept of morality, with explaining what the concept of morality actually refers to. Your answer to the second may well be: it doesn’t refer to anything objective; it’s variously either meaningless, false, or just a reflection of arbitrary personal opinions.

            Wait a minute, these are not the only options !

            The answer to the question, “why does water flow downhill” is neither meaningless nor entirely arbitrary. Instead, it’s a consequence of physical laws in our Universe, which are pretty much immutable, and are something we all have deal with whether we want to or not. We may not have a perfect understanding of these laws, but that doesn’t prevent us from modeling them with theories of gravity, electromagnetism, etc.

            Morality is similar to these. Given the physical laws of our Universe, and given that we squishy bipeds evolved in a certain way, there are certain specific patterns of behavior we must adopt (and/or avoid) in order to survive and thrive. If you’re asking, “yes, but why should I want to survive and thrive, maybe I want to usher in a new era of darkness and despair instead”, then the answer is, “Because most of us evolved from generations of ancestors who wanted to survive, while all others got eaten, so we can’t help but want to survive, too; so take your darkness somewhere else”.

            That is an objective fact, in the sense that it’s a consequence of our physical laws; but it’s also kind of arbitrary, since there’s no Grand Ultimate Cosmic Reason for why these laws should be the way they are. For example, if we humans were totally indestructible, then the prohibition on wanton killing would make no sense.

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:

            if physical determinism is true, you never believe anything because it is true. You believe it because of the physical causes that happened to impinge on your brain.

            The way in which those physical causes affect my brain are usually truth-tracking. For instance, when I see something with my eye, light reflects off of or is emitted by an object, goes into my eye, is processed by neurons, and received by me as sense-data. This is a physical cause, but it leads to me having true beliefs about the world. Of course, physical causes can also cause me to have false beliefs, such as if someone “hacked” my brain to implant false beliefs into it, but most beliefs aren’t caused by anything remotely like that. Most physical causes affect my brain in a truth-tracking way – biases are notable in part because they’re a deviation from this norm.

          • Loyle says:

            @Samuel Skinner

            “I don’t think most people have a very strong negative emotional reaction to murdering Hitler.”

            Hatred is a very strong negative emotional reaction for me.
            If I’m thinking of, or rather, considering murdering Hitler, it is more likely than not done under the influence of hate.
            Fortunately for me, I’m not in a situation where I’d likely have the opportunity to murder Hitler. And were I given the opportunity, there are billions of enthusiastic persons willing to and better equipped to do so that I may point to. So I don’t need to entertain such thoughts.

            Then again, I’m very much not “most people” so I guess your point still stands.

          • @Anonymous:

            If morality means “I feel that X is wrong” then the fact that I feel that way because that way of feeling resulted in reproductive success in the environment of my ancestors doesn’t make my feeling that way an illusion.

            But if morality means “X is wrong, and I know that because I feel it is wrong,” then an explanation of my feeling that doesn’t depend on X actually being wrong means that my moral feelings are an illusion, a false perception of a (possibly nonexistent) moral reality.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            The way in which those physical causes affect my brain are usually truth-tracking.

            How do you know this? If you want to say that a system is “truth-tracking”, you have to know what is true in order to compare it against the output of the system.

            You can’t say: the system is truth-tracking. I know this because of what I found out by using the system.

            Of course, physical causes can also cause me to have false beliefs, such as if someone “hacked” my brain to implant false beliefs into it, but most beliefs aren’t caused by anything remotely like that. Most physical causes affect my brain in a truth-tracking way – biases are notable in part because they’re a deviation from this norm.

            Evolution (the argument goes) “hacked” your brain to cause it to systematically produce false beliefs. Why? Because they’re more useful than true beliefs for propagating your genes.

            For example, to hear some people tell it, your “ego” is an illusion. You think that there is some kind of enduring self which will experience in the future pleasures that you pay for now. This is very useful. For instance, why would you go hunt a mammoth now when you won’t get to eat it for a few hours? But actually, there is no such ego.

            Or at least, you could say this if you had any objective warrant to believe in evolution—which, under determinism, you don’t.

            ***

            To elaborate on the first point, I think Leonard Peikoff’s “UNIVAC” example is helpful.

            Imagine that you are locked in a room with an old-style UNIVAC-type computer. You have no access to the outside world except through the output of this computer. All it does is add up numbers, say, the total world production of wheat.

            You know that there is a big red switch inside this computer. If the switch is in the “up” position, the addition is completely accurate. Given correct inputs, the result will be correct. But if the switch is in the “down” position, there are random errors. Maybe the addition is accurate, but more often it isn’t, either in subtle ways or in very obvious ways.

            If you can open up the computer and flip the switch up, you can rationally trust the computer as a means of processing information. You can say: on the assumption that inputs being fed into this computer are correct, I know what the world’s wheat production is.

            But if the computer is locked and you can neither observe nor control the switch, you cannot rationally trust a single thing that comes out of it. You have no independent access to what the world’s wheat production is; you’re locked in the room. Not being able to influence the switch, the computer is totally useless to you.

            This is, of course, a metaphor. The computer represents your rational faculty. The switch represents your mental “focus”. You know that human mental processes are fallible. If you don’t control whether you are reasoning correctly or not, you could not only be wrong about a few things here and there; you could be wrong about everything. And many people are, or at least seem to you to be, so this is not an idle possibility.

            The problem is not that you can’t be “absolutely certain of everything”. The problem is that you can’t have the tiniest probability of belief in anything. What does it mean to say that a belief is probable? It means there is some evidence for and some against. That evidence itself is either certain or also probable. If it’s probable, it means there must be some evidence for and some against, and so on. Eventually, you’ve either got to get to something that’s certain, or you have to admit that the whole chain in fact ends in no evidence at all.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Bugmaster:

            Wait a minute, these are not the only options !

            Of course they’re not the only options! I never said they were.

            Morality is similar to these. Given the physical laws of our Universe, and given that we squishy bipeds evolved in a certain way, there are certain specific patterns of behavior we must adopt (and/or avoid) in order to survive and thrive. If you’re asking, “yes, but why should I want to survive and thrive, maybe I want to usher in a new era of darkness and despair instead”, then the answer is, “Because most of us evolved from generations of ancestors who wanted to survive, while all others got eaten, so we can’t help but want to survive, too; so take your darkness somewhere else”.

            Yes, the ethical theory I believe in is not too different from this.

            What ultimately makes something good for an individual is not any kind of outside sanction, but his own choice, his own valuing of it. The choice to live and to pursue happiness is primary, and ethical principles are the hypothetical imperatives (if…then) that follow from that. We need ethical principles because the achievement of long and happy life is not automatic but requires a way to make complex, long-term decisions. On the other hand, the achievement of misery and death will happen without any specific course of action.

            The task of ethics is to defend this view, particularly as opposed to other conceptions of what makes something valuable or good.

            However, my criticism is that the evolutionary story does not answer those kinds of questions. It is tangential to them. As I explained above, the fact that we evolved to value something does not in itself show that it is valuable. There are arguments out there that there are natural duties we must follow whether we like it or not, or that ethics is meaningless, or that it’s whatever God says it is, and so on. And these have to be responded to.

            Also, your formulation equivocates between what is necessary to the “surviving and thriving” of society and what is necessary to the “surviving and thriving” of the individual. It may be true that individuals each have incentives for acting in ways that are good for society as a whole, but you have to show this.

            Utilitarianism, in contrast, says that each person should act to maximize aggregate utility. But why not say that each person ought to maximize his own utility? There is a very large space in between: “acting to maximize your individual utility is exactly the same as acting to maximize total utility” (which is what J.S. Mill said, very dubiously) and “if each person acts to maximize his own utility, this will result in minimal total utility” (which is what most people have in mind when they picture an egoistic “war of all against all”).

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:
            If the truth is consistently outside my perception, it’s questionable whether it’s meaningful to talk about it at all. EY said it well in “The Simple Truth”:

            “Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”

            So when I say that my beliefs are truth-tracking, I mean that they’re generally in accord with my observations, which in turn are consistent with each other. How do I know that my observations have any relation to the real world? They act as if they were caused by something consistent – if I observe how a ball falls after dropping it nine times, I don’t observe it floating on the tenth. Of course, my observations could all be caused by a deceptive demon, but I have no reason to believe that one exists.

            Certainly, people may have some false beliefs because of evolution. But how do they discover that these beliefs are false? By using more reliable faculties – reason and the senses, where it was evolutionarily advantageous for them to be truth-tracking.

            Also, while global skepticism is a challenging problem (though epistemology isn’t my area of interest, so I don’t know much about it), it’s independent of determinism. Even if libertarianism is true, your senses could still be deceiving you, you could be a brain in a vat – or libertarianism could be false and you believe it to be true because of those same physical causes.

          • Anonymous says:

            @David Friedman

            What if ‘X is wrong’ means ‘X is wrong according to the way humans think’?

            Similarly, almost all humans have opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs really exist, even though some species don’t have them. ‘Opposable thumb realism’ would not require proving that opposable thumbs exist in some Platonic sense, just that they exist in the real world and are a near-universal characteristic of humans.

            I say almost all, and near-universal, because obviously there are some people who don’t have hands because they were born without them, or lost them in an accident, and there are people who are paralyzed from the neck down and so cannot oppose their thumbs, and so on. Even so, I think the phrase “humans have opposable thumbs” is a reasonable enough statement to make. Similarly, I think the statement “humans are sexually dimorphic, i.e. are either male or female” is a reasonable enough statement to make, because even though there are some people for whom this isn’t true, they, like the people without opposable thumbs, are rare enough that they are the exceptions to a very pervasive rule.

            I think that if you’re comfortable with these statements then it makes sense to refer to moral views that almost everyone agrees on as being true in the same kind of way.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            What if ‘X is wrong’ means ‘X is wrong according to the way humans think’?

            This is circular. “Wrong according to the way humans think”, okay, not too implausible. But what do they mean when they say it’s wrong? What does “wrong” mean? That’s the question.

            Compare “humans have opposable thumbs” and “everyone agrees that humans have opposable thumbs”. They are not the same. And neither are “X is wrong” and “everyone agrees that X is wrong”.

            Everyone agrees that humans have opposable thumbs because “opposable thumbs” is a term with some objective meaning. It’s true regardless of whether anyone agrees upon it. They agree upon it because it’s true.

            You can’t say: “Oh, ‘humans have opposable thumbs’ just means ‘everyone agrees that humans have opposable thumbs.'” That leaves out something very important: what are opposable thumbs?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Vox Imperatoris

            I’m not saying “everyone agrees humans have opposable thumbs”. Everyone does agree that, but that’s neither here nor there. I am saying that humans have opposable thumbs in the same way that humans have brains that think that X is moral and Y is immoral. Yes, there are exceptions; there are also exceptions to humans having opposable thumbs. If having opposable thumbs can be thought of as being a universal enough aspect of being human to make the statement ‘human opposable thumbs really exist’ true, then, assuming moral views are similarly consistent, the statement ‘human morality really exists’ is arguably just as true.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            I think you missed the point of my post.

            I’m not saying “everyone agrees humans have opposable thumbs”. Everyone does agree that, but that’s neither here nor there. I am saying that humans have opposable thumbs in the same way that humans have brains that think that X is moral and Y is immoral.

            Of course you’re not saying that everyone agrees humans have opposable thumbs. It’s an analogy: “everyone agrees X is immoral” is to “X is immoral” as “everyone agrees humans have opposable thumbs” is to “humans have opposable thumbs”.

            You are making an argument for the “everyone agrees X is” type of statement, while apparently thinking that you are making an “X is” statement.

            To say “X is immoral” means “everyone agrees X is immoral” is circular and silly because it doesn’t say what “immoral” means! What is it that they agree upon? And are they right?

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Vox Imperatoris:

            the fact that we evolved to value something does not in itself show that it is valuable.

            I am not convinced that there’s a difference. That is, I am not convinced that there exists some external moral standard out there, either in the form of moral laws (which are distinct from ye olde natural laws such as gravity), or in the form of godlike entities. If someone postulates the existence of such laws or entities, it’s up to him to provide supporting evidence; until he does, I’m not going to believe in undetectable laws or sneaky stealth gods or any other such things.

            Also, your formulation equivocates between what is necessary to the “surviving and thriving” of society and what is necessary to the “surviving and thriving” of the individual.

            That’s a good point, but, in my defence, most people (with the possible exception of Ayn Rand, heh) derive some degree of happiness from seeing at least some other people being happy. The mechanisms for this seem to be built into our genome, at least to some extent (I know I keep saying “some” a lot, but I don’t want to accidentally claim omniscience). The overwhelming majority of people would not enjoy watching a random stranger suffer; so, if you want to maximize everyone’s happiness, you have to take that into account.

            Once again, the answer to the question, “yes, but why don’t we enjoy watching random strangers suffer ?” is “evolution”; and the answer to “yes, but physical reality aside, should we, objectively speaking, enjoy watching strangers suffer ?” is “mu”.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Bugmaster:

            I am not convinced that there’s a difference. That is, I am not convinced that there exists some external moral standard out there, either in the form of moral laws (which are distinct from ye olde natural laws such as gravity), or in the form of godlike entities. If someone postulates the existence of such laws or entities, it’s up to him to provide supporting evidence; until he does, I’m not going to believe in undetectable laws or sneaky stealth gods or any other such things.

            I don’t believe in some intrinsic outside standard, either.

            But people do have a choice about what they are going to value. It’s not enough simply to say, “people in the past valued thus-and-so because they were selected to by evolution”. You have to decide what you are going to value.

            I guess I haven’t explained very well how the evolutionary argument is tangential to the question.

            For anything that people value, you have to ask: do they value it for its own sake, as an ultimate value? Or do they value it as a means to some higher value?

            Suppose there really were a God, and that all human beings were created by him exactly as they are now. And suppose he handed down stone tablets to people to tell them his commandments. The question would still remain: why should people follow those commandments?

            Is it just self-evident that they ought to follow the commandments? I don’t exactly see how. Or does it reduce to something deeper like, they want to get into heaven and avoid hell? But why do they want to get into heaven and avoid hell? What are they trying to get by it? At last, at the end of the chain, you run into whatever it is that people value ultimately and for its own sake.

            It’s conceivable that there is some outside reason why people simply must value that thing; i.e. that this thing is categorically valuable. But it’s also possible that the ultimate value is chosen in a way not evaluable by ethical standards; i.e. that this value is conditional on the choice.

            The evolutionary picture is tangential because regardless of evolution, each person has to decide for himself: what do I value ultimately in this way; and why do I value it? Not “for what cause” but “for what reason”? Is there some outside reason, or is my choice the final word?

            That’s a good point, but, in my defence, most people (with the possible exception of Ayn Rand, heh) derive some degree of happiness from seeing at least some other people being happy. The mechanisms for this seem to be built into our genome, at least to some extent (I know I keep saying “some” a lot, but I don’t want to accidentally claim omniscience). The overwhelming majority of people would not enjoy watching a random stranger suffer; so, if you want to maximize everyone’s happiness, you have to take that into account.

            The idea that Ayn Rand didn’t derive happiness from seeing other people being happy, or said that this was improper, is false and the most absurd distortion. People say this because she did make the very important distinction between terminal value and instrumental value.

            She said that you ought to make other people happy, such as friends and lovers, because it will make you happy. That if their happiness didn’t contribute to your own flourishing life, love and benevolence would indeed be absurd and twisted out of any rational use. Each person is his own terminal value, and other people are instrumental values for him. And this is her explanation of why love and benevolence are valuable.

            But put that aside.

            The fact that you have an attitude of benevolence, that other people’s happiness contributes to your happiness, does not at all go to show that everyone‘s happiness is equally valuable to you. Their value to you depends on the degree to which they do contribute to your happiness.

            Yet a system like utilitarianism, which asks you to act solely to maximize aggregate utility, adopts a completely impartial attitude. It says that if your wife is trapped in one burning building and two strangers are trapped in another, you ought to let your wife burn and save the two strangers because there are more of them.

            What utilitarianism fails to establish is why you are or ought to be concerned with total utility.

            As I said before, it is very implausible—not to say absurd—that maximizing your own utility calls for exactly the same actions as maximizing total utility. But it’s also far from clear that maximizing your own utility calls for actions that would lead to minimal total utility as the result of some hellish war of all against all. The point is: people do not in fact wish to maximize aggregate utility, and there is no reason why they ought to.

            And on one final note, because I am afraid I will be misunderstood on this point: it is still possible to criticize things that people value, or to tell them that they are wrong to value it, even if one’s ultimate value is a matter of free choice. The first and most common way is by showing them that which they value instrumentally does not in fact lead to the ends they value terminally. The second way is by showing them that their ultimate or terminal value, which they have chosen on the basis of some outside reason, is not in fact supported by that reason, either because the reason would support another ultimate value, or because the reason is false.

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:

            But people do have a choice about what they are going to value.

            Whether that’s true depends on what you mean by “value”. They can in the sense that they can choose to seek out anything, but not in the sense that they can determine their own preferences. For example, I could choose to drink coffee instead of tea, but I would be wrong to do so because I like tea more than coffee, which is mostly not subject to my own will. Similarly, a (non-AI) paperclip maximizer with free will could choose not to maximize paperclips, but couldn’t choose not to value maximizing paperclips. You can control what you do, but not what’s rational for you to do.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Vox Imperatoris:

            But people do have a choice about what they are going to value.

            I disagree.

            Firstly, while I do agree that people (by and large) can be convinced that some things are more valuable than others, they cannot spontaneously choose to believe it. Similarly, I could theoretically be convinced that the sky is purple with green polka dots, but I cannot simply choose to believe it.

            Secondly, a person’s core values (such as “pain is bad, pleasure is good”), as well as basic social impulses (“watching others of my tribe suffer is painful”), are incredibly resistant to change (if not outright immutable). I think this is what you meant when you made the distinction between “valuing a thing for its own sake” and “valuing the thing as a means to an end”.

            My contention is that our core values are shaped by the physical laws of nature (and thus, evolution); and all the other moral judgements we make, such as “digital piracy is bad” or “democracy is good” are simply models that we build in order to answer the question, “how can I best satisfy my core values ?”. Thus, the answer to the question “is X moral ?” is conceptually simple — if it leads to a better satisfaction of your immutable core values, then it’s moral — but can be incredibly difficult to work out in practice.

            The idea that Ayn Rand didn’t derive happiness from seeing other people being happy, or said that this was improper, is false and the most absurd distortion.

            That was meant to be a joke, sorry 🙁

            The fact that you have an attitude of benevolence, that other people’s happiness contributes to your happiness, does not at all go to show that everyone‘s happiness is equally valuable to you. Their value to you depends on the degree to which they do contribute to your happiness.

            This is probably true, yes; but again, I want to note that you are not in control of how much any given person’s happiness contributes to your own. These parameters are built into your hardware.

            Yet a system like utilitarianism, which asks you to act solely to maximize aggregate utility, adopts a completely impartial attitude.

            I am not 100% on board with utilitarianism, but still: as far as I understand, utilitarianism tries to answer the question, “given that you will probably never become the Ultimate Dictator, what kind of social system should we build to ensure that your core values are adequately satisfied ?” The answer is, “some sort of a system that treats everyone more or less the same, since chances are good that you personally are pretty average”.

            What utilitarianism fails to establish is why you are or ought to be concerned with total utility.

            The answer is — and again, I could be wrong — “because if everyone does this, everyone’s utility will increase”.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Bugmaster:

            utilitarianism tries to answer the question, “given that you will probably never become the Ultimate Dictator, what kind of social system should we build to ensure that your core values are adequately satisfied ?” The answer is, “some sort of a system that treats everyone more or less the same, since chances are good that you personally are pretty average”.

            This makes sense as a theory of what the government should do: everyone ought to agree that it act to promote the general good, since things would devolve into warfare if the government were the means of taking wealth from others to give it to yourself.

            The answer is — and again, I could be wrong — “because if everyone does this, everyone’s utility will increase”.

            It may be true that total utility will be highest if everyone is a perfect utilitarian. It does not follow that your utility will be highest. Moreover, you know very well that not everyone (or more to the point, no one) is going to be a perfect utilitarian.

            Is it the most self-serving thing you could do to give all your money to random strangers in Africa because it brings you so much happiness? I kind of doubt it.

      • JBeshir says:

        I think you have good points about how utilitarianism-the-set-of-values fails to exactly matches any entire value system. That said, I do think it has some use. It matches what I think of as “a better world” a lot more closely than any of the alternative models I’ve seen, despite breaking down in some cases, and my value system/utility function has terms for both “living in a better world” and “having made the world better”, and it is useful as a way to discuss what fills those terms best with other people who have similar ones.

        I don’t think working towards fulfilling those terms is even “altruistic” in the sense Rand uses the word; I do it because I have preferences over how the world is, and also a preference for having made the world fit those preferences better. Making the world be more like how you want it to be is something I think of as, well, quintessentially human, and defining of “having done something with your life” and “success”, whereas merely surviving feels like failure, an unreasonably low bar.

        I think a lot of humans include those things (utilitarian-ish preference for a better world, utilitarian-ish preference for having made the world better) amongst their values, but a lot also have “retribution”/”justice” as a competing value, and the relative strengths vary a lot between people. They seem to match up well to Moral Foundation Theory‘s Care/Harm and Fairness foundations, respectively. I did get a correspondingly high preference for the former and low weight for the latter last time I took a questionnaire for it (although I think it’s normed on Americans so I might just be exceptionally low compared to them).

        The other use for utilitarian-like thinking and where I think it tends to arise often amongst humans is that “most good for the most of us” is a simple impartial principle long-term cooperators can use to make decisions when all the cooperators involved are relatively similar in ability to assist and need, and get high expected outcomes for all involved, and this is helpful to the point that people often avoid discussing some of their needs or ability in order to artificially create such a situation. But this is not quite the same thing.

        Edit: I would argue that, by most people’s value systems, it is important that even if just deserts are what you favour heavily, we avoid acting on a preference for people to be unhappy without a great deal of care towards unseen consequences. Like naively acting in line with care/harm ideas can cause indirect harm and you need to think about that, acting naively in line with just desert ideas can have very bad effects, too.

        Making people miserable risks making other people miserable in a lot of ways. One is that clusters of miserable/deprived people tend to be a problem for the people around them, and manufacture more deservedly miserable people to expand that problem. Another is that making people miserable is a lot easier than making them happy, so if everyone naively acts to try to make good people happy and bad people miserable, while disagreeing on who the bad people are, everyone winds up miserable. This does not actually bring about ‘just deserts’.

        I think a lot of people make these errors, and it’s one of the reasons why less retributive societies seem to be doing better on a lot of quality of life metrics, including justice.

    • Jordan D. says:

      My essential problem with this formulation is that we’re using Hitler as a way to avoid the process where we justify that one party is sufficiently worse than the other that they *deserve* bad things. I think that’s exactly where this kind of paradigm always breaks down- unless you can create a universally-accepted and accessable system of norms, you’re going to have me inflicting cornflakes on Hitler on one side, antisemites rounding up Jews on the other and terrorists beheading people in the middle.

      To paraphrase a quote, I’m willing to believe that some people deserve ill, but I wouldn’t trust anyone who wanted to dispense it.

      • Anonymous says:

        It doesn’t have to involve anyone deserving bad things. My formulation is entirely consistent with the idea that, all else being equal, more utility is better, but that not everyone counts for as much in utility calculations. If a bad person was worth only half as much as a good person, it would mean being ambivalent between the bad person getting one utile and the good person getting two. But it wouldn’t mean preferring the bad person to get no utiles than one.

        Regarding different people having different ideas of what is and isn’t moral, that’s true – and as someone said upthread is an advantage of utilitarianism. Most people count aggregate utility as being important, though not exclusively so. If you can point out a change that increases utility, perhaps some people will believe it good according to what else they care about, some will believe it bad – so views on it will range from enthusiastic support to apathy.

        My point is only regarding pure utilitarianism – the claim that all moral views ultimately boil down to maximizing aggregate utility, and that if they don’t then they’re wrong.

        • Tibor says:

          Maybe there are some unstated assumptions here though. Why do you/we want to reward the “good” people and punish the “bad” people? I think it could be mostly because we want the impact of the “bad” people to be lower. Essentially, if bad people are punished/receive less good, they will do less harm. That is actually quite sound, but it might be covered in “standard” utility if one measures not an increment in utility at a particular time but the total utility summed over time. Then punishing bad people might end up leading to a greater total utility for the same reasons as above (being bad is not worth it as much as before).

          If your goal is maximizing utility, you have to be careful about what you actually mean by that. Maximizing the total utility at any particular moment might lead to less utility in total, because your available range of present utility depends on your decisions in the past.

          Also, I think that this is where utilitarianism might actually falter. If all I care about is total utility over all time, I might end up finding out that the best thing to do is to slavedrive the current generations of mankind and make them toil to death so that some kind of a positive singularity happens a few months sooner, bringing 1 extra year of total utility far exceeding anything before in history. So total utility over all of time does not seem to be a good answer either. Some kind of moving window of time (so you avoid the problems with maximizing at marginals) sounds good until you realize that if that window overlaps with the singularity event, you again slavedrive (almost) everyone to death which is probably a wrong answer.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Tibor:

            Why is slave-driving everyone to bring about the singularity a wrong answer? If utilitarianism is true and the singularity brings about enough utility, it’s obviously the right answer.

            Of course if you put enough ad hoc modifiers on utilitarianism, it’ll be non-disprovable. But then so is the belief that there is a dragon in your garage.

          • Tibor says:

            @Vox:

            Because I take intuition as an override over a theory that is very much at odds with it* and because if you observe people’s actions, there is pretty much nobody in the world who believes this is the right answer as shown by the absence of ascetic workaholics who also do not waste the precious resources on charities that help the people in the present.

            Of course, what people do or do not believe is not necessarily true (if there is such a thing as a universal moral truth), but if the data are so one sided, then it sure amounts to something (especially since one has more or less no other sources of information).

            *I give the last word to intuition here as I am quite sure that it is fundamentally impossible to derive any kind of moral theory from the facts of the physical world only. You can do proofs in maths because you restrict yourself to the ideal world of mathematics where you can define whatever you want in whatever way you want…you can do the same with morals but you have to a) work with precise and unambiguous definitions (if you want the result to make any sense), which is the Achilles’ heel of most deontologic ‘proofs’ and b) show that those precise terms then apply in our reality as well. The problem is that it is much easier to show that something in reality more or less is a very good approximation of a perfect triangle than that something in reality corresponds to moral statements.

    • Tibor says:

      I think that utilitarianism is useful but also incomplete (as is any other moral theory, I think using intuition as a final moral arbiter is probably as good as you can ever get).

      Take for example the Scott’s post on guns. I realized later that there was one thing that was really bugging me in the analysis even if it were spot-on correct. The problem is that even if limiting the number of guns might decrease the number of murders, you are employing collective punishment. Limiting the number of guns reduces murders because some of their owners either use the guns to murder people (and would not do that otherwise), are not careful enough with guns so they get stolen from them and then used to murder someone or a few more things like that. But there are also people who will buy a gun, keep it safe from others and use it to harm nobody (or nobody who does not attack them). The problem is that you cannot distinguish between those people a priori and definitely not on a policy scale. So you end up punishing people for other people’s mistakes. This is different from the externality arguments with factories and such because there you can easily identify all those who produce the pollution and so possibly tax them and only them.

      Maybe some people would say that for the greater good it is still worth punishing a few innocent people a little. But we don’t have to stick to our guns (pun intended) and we can make the punishment much more severe while still keeping the utility of that act positive. I think that at a certain point pretty much anyone stops being a utilitarian. In other words utilitarianism is incompatible with an intuitive understanding of morality, even if one realizes all the implications of every act and the whole cost/benefit analysis, there is still something missing.

      One interpretation could be that a perfectly done cost-benefit utilitarian analysis would still always give the right answer but that since we are not perfect, we always miss something and so this intuitive mechanism is a useful heuristic to be used to overcome the error in those border regions.

  66. Commodity prices (notably oil, but a lot of other commodities, too) are dropping. NPR is gloomy, and so is The Economist.

    While there’s some slight mention of people spending less on transportation and heat, this doesn’t doesn’t seem to make up for the losses to the people who sell commodities.

    I’d have thought commodities being cheaper would be grounds for celebration– the average person can get more stuff for less money. People who make stuff can make it more cheaply so there should be more business opportunities.

    Perhaps we are so tangled up in obligations that dropping commodity prices are just too disruptive. Perhaps it’s one of those seen and unseen situations– it’s easy to see the losses to commodity suppliers and to government programs which are pegged to commodity revenues and hard to see the new projects that will happen. Perhaps there’s something fundamental I’m not seeing.

    What do you think?

    • Marc Whipple says:

      The system is so entangled and dependent on “growth,” by which it means price increases to reflect monetary inflation, that if anything gets cheaper, almost everybody gets hurt somehow. Banks lent billions to energy producers to develop fields. Energy producers hired lots of people (many of them without other ways to make comparable wages) to work on them. Communities rapidly added services and capacity. Now the banks have to eat the losses which makes money tighter, the energy producers have to pay what are now overpriced loans or go bankrupt (many of them have, many more will follow) the workers are in North For God’s Sake Dakota with no alternate employment and no support network, and the communities are screwed in ways too varied and numerous to even describe.

      You’re probably right in that overall, a lot more economic growth can happen with lower energy prices. But we don’t necessarily have a lot of, to steal a phrase, shovel-ready economic growth ready to take advantage of the lower energy prices and we do have a system where the shock propagates quickly and widely.

    • brad says:

      I’d think that housing — a major cost for everyone — being cheaper would be grounds for celebration, but 2008 put paid to that notion.

      • Anthony says:

        There is no one “price of housing”. In the Bay Area, something weird happened. When the price of houses for sale fell in 2008, the price of rent went *up*. Why? Because the marginal house-buyer was no longer able to buy a house because of tightened credit standards. So there were suddenly lots of people with relatively high incomes and credit ratings who were looking for rentals instead of houses (or condos) to buy. Landlords with vacancies in better neighborhoods raised their rents in response to the influx of people with lots of money to spend on rent.

    • xtmar says:

      I’d have thought commodities being cheaper would be grounds for celebration– the average person can get more stuff for less money. People who make stuff can make it more cheaply so there should be more business opportunities.

      This is also called deflation.

      That’s a sort of glib answer, but it’s true. Most economists view deflation as bad because even though you can get more for less, there are a lot of sticky things in the economy, like wages, where it’s hard to cut back on what you’re paying commensurate with your newly lowered commodity prices. Nominal deflation is bad, so perhaps we should be targeting 4% inflation instead of 0-2%.

      The other, possibly more worrying indicator, is that while commodity prices are low in part because of excess production (which is good), they are also low in part because demand is lower (which indicates a contracting economy, save for efficiency gains). China, for instance, despite supposedly growing by 6% or something last year, consumed 1% less energy, which suggests that their economy didn’t grow as fast as they said, unless they’re getting more than 7% efficiency growth, which is unlikely. http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL3N1531DV

    • bluto says:

      Prices are dropping because the average person somewhere isn’t taking advantage of the lower prices. Supply of oil or other commodities doesn’t change as rapidly as demand, so shifts in price are frequently much better indicators of demand shifting rather than supply (supply shifts happen but on a much slower scale–because drillers have debt which means they need cash flow even when prices fall).

      So the rapid decline in prices suggests that someone’s economy is undergoing a pretty serious deleveraging, which is bad news.

    • Murphy says:

      I’d guess that it’s the speed of the drop that’s the problem.

      If oil gets 1% cheaper per month then it gives companies time to wind down marginally economic production, workers have time to start looking around for alternatives as things get slowly tighter at work, better operations have time to pay off loans etc but if prices drop 50% in a month then suddenly everything happens at once and many companies go from profitable to utterly uneconomic in a month.

      You’d get the same effect if a commodity doubled in price overnight. if oil had gone to 200 a barrel overnight then suddenly many businesses would be uneconomic to run and many peoples lives would be screwed up overnight.

      I imagine that a slow drop in commodity prices is good for the economy but sudden decreases and increases cause problems.

  67. Apropos of several comment threads …

    What poets do people like?

    My favorite is Kipling. Others I like include Millay, Hopkins, Thomas (who I like to describe as Hopkins drunk), Dunne, Prior, Frost, GKC.

    • Said Achmiz says:

      I like Byron, Swinburne, Pushkin, Kipling, Vysotsky.

      • Are you reading Pushkin and Vysotsky in translation or the original? I don’t read Russian.

        There are a few things by Heine and Goethe that I like, but my German isn’t good enough to adequately judge their work or know much of it.

        • Said Achmiz says:

          Original; I’m a native Russian speaker.

          I don’t think translated poetry is generally worth your time (e.g. Pushkin loses much in translation, in my experience), although there are exceptions (I don’t speak Persian and so don’t know what the Rubayyat is like in the original, but FitzGerald’s version is beautiful, for example).

          • For evidence that Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat is in large part Fitzgerald, not Khayyam, compare the (I think five) different versions that Fitzgerald produced.

            When my daughter was very little, I recited the Rubaiyat to her when walking her to put her to sleep. The first evidence that she understood language was that, when I started the first verse, she would put her head down on my shoulder .

            She knew that “Wake, for the sun” meant “go to sleep.”

        • Bugmaster says:

          Hmm, now I am curious: is Vysotsky even comprehensible in English ? I’ve always thought that it would be difficult to figure out his lyrics without having a Soviet perspective, but I could be wrong. I’m a native Russian speaker, so it’s possible I’m just being a snob…

          • Aaron Jacob says:

            I’ve long been a fan of Кони привередливые, if for nothing else than Vysotsky’s gritty voice and the timbre of his guitar. Even having read the lyrics translated, it’s clear that he’s conveying something whose depth is inaccessible to me as a nonspeaker of Russian. The fact that he’s saying something meaningful is clear enough, of course. I let down my fishing line without any bait, and I can tell the river’s deep and that there are fish, but I don’t catch any.

    • Kaj Sotala says:

      I haven’t read very much poetry, so I can only point to individual poems rather than writers. But I did like The Highwayman, The Lady of Shalott, The Stolen Child (if you thought that half of my poetry exposure comes from listening to Loreena McKennitt, well, you were probably right) The Raven, Howl, and To a Mouse.

      I’ve also enjoyed Lord Dunsany, whose works aren’t always necessarily poems as such, but certainly often have a poetic feel to them – e.g. Sardathrion.

      If anyone wants to make recommendations based on these, I’d welcome them.

    • Anatoly says:

      W.H.Auden, A.E.Housman [1], Wilfred Owen, Vikram Seth [2], John Donne, Tennyson, W.B.Yeats.
      (in Russian) Pushkin, Brodsky, Khodasevich, Mandelshtam, Tsvetkov, Vvedensky.

      [1] Wendy Cope wrote:

      Another Unfortunate Choice

      I think I am in love with A. E. Housman,
      Which puts me in a worse­ than ­usual fix.
      No woman ever stood a chance with Housman
      *And* he’s been dead since 1936.

      [2] for
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Gate_(Seth_novel)

      • I am particularly fond of “Terence, this is stupid stuff.”

        But also

        “The King with half the East at heel is marched from land of morning;
        Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
        And he that stands will die for nought, and home there’s no returning.
        The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.”

        Also “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”

        I should probably have included Housman in my list.

      • Deiseach says:

        Yeats, and a poem I come back to more and more this past decade or so. Also invoking memory and nostalgia in me, because I had “school English” that particular birds were called “starlings”. Then reading Yeats where he was writing in 1922 during our Civil War, and he used “stare” instead, and noted that in the West of Ireland they were called “stares” and years later, unrelated to the poem, my late father referring to the birds flocking in the back garden as “stares”, which I had never heard him use before (we’re not from the West of Ireland), or at least if he had, it was when I was too young to remember and it was before I went to school and was taught “proper” English.

        So. Poem by W.B. Yeats:

        The Stare’s Nest by My Window

        The bees build in the crevices
        Of loosening masonry, and there
        The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
        My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
        Come build in the empty house of the stare.

        We are closed in, and the key is turned
        On our uncertainty; somewhere
        A man is killed, or a house burned.
        Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
        Come build in the empty house of the stare.

        A barricade of stone or of wood;
        Some fourteen days of civil war:
        Last night they trundled down the road
        That dead young soldier in his blood:
        Come build in the empty house of the stare.

        We had fed the heart on fantasies,
        The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
        More substance in our enmities
        Than in our love; O honey-bees,
        Come build in the empty house of the stare.

    • DavidS says:

      Blake. Metaphysicals, especially Dunne. Eliot. R S Thomas (not as well known as previously listed folk).

      • I’m curious what you like of Eliot’s. _Hollow Men_ is poetry, but I can’t say I much enjoy it, and of the small amount of Eliot I’ve read I don’t anything grabbed me.

        • Psmith says:

          Not OP, but I thought “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had a remarkable snap and verve to it for modernist poetry. I also liked “Gerontion” and “The Waste Land”. Four Quartets is some mighty tough sledding, but I’m told it’s very good.

    • keranih says:

      Huh. This is one of those I’m tempted to not answer because people have already said things I agree. Interesting…

      For what it’s worth: Frost, Kipling, Houseman. Ted Hughes (Life of Crow, esp), Millay selections, Archald Macliesh, TS Eliot (in selected doses) Tennyson. Niki Giovanni (some, not all.)

      My favorite for many years has been Hart Crane:

      Repose of Rivers

      The willows carried a slow sound,
      A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
      I could never remember
      That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
      Till age had brought me to the sea.

      Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
      Where cypresses shared the noon’s
      Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
      And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
      Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
      Asunder …

      How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
      And all the singular nestings in the hills
      Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
      The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
      I remember now its singing willow rim.

      And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
      After the city that I finally passed
      With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
      The monsoon cut across the delta
      At gulf gates … There, beyond the dykes

      I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
      And willows could not hold more steady sound.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        The snows that are older than history,
        The woods where the weird shadows slant;
        The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
        I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.

        There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
        And the rivers all run God knows where

        Robert W. Service, and from another of his:

        Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on

        From another, hard to locate, author:

        Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can bake you dry
        Snow can burn your eyes, but only people make you cry

    • onyomi says:

      I’m curious what people think of this 12th c. Chinese poem (it is technically a song lyric to a pre-existing melody) in translation. It is undoubtedly a great poem in Chinese, but I can’t decide whether it sounds cheesy in English. The translator here has made the unusual choice to attempt to approximate the Chinese rhyme in English, which often sounds cheesy, but sounds kind of okay here to me, because it doesn’t feel too, too forced, and I appreciate the effort. Still, it’s hard for me to find translations of Chinese poetry that really satisfy me, because the sound and word choice are important, as in most languages, and use of allusion (references to stories, poems, etc. the educated Chinese reader would already know) is especially heavy and difficult to capture.

      武陵春

      風住塵香花已盡,日晚倦梳頭。
      物是人非事事休,欲語淚先流。
      聞說雙溪春尚好,也擬泛輕舟。
      只恐雙溪舴艋舟,載不動許多愁。

      To the tune, “Spring in Wuling”

      Wind is still, dust fragrant among blossoms fallen fair.
      At close of day I am too worn to comb my silken hair.
      Objects remain, but the essence is no longer there:
      Everything has ceased. My speech is choked by tears.
      Shuangxi in spring is still lovely, I hear.
      I would sail there in a boat dainty as a leaf.
      But the featherweight Shuangxi vessels, I fear,
      Could not bear the mortal burden of my grief.

      This one is by female poet, Li Qingzhao. One of my personal favorites is 8th-9th c. poet, Bai Juyi, but his poems are even more aurally rich and hard to find good translations of.

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        An audio link to the tune might be helpful.

        • onyomi says:

          Unfortunately, most of the original melodies for this genre of poem have been lost for a long time. Might have sounded something like this (fairly liberal interpretation of another poem with extant melody belonging to roughly the same time period and genre, albeit sung with anachronistically modern Mandarin pronunciation):

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZkstHlWPHM

  68. Deiseach says:

    According to the local paper, we got 150 billion gallons of rain in December over the county.

    I don’t know how they worked that out, but it certainly feels like it rained 150 billion gallons just here. I have no idea what the national total is, but it certainly was the wettest couple of months in recent times.

  69. onyomi says:

    http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/palin-endorsement-widens-trumps-lead-among-idiots

    So this is good for a laugh, but I think Nate Silver’s blog was also absolutely right to dub Trump “Palin 2.0.” And the same people who loved Palin on my Facebook all love Trump. This was a bit baffling to me at first–superficially they don’t have much in common other than running campaigns that make me feel my intelligence is being insulted, yet it also seemed intuitively obvious that Trump was, indeed, Palin 2.0 as soon as I heard the news.

    My working theory is that what they have in common is the trait of running campaigns on pure personality: people liked Palin not for any particular policy idea, but because she was a mom “like them.” And other than the strongly anti-immigration types, people don’t like Trump for any particular ideas, but simply because he’s charismatic, he inspires confidence, he promises he’ll make us all winners, etc.

    Question: is this basically correct, and does anything explain the rise of a more unalloyed cult of personality among our politicians of late? I mean, I don’t think the Democrats are immune–Obama get elected on “hope and change” without a lot of specifics about what that entailed, but the Republican field seems especially bad on this count lately.

    I’ve never had much faith in democracy, but assuming we think it can and should work, this kind of focus on personality seems like it has to go. Yet, since people are rationally ignorant about politics, it’s already kind of impressive the extent to which it ever rises above the level of popularity contest. I mean, say what you will about Mitt Romney and Bob Dole, but they weren’t picked for their charisma.

    This seems a disastrous trend, but I’m not sure if it’s a secular trend or just the happenstance of Trump existing.

    Related, I’ve been skimming Scott Adams’ posts on Trump the “master persuader” off and on, and while he’s thus far been proven right, I guess, I also have to say that I never found Trump (nor Palin) remotely persuasive or charismatic (and to prove I’m not immune to charisma and persuasion, Bill Clinton has an uncanny ability to completely disagree with me on everything yet make his positions sound eminently reasonable for the space of time he’s talking about them). Does “master persuader” just mean “someone who’s really good at cynically manipulating dumb people,” then, or could Trump persuade me too if he wanted, only he chooses instead to focus his efforts on the dumb masses where the votes are?

    • Nathan says:

      One thing I don’t understand is why I *don’t* like Trump. Like, obviously I dislike his policy proposals and think he’s being completely disingenuous to claim he could implement them anyhow. But that applies to Sanders as well, and I can’t help getting a little happy when I see a new poll putting him in front of Clinton in Iowa.

      Liking Sanders over Clinton although I know he is from my perspective a worse candidate is something I can understand about myself. I generally find myself drawn to candidates and parties that represent a splintering of power away from the established ruling class. So I always find a minor party to vote for (in Australia, where they can win) and internationally find myself cheering for groups like UKIP or candidates like Huckabee. I even get excited for groups like are strongly opposed to me ideologically like Podemos, Syriza, and the Five Star Movement.

      And yet I find myself not just intellectually opposing Trump, but viscerally hating his success. I’m not complaining, but I don’t know why there’s this apparent emotional inconsistency.

      • Nita says:

        Perhaps you like underdogs who have a well-defined political model that they earnestly believe in? That’s what Sanders, UKIP and Syriza seem to have in common. They are invested in an internally consistent system of beliefs that they feel compelled to defend.

        Trump, like an old-school Internet troll, doesn’t seem to be burdened by such constraints.

      • JBeshir says:

        Maybe you perceive them as different in terms of, not policy, but behaviour within the public discourse? Trump kind of endorses rudeness, and I think it makes sense to be opposed to that regardless of where it’s coming from ideologically, especially if you’re used to at least elected figures being a point of at least surface-level manners in a sea of Twitter trolling and they threaten to disrupt that.

        The other thing is that the others are at least claiming to be cooperators, acting for the better good of everyone, who merely have different ideas about what that is. Whereas Trump just doesn’t care at all about being even seen as one. If you think “being a cooperator” is something which should be in high regard, that’s a bad thing.

        From probably the opposite ideological ‘side’ as you, Trump is actually less in disagreement with me on most object-level policy issues than many of the other candidates are. The exceptions- especially the religion-based ban idea and the alarming endorsement of the US’s WW2 internment camps (which, to his credit, he did walk back)- and how he arrived at them are the problem, as they lead me to view him as a threat to the already frayed and damaged norms of politics being about deciding on policies for everyone’s good rather being about a battleground for ethnic supremacy. I’d take a person who disagreed with me on object-level policy over someone who threatened to break the meta-level norms of politics in that way, myself, even if they entirely agreed with me.

      • Marc Whipple says:

        Because he’s an obnoxious entitled abrasive schmuck?

    • Alraune says:

      Does “master persuader” just mean “someone who’s really good at cynically manipulating dumb people”?

      No, it’s a “great philosophers do not argue” thing. Framing, not arguing, wins arguments. The persuasion talent Adams is talking about lies in

      A. the ability to see where your opponent’s narratives fail to correspond to reality
      and
      B. the ability to force this clash into the open through a simple alternative framework that can be swallowed all at once

      It is, in other words, a pattern-crystallization talent. The abject failures of the American-led International Community are factual, but it would have taken another decade for them to pierce the public consciousness without “Make America Great Again.”

      And, no, it’s a strategy for preying on the powerful and comfortable, not the stupid. The most current example is this, in which Trump has somehow provoked National Review into issuing what can only be described as a Royal Edict against him. Complete with two signatures ending in “III.”

      • onyomi says:

        You mean, he’s just trying to piss off the establishment as hard as possible and the masses, hating the establishment, love him for it? That makes a certain amount of sense, and I hate the establishment too, but I also find him quite… unpersuasive. I mean, how can a “master persuader” so utterly fail to persuade me of anything? And while I’m not totally his target audience, I am going to vote in a Republican primary and am relatively reddish by SSC standards. That is, part of me wants to be persuaded.

        Like Nathan above, I find myself actually rooting for Trump in the sense of liking anyone who upsets the establishment–especially the Republican establishment, which, for better or worse, ends up representing me on some level as a rightward-leaning person–yet I don’t like him personally. I don’t find him charming or charismatic or convincing. Clearly a lot of people do, as I don’t think it’s just his ability to outrage the establishment that is getting him so many votes–if it were, Ron Paul would have won last time–Trump clearly has some kind of charisma, but I just don’t get it.

        Also, which new patterns are they that Trump is helping to crystallize in the American consciousness? That there is a lot of illegal immigration? That America isn’t “great” anymore? The former seems to have already been common knowledge; I would maybe agree with the latter, but I don’t really see how Trump is revealing the failures of the US political class any more clearly than, say, Ron or Rand Paul, or even the combative Ted Cruz (I guess he highlights the problem of political correctness somewhat, but complaining about political correctness had already become a staple of the US right before he came on the scene).

        • anonymous says:

          Trump is one of the few low class (i.e. vulgar, not money-wise obviously) and proud of it, people to run for office in recent years. Another of that small group is Sarah Palin. Other politicians have tried to play that angle, famously George W Bush, but there’s a difference and we notice.

          Although I don’t share it, I can understand the excitement people have about seeing “one of their own” running for president. Andrew Jackson took the White House using a similar strategy.

          Scott Adams hypnosis stuff is just broken clock nonsense.

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, Bush Jr. definitely ran as “the guy you’d like to have a beer with” in addition to supposed competence, but Palin and Trump feel somehow qualitatively different, though maybe it’s only in the degree to which their personalities take center stage.

        • dndnrsn says:

          While Scott Adams is a little bit crazy, and his “Trump is a magician who can talk anyone into anything” shtick is clearly wrong, I think that he is right in a few things about Trump.

          That he’s short on specifics when talking about the failures of the American political class and “making America great again” is a plus – Paul senior and junior have their own vision for what the problem is and how to fix it; Trump is letting people’s minds fill in the blanks, a lot of the time.

          It’s like how, although he had clear policy goals, Obama’s 2008 campaign let people project a lot of hopes and dreams onto it. With the result that a lot of people who voted for him expected him to be much more left wing than he actually is (and a lot of people who voted against him projected their fears onto him, and still think he’s a lot more left wing than he is).

          The last thing is actually happening with Trump -the lack of clear positions means that those who don’t like him are filling in the blanks with their fears (eg, the he-is-an-actual-fascist business).

          • onyomi says:

            “…letting people’s minds fill in the blanks, a lot of the time.”

            I think this is a key point, but it also seems like, without policy specifics, personality must, necessarily fill the void.

            It’s sort of a two-pronged strategy: project a personality lots of people can relate to; be very vague about what you want to actually do so that those people relating to you can assume you’ll do things they’d like.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @onyomi:

            I don’t know if it’s a personality everyone can relate to, so much as a personality people can fix upon – turn into their champion (or, alternatively, nemesis).

            Witness how both far-right types, and left-wingers who don’t like him, seem to think Trump is a secret white nationalist, or a stepping stone to white nationalism becoming politically acceptable in the US, or something similar.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I think it’s not just that Trump annoys the Republican establishment, but that he does so whilst projecting an aura of strength and dominance (witness, for example, his multiple refusals to apologise for saying offensive things). If you think that your party leadership is full of people who are at best spineless wimps unable to stand up to the (largely opposition-aligned) media, and at worst shameless Quislings who identify with opposition media types more than with their own base, then any candidate who clearly couldn’t give two hoots about placating the media is going to be an attractive proposition.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            That is certainly a factor in my own mind.

            While I would personally prefer Carson or Cruz, I must confess that I derive a great deal of schadenfreude from watching Trump make people’s heads explode.

        • stillnotking says:

          I doubt even Trump’s biggest fans would describe him as “charming”. A big part of his appeal is the anti-politician thing, the blunt, tell-it-like-it-is attitude.

          Speaking as someone who regularly interacts with those mysterious creatures, the Republican base — although I don’t know any strong Trump supporters AFAIK, just people who probably would vote for him if nominated — I can tell you that’s exactly what they want from elected officials. They feel lied to, constantly, by the media and even by their own party establishment. The smarter ones understand that Trump’s persona is a pose, too, that he wouldn’t make a very good president for all kinds of reasons, but he is speaking their language, and that counts for a lot.

          Also, they really, really hate Hillary. You have no idea how much they hate Hillary.

          • HlynkaCG says:

            Hillary is basically Nixon without Nixon’s humility or discretion.

            That is not a good recipe for stability.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      @onyomi:
      Obama created and captured a certain zeitgeist, but it’s not as if he had no policy proposals. He had detailed ones and went on to implement them.

      I think Alraune has a point in terms of framing, not argument, being a winning strategy. But I’m not sure it has to correspond to reality at all.

      Take the first point where almost everyone thought Trump’s balloon would pop, when he derided McCain for being captured. Here is Trump responding to questions about that statement.

      There is no “give” in Trump’s outward persona. He does not admit to failure. Almost any other candidate would have apologized for that statement, and thereby signaled to the electorate that they really had said a terrible thing. Not Trump.

      I think the people he appeals to like the fact that he say things that they believe. One example, that immigrants (really, the central examples of immigrants people see and know to be immigrants every day) are (somehow) awful and bad for America. He says it in a simple and straight-forward manner. He does not hedge or walk-back. He never breaks character, if it even is a character.

      As an example, Newt Gingrich tries to be that guy. But he also wants the reporters and pundits to think he is the smartest guy in the room. And he wants the evangelicals to think he is a true born-again. The seams show.

      • onyomi says:

        Obama may have had substantive proposals, but I think he was largely elected on his persona. If you don’t think so, my guess is you weren’t on a college campus at the time.

        I do think there is something to the way Trump refuses to apologize. That point may be more important than it seems. Many on the right, myself included, are sick of politicians refusing to say what they mean and then squeamishly apologizing and backing down every time someone catches them expressing any actual opinion. Many before Trump have claimed to be anti-establishment, but no one has really acted on that claim in so obvious a way. His pre-existing celebrity probably helped a lot on that point. This alone may explain a lot.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @onyomi:
          Every politician is largely elected on their persona.

          But there are multiple phases in a campaign, and multiple fields of battle in each phase. Winning polls, winning volunteers, winning small donors, winning pundits, winning establishment backing, winning large donors; these are all important. They are all only means to the end of winning votes on election day, but usually all of those components still fall under “necessary” even though not “sufficient”.

          It is the very, very, very rare candidate who can start with winning polls, lose all the other aspects, and still make it to election day a winner.

          Obama’s actual policy proposals did matter, and a fair amount on the margin, because his primary contest with Hillary was hard fought almost all the way to the end.

          Trump is making it harder and harder to win the general election. He owes a large part of his success to the fact that Jeb is a horrible campaigner, trying on different personas and all of them look like bad toupees. If Jeb wasn’t such a bad campaigner, he might have forced Christie, Rubio, and Kasich into marginal territory early and consolidated the “establishment” voting block. That was what he was set up to do. Then Trump might not have looked like such a clear leader in the polls the whole time.

          But, the Republican base is composed of a huge number of people who are fundamentally at odds with the establishment. This was the basic dynamic of 2012. Two large chunks of the base want a scorched earth policy that never brooks compromise. One part is the evangelical base. The other is what became the Tea Party (which looks a lot like the contingent that brought Goldwater to the nomination in 1968). I think those chunks actually overlap a fair amount. But together they seem to form at least a slight majority of the Republican primary voters.

          Trump has captured that Goldwater contingent. Carson had the evangelical contingent until he started in on pyramids. I’m not sure whether the polling data can tease out where his support flowed to, but some chunk of it went to Trump.

          Edit:Actually it’s pretty clear it almost all went to Trump.

          In 2012, you had these big swings from one “candidate of the week” to another. It looked like that restless majority was looking for a candidate they felt comfortable with. One by one, each of the possibilities showed themselves to be either not genuine or not competent enough. Herman Cain struggling to remember Uzbekistan while touching his nose with the tip of his tongue killed his candidacy. The fact that Gingrich is easily portrayed convincingly as a power hungry d-bag without principles killed him.

          Carson made one of those mistakes this cycle. Trump has not. To an extent this is because Trump basically tells you he is a power-hungry d-bag, so those charges can’t stick to him, even though he is as much of a flip-flopper as Gingrich or more.

          Edit: And I didn’t mention Cruz here, who positioned himself to own both of those chunks, but has made a ton of enemies among the party apparatus. You can see he also gained from the decline of Carson. Other “outsider” candidates dropping (Fiorina) seem to have also contributed to his rise.

          • onyomi says:

            “Every politician is largely elected on their persona.”

            I don’t think this is at all generalizable, though it seems to be increasingly true over time. Coolidge? Johnson? Nixon? Bush Sr.?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            Persona as filtered to the relevant electorate.

            When primaries really were smoke filled rooms, there was a different relevant electorate. When newspapers were the filter, and not TV or YouTube, that effected how the electorate perceived persona.

            But at the end of the day, we are social animals.

          • onyomi says:

            Of course, what gets elected is always a person and not an abstract ideology or set of ideas. All the same, some candidacies and campaigns are more about ideas and proposals while others are more about personality. How does the saying go? “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”?

            Candidates not expecting to win like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders generally have the luxury of making it more about ideas, but it’s certainly not the case that the more ideological candidate always loses to the more personally charismatic candidate, though personal charisma goes a long way in what ultimately amounts to a kind of popularity contest.

            Bernie makes a big deal of running a campaign “about ideas,” and, while I disagree with most of his ideas, I think he mostly lives up to that. I would be thrilled to see a Sanders vs. Paul general election (even better if it were Paul Sr.)–two slightly grumpy, ideological, not very charismatic old men with diametrically opposed ideologies just fighting it out in the realm of ideas. Not going to happen, but it would be nice.

            My nightmare election was Clinton vs. Bush because it would just be two very safe establishment candidates at a time when the establishment needs a serious rebuke, arguably from both sides. Thankfully, this looks increasingly unlikely.

            Trump vs. Clinton, at least, promises not to be boring, but it will probably be brain-dead, as Trump will be running entirely on personality and Clinton will be running as the first female president/blue tribe standard bearer/anybody-but-Trump.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            “but it’s certainly not the case that the more ideological candidate always loses to the more personally charismatic candidate”

            I don’t think charisma and persona are the same thing. Two people can be both be just as charismatic as each other and have completely different personas. Roughly, persona is the set of properties you associate with the person.

            The artist (formerly and now known as) Prince is extremely charismatic, but you aren’t going to elect him president no matter what. So Obama got elected on his steady, enthusiastic, hopeful, empathetic, fairly liberal, intelligent, thoughtful, energetic, urbane yet grounded persona.

            McCain was popular because he had a irascible, grumpy, playful, hard-headed, no-nonsense, middle-of-the-road, contrarian persona. But during both the primary and the general election he went against that basic persona any number of times, which cost him. By the end of it he just seemed like he was even disgusted with himself.

            Al Gore almost never acted like himself during the entire 2000 electoral cycle, and it hurt him. He was more “Al Gore” than he had been in about a year when he finally gave his concession speech.

          • onyomi says:

            By “personally charismatic,” I simply mean “someone who presents an attractive public persona.”

            I don’t disagree with your evaluation of these personae, though I never personally found John McCain’s persona appealing at any time (Bob Dole seems to have very much fallen victim to the same dynamic you describe happening to Al Gore, being a very funny and likeable person except when running for president), but I still disagree that the persona is always the most important element in any politician’s election. It’s always an element to some degree, but its importance varies depending on the candidate and the campaign.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Obama’s actual policy proposals did matter, and a fair amount on the margin, because his primary contest with Hillary was hard fought almost all the way to the end.

            Funny how different things look from the other side. The one major policy difference I can recall him having with Hillary was his belief that the individual mandate was immoral. We all know how that turned out.

            I can think of quite a lot of concrete policies along those lines that were quickly discarded (many of which would have been trivial to fulfill), but I’ll avoid the gish gallop for now.

          • Anthony says:

            Jaskologist – THE issue separating Obama from Hillary was the Iraq War. But look how *that* turned out….

            HeelBearCub – I saw an analysis that says that Trump’s popularity shows that a lot of the people who vote for the Republicans aren’t voting for ever lower taxes on rich people or defending Israel to the last Arab or banning abortion, or all the other issues which get the hard-core base and the party intellectuals excited; but rather, they’re voting against the Democrats because they see the shrill anti-racists and feminists and whackjob environmentalists telling them (mostly white, working people) that they’re the cause of every problem in the U.S.

            If you take issue polls, you’ll see that lots of people vote for Republicans despite many of their policy planks. They vote for Republicans because they hate the loudest voices on the left, and those voices hold over the Democrats. Trump’s strongest appeal is to *those* Republicans, not the ideological conservatives. (Look at the poll on Instapundit – that’s mostly self-selected ideologues.)

  70. Dindane says:

    How exciting is this? (non-rhetorical question)
    http://www.data-journal.science/

    • Nita says:

      Well, I like the idea… but the categorization scheme is hilarious 😀

      Natural sciences
      Formal sciences
      Applied sciences
      Social sciences
      Medecine [sic]
      Fringe sciences

  71. BBA says:

    Anyone have thoughts on the Flint water crisis, mentioned in passing in previous threads?

    The leftblogs I read are furious at the Snyder administration – “you gave them water that you knew was poisoned just to save a few dollars!” – but from what I can tell, it’s more a case of gross incompetence than malice. The Flint River water, like the Detroit system water it replaced, had safe levels of lead at the treatment plant; the authorities just didn’t take into account that the water passed through lead pipes between the plant and the faucet. The chemical composition of the Flint River was such that it was far more corrosive than Detroit water, leading to vastly increased lead from the pipes getting leached into the water, with disastrous results.

    • keranih says:

      Wikipedia’s article is actually pretty good, and is working hard to stay neutral.

      My big take-aways – municipalities with more outgo than income will do things which may be unwise. This is both Flint (who went looking for cheaper water) and Detroit, who reacted very badly to the loss of the revenue from Flint, and who were the primary driver of the crisis by cutting off Flint’s water two years early.

      WRT the sourcing of water from the Flint River – from what I’ve read, that water was known to be an iffier quality than Detroit’s water, and it appears that the Flint processing was perhaps not up to par (which is why they had to add extra chlorine treatment increasing the corrosive nature of the water).

      WRT gross incompetence vs malice…it’s not clear to me which way this one led. IMO, Detroit’s reaction had the most malice, but the reports of coverups on the part of Flint are out there. I would like to see more comprehensive reports of the actual water quality and level of contamination, in order to properly decide how worked up to get over this.

      My biggest take away is that this is yet another reason for persons of a rational and forward looking bent to get involved with their communities at the most local levels – there are lead-soldered pipes in municipalities all over the globe, and this will need to be addressed at some point. (And that’s just the tip of the iceberg wrt various infrastructure issues.) Better to start planning sooner rather than later.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        there are lead-soldered pipes in municipalities all over the globe, and this will need to be addressed at some point

        Why? What’s wrong with the status quo? It only needs to be addressed when opening a new water treatment plant. And getting rid of the lead doesn’t let you run the treatment plant any differently, because the same chlorine leaching out the lead is also leaching out the iron and destroying the mains.

        Is there any reason to believe that Flint / the county would have made the same mistake if they had run on the original 3 year schedule?

        • keranih says:

          Is there any reason to believe that Flint / the county would have made the same mistake if they had run on the original 3 year schedule?

          I think that depends on what you define as their mistake – was it lack of monitoring? Using their (usual, long term) back up water source? Using a corrosive sanitation chemical (when the options are insanely expensive)?

          As for the lead solder – it’s a matter of a lurking threat, which needs to be weighed against everything thing else that needs to be done with the same tiny pot of public funds. My point is not that OMG LEAD GET IT OUT, but that municipalities need investment of time by smart people.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          A town where I lived as a teen (Eastern Canada) regularly has boil water warnings because the pipes can’t keep sufficient water.

          I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those things where there is a special emergency notification system that gets used for everything including minor problems and so an actual problem gets ignored because someone filed some paperwork and ticked the “very severe” box.

      • BBA says:

        Here’s what I don’t get – both Flint and neighboring municipalities in Genesee County decided to switch from Detroit water to the new Karegnondi pipeline. But only Flint got cut off from the Detroit supply early while the rest of Genesee stayed on Detroit water. Who made the call that only Flint had to use the Flint River, and why?

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Many news stories say that Detroit “cut off” Flint, but some say otherwise. The idea that that Detroit would completely cut off Flint out of spite seems absurd to me. I’m pretty sure that what Detroit did was to raise prices even more than the prices that had already driven them away; the county chose to pay those prices for two years and Flint didn’t. But this brings us back to the story of it being the fault of the evil penny-pinching emergency manager.

          (Many news stories refer to the county choosing to continue buying Detroit water, so it’s not like they had a different length contract or something.)

          • keranih says:

            This 538 article (h/t WP talk page) seems to agree – when Detroit was told that Flint was going to switch to the new system, they cancelled the long term contract and offered a series of short term contracts at elevated prices. *nice* Legal, but still.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            And the source for that has a number: $10 million over 2 years. But it is ambiguous whether that is the total charger or the increase over the previous rate.

    • brad says:

      “The chemical composition of the Flint River was such that it was far more corrosive than Detroit water”

      I’ve read that in several places, but haven’t seen any articles that really get down to the nitty gritty. Maybe because not many people care, but if so I happen to be one of the few. What exactly are we talking about here: Lower PH? Higher PH? Lower dissolved solids (i.e. softer water)? Better conductivity?

      When a newspaper prints the words “corrosive water” it sounds pretty bad, but it may well be the case that the water was fine in general, it just wasn’t fine with respect to the specific problems the old pipe network has.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        The chemical problem was low pH. But my understanding is that it was not that the river had low pH. The only thing that made the river difficult to use is that it was low volume, compared to the Great Lake Detroit was using, so all its parameters could fluctuate quickly. But I don’t think that actually caused any problems. My understanding is that the main problem was that the treatment plant dumped chlorine in the water to disinfect without knowing that they had to buffer it. Probably because they were used to topping up the chlorination of the Detroit water that was pre-chlorinated and pre-buffered.

  72. antimule says:

    I kinda doubt that anyone is going to see this, but I think it is the best explanation of Trump phenomenon:
    http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.rs/2016/01/donald-trump-and-politics-of-resentment.html

    It describes rise of Trump as the revolt of the wage class. Essentially, there’s wage class (blue collar) and salary class (white collar). Former was largely destroyed due to globalization (that benefited the later) and illegal immigration and Trump is the only one who at least appears to be looking for them. I don’t agree with all conclusions of the author, but is interesting nonetheless.