Famous books rewritten in the style of Donald Trump: Lord Of The Rings, Atlas Shrugged
Confucianism is newly popular in China after bouncing back from its Cultural Revolution-era ban. The government hopes to build up the philosophy as some kind of principled alternative to Western liberalism, although for now it still seems kind of forced. Bonus for people with too many stereotypes about the conformist East: one of the leaders of the Confucian revival decided to make his point by going around in old Confucian-style robes.
Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks AlphaGo’s victory is a pretty big sign.
Relevant to our interests: a new study on guns and homicide continues to find a correlation; goes part of the way to eliminating a reverse-causation hypothesis.
George R. R. Martin’s continent of Westeros is just Britain and an inverted Ireland mashed together.
After I complained about weighted blankets costing too much, Kate very kindly found one that only costs $90.
Can we really kill all mosquitos in the world to eliminate malaria? Obviously there are some risks here, but risks have to be weighed against benefits – if we don’t do it, mosquito-borne diseases keep killing one million people each year. Related: general staring in awe at the possibilities of CRISPR. Related: can gene drives mitigate wild animal suffering? Of course Brian Tomasik weighs in.
Y Combinator is interested in basic income.
A lot of talk recently on the persistency of ancestry-adjusted economic success – that is, the peoples who were doing more agriculture thousands of years ago are more modernized and prosperous today. Here’s Brian Caplan (with some extra recommendations) and Dietrich Vollrath, and an NBER paper on Africa – Garett Jones has also been talking about this a lot. “You can control your country’s future ancestors!” is the new motto for immigration skepticism.
China Channel is a Firefox add-on that puts you behind the Great Firewall of China. Useful for journalists and developers who want to know how (and if) Chinese people will view their site; interesting for other people who want to know what Chinese Internet users have to go through every day. Warning: you may be authentically kicked off various websites or the whole Internet and not be able to browse normally again until you turn this off.
“Shockingly” successful new treatment for Lou Gehrig’s disease in mice. Compound already has some medical uses and so might be prescribable off-label (though talk to a real neurologist first before you believe this).
If you ever wanted to know what Louis XIV, Mark Antony, and James Maxwell would look like if they were pretty anime girls, now you have moehistory dot tumblr dot com.
Plomin et al on Discontinuity in the genetic and environmental causes of the intellectual disability spectrum. Severely disabled people have specific disorders not related to normal intellectual variation; mildly disabled people just got the short end of the stick in the ordinary genetic lottery.
The Netherlands is training attack eagles to solve their drone problem. Next step: train attack pterodactyls to solve their eagle problem.
Redditors recollect the best Cards Against Humanity plays ever.
Spotted Toad discusses a paper about genetic confounds to value-added teacher pay. If I understand it right (uncertain; it’s pretty complicated) your genes affect not only how much you’ve already learned, but how much you will learn in each particular year. So if we paid teachers based on how much their students’ test scores improve, we might just be rewarding teachers who get genetically-lucky children. Also, the study doesn’t really make a big deal of this and I don’t trust myself to have definitely understood this correctly, but it looks like they might have calculated what percent of variation in test scores (corrected for past test scores) is due to the school environment and found it to be 4%? That would be…something.
Man hacks a bunch of drones together to create a functioning hoverboard, flies it over a lake, is slain by Dutch attack eagles.
A few years ago, some libertarians said they would move to New Hampshire if 20,000 other libertarians also agreed to move to New Hampshire. The theory was that New Hampshire was small and already pretty libertarian, and 20,000 people is a lot of people, so they would have a lot of influence to affect the state and build the sort of libertarian community they wanted. Now they’ve finally gotten their 20,000 and the move will be beginning soon. Needless to say this is a pretty creative way of doing activism. I generally support people branching off into legally isolated communities in order to let everyone achieve their goals simultaneously – but if I were a non-libertarian New Hampshirite right now I would be pretty upset.
The Brain Preservation Foundation’s $25,000 Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize has been won by a team who demonstrated “near perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain” with obvious positive implications for cryonics. Next step is the conceptually similar Large Mammal Prize, which is offering $25,000 for a perfectly preserved pig brain – just in case any of you happen to have one lying around.
This week in accurate animal names: the alien head fish. This week in inaccurate animal names: the mountain chicken.
Impressive recent progress in US internet speed.
“Other people don’t use Twitter the way you do”: one random tweet selected from the website per click.
On the one hand, my theory of a vast conspiracy to replace success-based-on-merit with success-based-on-college-admissions plus college-admissions-based-on a-fuzzy-system-which-in-the-end-will-reduce-to-social-class-and-conformity was overly paranoid and politicized. On the other hand, this article.
Related: New study suggests that rise in college tuitions pretty much entirely from effects of increased subsidization. Ben Southwood’s commentary links my Tulip Subsidies post.
If Clinton wins the primary, will Sanders backers be too bitter to support her in the general? I’m betting ‘no’, but an interesting question and a parable on the dangers of being too quick to insult your opponents.
Study: Low resting heart rate is associated with violence in late adolescence. This isn’t the first time people have found this, either. My totally non-serious troll theory is that this is why stimulants decrease adolescent violence.
This week in academic intolerance: Christian college kicks out professor who says Christians and Muslims worship the same god. I didn’t even know that was up for debate!
Another top doctor in another top medical journal blasts the state of nutrition science – this time it’s cardiologist Steven Nissen in Annals of Internal Medicine. Obligatory denunciation of Ancel Keys is of course included. The Washington Post has a really good post-mortem with a survey of the arguments and counterarguments. Possible summary: “Everyone agrees nutrition science is hard, but nutrition scientists are trying their best, and maybe you could lay off them for a while and also stop reporting every single preliminary result of theirs on the front page of the newspaper”.
The effect of culture: German families who watched West German as opposed to East German TV had fewer children, maybe because the West German shows promoted a culture of smaller family sizes. I freely admit I would not have predicted this and will have to adjust a lot of my beliefs.
All you people who say you’re tolerant of everybody whether they’re white or black or purple, now is your time to shine.
Tyler Cowen’s unemployment bet with Bryan Caplan.
The US is finally starting to win Math Olympiads, and all it had to do was get a couple of bright kids out of the normal school system and into places that could cultivate their talents. With a shout-out to SPARC, which is (was?) affiliated by CFAR and MIRI.
Raptors (the birds, not the dinosaur) may be deliberately spreading fire. Next step: arm pterodactyls with AK-47s to solve the fire-wielding raptor problem.
Study: the more vengeful your god, the more cooperative your society.
Study: over the past decade, the black incarceration rate has gone way down.
This week in overly generic place names: Humansville, Missouri and Hart’s Location, New Hampshire.
This week in things that don’t replicate: some of the advantages of bilingualism. Bonus for suggested adversarial collaboration, malus for the adversary saying “no way”.
Can classical conditioning of the immune system partly replace normal immunosuppressant drugs?!
New study challenges the idea that Native Americans drink more, finds in self-report survey that Native Americans drink at the same rate (and the same amount) as various other groups. But as usual, read the r/science comments, and remember that hospital records, which are a lot more trustworthy than self-report surveys, treat Native Americans for alcohol-related complaints at four times the usual rate. I continue to be wary of self-report drug use surveys.
Old and boring: Markov chains. New and exciting: neural nets trained to predict texts. From Strunk & White: “The most useful kind of paragraph is the Possessive Jesus Of Composition And Publication. The Possessive Jesus Of Composition And Publication is a paragraph of two independent legs in which the reader will probably find a series of three thousand or more emphatic statements…this sentence cannot help himself by substituting a semicolon for a comma. Instead, the sentence will always do well to examine his brother the paragraph and to write twenty ideas that are related to the paragraphs. In spring summer or winter sentences should be avoided.”
More anti-bullying programs that seem to work.
The newest study on benzodiazepines says they do not in fact raise dementia risk. Take this alongside the latest studies on cannabis not in fact affecting IQ, and maybe we should be a little more careful with correlational drug side effect research.
Speaking of careful drug side effect research! Previous correlational studies have failed to really show any problems with light drinking in pregnancy, but might have been confounded by mostly healthy people drinking more. A new study (excellent summary by Vox here) uses “Mendelian randomization” – that is, it compares people with genes that predispose them to drink more versus people with genes that predispose them to drink less. Since genes are upstream from everything else, it’s harder to confound those than actual drinking habits (I was originally concerned about them finding inter-population differences, but they seem to have controlled appropriately). The new methodology finds that light drinking does indeed harm babies, and the CDC has updated its guidelines to suggest that any women who might be pregnant, even without knowing it, should avoid drinking.
Public Policy Polling’s new South Carolina report will tell you which candidates’ supporters are predominantly male versus female, or older vs. younger. It will also tell you less frequently polled questions, like which kind of barbeque sauce they like, who they think should have won the Civil War, and whether or not interning the Japanese during World War II was a good idea. Note that only Republicans got the fun questions, so the Very Liberal category has miniscule sample size and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Many chapters of the Koran began with mysterious combinations of letters. Theories include impenetrable divine secrets vs. the initials of the scribes who first recorded them.
A secret government AI called SKYNET is malfunctioning and sending its heavily armed robots to kill innocent people. This is not a drill.
This week’s best-titled physics blog post: The Universe Has A High (But Not Infinite) Sleep Number.
The American Enterprise Institute has determined that the average person would only get an extra $70/year if we stopped paying CEOs ridiculous salaries and gave it to the workers instead. Unfortunately, this is the American Enterprise Institute being very tricky. A commenter on r/economics points out the problems, re-does the analysis, and finds that the per capita bonus would actually be as high as $406/year. Still not going to single-handedly solve poverty, but starting to look a little more attractive.
You’ve probably already read the commentary on Scalia’s death, but did you know that there was a play about him and an opera about his friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Or that he helped push Obama to nominate (the very liberal) Elena Kagan to the Court?
Noah Smith: Some new evidence suggests, contra economic theory, that free trade with China has cost jobs without necessarily replacing them elsewhere. David Friedman, any thoughts?
Educational psychology’s omnipresent superstar theory of “grit” claims that success depends not on any innate ability but on a (teachable) passion for sticking to hard work in the face of difficulties. Now it’s been tested (abstract, news article), and…”grit” accounts for 0.5% of variation in academic achievement (compared to 40% for intelligence). To add insult to injury, “grit” turns out to be pretty much identical to plain old Conscientiousness, which like everything else is about half heritable and half non-shared environment. I assume the grit research community has sworn to diligently keep pushing on in the face of this hardship. Also, would somebody please use this methodology for growth mindset?
When the Chinese bureaucrats who invented the Three Represents, the Four Olds, and the Eight Honors get bored and stop taking pride in their work, you get the propaganda campaign in favor of the Two Whatevers.
For fans of HPMoR or Japanese light novels: Eliezer Yudkowsky has a new novella, A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?!
You seem to not have the required bad Vox article, here you are.
Can anyone explain how gene drive are possible with mechanics of evolution? Like I'd assume that gene drive genes would be most of genomes or we would have some resistance to them.
Regarding the AI killing people, if you train it on anything slightly wrong it will magnify that. Like a robot was given a difficult task where all the images of one class were taken at night and so i just classified based on level of light.
Edit: idk what is going on with the html here. the text highlights when mousing over?
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Aargh. Vox people, if you’re reading this, http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/14/drug-testing-welfare-users-is-a-sham-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/
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I actually got a change made to this article. I mean sure I spent my lunch hour writing a 750 word email to the author and both senior editors at Vox complaining about it and all I got was a ghost edit (no correction on the masthead) that just made it clear that they were parroting one of the bad statistics and that they didn’t generate it themselves, but that totally counts. Right guys? ….. Guys? …. anyway here is the email and their response if anyone is curious.
To the Author and Editors,
North Carolina’s drug welfare program may be unnecessary and created in bad faith, but either your article was written with the same kind of bad faith or you have demonstrated some laughable incompetence with statistics. In it you say that “150 people were referred for drug testing” and “21 tested positive” . The sane number to derive from that is that 14% (21/150) of public aid applicants who had been convicted of a felony within 3 years of applying to the program tested positive. Instead you compare the number tested positive to all 7600 people who applied for the program, including the 7450 of them who did not get testing. Do you seriously not see the flaw in assuming that of the 7450 individuals who did not get testing none of them were using drugs? You state literally sentences later that the rate of illicit drug use in NC is 8%. If this giant cohorts rate of drug use is supposedly 0% why are we not studying that as part of the war on drugs. Do you believe we should just have heroin addicts without felony convictions apply for the Work First Program in NC instead of sending them to rehab? Because apparently by virtue of being part of the cohort not referred for drug testing we can assume their drug use will drop to zero.
Amazingly, it goes downhill from there. You mention a bit further in that actually that group of 150 that got referred that only 80 actually showed up. So the real lesson we get from this data is that when you try to drug test public aid applicants who had been convicted of a felony within 3 years of applying to the program, nearly half won’t bother showing up and of those that do will have a rate of drug use more than three times the general population (21/80 = 26.25%). Now let’s compare that to the title of your article: “North Carolina is the latest state to find welfare recipients rarely use illegal drugs” to what actually happened: North Carolina looked at welfare applicants who had been convicted of a felony within 3 years of applying to the program and found that they use illegal drugs at over three times what is accepted as the general population rate. Nothing seems incongruous to you? Clicking through your other links finds the same pattern of testing a small group from a pool of welfare applicants and then comparing the number of positives to the entire pool of applicants. The Tennessee program that found only 65 of 39,121? Here is a quote from the article that you linked “Since the law got started, 609 people have been asked to take a drug test: 544 tested negative and 65 tested positive”. 65 divided by 609 is 10.7% or slightly above the national average. The Arizona program that only found one only tested 19 people over the course of 5 years (from your link: “over the course of more than five years, 42 people have been asked to take a follow-up drug test and 19 actually took the test”). And the Utah one is not 12 out of 47,000 it was 12 out of 466 (this one is actually still quite low, not giving a full quote here its literally the second sentence of the HuffPo article you linked too).
Here’s something that may surprise you based on this email so far, Victoria. We’re on the same side on this issue. I think the laws are bad for ideological reasons and beyond that I doubt how practically effective they would be in deterring drug use anyway, but your article is so bad it makes our side looks like its populated by blind partisans who can’t read a study. If you framed the numbers this way on purpose shame on you. Shame on you as a journalist for so badly abusing your platform to mislead people and shame on you as a partisan for being so bad at it. If you truly are this bad at statistics, maybe take a little break from writing about numbers until you have a chance to do some serious brushing up. As it stands I’ll be eyeing the numbers of every article published by Vox more closely knowing that they will allow, intentionally or not, articles like this to be published which abuse statistics so thoroughly,
Regards,
XG277’s name
And the response:
Hello XG277’s first name,
I’m Victoria’s editor. Thanks for your note. We’re clarifying the language here to show that the department of health provided that .3% figure to reporters (and Victoria doubly confirmed the figure with the department this morning and we have an email saying as such). We quoted part of the email in the story; their rationale is that the sample size is indicative of the full population of 7600 people.
Thank you for your concern and please let me know if there are any questions.
Best,
Michelle
So yeah. All my concerns totally addressed /s
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Vox is not actually any more intellectually honest than Slate or Salon, they’re just selling a slightly different brand of ideology. I was hugely disappointed to realize this, but we’ve got to accept the reality of the situation.
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Fair enough. I mean we were warned. Their motto is ‘explain the news’ not ‘explain the news accurately’
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And Fox’s slogan is “Fair and Balanced”, not “Fair and Balanced and we actually mean that we’re not outright lying”
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>Vox is not actually any more intellectually honest than Slate or Salon, they’re just selling a slightly different brand of ideology.
I’d say Vox and Slate are about equal. With Salon being noticeably worse.
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Going to agree here, Vox and Slate both have some decent folk on their staff. The Vox articles recently on my field of expertise (renewable integration) where actually pretty spot on! I mean, they’re still a giant heartbreaker; I was so excited when Ezra Klein started Vox only to see my hopes crushed but I would not put it even close to the same level as Salon.
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>their rationale is that the sample size is indicative of the full population of 7600 people.
wat
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We’re clarifying the language here to show that the department of health provided that .3% figure to reporters
That’s the big clue right there. A lot of “reporting” is no such thing, it’s rewriting press releases or turning a molehill into a mountain. Why recheck figures for yourself? Surely the party giving them to you got them right in the first place! After all, you’re a journalist not a mathematician. (And if the North Carolina Department of Health is that bad at statistics, then there’s a lot more to worry about).
Seriously, at this stage, the only thing I’ll believe is correct in a newspaper or media outlet is the death notices and sports pages
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There has been a surge of GamerGate articles going around in the past day, and while I *really* *really* don’t want to get into which side is right here, one thing I noticed was that articles were talking about how the police departments were ignoring complaints of rape/death threats — with no attempt made to ask the police departments what the hold-up was. It’s like that was too much work, especially when you already have your 3000 words.
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Assuming the question was even asked, I would guess that a large part of the hold up is insufficient evidence.
When I was still working EMS and responding to domestic violence calls on a semi-regular basis I must have overheard the following conversation at least once a month. Paraphrasing…
Deputy: Had they threatened you before?
Citizen: Yes they sent me all sorts of nasty messages saying they were going to ____ (beat, rape, kill, maim, etc…)
Deputy: May I see them?
Citizen: I deleted them, because they were so horrible
Deputy: …
Citizen: Well why are you just standing there aren’t you going to arrest his/her sorry ass?
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I emailed some Vox higher-ups about this sort of thing once (I’m being deliberately vague because I’m not sure about the ethics of revealing private email conversations). They said that they are very committed to accuracy, that they sometimes make mistakes, and that when these are pointed out they are happy to correct them. They seemed to genuinely misunderstand certain points, and to have differing interpretations of others that I find questionable but which are within the range of what smart honest people might come up with.
I know my links posts often contain a lot of really wrong stuff before all of you guys correct me, and I think maybe once you get to the point where you’re publishing twenty or thirty different things on topics you know next to nothing about, eventually it just becomes too hard to do it in a really virtuous manner and you stop worrying about it as much.
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If your business is communicating facts, and if one of the things you don’t care about so much any more is that your headline rests on getting the size of the denominator wrong by four orders of magnitude, maybe you should get the F&^% out of that business.
(you= vox, not scott)
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Being incorrect about complicated stuff is easy to do, and I don’t blame Vox for it. Pulling dramatic and far reaching conclusions out of studies you don’t really understand is a lot less defensible. And deliberately misrepresenting your opponents (such as Yglesias has done in claiming that Republicans say Bush was not President on 9/11) is really very poor form.
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So what’s not clear to me is how they determined who got “referred” for testing. If they made that determination based on some criterion which correlates with drug use (which seems likely, given that the language in the original article says “According to data supplied by the Dept. of Health and Human Services, out of about 7,600 cases reviewed from August to December, about 150 met the criteria to require a drug test.”.
If that’s the case, what we’re really measuring is the probability that someone is using drugs, given that they meet the selection criteria.
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The Technology and Science of “Gene Drive” by Razib Khan at his GNXP blog. Be sure also to read the comments
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The last time the red text thing happened, it was an improperly closed link tag.
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>Regarding the AI killing people, if you train it on anything slightly wrong it will magnify that.
No, no, the seven people they trained it on were definitely related to terrorists in some way.
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The link to the alien head fish doesn’t work.
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Sorry! It’s fixed now. And here’s an extra Giant Bering Wolf-Fish for your troubles.
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“Cue Internet feminism freaking out and accusing them of “fetishizing the fetus” and “positioning women as chattel”.”
The ‘accusing them of’ link also doesn’t work.
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What is this referring to?
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Something I deleted.
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And there is also the Hoover chicken.
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Okay, but aren’t you generally in favor of open-ish borders? Or have I misremembered? Anyway, if Mexicans can move to California then I see no principled way to object to libertarians moving to New Hampshire.
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I’m not 100% in favor of open borders, and I think if, say, twenty million Mexicans deliberately coordinated among themselves to move to California so that they could vote in laws saying everyone had to speak Spanish, a lot of people would view that a little differently than people slipping across the border to find work.
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A fairer comparison would be if ~600000 Mexicans coordinated a move to California. (pop of NH: 1.33m; 66x the 20000 FSPers. Pop of California: 39m.) And you know? It’s been done, minus the coordination. The illegal population in California is estimated at 2.4m.
But I have to agree with La Dreapta. It’s the principle of the thing.
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IIRC, the Mexican government has handed out directions on how to do it. Which would make it not only coordinated, but an attack of war (as an invasion).
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One of the most interesting features of the open borders project is that it makes war obsolete by virtue of automatic surrender. Who needs tanks and rifles when your people can just walk across the border unarmed?
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The Mexican government has also paid for registration fees so its citizens living in the U.S. illegally can apply for DACA.
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@Outis: This has already been done- in 1975 Morocco took control of what was then the Spanish Sahara (now the disputed territory of Western Sahara) by marching 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians, led by King Hassan II, across the border. There were Spanish troops present, but they didn’t fire.
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Stalin also used it as a military tactic to ‘pacify’ regions by moving ethnic groups in such a way that every region had a significant Russian minority who would oppose independence.
China used the same tactic in Tibet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet
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Ironically, the US ended up getting Texas after the Mexican government opened the border and allowed mass immigration from the US.
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“One of the most interesting features of the open borders project is that it makes war obsolete by virtue of automatic surrender. Who needs tanks and rifles when your people can just walk across the border unarmed?”
Unilaterally putting your citizens under the jurisdiction of a separate sovereign government seems like a funny way to win a war.
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Fifth columning has a long and (in)glorious history.
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@Outis:
Who needs tanks and rifles when your people can just walk across the border unarmed?
Because violent conflict within a state never happens.
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Here is your friendly monthly reminder that net illegal immigration has been zero for the past eight years. The fifth column attack of war which provoked an automatic surrender ended while you weren’t paying attention.
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It’s not as if they illegally immigrate and then disappear; the ones that have already illegally immigrated are still there and still affecting things.
The same applies to Scott’s objection to libertarians moving to New Hampshire, of course. If they all moved there (which still makes them proportionately fewer than Mexicans in California) and stopped moving but the ones that had already moved there changed the laws and culture, a lot of people wouldn’t like it.
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Unilaterally putting your citizens under the jurisdiction of a separate sovereign government seems like a funny way to win a war.
If the separate sovereign government in question is a democracy, it may not be separate that much longer.
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@Jiro
Yes, but (1) the US population continues to grow apace, absorbing the illegal immigrants, and (2) the ones who are here assimilate over time. At their peak, illegal immigrants comprised 4.1% of the population, but this has already fallen to 3.6%.
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@Earthly Knight,
You’re asserting your conclusion as if it were evidence of itself.
If illegal immigrants arrive, never leave, and their children are officially counted as US citizens that doesn’t mean that we have “absorbed” them and the problem is solved. It just means that we have given up on actually removing them.
I have some sympathy for the principle of “Stadtluft macht frei” or the idea of the melting pot, and there is evidence that some immigrant communities are assimilating to mainstream American culture. At the same time, actually presenting that evidence or those ideas would be helpful especially since many of us they are unconvincing.
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The point about absorption is simple and purely mathematical. If a subpopulation holds at the replacement rate, while the larger population of which it is a part continues to grow, the subpopulation will, over time, take up a smaller and smaller fraction of the population. If net illegal immigration stays at zero, in a decade only 2.5% of Americans will be illegal immigrants, and in two decades their share of the population will be negligible.
This data on the characteristics and attitudes of second-generation immigrants might help to assuage your worries about assimilation. Some highlights:
–While 33% of first-generation Hispanic immigrants think of themselves as Americans, 61% of second-generation immigrants do.
–26% of married second-generation Hispanic immigrants have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity.
–78% of second-generation Hispanic immigrants believe that you can get ahead if you work hard, compared to 58% of the general population.
–A full 90% of second-generation Hispanic immigrants are proficient english speakers.
This issue is a bit vexing for me, because while I (a) sympathize with concerns that a huge influx of immigrants might overwhelm public education and social services, and (b) value our culture and don’t want it radically altered by outsiders with a different way of life, I also think it’s pretty clear that the era of massive illegal immigration has ended, and don’t see a bunch of hardworking Catholics as aliens with irreconcilable values.
For what it’s worth, I think of fears about immigration in Europe, where the immigrants do often hail from pre-enlightenment cultures, as a lot more real and pressing.
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@ Earthly Knight:
Exactly. The problem is people vastly exaggerating the costs while ignoring the benefits.
Or, in fact, treating the benefits as costs by complaining that immigrants are “stealing jobs”.
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First of all, that doesn’t distinguish illegal and legal immigrants!
Next, it compares today’s first generation immigrants to the second generation that resulted from yesterday’s first generation immigrants. In other words, it is comparing apples and oranges. We don’t know that yesterday’s first generation had the same attitudes as today’s first generation to begin with, and we don’t know that the second generations will change in the same way (and I can think of a number of reasons why they might not).
Furthermore, the way those questions are phrased is such that they ask almost nothing about the immigrants’ beliefs. “Do you consider yourself an American” is just an applause light and says nothing about what the immigrant actually thinks. If you look at the political party question, the second generation was actually more tilted towards the Democrats than the first generation. (And “Hispanics” includes non-Mexicans such as Cubans who are more likely to be Republican; I wonder what the result would have been for Mexicans only). And that’s just about the only question related to politics–what did either the first or second generation think about taxation, government spending, etc.?
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@ Jiro:
Why, oh why, might Hispanic immigrants (especially illegal immigrants) and their descendants dislike Republicans?
Could it be that the Republicans want to deport (or “self-deport”) either them, their relatives, or their close acquaintances? You can’t keep calling to kick people out of the country and then act surprised when they support the party that doesn’t want to do so. Moreover, by driving them to that party, you aid in their indoctrination into the view that the solution for all their problems is more welfare and redistribution.
It’s pretty much the same reason why there is a relative lack of blacks, gays, lesbians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists in the Republican party.
Gay couples, especially, are perhaps the most natural Republican demographic from an economic standpoint. Double income, no kids. What possible reason could they have for not voting for Republican politicians who will lower taxes and cut welfare spending?
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@Earthly Knight
I agree that Catholic Hispanics do less to change the culture of a Western nation than Muslim Arab/Syrian/etc. immigrants will.
But when you say
Why do you think the relevant group to look at is “Illegal Immigrant” rather than the population to which the Illegal Immigrants belong? Immigrants tend to have higher birthrates then the native population, so positing less influence as time passes seems to assume complete assimilation.
@Vox: Could be because supporting smaller government (which republicans ostensibly do) is actually quite rare.
What kinds of political parties were the immigrants supporting in their home countries?
Republicans assumed Hispanics were natural conservatives because they were Catholic, I guess? And aren’t like the blue tribe much, maybe. But poor immigrants will be more drawn to economic issues than cultural ones.
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@Vox –
You may have said so before, but please remind me just what you think our government (or our citizens should tell our government) do regarding people who have broken immigration law?
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Earthly:
That graph does not show what you claim it shows. If the influx of new immigrants is balanced by existing immigrants being amnestied, then the number of illegal immigrants is stable, but net illegal immigration remains positive.
Vox:
Which disproves the claim of assimilation. They are American citizens and think themselves as Americans, but in practice they vote according to the interests of a non-American group. As usual, self-reporting is no substitute for observing actual behavior.
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@Outis
Do you think it is reasonable for someone to vote for their family to be deported?
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@Outis
Through 2013, the Obama administration granted legal status to a grand total of 250,000 illegal immigrants, or about 50,000 per year. This number is trivial, and will not affect the conclusion that net illegal immigration stands at zero.
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Probably because he doesn’t share your … intuitions regarding the overwhelming importance of race and ethnicty.
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Forgive me for thinking genes and culture might affect behavior.
I’ll just click my heals together three times and say “tabula rasa” and everything will be fine.
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@ Earthly Knight
“If a subpopulation holds at the replacement rate, while the larger population of which it is a part continues to grow, the subpopulation will, over time, take up a smaller and smaller fraction of the population.”
Does that actually apply, regarding the birth rates of immigrants vs. natives in the US? I thought the native US was holding at replacement rate and the overall population has only been growing due to immigration (legal or not).
http://cis.org/ImmigrantBirthRates-FertilityUS
http://cis.org/declining-fertility
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/12/immigrants-birth-rates-tumble-effect-population-gr/
“The birth rate of immigrant women of reproductive age dropped from 76 births per 1,000 women in 2013 to 62 births per 1,000 in 2008. By contrast, native-born women’s birth rate dropped from 54 per 1,000 to 50 — a much smaller decline.
Immigrant women still have a higher fertility rate, but their average of 2.22 children expected during their lifetime is well below immigrants’ peak of 2.75 in 2008, said the report, written by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler for the Center for Immigration Studies. By contrast, the native-born fertility rate was just 1.79 children per woman in 2013, for an average of 1.87 overall.”
It would seem the evidence contradicts rather than supports your assertion, but if you have some primary source that caused you to believe that natives have a higher than replacement birth rate while immigrants hold at replacement rate, let’s see it.
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@ keranih:
Give them amnesty. Preferably with little medals for having the courage to break an unjust law.
@ Outis:
They vote like Democrats. Who, last time I checked, were assimilated Americans.
But sure, how can they fully assimilate and feel comfortable as “real Americans” while under the threat of deportation for themselves or their families?
What I want is for immigrants to vote for small government and low taxes. Having the party ostensibly in favor of small government engage in race-baiting and immigrant-hating does not accomplish this goal.
If I were the child of an illegal immigrant, would I say “Hmm, let me check out what the Republicans are saying on economic policy?” No, I would almost certainly hear one sentence from them on immigration and tune everything else out.
It’s a vicious circle: take any group which doesn’t have much support for Republicans. Immigrants, for example (but it also applies to blacks, Jews, gays, atheists, etc.). Republicans want to form a coalition to, say, lower taxes. But say immigrants lean left just a little bit. So Republicans say: aw, it won’t hurt to try to combine anti-tax sentiment with anti-immigrant sentiment; the immigrants already are against us, and we can pick up a lot of xenophobic people in the bargain. Then, once immigrants see this, they start to lean much more left, and so the Republicans decide to intensify the anti-immigrant sentiment. This continues until they’ve completely alienated them.
The “Sailer Strategy” is just to triple-down on appealing to white men, while alienating everyone else. Because hey, if you can get 90% of their vote, you don’t need other votes. I think this is unlikely to work.
Moreover, if our goal is to promote small government and individual rights, immigration freedom, and the freedom to employ and associate with immigrants, is a major constituent of that. It is not a costless tradeoff, trading more immigration restrictions for lower taxes, even if you could get away with it.
@ Z:
It’s called “intermarriage”.
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@Z
I am talking about illegal immigrants, that is, foreigners who have entered the country illegally. The number of illegal immigrants in the country has been constant (actually, it’s fallen slightly) over the past eight years. You are talking about illegal immigrants + the descendants of illegal immigrants. American-born descendants of illegal immigrants are American citizens.
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@sweeneyrod: I think it’s unreasonable to give someone voting rights when their own family remains involved in illegal immigration. I know that America has its hands partially tied by jus soli, but other countries should take heed.
Of course, the whole point would be moot if both parties treated support for mass illegal immigration as beyond the pale, but alas.
@Earthly: thanks. I still think it’s suspicious that we are not given data on actual flows (how many people are entering, how many are leaving), and I know that there is a large number of “sanctuary cities” that actively hinder collection of data on illegal immigration. But let’s assume it’s true that it has stopped. Do you have a theory of why? What makes you think that it will not resume?
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Vox:
While Democrats are Americans, they are a skewed subset of Americans. Mexican immigrants would have to vote like average Americans in order to not change the country. Voting like a skewed subset of Americans is not enough.
EK:
By that reasoning, if we legalized all illegal immigrants right now, you could say that the number of illegal immigrants dropped drastically to zero and illegal immigration has no effect whatsoever.
When people worry about the effect of illegal immigration, they are comparing the situation that results if the immigrants don’t arrive and the situation that results if they do. The differences between these two situations include differences that are an indirect consequence of the illegal immigrants, as well as differences caused by the illegal immigrants directly doing things. The creation of more citizens whose ideological balance differs from the existing citizens is an indirect effect.
(If we developed brain emulations and ems are considered citizens, and by some accident of history people only wanted to create ems who are Democrats, would you say that creating a few million ems doesn’t change anything because they’re all citizens anyway?)
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@ Jiro:
So if they voted like Republicans, that would be a reason to keep them out?
What I really mean is that the views they support are within the American mainstream. They are not radical ISIS-supporters coming to burn the place down.
Of course, if a substantial number of people enter the country who vote like Democrats, that will push the country more toward the position favored by Democrats. That does not mean there is a “Stalin—Democrats—Republicans—Hitler” axis, and that this moves us toward Stalin.
Moreover, as I say, the most important reason they support the Democrats’ economic proposals is because they correctly perceive the Republican worldview to be against them.
It’s the same reason why Jews heavily lean Democratic. They are repelled by the Christian triumphalism within the Republican party, while with the Democrats they are a much better cultural fit.
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Well, I wouldn’t say that the major Latino communities on the West Coast, at least, are a particularly good cultural fit to the Democratic core. They’re much more religious, for one thing — granted, Anglo Catholics historically voted Democratic, but that’s changing — a lot of them are rural, and they tend to show a lot of the sort of small-business entrepreneurialism that Republicans really like.
Their alignment with the Democrats looks more pragmatic to me. The Republican establishment knows this, it’s why ¡Jeb! and Rubio and, before them, George W. Bush spent a lot of time trying to court the demographic. But the populist wing of the party doesn’t like it, and there’s enough nativist sentiment floating around in its base that I think the populists are going to win, for now.
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In NY around 40% of Hispanic people eligible to vote are of Puerto Rican descent and another 20% Dominican, Mexican descent is only around 7%. I don’t have numbers for just NYC but I suspect they’d be even more skewed.
I think those intra-Hispanic demographics change the potential political calculus significantly as compared to say New Mexico or Illinois, even if at the moment everyone is voting Democratic.
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This is not quite right. People who are worried about illegal immigration, if they are at all rational, are worried about the effects of current and future government policies. But no future government policy will have the power to strip birthright citizens already alive of their citizenship. So no matter your feelings about illegal immigration, the current population of American citizens who are descended from illegal immigrants is beside the point.
Now, the future crop of birthright citizens is still on the table. But their numbers will be relatively small, because net illegal immigration has stood at zero for eight years.
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@ Nornagest:
I wouldn’t call it “pragmatic”. Sure, they have a lot in common with Republicans. That’s my whole point that they’re not the irredeemable reprobate doomed to follow the City of Roosevelt over the City of Reagan.
The problem is that the immigration issue is much more salient to them. That pushes them away, so they start associating with the people in favor of letting them stay in the country. It just so happens that those people support things as varied as gay rights, abortion rights, and higher taxes on the rich, and they spin a coherent narrative of how it all fits together. Over time, that pushes them more towards the Democratic worldview in all respects.
(A similar story can be told of how evangelicals, once apolitical, got pushed into the Republican party and changed their own views to cohere with it as the same time they influenced the Republicans to have a more religious message.)
I think “courting” Hispanics is exactly what the Republicans should be doing. And it mostly is what the “donor” class of “business Republicans” want. The problem is, as you say, the nativist crowd.
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EK:
But there are 11 million illegal immigrants still. You could, for instance, deport them all before they have more children. I think the effect of that would be relatively large.
In any case, the country’s ability to defend its borders has been permanently damaged. When the next immigration wave hits, it will penetrate even more easily.
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@ Outis:
Are you seriously advocating that the U.S. government should, or even has the ability to, round up 11 million people and throw them out of the country?
Because it’s not going to happen. And it would be completely monstrous if it did happen.
If so, then good.
But honestly, I don’t see how this affects “the country’s ability to defend its borders”. The only thing I see affected is the willingness to do so, i.e. a greater tolerance toward immigrants in some quarters. And even there, you could argue that it has increased other people’s “willingness to defend our borders” by a greater amount.
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@Vox
That seems like a low standard. I’m pretty sure that many people are upset about behaviors/beliefs that fall far short of that.
Some comments about things I am not going to bother to quote:
– I think it’s pretty clear that culture plays a huge effect. There is an enormous difference in outcomes between Asian and non-Asian immigrants. This is not just a peculiarity of Asian immigrants to the US, you see similar high success rates for Asian immigrants in the EU and other places.
Some other cultures do spectacularly bad. In the Netherlands there are two main groups of Muslim groups, Turks and Maroccans. The latter is doing quite a bit worse than the first and is much less capable of organizing than the first group.
– There is a clear reduction in birth rates for the second and third generation in my country, getting very close to native rates. This makes the fear that natives are outborn by immigrants a false belief.
– Nationality given to babies born inside the country is a US law, that my EU country doesn’t have, for which I am glad. It effectively breaks up families when parents can’t stay, but young children can. So you get situations where people are incentivized to leave their children behind, which is a perverse choice.
– The ‘immigrants don’t cost any jobs’ argument ignores the issue that the jobs taken over by immigrants are initially the lower class jobs, while people who benefit are those who employ/hire gardeners, nannies, taxi drivers, etc. These tend to be the upper and upper middle class. Not surprisingly, the people who tend to be most anti-immigration are the lower class and those in favor are either immigrants themselves or the upper/middle class. Ironically, the first group is then called racist for defending their meager existence, while ‘progressives’ then claim the moral higher ground for advocating policies that benefit them financially (while they are already better off). As such, I see support for open borders on the left as a rather elitist position.
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“It effectively breaks up families when parents can’t stay, but young children can.”
Someone explain this to me. Does Mexico et al not grant the children of citizens born elsewhere citizenship? Is there some legal reason why minor citizens cannot be kept with their foreign guardians who are being returned?
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I don’t know exactly how Mexico does it, but I do know that the US is pretty unusual among first-world counties in granting jus soli citizenship.
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Mexico grants citizenship to anyone born on Mexican soil or to at least one Mexican citizen parent abroad. Those children can go home with their parents unless there is an unwritten “…and of course the child must experience the benefit of being raised in the superior environment of the United States” at work.
May not apply to all Latin American immigrants, of course.
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@ Aapje:
Weren’t you the guy saying that Israel should let all the Palestinians in, no questions asked? I find this difficult to square with your opposition to open borders. I mean, supporting open borders in general doesn’t mean you think Israel has to commit suicide in this way, but it doesn’t make too much sense the other way around.
I agree that open borders is senseless as a left-wing position. Welfare “safety nets” are one of the main drivers for immigration restriction: if you turn the country into a private yacht club with special benefits for the members, then you’ve got to worry about too much riffraff coming in, ruining the ambiance, and eating all the hors d’oeuvres. And as you allude to, labor union protectionism was historically one of the major forces for closing borders in the first place.
In that sense, open borders is a “Koch brothers idea”.
Anyway, the fact that immigration benefits the upper and middle class doesn’t mean that it hurts the lower class. One major advantage that lower-class Americans have over most immigrants is that they speak fluent, unaccented English. So they will naturally tend to be placed into supervisory roles and those interacting with the public.
On a wider scale, by being productive and lowering the cost of goods and services that natives buy, immigrants increase the real wages of lower-class natives, even if to some extent they decrease their nominal wages.
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It would be reason to say “if we don’t keep them out, the country is going to change”. just like Scott fears for libertarians in New Hampshire.
That’s a very incomplete reason. George Bush supported Mexican immigration, but that didn’t make them become Republicans. And there are other reasons they support Democrats than the Republican stand on immigration, including their income level and use of social services as well as the tendency for Democrats to gain support by race-baiting and class-baiting.
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@ Jiro:
It will undoubtedly change. But the change in ideology is unlikely to be as radical when produced by economic migrants versus when it is produced by 20,000 coordinated and extremely committed libertarians.
George Bush did. But you may have noticed that he faced intense pushback in his own party, ultimately sinking his most important efforts to come up with some solution.
And yes, there are other reasons why they tend to lean left. But e.g. under Reagan they didn’t lean extremely left. Under George W. Bush they supported him at 45%. When Republicans actually make an effort to appeal to them, they support Republicans in much greater numbers.
One might hypothesize that stopped their hostility toward them altogether, they might change their ways entirely. But when they talk about “self-deportation”, it turns them away. When they hear that, they tune the Republicans out and don’t even hear the arguments for lower taxes or whatever. They just hear the Democratic story, which is that we need the government to solve all our problems.
Sure, you can argue that Democrats engage in “race-baiting” and “class-baiting”. The thing is, it’s a lot more persuasive to say “vote for us because the other guys want to kick your family out of the country” when that’s actually true.
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EK and Vox:
Your implied assertion that children of immigrants perfectly assimilate to equal the values, and thus voting behaviors of native citizens has already been addressed…by none other than EK:
“–While 33% of first-generation Hispanic immigrants think of themselves as Americans, 61% of second-generation immigrants do.”
61% is not 100%. You need to do better to convince anyone other than yourself that immigration is changing internal demographics enough to change US political outcomes, permanently.
Their birth rates outpace natives, for at least a few generations. That is established until you can presented a primary source contradicting the one I presented.
Immigrants and their descendants do not have the same values as the community they are entering, otherwise *at bare minimum* the figures you presented previously would have indicated perfect assimilation. They do not.
Those are the facts presented thus far. Mental gymnastics doesn’t address the facts I presented, nor the points on second-order implications raised by others in the thread. Present new information or update your beliefs.
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@Randy
The point is that the family now has to choose between breaking up the family, which gives the child access to a US education, etc; or keeping the family intact. They are given an impossible choice, IMO. Giving people a choice can be more cruel that not giving them that choice.
@Vox
I think that there is a huge difference between migrating to a new country vs migration to a country to which one has very strong connections. I would argue that a Palestinian has a connection to the land where his grandfather lived, which is not comparable to the connection that Mexicans have with the US (or Syrians with Germany).
Secondly, I believe that Israel had a legal obligation to take back the refugees after the war and am strongly against the concept of ‘facts on the ground’ aka just ignoring legal obligations for a long time and then claiming that they are no longer relevant. It would incentivize bad behavior.
Thirdly, I believe that people primarily have a duty to build up their own country. In the case of Palestinian refugees, the refugee camps are not a country, so they don’t have that option where they are right now. This is not true for most immigrants.
All lower class Americans speak ‘fluent, unaccented English’????? :O
I’m just flabbergasted that someone would believe such a thing. Here is one example of how plenty in the lower class don’t speak middle/upper class English:
http://www.thethinkingatheist.com/forum/Thread-How-to-Speak-Hillbilly-Appalachian-English-Dialect
African-Americans also tend to have speech patterns which are considered lower class/improper/etc.
Finally, I think you underestimate the additional qualities that are necessary for a supervisory role, which many in the lower class don’t have. A good example is the ability to speak Spanish. If the supervisor can’t supervise because he can’t communicate with the Mexican workers, he is clearly worse as a supervisor than a Mexican with reasonable bilingual skills. Immigrants are also less ‘trouble’ (= they wont complain about abuse as easily). I could go on.
A jobless native is objectively worse off with slightly cheaper goods and services than if he had a job and more costly goods. And again, the poorer people are, the fewer goods and services they can afford, so their gain is smaller.
As a general rule, capitalist gains benefit the rich more than the poor and socialist gains (like welfare) benefit the poor more than the rich.
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@Z
I don’t know if you are addressing me, but if you are, let me be clear: in the quotation you first responded to, I was discussing illegal immigrants, not (citizen) descendants of illegal immigrants. Your original comment concerns the descendants of illegal immigrants, and consequently does not make contact with the section of my comment you quoted. I do not need to “update my beliefs” because you were confused about what was going on and started talking about something else.
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@Doctor deal
One of Scott’s links on this very page is about how 1/5 of immigrants’ grandchildren are so Americanized they self-identify as non-Hispanic.
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Replying to statistics earlier in the thread: Not all illegal immigrants are Mexican. Only about half are, and their numbers are declining while the total number of illegal immigrants remains constant. The inflows from the rest of the world, mainly from other Latin American countries and Asia, offset the outflow to Mexico.
Also, illegal immigrants are split about 50/50 between those who crossed the border illegally and those who entered legally but overstayed their visas. There’s something to the popular image of illegal immigration, but it increasingly doesn’t match the reality.
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But the context is about the effect of illegal immigrants. Changing the political balance among the next generation of citizens is certainly an effect of illegal immigrants, even if the citizens are not illegal immigrants themselves.
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Well, I wouldn’t say that the major Latino communities on the West Coast, at least, are a particularly good cultural fit to the Democratic core. They’re much more religious, for one thing — granted, Anglo Catholics historically voted Democratic, but that’s changing — a lot of them are rural, and they tend to show a lot of the sort of small-business entrepreneurialism that Republicans really like.
Yeah, I don’t feel like a Red when objections to Mexican immigration come up. Entrepreneurial Christians are exactly the demographic I want to have more of.
The only way I can make sense of it is that the Republicans are the Party of the native working class, for whom any increase in the supply of labor is a threat. Whereas Democrats are this weird pincer movement of the gentry and lumpenproletariat.
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The most recent Pew US religion survey found that American Jews have very liberal/left-wing political views, in some cases more liberal than the religiously unaffiliated. Perhaps Christian triumphalism among Republicans is the reason why they ended up this way, but right now the most logical explanation for why Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats is because they largely agree with the political positions of the Democratic Party. Culturally, most American Jews have been assimilated into the Blue Tribe for a long time. So even if the Republicans were to drop all pretenses of Christian triumphalism tomorrow, they probably wouldn’t appeal to many American Jews, except perhaps for some of the highly religious Orthodox types (the same survey unsurprisingly found that most American Jews aren’t very religious).
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@ NN:
Exactly, it’s self-reinforcing and can’t be eliminated overnight. And before it was merely Christian triumphalism among Republicans, it was just plain anti-Semitism (in the 20s, etc.).
Interestingly, as I recall, the only Jews who (on average) lean Republican are Russian Jews (who immigrated during or after the Soviet Era). Guess why?
On the other hand, even Ayn Rand voted for FDR the first time around. For one, because as she said, she didn’t know much about politics. (Also, because he campaigned on the opposite economic platform he governed on: that Hoover was too interventionist, which was true.)
But one of the main reasons was that FDR planned to repeal Prohibition, which was supported by WASP types and groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
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That may be true, but the US isn’t unusual among countries in the Americas, most of which grant jus soli citizenship. Jus soli is largely a New World thing. Framing it in terms of first world vs. third world is misleading.
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But what if the Mexicans coordinated to move to California to be the swing vote on a bunch of issues that the Californian population was divided 50-50 on? This is a better analogy. If the Free State Project succeeds, New Hampshire Democrats will get their way on a bunch of social issues and New Hampshire Republicans will get their way on a bunch of economic issues. Assuming they care about these issues roughly equally, they should feel neutral about the Free State Project.
On the other hand, I don’t know if there’s a Fascist Party of New Hampshire, but they should be universally upset by this. Oh well, we can’t all win.
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So, when umpteen thousand come across the border, to the point where one can’t find work in the service sector without speaking Spanish, that’s completely different?
I agree – a different culture moving into your area is a different culture, and either it’s okay to be disquieted about it, or not.
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Yes, it seems like the coordination may matter for making them less culpable, but not from a consequentialist standpoint.
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And it’s important to distinguish between culpability and desirability. I completely understand why many immigrants make the choices they do, but that doesn’t mean that I find it desirable.
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twenty million Mexicans deliberately coordinated among themselves to move to California so that they could vote in laws saying everyone had to speak Spanish
Would be defensible on the grounds that the first non-native language spoken in California was indeed Spanish, and that English as the de facto official language really only came in when (quick consult of Wikipedia) “California was acquired by the United States under the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the defeat of Mexico in the Mexican–American War”.
I mean, you might well be able to argue on grounds that since Spanish was the original tongue of colonised and settled California, then bi-lingualism or two official languages is not beyond the pale. If people are going to be consistent about “Speak English, you’re living in America!” then they really should translate all the Spanish names (such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, etc.) into English. I’m just surprised no organisation has demanded all the blatant religious names should be removed (there has been to-ing and fro-ing over the seal of Los Angeles county)
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I think it’s defensible if for whatever reason there happen to be a majority of Spanish speakers already there and they want to become a true bilingual state. It’s just common sense.
However if lots of Spanish speaking people move in just for the purpose of making everyone speak Spanish it does not count because then there was no real need to become bilingual in the first place.
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Being Mexican territory does not necessarily mean that it was full of Mexicans and not Americans. Much of the territory acquired in that treaty was either majority American or majority Native American. Seems to be the latter in this case, I can’t find the 1850 census estimates for Native Americans but I figure less than 6000 Mexicans from it (about 7000 people who were native to California, about 1000 of those born in the last 2 years, mostly to the 80,000 or so people who had already shown up for the gold rush, including a lot of people born in some other part of Mexico).
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One possible rule of thumb (based on the US immigration rate in 1907): Immigration rates under 1.5% per year should be regarded as harmless.
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That doesn’t really make sense. It would be better to say “immigration rates that are under 1.5%, and when the government is similar to the government in 1907, should be regarded as harmless”.
Even that probably isn’t good because immigration from different countries can be different. The ease of immigration from Mexico changes the character of immigration compared to immigration from overseas.
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Of course, you can be in favor of people being allowed to do something and still be mad when they actually do it.
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I think the issue is that there is no frontier. Most open boarders advocates afaik want it to be reasonably easy to make your own country which would largely prevent people from moving to place to create their own community.
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Wait, what? It seems to me that open borders makes it impossible to create, or even keep, your own country.
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Why would you assume that?
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Is that a serious question?
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Because just like in Internet communities, you are liable to a massive overflow of newcomers who don’t respect your rules and in fact want to change them. The only way to deal with this is to give the old guard unprecedented powers to enforce newer and more strict rules.
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@ Cichlimbar.
Yes, as there seems to be an inferential step missing. So long as your group has higher fertility or is just plane meaner than the “locals” or the “intruders” you can claim and keep whatever country you want.
@Wrong Species:
It’s not unprecedented at all, that’s why I’m asking.
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I am reminded of Joe Haldeman’s book Worlds Apart, in which the survivors of a nuclear war plan to launch a generation ship towards a nearby star system. Part of the surviving populace belongs to what is usually referred to as a Dominionist sect – they don’t believe in birth control, and purposefully try to have very large families, because of the command to be fruitful and multiply. They claim the right to be represented in the ship’s crew.
It is calculated that if some very small number of them are included, and their beliefs are propagated, the ship is doomed because they will outbreed its capacity to support the crew before the ship arrives. Hilarity ensues.
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“So long as your group has higher fertility or is just plane meaner than the “locals” or the “intruders” you can claim and keep whatever country you want.”
So in other words, the natives will have enforceable power over the newcomers, over a presumably defined geographic area? That sounds like borders.
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>So in other words, the natives will have enforceable power over the newcomers, over a presumably defined geographic area? That sounds like borders.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me that “open borders” is the same as “no borders”. You can let everyone in who wants to, but have a law that forces them to wear a hat that says “stupid stinky immigrant” while they’re within them.
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In that sense it is impossible to have no borders. There will always be a place crossing which one changes jurisdiction, outside some global government that simple makes the upper atmosphere the border.
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>In that sense it is impossible to have no borders.
Yes?
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and therefore I don’t think that’s what people mean by no borders, but that they intend the label to apply as a synonym for the open borders on immigration position.
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gbdub says: …That sounds like borders.
Yes it does. That is why I am skeptical of Outis’ assertion that “open borders makes it impossible to create, or even keep, your own country.”
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Nobody in the open borders threads seems to have mentioned the fact that the U.S. had effectively open borders for most of its history. There were some limits on oriental immigration put in towards the end of the 19th century, but that was pretty much it until the 1920’s.
Which makes it odd for so many people to believe that open border are not merely arguably suboptimal but an obviously terrible idea.
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@ David Friedman:
Well, I agree with you.
But I find it’s not very persuasive because it just becomes “That was then, this is now. Back then, the quantity of ‘wretched refuse’ that could reach our shores was inherently limited by the cost of transportation. But now, we’d be overrun by fifth columnists who would destroy everything we hold dear.”
Bonus points if is it argued that immigrants were in fact responsible for Progressivism and the New Deal.
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Well, it also had a frontier, somewhere to escape from Back East.
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People prior to the 1920s also complained about the crime and violence of immigrants as well. I’m not sure telling people that things will be fine in 50 years after the adjustment period is a great sell.
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@Vox Imp:
Despite the costs of transportation, in the early years of the 20th century the U.S. was receiving about a million immigrants a year. Relative to population, that’s three times the current rate of legal immigration.
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@ Samuel Skinner:
Alternative hypothesis: things were fine then, too, but people in the 20s had the same tendency to exaggerate the negatives of current immigration in comparison to past immigration.
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There are plenty of cases of immigrants doing horrible things; the New York Draft riots springs to mind as a particularly egregious example.
If your position is about later immigrants, we did have gangsters during the prohibition that I believe were drawn disproportionately from the children of immigrants.
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It was impossible back then for immigrants to consume a lot of social services by our standards, because that level didn’t exist. It was also impossible for they or their citizen descendants to vote themselves social services or big government by our standards, because the Overton window for such things was drastically different.
Also, the fact that they came from countries far away and the trip was one way affected their willingness to assimilate.
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@ Samuel Skinner:
Yes, but did these problems outweigh the benefits of immigration to the United States? The conventional understanding is that they did not.
@ Jiro:
They or their citizen descendants kinda did vote for the same big government we have now.
Anyway, if you think the Overton Window is inevitably sliding leftward until we reach our inevitable socialistic doom, I don’t see much point in trying to do anything about it.
If you don’t think that and think it’s actually possible for us to move toward greater freedom, then I think your concern is overblown.
Letting a lot more immigrants in might shift the short-term Overton Window to a position somewhat less in favor of economic freedom. But as Bryan Caplan points out, these immigrants also shift the short-term Overton Window to be more in favor of immigration freedom, which is a major component of liberty.
And there’s no particular reason why it should knock off-course the long-term movement of the Overton Window in favor of greater liberty. As I see it, this is driven by the opinions of intellectuals and not by the opinions of low-skilled immigrants.
Anyway, what ticks me off about discussing this issue with “libertarians” who oppose immigration freedom is that, on this issue, they suddenly switch over to some kind of extreme version of the precautionary principle where if you can handwave any kind of potential danger from immigration, we have the government come in and stop it. While they don’t think this about anything else.
On the contrary, I follow Caplan’s view that if the evidence is really clear that the consequences would be really bad, the government is justified in intervening against something. But it’s no more clear that we have to shut down mass immigration to save liberty than it is that we have to ban all fossil fuels to save the planet from climate change.
The right’s “immigration alarmism” is exactly parallel to the left’s “climate alarmism”. (And that’s perhaps being more generous to “immigration alarmism” than it deserves.)
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I’ve grown more sympathetic to the precautionary principle as I’ve gotten older and seen more plans fall apart for unpredicted reasons, but nine times of ten, even so, it reads more like a rationalization than a real objection.
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I wasn’t talking about the inevitability of changes in the window, just about the effect of the immigrants given the already known position of the window. Immigrants back many generations ago couldn’t have the type of influence that immigrants now can. This makes it a bad comparison to say “see, we had immigrants back then and it was okay, it should be okay now”.
Sorry, I’m not an average utilitarian. I don’t want to increase average liberty at the cost of decreasing the liberty of people already here.
If they or their descendants keep voting for Democrats, it certainly is driven by them. Just because they are low-skilled and aren’t publishing papers in journals doesn’t mean they have no influence.
Many problems from immigration happen because of the interaction with non-libertarian elements elsewhere in society. If the government was small and restricted in what it was allowed to do, immigrants (or anyone else) couldn’t vote for social services or big government, and private owners of roads, etc. would be able to exclude them if they were causing a crime problem.
Edit: See your own comment below about primary and secondary regulations. Limiting immigration is a secondary regulation needed to mitigate the damage that is enabled by the primary regulation (having a big government)
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@ Jiro:
Immigrants back then had at least as much influence as now. Are you familiar with the whole anti-Catholic scare? It happened because people were afraid of Catholic influence, which was real.
I’m not an average utilitarian, either. Or a utilitarian at all. (Actually, the view you are condemning is not average utilitarianism but total utilitarianism: the idea that what matters is the total utility of all people. You yourself are advocating a position equivalent to average utilitarianism: that the U.S. government should be concerned with the average utility of the people within its borders, not the total.)
I think that immigration freedom—i.e. the freedom to associate with immigrants—is a major part of the liberty of Americans. And I think that Americans will benefit from immigration freedom.
I do not believe that open borders will destroy the country but we have to do it anyway because we’re altruists. I think it will have some negative effects on our freedom, but more positive effects on our freedom and well-being.
I think that everyone will benefit in the long run from immigration freedom, except perhaps natives who are both stupid and lazy. And I think the rest of us outnumber them, so too bad for them!
What makes you think that they will continue voting for Democrats indefinitely? Or, for that matter, that Democrats will continue to hold all the same positions?
So why, exactly, do you think the solution is to have closed borders until we establish libertopia?
Especially not when immigration itself dissolves the sense that everyone is the country is part of the same family, and decreases support for the welfare state. The very fact that taxpayers don’t want to give welfare to Mexicans is a force against the welfare state. The U.S. already has heavy restrictions on the immigrants’ eligibility for welfare.
The best outcome, I think, would be an “opt-out system”, where you get to immigrate on the condition that you “opt-out” from welfare and the taxes that pay for it. Such a system could lead to the collapse of the welfare state, as the most productive citizens would also clamor to “opt-out” from those taxes and benefits.
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The kind of influence they had back then was different from now, and leads to different problems, making it a bad idea to compare then and now. Even looking at your own example of Catholic influence: Mexicans are usually Catholics, but hardly anyone thinks that Mexican immigration will cause problems because of that.
Well, look at the data EK linked to. He linked to it to show that Hispanic immigrants became more average, but in fact his own data shows that with respect to political party, they didn’t.
Quoting you: “The problem, of course, is that by “deregulating” just the tertiary or secondary level, you make the problems worse. It’s only if you deregulate the whole thing that you fix the problems and end up with something better than the combination of all three levels. The really big problem is: how do you “gradually” repeal and replace this system, when each gradual step toward making it better actually makes it worse?”
Perhaps your answer there will apply here too, even if the answer is just “it’s really hard, and be really careful”.
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@ Jiro:
Your last point is correct and insightful, and yes, my answer is “It’s really hard and you have to be careful.”
Otherwise, we could, for instance never repeal Obamacare and its individual mandate until The Day We Have the Libertarian Revolution.
Edit: there’s also the general point that our immigration restrictions are a much worse limitation on liberty than the requirement to e.g. force people to buy health insurance. The latter isn’t really that bad.
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“Also, the fact that they came from countries far away and the trip was one way affected their willingness to assimilate.”
Your other points (lack of a welfare system or immediate prospects of one) are correct. But I believe the evidence is that a substantial number of the early 20th century immigrants did return to their homelands, sometimes retiring back there with the money they had made here, sometimes going back to fetch family members who had not come on the initial trip.
According to my parents’ autobiography, my mother’s father came to the U.S., returned to eastern Europe, then came back to the U.S.
On a related point … . By sometime in the 18th century, a perceived problem with transportation as a criminal punishment in England was that it was becoming too easy for someone who had been transported to the New World to (illegally) come back.
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I suggest that one of the blind spots of most people in the first world is the belief that they will never be refugees. I’m not predicting any particular disaster, I just have a general belief that you can’t absolutely count on things to be stable and safe.
I believe that it would be to the advantage of everyone to have a world where it isn’t a disaster to be a refugee.
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I suggest that one of the blind spots of most people in the first world is the belief that they will never be refugees.
I have always been aware of that possibility, and it has become particularly acute this campaign season. But I do not believe that the possibility of my becoming a refugee gives me the right to demand that someone else’s army fight to defend me, or that their honest civil servants (and a body of honest civil servants is no small thing to be taken for granted) should serve me. Absent these things, mere geographic access is meaningless; whatever it is I am fleeing will follow me to e.g. Canada as surely as it would to Wyoming.
And really, what fraction of refugees anywhere are asking for anything less than the protection of the host nation’s army and police and the support of its civil service?
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Moonbase 2016!
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How would open borders prevent people from moving into your new country?
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They wouldn’t. What you do is escape further into the frontier whenever undesirables move in… until you run out of frontier.
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This seems impractical even if the earth is infinite. You’re going to get that one asshole guy/family/clan/tribe/nation who really really won’t take a hint and who can move as fast as you can.
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Welcome to America!
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Switzerland seems to be a good way ahead of everyone else of solving the problem of “how to prevent one organized plurality to use democratic means predatorily against other communities (especially in a context where the different communities are not segregated)?”
Their answer is to grant a maximum amount of rights and self-governance to each recognized community, and only a minimal amount of power to the central government (diplomacy, defense, making sure every community respects what is considered basic human rights [the Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden was forced to allow women to vote in 1991, for instance]). This way even if a community is demographically dominant to the point of generally being in control of national affairs, this doesn’t give them enough legal power to be able to rob other communities of their rights.
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Yes, but how do you convince a powerful central government to cede their power?
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In fact, isn’t this supposed to be the design of the United States? So not only would it be difficult to roll back the centralized power, but it’s also a case study in how controls intended to keep power decentralized can fail in that objective.
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I don’t think the Free State project will work. In the same time period, lots of people from Massachusetts and other New England states that lean left have been moving to New Hampshire to save money on taxes. My impression is that this migration moved NH somewhat leftward, and it will be difficult for the Free State Project to counter this leftward tilt. Note that the achievements so far have been on the liberal side of things. If they had gotten the 20,000 people there ten years ago, they might have made a difference.
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You underestimate what a group of ideologically motivated people can do. If the free staters are organized they can push a lot of their agenda through the government.
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When that process happens to western states like Colorado & Arizona, they call it “Californication.”
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I knew this had something to do with the adultery discussion!
No, really. How important is it for people to maintain stable loyalties?
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I’m not sure it has anything to do with loyalty. In this case, the perception is that people vote for programs they like, dislike the taxes that come with them more than the benefits when it ends up happening, then move to lower tax, lower benefit states and repeat the process without learning anything.
Probably the California emigration has more to do with just getting more crowded, perhaps zoning laws, or different economic patterns, and is noticed when those most fitting the LA stereotypes clash in the new states.
People don’t dislike newcomers because they perceive them as disloyal, but likely to change the surrounding culture in some undesirable way.
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If they are going to be voting in your elections, pretty important. There will be many opportunities to vote on matters that trade short-term gain against long-term cost, and many more with high risks and high benefits. If a sizeable fraction of a state’s population is only planning to be there for a few years, or is only tentatively planning to stick around for the long haul and likely to pull out if the risks don’t pan out, they can cause real and lasting harm.
That’s not too likely to be a problem in national elections yet, but interstate mobility in the US is high enough to matter politically. The old rule that one had to own land to vote was, for its faults, a somewhat effective safeguard here – even if you are planning to leave, you’ll want to sell your property without taking a loss and so won’t want to make the state a less desirable place to live in the long run. And probably you wouldn’t have bought land if you weren’t planning to stay.
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Of possible interest – NYT article on The Principle of 2nd Home, 2nd vote.
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people vote for programs they like, dislike the taxes that come with them more than the benefits when it ends up happening, then move to lower tax, lower benefit states and repeat the process without learning anything
Having lived in various western states for the majority of my life, people in Arizona / Oregon / Nevada / Colorado don’t seem to mind Californians per se–they’re nice enough folks–but rather the pattern you mentioned that comes along with them. Californians flee the consequences of their votes, then turn around and try to implement all of the “good ideas” that led to those consequences in the first place.
The analogy I’ve heard is that of leaving your town because it’s full of the plague, but conveniently bringing all of your fleas with you.
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“The analogy I’ve heard is that of leaving your town because it’s full of the plague, but conveniently bringing all of your fleas with you.”
I always preferred “rats fleeing a sinking ship”. You can get rid of your fleas. Much harder to get rid of your inner commiefornian.
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Yeah but that sort of metaphor can get you in trouble around here. People will read it as calling people rats, and thus an excuse to play Six Degrees of Adolf Hitler, rather than getting your actual point.
I’d avoid metaphors in general to be honest. It’s odd but people get really tangled up in them here.
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Here in the Austin TX area, this Californication pattern is very much a concern. I live in a town 20 miles west of the city, with about 2,200 population inside the limits, and about 30K within the “extra-territorial jurisdiction”. The influx of new people is incredible: there are 2K-3K new homes under construction right now (including 200 in what used to be woods just on the other side of my back yard).
The enormous rate of population growth pretty much guarantees that the existing culture and policies will be swamped.
On the town’s informal facebook page, people are now frequently complaining about people (assumed to be newcomers) showing poor manners as interpreted by those of us here already. But they’re always taking pains to say that “we all came here at some point, so we shouldn’t object to you. But please keep our town as charming as you found it when you moved in, rather than changing it to something else.”
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Huh, isn’t Californication what they call the stuff Hollywood sells? I thought that was understood.
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Urban Dictionary has both meanings, actually.
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But they’re largely living in towns along the southern border that are essentially suburbs of Boston at this point. They’re probably not terribly involved in state level or even local level politics, whereas the idea behind the FSP was that participants would be involved at state and local level politics.
If FSP isn’t going to “work” (which is going to vary based on your definition of “work”), I suspect it will more be due to differences of opinion between left and right libertarians. For example, there’s probably significant subsets of the FSP population, one of which supports environmental causes and another of which supports environmentally unfriendly factories being built wherever.
Not all people who favor small government are anti-left. The assumption that the FSP is inherently right-wing isn’t valid.
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“Not all people who favor small government are anti-left. The assumption that the FSP is inherently right-wing isn’t valid.”
“Right-wing” is ambiguous. But my impression is that the movement is by libertarians in the current American sense, people who believe in small or zero government and a society organized by private property and voluntary exchange.
I’ve spoken at FSP events twice in recent years, once Porcfest, once the other annual event whose name I have forgotten. I didn’t see any obvious split between left libertarians and right libertarians.
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What I think the best case outcome of the Free State Project would be is for a cultural hub to develop. A city, or a part of a city, that has its own personality and industry and culture, as Paul Graham describes. I think that if New Hampshire, or even just a bit of it, can become known for being a libertarian hub, the project will have worked, because you will see libertarian-affiliated people moving there separate from the Free State Project – doing so instead just because they think it seems like a nice place to live.
I don’t know anything about New Hampshire so don’t know whether this is likely, or whether there is a city or location kinda like this already that might be a suitable candidate.
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I wonder if these 20,000 libertarians are going to be co-ordinated or not. Are they all going to spread out across the state, in which case I imagine their influence will be diluted among the general population, or do they plan to cluster in certain areas?
Will they all be voting one way on certain issues? Have they agreed on these issues? I notice a line about “They were instrumental in … legalizing same-sex marriage through the legislature in 2009” so that does seem to indicate some level of political organisation. On the other hand, were these activist-types who got legislation pushed through all libertarians working in the name of libertarianism, or were they simply broadly a coalition of the progressive?
It will be interesting to see how it works out in practice – will all 20,000 stick together as a movement, or will they simply be the Jones family moving in next door and carrying on as ordinary, and ditto the rest of them?
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I am very suspicious of whether the full 20,000 are going to move.
But a good number of libertarians have been “early movers” and have indeed concentrated in certain areas.
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I think there is an element of the FSP that people are missing.
Immigrants tend to cluster–Irish in Boston, Poles in Chicago, Ashkenazi in New York. If moving to a new place, it helps if there are lots of people there with whom you have some sort of link.
The same principle applies to non-geographical ethnicities such as folk dancers, SCA, rationalists, libertarians. When we arrived in California twenty some years ago, the two people who helped us unload the truck were SCA members. One was someone I knew, one not.
The FSP may represent itself as a way of making New Hampshire more libertarian. But to a considerable extent it’s a way of giving libertarians a place to live where there are lots of their kind of people to interact with. I expect that if we moved to New Hampshire, there would be people we had never met before willing to help us unload the truck.
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On the heart rate thing: perhaps a certain personality type is conducive to both violent behavior and regular exercise (which would tend to lower heart rate)?
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People who don’t exercise regularly probably aren’t very good at violence, and people who aren’t very good at violence are probably going to go out of their way to avoid violence.
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This was my first instinct. At the very least, high testosterone ==>more likely to play sports & high testosterone ==>more violent.
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It’s more likely due to the fact that heart rate is related to arousal level, which is going to be higher if you’re a more fearful person. Clinical psychopaths are said to have lower heart rates, which makes sense since they tend to lack fear of social punishment or anything at all, really. I’m not aware of testosterone being elevated in clinical psychopaths.
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As someone who had a really low blood pressure and was prone to violence (never attacked anyone but there were some really narrow misses. (I assure you they all deserved it, for what zero that’s worth to a reader)), here’s my ideas for why they might correlate, if they indeed do:
(Actually, first, an important post-post predendum:
Sorry if any of the manner of my wording is seems threatening, or just is objectively bad form: I’m basically reporting introspection on a (mostly past) pronounced tendency towards violence (and extrapolation of) so naturally there’s a risk of that. I tried to be careful but I’m quite tired right now so I apologise if the manner of this post was insensitive. If it helps, this is basically all from memory and I’m not here trying to signal that I can get away with discussing violence and, particularly, violent thoughts and inclinations, which would be a textbook form of intimidation. Yeah that probably was worth stating explicitly, come to think of it Actually, having considered that, I’ll have another look over the post, though I’m sure some stuff like “a desire to smash things and people” can’t really be rephrased, at least at my current level of consciousness, and all I can do is say I’m aware it’s problematic for civil conversation to be announcing having or having had such thoughts, but this seems like a case where it’s part of the signal. Sorry again if I fucked up on this front, I’m very tired right now, and that’s not an excuse, just a potential (hypothetical) explanation.)
(having had a look at the post, I’ve decided to just leave it as it is, though (imo) it definitely falls somewhat afoul of what I said above. As the particular phrasing might be of anthropological interest, (I’m sure it will be to me tomorrow morning) -please think of it as being in close 3rd person tense or something.)
:
(sorry about this first one especially)
Imo there’s nothing more frustrating than the thought of someone getting away with being deliberately shitty, and nothing more calming than the thought of using violence to solve said rift in reality’s order.
It could also be that being risk-insensitive or outcome-insensitive leads to both calm and violence. Like how suicidal people can feel at peace and calm before they go, because they know there’s nothing to worry about soon (I mean that literally and only literally). Imo worrying is a large cause of restraint from violence, (as are planning ahead, considering things objectively, and determined self control, all of which probably produce stress) and engaging in violence generally involves a certain acceptance of risk, as in possibility of highly negative outcomes (or denial, I suppose, or sublimation, as in “legitimate denial”) on an existential (though not necessarily conscious and explicit) level.
It could also be that violence is so stressful (however stressful that is in this case) that in order to engage in it one must be or make themselves resilient in certain ways, particular WRT control or nonstarter-ifying of anxiety/fear/similar emotions. Or in reverse, violence, perhaps even including violent thoughts (which I know isn’t part of the category), might be a low trauma or stress desensitiser. Kind of like how exposure to loud noise can make you end not hear sounds so loudly for a while, especially if the exposure is frequent or extreme.
Then there’s also the possibility that being the kind of person who is prone to violence means that there’s a lot of kinds of petty shit you don’t have to deal with- if you give off that vibe. I assume petty and/or nasty and/or shitty people must have some way to estimate who is volatile, unless the prevlance of volatile people has been reduced wayyyyy too much by our slavish society. (which is why Is why I think a small minority of volatile people is not only positive but necessary- actually not just for harassment and other problems, but for threats also (and moreso), which there isn’t a hard line distinguishing from either hostile speech or violence.) Also, proneness to violence is likely significantly correlated to capacity for it -in fact it’s almost a prerequisite, as a physical attack from someone who is not (currently) physically dangerous is liable not to be classified as violence at all. So if proneness to violence is correlated to being dangerous in a physical sense as well as a(n otherwise) mental one, then people who are likely to be unusually violent are likely to also have the reassurance of knowing they can defend themselves.
Also effective violence generally involves contracting certain muscles at 110% while keeping others, possibly even neighbouring ones, relatively loose: it’s generally about generating momentum rather than raw strength output (or CNS activation), though those are important too. Still, a certain kind of calm can be very beneficial for fluency of such movements and the avoidance of jerkiness, though imo it’s not strictly necessary more or less at all.
Lastly if one is good at violence (possibly, imo likely, somewhat correlated to proneness to violence) then at least they are good at something. so- something something “self-esteem” something. I had other things I was good at but if I didn’t it sure would have been nice to have the memory of tearing a punchbag from its joists.
Then there is of course the fitness angle (as seperate to other points)
And people who are prone to extreme thinking might be prone to dismissing large classes of worries entirely, and, more straightforwardly- to violence. Like if you’re thinking about smashing people and things (and finding it to be a pleasant and/or sanity preserving diversion) then you’re probably not obsessing over what people think of your hair or falling into other such stress, and especially stress spirals.
Anyway imo the possible factor that jumps out the most to me is that someone who is going to assault someone is just not that worried about their life: they don’t have way higher priorities that they’re willing to go through stress and/or humiliation (imagined or real, (or possessing of a more subtle ontology)) for, so in a sense they don’t have to be ready for extreme stress.
There may also be a factor of violent people tending to be simple minded or more simple minded people being violent.
(specifically, lol-) having said all that, it may be that narcissistic tendencies correlate with both violence and low-stress.
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I think it is a good, if somewhat disconcerting point to note that anxiety is, surprisingly likely a net preventer of violence, though it might seem superficially to be the opposite. I have a fairly bad temper, but also a very naturally anxious and conflict-averse temperament. I am also, to some extent, trained in the use of violence, having studied various martial arts for a long time.
I can imagine that if I were otherwise the same but less anxious, I might actually be more likely to follow a violent impulse felt during a burst of anger, because it is normally anxiety about negative consequences which does at least some of the work to keep such things in check.
Though I haven’t come close to employing violence out of anger (have only used martial arts in one “real life” situation, but that was more as a means to diffuse someone else’s violent outburst), perhaps in part because my own non-risk taking nature makes me avoid situations where violence is likely to occur in the first place, I can imagine it being more likely if I were less anxious (it may be useful here to distinguish between calm and level-headed and non-risk averse; the stereotype of the murderer is a psychopath who doesn’t feel empathy for the victim and who has a kind of cold, cruel attitude–it’s not that he doesn’t feel anger, it’s that the normal empathy and concern and worries about the future which would keep it in check are not present. This clearly cannot be confused with some kind of Zen equanimity, which would mean not getting angry so easily in the first place, or, at least, knowing how to view negative emotions from a place of dispassion).
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The idea of people with low heart rate committing more violence makes me think of Hannibal Lecter killing a nurse while attached to a heart rate monitor and it never even fluctuating. I have heard it theorized that psychopaths are people who can only get excitement through extreme behavior.
(Also, confession a while back someone was posting about how you can tell someone’s class by their shoes and I asked them what they would predict about a woman with a good bag and cheap shoes. I was making a reference to “You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash” from The Silence of the Lambs. I didn’t know how to reveal it without sounding like a dick)
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China channel seems to be unsigned, so I can’t install it. Also, it’s from 2008, so can anyone be sure it’s even installable, even if it was signed?
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It sounds like it just redirects your requests via a server in China (not a VPN server, probably, I don’t think a browser extension could manage a VPN connection, but similar). This server may or may not be MITM’ing all your secure sessions and stealing your passwords, but let’s assume it’s not. Even if it is, it’d be cool to see what the public web looks like from China.
The problem is, though, that servers require maintenance and cost money. If this app was published in 2008, the backing server might very well be dead.
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If this app was published in 2008, the backing server might very well be dead.
If the Chinese government doesn’t like the idea of foreigners understanding exactly how the Great Firewall of China works, the backing server might very well be dead even if it were installed last week.
The Chinese government is fairly sophisticated at understanding what internet traffic is serving what purposes. The sites that can’t be accessed from China, can in many cases be accessed perfectly well from three- and four-star hotels serving the local elite and foreign visitors. Two blocks down the road, oops, no Facebook for you. Did you get your SIM card in China or abroad? Matters. They are happy for you as a Westerner to tunnel a VPN to your server in Europe or North America, but they know perfectly well that’s what they are doing and they can stop it if they want to.
So I’m guessing China Channel is either defunct, or there’s a functionary somewhere in charge of deciding what sort of censorship China Channel is exhibiting to curious foreigners, not necessarily related to the censorship being imposed on the Chinese. At a minimum, I wouldn’t trust it unless verified by a boots-on-the-ground comparison – and I won’t likely be going back there this year unless North Korea does something monumentally stupid, or I might quietly volunteer to help with that.
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My guess is defunct for at least half a decade.
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> New study challenges the idea that Native Americans drink more, finds in self-report survey that Native Americans drink at the same rate (and the same amount) as various other groups. But as usual, read the r/science comments, and remember that hospital records, which are a lot more trustworthy than self-report surveys, treat Native Americans for alcohol-related complaints at four times the usual rate. I continue to be wary of self-report drug use surveys.
Couldn’t this be explained by Native Americans drinking at roughly the same rate as various other groups but being roughly four times as susceptible to alcohol-related issues? Is there any data on susceptibility to negative long term side effects of alcohol by group? (I almost said LD50, but that’s not the kind of study that clears the IRB)
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Just as they are more susceptibility to measles. I don’t think the great length of white exposure to distilled liquor could cull the herd that much, but even beer, wine, etc. require a certain level of technology.
(Some cultures did have alcoholic beverages — the Aztecs, for instance — but they may not have had them for so long.)
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Precolumbian alcohol consumption in America was ceremonial rather than recreational or the ‘people will die without this’ level some old world cultures took it to. So while they had alcohol they weren’t consuming much of it.
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When spirits were introduced, the East Coast tribes tended to regard them as preferable because they treated alcohol as a mind-altering drug. You didn’t drink to get pleasantly warm, you drank to get DRUNK.
This was not happy in its results.
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Yeah, and, relatedly, that study could be thrown off by failing to account for the degree of alcohol abuse. In my experience, which is anecdotal but fairly broad, the amount of non-drinking natives is comparable to the amount of non-drinking non-natives (although there’s a lot more dry-drunks and religious abstainers in the former than the latter), and I wouldn’t be surprised if comparable numbers met the definition of binge drinking and heavy drinking from, e.g., http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/moderate-binge-drinking. But there’s “5 or more drinks on the same occasion on each of 5 or more days in the past 30 days” and there’s “15 or more drinks on the same occasion on each of 25 or more days in the past 30 days.” I’m guessing the rates THERE are not comparable, which would explain the contravening evidence in mentioned along with the link more-than-adequately.
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Any genetics studies here? If they’re not drinking to excess but don’t have the genes to handle alcohol that could be one explanation.
Probably though the answer is in under-reporting and under-estimation of alcohol consumption. Nobody ever thinks they drink too much and everyone, when asked by their doctor “how much and how often do you drink”, always edits it to “only socially and a few glasses of wine on special occasions”.
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Plus, that goes double or triple when the surveyed person is a member of a minority culture being asked, typically by a member of a majority culture, about something that implicates a well-known racial stereotype and which is often a sensitive topic in terms of culture and/or personal history.
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Also, American Indians are more likely to avoid alcohol altogether because they tend to have problems drinking in moderation. For example, I was impressed that of the two Indian tribe casinos I’ve been to, one (Barona) was completely dry and the other (San Miguel) downplayed drinking significantly. They probably give up a sizable amount of easy money that way.
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“Study: the more vengeful your god, the more cooperative your society.’
Hmmm — that could go either way. After all, “you will be punished for this” is good incentive to cooperate, but also the more you expect cooperation, the more severely you judge non-cooperation, and therefore more severely you expect it to be treated.
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That’s exactly the mechanism at work though, isn’t it?
The more vengeful the people, the more vengeful the character of their culture (with the temperament of their gods as a representation/projection of it), the stricter and strictly enforced the punishment for defectors. Thus evolutionary psychology/sociobiology rears its ugly head again.
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http://www.nature.com/news/behavioural-training-reduces-inflammation-1.15156 a related study about using mental techniques to control unconscious things your body does.
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I don’t have strong opinions on whether light drinking in pregnancy is harmful. But what you wrote is inaccurate.
CDC didn’t just tell pregnant women they “probably shouldn’t drink”. It told *all* sexually active women who stop using birth control to stop drinking. It also said “Alcohol use during pregnancy, even within the first few weeks and before a woman knows she is pregnant, can cause lasting physical, behavioral, and intellectual disabilities that can last for a child’s lifetime. These disabilities are known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). There is no known safe amount of alcohol – even beer or wine – that is safe for a woman to drink at any stage of pregnancy.”
I also don’t have an opinion on how good that Vox article is. But you say the article’s summary of the new research is excellent, and the article says the new research links light drinking to a small IQ decrease, not to FASD. Also, most importantly, the article concludes that “for now, the preponderance of evidence suggests light drinking during pregnancy probably isn’t harmful.” So if the article you link to concludes that light drinking in pregnancy probably isn’t harmful, and if the new evidence doesn’t even link drinking to FASD, and if CDC tells all sexually active women who don’t use birth control to stop drinking because FASD, then don’t you think your ridiculing of those who “freaked out” over the CDC opinion is uncalled for?
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What’s CDC’s evidence for effects on an infant brain that doesn’t exist yet, when an infant has no blood circulating yet? I’m sure some things about the fetal environment suffer but surely the sensitivity varies over the course of a pregnancy. It’s a bit cruel to make people feel guilty for what happens before they know they’re pregnant (but on the other hand, if it *is* a relatively flat risk profile and even the first 6 weeks matter, then their advice is obviously correct; many unintentional pregnancies *do* become live births).
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They have no evidence, which is why they can truthfully say things like “no known safe level”. Knowing nothing allows you to say anything if you toss in the right qualifiers.
Knowing nothing would also explain how they could be so incredibly, unbelievably tone-deaf on this one, but that’s another matter.
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For me, ‘sexually active women who don’t use birth control’ = women who are trying to get pregnant. I don’t see why it’s wrong to tell those women that they should refrain from doing things that will harm the fetus. Whether that is smoking, using cocaine or drinking. This is just an extension of the ‘pregnant women shouldn’t do this harmful thing’ advice, taking into consideration that it’s not immediately clear when a woman is pregnant. If light drinking harms the fetus, then she can’t just stop drinking when she stops having her period, because that would be too late.
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If you’re just going to kill the baby anyway, no point in stopping drinking.
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….That’s not really a common situation, is it? In the West, sexually active women who don’t use b/c either want to get pregnant or are ignorant and/or in denial about the chance to get pregnant.
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Or are poor and lack health insurance — condoms are an effective form of birth control that can often be obtained very cheaply or even for free. Or probably a dozen other scenarios that neither of us have considered because (I assume here) neither of us are women.
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wysinwyg – I’m not following you here.
Are you saying that women who don’t use b/c are prevented from doing so by outside forces, or that women who don’t use b/c are making that choice themselves?
Or some third thing?
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Aapje said:
I state instead that there are probably women who don’t have health insurance or enough money to afford hormonal birth control or an IUD, and understand the possibility and likelihood of becoming pregnant, but use condoms or coitus interruptus as birth control instead.
I also suggest that there may be other reasons that women may eschew birth control but remain sexually active even if they don’t want a pregnancy, and that several men may have some difficulty figuring out why because of the dreaded conceptual scourge which shall not be named in these hallowed halls.
Implicit in this argument is that Aapje wasn’t counting condoms as birth control already, which may very well be an invalid assumption.
Also, many women probably rely on their partner’s having had a vasectomy as a form of birth control.
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Or because they feel like they’re not the “sort of girl” who needs birth control and are thus too ashamed to actually go and get it.
You will frequently run into this kind of girl in the wild, they’re the ones who say “I don’t usually do this…” right before you have sex. Often from traditional cultures or just a bit on the sheltered side. The kind who will swear up and down that they’re going to the college clinic tomorrow to get on the pill but then a month later they’re panicking that their periods are a day late.
I don’t know how prevalent they are relative to the population, but it seems like self-image is a bigger issue than money for at least some women.
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@ wysinwyg
Thanks for the clarification. I did not equate b/c with “the pill” to the exclusion of condoms (I’m curious as to how often contraception = b/c = the pill) so I didn’t get your meaning at first.
IMO, reasonable person who was female, fertile, and having sex would consider some sort of contraception to be required to prevent pregnancy. There are a number of non-reasonable people in the world, though.
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There are also, heretical though it may seem to some, women who genuinely decide to leave pregnancy to fate. Such as married couples who intend to have 2-3 children and stop but don’t have a strong preference as to when. Sex w/o contraception until the mission is accomplished is less hassle and more fun than fussing around with contraception until the optimal time and then worrying why you aren’t pregnant yet. Older couples who figure children probably aren’t in the cards for them, aren’t going to bother with fertility treatments, but if it happens, so much the better. Religion and/or naturalism can also be powerful factors.
Absent real evidence that light drinking in the first month of pregnancy poses significant risk, it is not realistic to expect that such women will become teetotalers and harmful to your credibility to command them otherwise.
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@ John
Good point!
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@wysiwig
Perhaps this is a cultural issue, but I’m rather amazed why anyone would not consider condoms to be included if one speaks of birth control. Birth control is by definition a catch all term, which includes condoms, pills, spirals, tying tubes, vasectomy, only having sex when the woman is not fertile (rhythm method), etc, etc.
If one meant to talk only about b/c pills, one would surely just say b/c pills. But perhaps I just care about accurate use of language too much.
@Dr Feelgood
Your example clearly falls in the category ‘ignorant and/or in denial’ IMO.
@John Schilling
I would argue that such a person is trying to get pregnant, but simply not stressing about it. A non-ignorant person who doesn’t use birth control for a long time knows that a pregnancy will almost invariably result, unless there is a fertility issue. If they don’t believe this, I would say that they are in denial, which was a category I named.
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I’m not really disagreeing with what I think is your main point: if CDC believes light drinking is harmful to the fetus, it’s reasonable to warn women who potentially might get pregnant of the danger.
The problem is that CDC doesn’t have good evidence that light drinking is harmful. In fact, according to the article Scott linked, the preponderance of evidence suggests that light drinking is not harmful.
Also while I obviously agree that all sexually active women of child bearing age who don’t use birth control can potentially get pregnant, I don’t agree that’s the same as saying that they are trying to get pregnant. I personally don’t like being nannied by a government agency and told that I shouldn’t drink if I l’m the risk of getting pregnant, especially if evidence suggests light drinking is not harmful. CDC is making a judgement call on the basis of better safe than sorry. The problem with this sort of thinking is that it is plausible to believe that light drinking might actually be beneficial to your health for other reasons. I think if there’s no good evidence, the CDC should err on the side of staying out of people’s lives. And while I was already kind of used to CDC telling me what I should be doing while I’m pregnant, this new opinion expands the scope of when they think they have the right to make judgement calls on my lifestyle choices.
(This is an objection based on principle. Personally, I actually seem to have one of those genes that make me unlikely to drink at all.)
Another outrageous thing about the CDC opinion is that while the new evidence might suggest a small decrease in IQ, it does absolutely nothing to link light drinking to FASD. And they not so subtly imply that FASD is what is at stake.
Also, have you seen the infographic?
So, anyway, I think there’s no reason for Scott to distort what is actually happening, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t do on purpose. In fact, after a couple of comments, he decided to change his wording.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Scott attacking the unreasonableness of much of what mainstream feminism is these days. I just think it’s best for his/our credibility if he’s very faithful to the facts. I do wish he kept the jab at the “fetishizing of the fetus” ridiculousness somewhere in there, but I guess there are more important battles to fight.
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AFAIK, a major reason why the ‘don’t drink at all’ advice is given is to prevent a slippery slope issue. Not drinking is always safe. ‘A little drinking is OK’ leads to the situation where some people will interpret a lot of drinking as ‘a little.’ Nowhere on the CDC page do I see them actually make the claim that a little drinking is bad for the fetus.
There is an important difference between ‘give advice to not drink at all, so there is no misunderstanding’ and ‘give advice to not drink at all, because any amount of drinking is harmful.’
Anyway, I’m not objecting to people who say that the evidence is poor, but people like this:
https://www.romper.com/p/the-one-problem-with-the-cdcs-new-alcohol-guidelines-no-one-is-talking-about-5040
who claim that such advice is sexist and anti-choice. I object to this kind of reasoning for the same reason I object to people who claim that climate change activists just want to take away our standard of life. It’s an argument that some things can’t be harmful to others, because if they were, it would complicate certain selfish desires. It’s anti-intellectual to just assume bad faith on the part of a person who tells us that our behavior is harmful.
I understand the feeling, but it’s also a very conservative, selfish feeling. ‘I want this, who has the right to stop me’ is ultimately just an adolescent thought. People who don’t grow out of that to find a balance are generally horrible people.
You have to admit that this is nothing more than a bit of advice. You are not being forced in any way. It’s a government sanctioned opinion, but it’s still just an opinion.
Hmmm, the evidence for that is very, very, very weak though. If any effect exists, it can’t be very large. It’s obviously something that a lot of people really want to be true, which makes me doubt the minimal effect being found (just like all those coffee and chocolate studies).
Let’s invert this: why do you think that they shouldn’t have the right to give advice?
And another question: if the people who are most likely to drink during pregnancy are less rational and can only be influenced by messages without a lot of nuance, is your discomfort at this lack of nuance an acceptable consequence compared to the babies saved from FASD?
In general, I have conflicting feelings about the nanny state for this exact reason. There is ample evidence that on average, people make some very bad choices about certain things. So a nanny state can improve overall happiness/health/etc by propaganda or forcing people to do certain things. It’s a difficult question to which point manipulation and/or a lack of freedom is acceptable for the greater good.
I actually see no mention in the infographic that light drinking can cause FASD. At most you can complain that they aren’t clear about it, but any infographic has to simplify. If they would say ‘heavy drinking causes FASD’, you’d have people (legitimately) complain that this would cause people to judge their drinking as moderate (it’s a known issue that a lot of heavy drinkers don’t see themselves as such), resulting in more babies with FASD.
Arguably, no health message is effective without the use of some propaganda. However, government agencies can definitely undermine their credibility when they go too far, but this is really not too bad, IMO. I really feel that people are looking for something to be offended about.
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Aapje, thank you for your fantastic, well reasoned comment. You’ve changed my mind. I now agree with you on what I think is the main point of this discussion: regardless of whether or not they are right in this particular case, people *are* just looking for things to get offended about. [Insert the requisite disclaimer that some, I assume, are good people.] Especially that those same people are not very likely to have the same sort of “nanny state” objections as I do.
Excellent point about slippery slope. I haven’t considered it.
As to CDC not claiming that light alcohol consumption is harmful, they do explicitly say this: “Alcohol use during pregnancy, even within the first few weeks and before a woman knows she is pregnant, can cause lasting physical, behavioral, and intellectual disabilities that can last for a child’s lifetime. These disabilities are known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). There is no known safe amount of alcohol – even beer or wine – that is safe for a woman to drink at any stage of pregnancy.” So while they are not exactly lying, they phrase it in such a way as to suggest that a little drinking is in fact bad for the fetus.
> Anyway, I’m not objecting to people who say that the evidence is poor, but people like this […] who claim that such advice is sexist and anti-choice.
Yes, good point, great paragraph. I agree.
> I understand the feeling, but it’s also a very conservative, selfish feeling.
Yes, that’s true. It is to a large extent selfish. In general, if I perceive a policy to harm me and my family even if it might do some good overall, I’ll oppose it for selfish reasons.
> You have to admit that this is nothing more than a bit of advice.
Yes, you’re right. I admit that. I don’t consider this particular piece of advice/policy particularly harmful at all.
> Hmmm, the evidence for that is very, very, very weak though. If any effect exists, it can’t be very large. It’s obviously something that a lot of people really want to be true, which makes me doubt the minimal effect being found (just like all those coffee and chocolate studies).
I couldn’t agree more on coffee/chocolate and wishful thinking!!! I do think there’s more reason to think moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial. It does appear to decrease the risk of dying of heart disease, to a much greater extent than the magic coffee/chocolate antioxidants do. There are also very plausible biological mechanisms that would explain why the decrease in risk could be happening. Anyway, I feel like this could be a subject for a separate debate. Overall, I don’t think the moderate alcohol/heart disease link is any weaker than the moderate alcohol/FASD link, but I think it’s reasonable if you disagree.
> Let’s invert this: why do you think that they shouldn’t have the right to give advice?
That’s an excellent question. The whole two paragraphs you write about your feelings about nanny state are excellent. Personally, I believe the government recommendations on many health matters have done more harm than good, so I think the society would benefit from the government erring on the side of giving less advice if the evidence is shaky, but I think it’s reasonable if you disagree. In any case, this also could be a subject for a separate debate.
> I actually see no mention in the infographic that light drinking can cause FASD.
Yes, you’re right, it’s not there. I meant these two points to be separate: 1) CDC bringing up FASD in their release, and 2) the infographic looking a little ridiculous to me. Of course you’re right in that infographics have to simplify, etc, so it’s hard to make them in such a way that they’re not a little ridiculous to some people.
Anyway, thanks again for your comment. I really appreciated it.
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You are probably the only person on the entire Internet today who admitted such a thing
Let me return a compliment by thanking you for such a rare open mind.
There is ample proof that all humans suffer from various cognitive and rationality deficiencies that cause us to behave like this (like confirmation bias). I wouldn’t disqualify anyone as ‘not good people’ for not being God-like, as it would disqualify myself as well (even though I try to recognize these deficiencies, they are too numerous and deeply ingrained in how the mind works for us to recognize and correct for them, especially since many work on the unconscious mind).
Your quote is not from the infographic page, so I missed it. You can argue that there is a lack of nuance, which centers around the interpretation of ‘can’ in that sentence. If you read it as ‘will’ it is too strong, if you read it as ‘may’ it is correct, but lacks clarity.
On the other hand, my experience is that accurate writing is very lengthy and thus makes many people less likely to read it; while a ton of people lack the ability to properly read any text, no matter how accurate. So they will scan a text and interpret it based on their beliefs, rather than interpret what was written. As such, nitpicking of this sort feels a bit of an academic exercise to me.
This is objectively true. A charitable reading of this paragraph is that they admit that there is clear evidence of a limit below which it is safe to drink. If they believe in the precautionary principle, it makes perfect sense for them to advise people not to drink at all.
In the end, I think that the real disagreement is between people who believe in the precautionary principle and those who don’t feel that women should be limited so much over something which hasn’t been proven unsafe, just because it has not been proven safe.
The rest of the arguments surrounding this issue feel more like rationalizations by people who have an unconscious objection to the precautionary principle, but can’t articulate it accurately.
AFAIK, a lot of studies claim that only red wine works (not alcohol in general). Supposedly there are compounds in red wine that are beneficial. However, I find it very suspicious that red wine is most popular in countries with a Mediterranean diet/lifestyle, while beer is more popular in countries where people have less healthy diets/lifestyles. This is a red flag that the studies may actually be measuring confounders.
The fact that no one has been able to make a red wine pill and generate the same effect with a proper double blind experiment just increases my suspicion.
Well, I’m almost certainly in a different country, where the government gave & gives different advice, so we can both be right. My perception is that there has been some very bad food science in the past and silly advice as a result, but overall, this has not done much harm and quite a bit of good (as weakly ‘proven’ by the increase in life expectancy). The main lifestyle/food issues that threaten our health are a lack of exercise, smoking & the popularity of food that tastes good by being salty/fatty/sugar-filled/etc. AFAIK, for none of these issues has my government given really bad advice. The stupid advice has generally been harmless.
If I were to blame anyone, it would primarily be businesses that took advantage of human weaknesses, to sell us harmful things without being honest about it (where big Tobacco takes the cake). The government organizations at least seem to try to help us*.
* But again, my nationality may influence this. I’ve observed that most Americans have very little faith in the ability of their government to be effective, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as capable people are less willing to work for the government and the people accept a worse performing government, thinking that it can’t do better.
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@Aapje:
Given your references to the precautionary principle, could you define it? And am I correct in believing that you approve of it?
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@Freidman
My definition of the precautionary principle is that if the ‘suspected or the maximum possible risk x harm when it does come to pass’ outweighs the benefits of ignoring this risk, it is sensible to act as if the risk is there, until this is proven not to be the case (or research finds new data that alters one of the variables, changing the equation substantially).
Personally, I think that the question of approval of this principle is a meaningless binary, as every sane person believes in this principle if if the formula is lopsided enough to one side and ignores it when it is lopsided to the other side. People with no knowledge of this principle do this automatically (and daily).
My personal opinion is that the benefits of drinking are small and often even negative, even without the risk of damage to the fetus (but I enjoy alcohol less than most people, which probably influences this). So if I were a woman trying to get pregnant, I would refrain from alcohol.
However, whether the CDC is doing the right thing depends on more variables, including the risk of losing their credibility, as well as the risk of misinterpretation of a more accurate message. I lack knowledge of various key facts to really judge if their stance is a good one.
My main objection to the criticism is not that the CDC is objectively right, but rather that I consider it very likely that the reason for their stance is not the one being criticized. As such, the criticism is either an attack on a weak man or straw man.
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“My definition of the precautionary principle is that if the ‘suspected or the maximum possible risk x harm when it does come to pass’ outweighs the benefits of ignoring this risk, …”
Thank you. What does “the maximum possible risk” mean?
It is possible that the only thing preventing the end of the current interglacial is AGW. I don’t think it at all likely, but it’s possible. Indeed, it’s possible that the chance of it being true is 100%, since you can’t prove it isn’t true. Hence the maximum possible risk is 100%. The damage done—London and Chicago under half a mile of ice, sea level dropping something over a hundred feet leaving every port in the world high and dry—would be immense.
Following out your definition of the principle, we shouldn’t do anything at all to reduce CO2 output–because the maximum possible risk times the harm if that risk happens is huge.
I can understand the view that if the best estimate of the risk times the harm is greater than the harm from not doing something, you shouldn’t do it–that’s the Hand formula for negligence. But “maximum possible risk” makes no sense.
The maximum possible risk from a nuclear reactor times the harm if it blows up is large–so the principle says you must ban reactors. But reactors are one way of holding down AGW, it’s possible that without them temperatures will go up and terrible things will happen, so the principle says you must not ban reactors.
Doing something is a choice, not doing it is a choice.
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I don’t see the problem or ‘selfishness’ in acknowledging that something is sexist and offensive while agreeing that, on the whole, it’s probably the best thing to do anyway. In fact, if something sexist and offensive needs to be done, imo it’s best we’re aware we’re making that compromise.
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I meant the upper bound. Statistical scientific methods based on p-values can by definition not prove that small effects exist or not exist, they can only ‘prove’ that the effect is below a certain level. Using the upper bound in a risk calculation is often useful, especially to decide when the precautionary principle is not applicable.
As for Global Climate Change, you are talking about different risks, so you could apply the precautionary principle in multiple possible ways. However, the general idea is that humans are causing change at a rate far faster than what nature normally does (aside from rare events such as the Chicxulub meteorite), so our influence is of a much larger magnitude than the natural ice age cycles. As most climate scientists believe that it has been proven that this human influence is much larger, the risks on the short term would primarily come from human influences, so the precautionary principle would suggest minimizing human influence on the global climate. Although one can argue that we now have so much evidence and the models are so good that intervening would not be precautionary, but is simply necessary to prevent a predictable outcome (within a certain band of uncertainty).
Or you sidestep this dilemma by creating reactors that are inherently safe from cooling failures. I generally prefer win-win scenario’s.
Historically, uranium reactors were pursued for military reasons. The disadvantages are immense (limited fuel supply, dangerous, only a small percentage of the fuel in the rods can be used, allows the creation of military grade uranium/plutonium by people who own such a reactor). I am quite fond of liquid thorium reactors, which should solve most of these problems, but they need a lot more R&D.
That said, ‘clean’ technology like solar is rapidly getting cheaper, so reactors may lose economic viability in the next few decades. In fact, nuclear has never been particularly viable from an economic standpoint, as evidenced by a total lack of plants built by private companies. Recent developments such as liberalization of electricity markets, greater uncertainty about long term electricity prices and the aforementioned possibility of being out competed by clean tech, makes it unlikely that nuclear can play a large role in the transition to (other) clean alternatives.
BTW. Requiring all new nuclear plants to be financed by private investors and maintain sufficient reserves to dismantle the reactor and safely store the spent fuel/radioactive reactor components would effectively be the same as banning them.
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Maybe you don’t, but the people who police sexism don’t agree with you.
Outside of rational blogs, being sexist means there are no excuses. You can either obey, or hope the accuser doesn’t have enough power to do bad things to you for being sexist. “It’s sexist but necessary” won’t help you–nobody will ever let you treat sexism as necessary.
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The entire charge of sexism is generally silly in the context of pregnancy/birth/abortion issues, IMO.
If anyone is sexist, it is nature which gave only women the ability to get pregnant. The biological differences between men and women mean that it is absurdly unreasonable to argue that men and women should face the same consequences. ‘People who are pregnant shouldn’t drink (too much)’ is perfectly gender neutrally written, but in practice, it only applies to women. If you wanted to make men face the same consequences, like forbidding them from drinking when their partner is pregnant, it would be nothing more than revanchism. It has no basis in logic.
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“I meant the upper bound. Statistical scientific methods based on p-values can by definition not prove that small effects exist or not exist, they can only ‘prove’ that the effect is below a certain level. ”
p values don’t give you the probability that something is true, they only give you the probability that the evidence for it would be as strong as it is if it were false in a particular way.
And I do not know what the “upper bound” for the probability of an event means.
You hand me a coin. I flip it ten times, without first examining it. What is the upper bound for the probability that I get ten heads?
If it’s a fair coin, the probability of ten heads is 1/1024. But I don’t know that it’s a fair coin. It’s possible that you gave me a two headed coin as a joke. If you did, the probability of ten heads is 1. Does that mean that the upper bound of the probability of ten heads is 1?
So far as the reactor question, my point wasn’t about whether reactors should or should not be built. It was that the precautionary principle is incoherent, since deciding not to do something is also a choice, and it’s easy to imagine cases where both doing something and not doing it could have very bad effects, hence both alternatives are ruled out by the principle as usually expressed.
Can you construct an example, analogous to my coin flipping example, that makes clear the distinction between the probability of an event and the upper bound on the probability of an event?
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Full disclosure: I work for one of the larger electric utility providers in America.
You’re gonna want to take another look at the numbers. America has privately-built nuclear power plants. Lots of ’em. Keep in mind that not every electric utility is state-run – I’m actually hard-pressed to think of any that are.
Nuclear plants aren’t getting built for a number of reasons, exactly none of which are “they aren’t viable”, “they’re not efficient enough”, or “renewables like solar are going to make them obsolete.”
To start with, solar cells can drop in price all they want, they cannot be relied on for a grid. Quite aside from issues of reliability due to weather, you can’t get around the problem of solar being a dc power source. HVDC transmission lines are only useful for looooooong range transmission, you simply cannot use them for feeding businesses and homes – you have to convert to AC and you can’t avoid massive energy losses when you do that.
Nuclear isn’t any less cost-efficient than existing fossil fuel sources, and we sell plenty on interchange markets.
If it were up to just the engineers, they’d do away with everything but nuclear power. The reasons why you can’t are:
1- The regulatory environment. general NIMBY-ism, as well as paranoia over anything related to the word “nuclear” makes approval of new plants difficult, though not impossible. This has only gotten worse with the rise of Islamic terrorism and fears of nuclear material falling into the wrong hands.
2- The financiers. The people who are going to decide what kind of new plants we’re going to try and build hear “let’s move everything to nuclear!” their eyes glaze over, and they start repeating “can’t put all our eggs in one basket.” Risk-aversion is too high, even though the fuel markets would have to go insanely, implausibly, out of whack for a very long time to make nuclear less cost-efficient. It’s also a much greater initial capital investment, even though it pays off and then some in the long-term.
3-The public, and the government, want environmentally friendly energy sources. The push for renewables is largely garbage, but it’s good publicity, and lots of subsidies are available to make token investments -but not much greater – worth it. If you ask me, this is basically corporate welfare, but if you’re just giving money away, the board of directors is more than happy to take it.
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A quick web search claimed that DC to AC conversion is around 95% efficient, which doesn’t sound like a “massive” loss to me; it rather sounds like all it means is that solar would have to drop in cost only around another 5% further past what it would have needed to if it produced AC power for it to be at the same level of competitiveness. Has the web misled me, or is there some reason I’m missing why DC to AC conversion is a bigger problem than it appears to be?
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Is there really no way to convert DC to AC with reasonable efficiency, say 95% or better? I mean, it seems it ought to be straightforward enough. Is it a question of the quality of the waveforms, or something?
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@Friedman
That is not the question you would/should be asking. The proper question is: what is the chance that the coin is fair? Or alternatively, what is the maximum unfairness that the coin can have, with 9x% probability?
Of course, 10 flips is too low for meaningful conclusions, but if you flip it 10,000 times and get close to a 50/50 split, you can make statements about the likelihood that the coin is fair. On the other hand, if you would get a 75/25 split, you can be fairly confident that the coin is unfair and state with a certain likelihood that the unfairness is in a certain range.
Similarly, if you do a decent study and find only a minimal or no effect of drinking during early pregnancy, you can draw the conclusion that there is a high likelihood that the maximum effect is in the vicinity of 0%, not in the vicinity of 100%. However, even if studies find no effect on drinking, you can never state that drinking during early pregnancy never causes FASD, since there is always an interval of uncertainty.
That’s why the most reasonable way to apply the precautionary principle not to require proof of safety, but rather evidence that the actual risk is sufficiently low (with high likelihood).
It’s only incoherent if you apply it in an absolutist way, which is not what my definition suggests should be done, nor what I believe.
You are simply describing a situation where there is no perfect choice, but which instead requires judging different options relative to each other. This just requires you to compare the choices to each other and pick the best option. If there are two different ways that you could apply the precautionary principle, you pick the one where the comparison of risk x harm to the benefits not trying to prevent that risk has a better expected outcome. This is really just basic decision making.
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@nyccine
You are right, I made too strong a claim due to misreading a source. What I should have said: there have been no unsubsidized nuclear plants. For example, in the US the Energy Policy Act 2005 subsidizes the first 6,000 MWe, gives nuclear liability protection and loan guarantees. AFAIK, no nuclear plants have been built without extensive government support.
Technically, you could, with storage. Currently, aside from hydro solutions (which is only viable in certain places), there is a lack of commercially viable storage solutions. People are working on that, though.
As Protagoras said, the typical loss is ~5% for industrial converters and a little higher for consumer variants, which is hardly massive. Once solar becomes cheap enough, it’s no problem to add 5% more solar panels to compensate for this.
Also keep in mind that people don’t want nuclear near their homes, which is why the plants are usually in remote areas, requiring long transmission lines (which may require DC/AC/DC conversions, so you end up with converter losses in addition to leakage). In contrast, I have a solar system on my roof with a 93.5% efficient AC/DC converter. Assuming that much of that electricity is used by me or my neighbors, that is really rather efficient.
If we would price in externalities properly, fossil would already be out-competed, that is true.
You forgot the problem of scaling to demand, which nuclear can’t do. It’s impossible to use only nuclear unless you solve the same problem that is required to switch to 100% solar: cheap storage.
The fuel market is ‘implausibly’ out of whack right now. Remember how people kept saying that oil would bounce back up….I’m still waiting.
PS. I’m not actually suggesting we switch 100% to solar in the short term, but it’s hardly implausible that this can happen in the next few decades (before any new nuclear plants would be written off). You just need the price declines in solar to continue and for someone to find a solution for efficient and cheap electricity storage.
PS2. Some solar plants are already commercially viable with no subsidies, even with the current low electricity prices.
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“you pick the one where the comparison of risk x harm to the benefits not trying to prevent that risk has a better expected outcome. This is really just basic decision making.”
That’s fine. But “risk” and “maximum possible risk” are very different things, for the reason I have been trying to explain. It was the latter that went into your definition of the principle.
“The proper question is: what is the chance that the coin is fair? Or alternatively, what is the maximum unfairness that the coin can have, with 9x% probability?”
You were not defining the principle by “the chance that” but “the maximum possible risk.” It is possible that the probability of the coin being very unfair is high—someone might have slipped you a two headed coin.
I think, by the way, that you are misunderstanding my coin flip example, which isn’t about calculating something after the coin has been flipped but calculating the probability of an outcome (ten heads) before it has been flipped.
“but if you flip it 10,000 times and get close to a 50/50 split, you can make statements about the likelihood that the coin is fair.”
I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of a p statistic in classical statistics. It doesn’t tell you the likelihood that the coin is fair. It tells you the likelihood of getting the outcome you got if the coin is unfair in a particular way.
Are you familiar with the difference between classical and Bayesian statistics?
My standard example to make the point:
You pull a coin from your pocket and, without looking at it, flip it twice, getting heads each time. The probability of that result with a fair coin is only .25. Do you conclude that there is only one chance in four that it is a fair coin, a .75 chance that it is double headed?
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@Protagoras:
You’re missing something. Efficiency of conversion for a home, or small solar farm, is not the same thing as conversion for major transmission lines; this is exacerbated by the fact that you’d have to take a hit for each step-down. HVDC is only “better” than AC at very high voltages, at long distances (or underwater); when you start talking about distribution voltages and distribution, where you have to deal with multiple voltages, all much lower than what you need to justify HVDC cables, then you’re wasting money.
@Aapje :
We wouldn’t dream of touching solar if it weren’t for government (federal and state) subsidies. You’re not rebutting anything with this claim.
Man-made hydro isn’t for “storage”; storage isn’t a thing done at the generation and transmission level. Electricity has to be produced “on demand.” Man-made hydro is done to help offset peak demand, and can’t be done at more than marginal levels or the inherent inefficiencies of pumping water back into the lake you built will wreck you financially.
Not in the US it doesn’t; we don’t use HVDC (there’s like 3 or 4 places where some has been installed, mostly for underwater cables iirc but it’s not the case that we build a new plant far away and use HVDC; we’re still using A/C transmission lines). And again, we’re going to be dealing with issues of distribution, where multiple such conversions will need to take place.
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@Friedman
You could conclude that, but only with a very low level of confidence.
You can confidently conclude that the coin will not always show tails and also be 99% confident that the coin is not weighted so that it will land on tails 99.9% of the time. If you do more flips and still keep getting only heads, you can start make stronger claims within that 99% confidence level. So then you can start to claim that you have 99% confidence that the coin is not weighted to land on tails 75% of the time. Do more flips, and then you can be confident that the coin is not weighed neutrally. Then do more flips and you can conclude with 99% confidence that the coin is weighed to land on heads at least 75% of the time. Do a billion flips and you can state confidently that the coin must be at least 99% weighed. However, you can never claim that the coin will always land on heads, absent an infinite number of flips.
So let’s say that I would be asked to stake my life against a billion dollars on that coin flip (where I keep my life and the money on heads). If I only knew that the coin landed on heads twice, I couldn’t be very sure of winning if I played the game. Yet if I had a billion flips that showed heads, I would be quite confident of winning.
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@nyccine
Yes, I am. Solar is rapidly getting cheaper and the subsidies can thus be assumed to be a temporary measure to allow for the necessary R&D to become competitive with fossil. In contrast, nuclear is not (rapidly) getting cheaper and thus we can assume that the current subsidies for nuclear fuel will be necessary in the future as well.
You are missing the point that I was talking about solar becoming competitive in the future. The fact that solar requires subsidies today in no way proves that solar will not be competitive in the future. The latter requires analysis of trends, which I did (and which you didn’t rebut).
I think we may be using different definitions of storage here. Any energy that is not used right away, but can be tapped when desired, is ‘stored.’ Off-setting peak demand by turning electricity into gravitational potential energy at peak production and/or low demand, and driving a generator with that ‘falling’ water when there is low production and/or high demand, is a perfect example of bridging demand/supply gaps by storage.
You might might have meant to say that it is unsuitable for storing energy for use in the winter, which is probably true, but I explicitly said that we need better storage technology, so I’m not disagreeing with you there.
Wikipedia tells me that the storage capacity of pumped hydro is currently 740 TWh, which seems significant. If doing that will ‘wreck you financially,’ then there are a lot of silly governments in the world….or you are wrong and they are right.
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I think you’re being unfair to Internet feminists and misrepresenting what the CDC said. Note that they said not “don’t drink while you’re pregnant” but basically “don’t drink when you’re fertile” (of childbearing age and not using birth control), which does in fact boil down to presuming that any woman of childbearing age would be interested in bearing a child right now and should be making her decisions based on the hypothetical future child. It would have been reasonable to say “don’t drink if you’re trying to get pregnant or would be interested in bearing a child soon & it’s reasonably likely that you might”. Not reasonable to assume that’s the case for all women of a certain age.
Also, a lot of the outrage was about an infographic by the CDC which claimed that for any woman, alcohol leads to injuries/violence, STDs, and unintended pregnancy, which is pretty perplexing.
There was also some bad reporting which made it sound like you shouldn’t drink if you’re not “on birth control” (which sounds like it specifically means meds) while the original said “using birth control” (which can include condoms and such). That wasn’t exactly the CDC’s fault but maybe a failure of messaging.
Also, not drinking ever in one’s twenties is such a drastic step in this culture that you need really clear evidence and a really good reason to take that step, and we don’t really have that, and the CDC didn’t really acknowledge that.
So yes, there were some reactions that went overboard. But you make it sound like the CDC was completely reasonable and feminism was completely unreasonable, and that’s really not fair at all.
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I’ve updated the link, but if you read the articles their complaints aren’t really what you’re talking about.
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Thank you for correcting the factual error.
I see you’ve also removed the part about feminists’ reactions, so I can’t go read the articles, but I completely believe you that they were as over-the-top and poorly reasoned as can be. My problem was that by basically steelmanning the CDC’s actual position into something more reasonable (without saying that’s what you were doing) while presenting what I assume were particularly poor specimens of feminism (I didn’t follow your links but I did see a lot of discussion about this issue with varying degrees of reasonableness) you were giving the impression that a reasonable feminist has nothing to complain about in this case (not true) and therefore all the feminist complaints about this issue were unreasonable.
But anyway you’ve removed it, so thank you. (I’d be curious as to why, though – did you decide it was in fact unfair or just not want it to take over the comments? (If the latter, sorry for contributing…))
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I suppose at a certain level of precision, the CDC could have said “don’t drink if you might potentially become pregnant – i.e., if you are fertile, sexually active, and not using birth control – unless you are either (1) certain you will abort any resulting fetus or (2) prefer having children with avoidable negative consequences to giving up drinking,” but presumably people could infer those last two?
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While I don’t think there’s a role for government intervention in this kind of case, I do think it would be a tad… gauche to encourage such behavior.
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Hey, it’s the Center for Disease CONTROL, not Reduction . . .
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They’re actually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but they haven’t updated their acronym.
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IIRC, it said it increases the risk of those things, which is true, not that it necessarily leads to them.
And although some people have objected to the phrase “any woman” — what about women marooned on desert islands without any men around to impregnate them, huh? — I think it’s fair to let the CDC speak in conversational English.
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Only 10% of species of mosquitoes prey on humans. Only 10% of those carry disease – it’s not easy for pathogens to jump hosts. Eliminating one species of mosquito seems to me ecologically quite safe – it will just be replaced by another species that also preys on humans.
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And the diseases will be replaced by ones that like the new mosquitos, no? Microorganisms evolve faster than macro.
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You seem to be predicting that malaria has spread to all mosquitoes that prey on humans, but it hasn’t. It took malaria 3 million years to jump from chimps to humans. Changing definitive host is more difficult.
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Malaria is not exclusive. It doesn’t block other diseases so any microorganism which could evolve to be carried by those other species of mosquitos could already do so while malaria still exists. They’re not intelligent beings waiting to hitch a ride with a mosquito that will change hosts only if their old host becomes unavailable.
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The r/economics commenter is not doing the analysis correctly, they are doing the analysis differently. Which you could do in all sorts of ways. Perry did it in one way and was totally transparent about what he was doing, so that’s fine. The tone of the comment is unwarranted. Also, it is not the average person, it’s a subset of workers in both cases. Using per capita number would have been another valid choice, though, and one which would have brought down the number.
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I’ve changed the phrasing a little, but I think that redistributing from a small subset of CEOs to all workers, and saying that’s the effect of CEO wealth redistribution is very misleading. I could say that CEO wealth distribution would give workers only $0.00001 extra, if I meant only one very poorly paid CEO and all of the workers in the whole world. Or I could say it would give every worker a billion dollars, if by “every worker” I meant “every worker in a single small business”. There’s an expectation that you’re comparing comparable things.
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I don’t think either calculation is correct, but the critic seems closer to correct than the AEI. The problem is that he is implicitly assuming the ratio of CEO salary to number of workers is the same for the S&P 500 as for other firms.
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He says in the title which CEOs he is referring to. Unless his readers might not know that there are other CEOs, he is doing a really bad job of being misleading. Again, there are all sorts of different ways you could do this. I don’t think Perry has a claim to the best possible analysis here. But there is no “gotcha!” here the way the respondent thinks there is.
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Study by a think tank = propaganda. Yes, they are being misleading on purpose. Because that is what they are paid to do. That is their job.
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If you want to use a decision rule of “never believe what think tanks say”, go ahead. There are worse ones. But if we’re just evaluating on the basis of the context (think tank blog post vs. Reddit comment, or even upvoted Reddit comment), I don’t think the Reddit comment wins.
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The redditor’s analysis presumes that non-S&P 500 CEOs have an equivalent multiple of their worker’s earnings as S&P 500 CEOs. It wouldn’t be that hard to look at S&P 400 or 600 (mid cap or small-cap companies) CEO pay (they’re all public too) to show that the CEO’s salary redistributed likely looks quite different for the smaller firms (and then extrapolate for the remaining non-public firms.
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Don’t most CEOs already pay more than 40% of their income in taxes?
If it was 1915, and there was no income tax, the conversation would be different.
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Of course, this analysis all ignores the incentive effects, and so greatly overstates the appeal of killing the [CEO] that lays the golden eggs.
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There is considerable evidence that higher financial incentives don’t actually motivate people very well/at all. It’s primarily higher relative income that makes people happier, which results in companies collectively wanting to pay more than average, which obviously leads to unsustainable growth in salaries.
Simultaneously, you can just as easily turn the argument around and argue that the ever increasing gap between regular workers and top managers results in regular workers being disincentivized. What about the golden eggs laid by regular workers?
It’s a fallacy to think that good CEOs would suddenly disappear when salaries are considerably lowered across the board. Where would they go?
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This seems to be a much more pressing issue given all the signs of global deflation caused by stagnation of US worker wages and resulting slowing of consumption.
And the stagnation of US worker wages is not under dispute, even if the AEI wants to float dubious white papers about how little redistribution would matter.
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The strength of redistribution grows over time. A majority of the CEO salary is unspent, while the majority of worker money is plugged right back into consumer spending. ($70 for a couple of extra nights out on the town) That’s putting a large amount in aggregate back into the economy, regardless of per-person distribution, and keeps feeding itself.
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CEOs don’t put their extra money in mattresses — they invest it, so their extra income tends to increase credit, which will grow the economy everything else being equal. But that credit corresponds to debt which needs to be repaid with interest, so you can’t just grow investment without also growing wages and consumption or you end up with a situation of too much money chasing too few investments, burgeoning debt, and slowing growth.
No, wait, what am I saying…Ayn Rand was right about everything. Our current economic woes are all due to the poors and we should pay our heroic CEOs even higher so that they will be properly incentivized to save us unworthy peons from our inevitable decline into savagery.
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@ arbitrary_greay:
The fact that the majority of the CEO salary is “unspent”, i.e. invested, is literally the reason why it’s good.
The amount that the CEO keeps invested does not provide him with any special benefit at all. It provides a general benefit to everyone in the economy, by causing more wealth to be produced and lowering the price of goods and services.
The only special benefit he gets is in consuming some of that wealth. The amount he consumes is a net negative to everyone else.
So the idea that it’s somehow bad that the CEO is not spending 70% of his paycheck going “out on the town” is precisely backwards. They less they spend, the better.
Even if they just literally hoard their money, it’s not bad. By hoarding your money, you’re effectively forfeiting the right to use the share of production to which the money entitles you. Which means the value of everyone else’s money goes up because a smaller amount of money is chasing the same quantity of goods. So by hoarding or setting your money on fire, you make everyone else richer.
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@ wysinwyg:
The credit and debt balance out. There is no problem of there being “too much” investment. Especially not “too much debt” created by investment.
If “too much” is invested, the rate of profit goes down, and more people decide “Screw it, I’ll just buy my Mercedes now instead of waiting to buy it next year”, and consumption rises relative to investment until we’re back an an equilibrium.
As the economic degree of capitalism grows and production chains become longer, the tendency is for the rate of profit to become lower and lower.
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@Vox IMperatoris:
Yes, that’s true. That’s why the interest that I took care to mention in my comment is there. It’s important.
You can’t systematically repay loans with interest without growth.
That’s the theory, but since at least 2008 a lot of prominent economists and business analysts have argued that there’s too much money chasing too few assets. And empirically, it really does seem like there is too much debt in the world economy and that very little of it is likely to ever be repaid.
I’m getting bored of this pattern where I make a claim about economics, and you say “Economic theory predicts otherwise therefore you are wrong.” Would you mind responding with empirical evidence instead of theoretical arguments in the future?
(Also, it would be nice if you didn’t ignore really important parts of my argument in your efforts to prove me wrong. Or you can kindly explain how debt and credit can cancel each other out while still allowing lenders to make a profit from charging interest.)
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@ wysinwyg:
No, the debt plus interest is equal to the value of the credit. You are giving out money now, forsaking your ability to use it, in return for being paid back more money in the future.
If there is no growth, what will be the market rate of interest? Zero. And then people will cut back on investment until the market rate is not zero.
This is a self-solving problem.
What exactly is “too much money chasing too few assets” supposed to mean? If there is too much investment relative to people’s desire for consumption, then investment will be cut back.
This is totally separate from the question of governments or reckless consumers guided by government policy, taking on massive debt in order to fund consumption spending. If governments can’t pay their debts, the solution is to cut spending and divest themselves of assets. This may be painful, just as it is painful to go bankrupt, but it is not a problem. It is the solution to the previous problem of too much consumption spending.
The reason this is happening is that I don’t largely disagree with you on the observable quantitative facts. I disagree on the interpretation and the causes.
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@Vox Imperatoris
The growth is unbalanced wrt which sectors benefit and not trickling down. Same with if the CEO spent all of that money on luxury items and such.
@wysinwyg
Thanks for your explanation. I was kind of chasing that sense of how certain swathes of investing seem to do no work other than padding out rich peoples’ accounts, (something something stocks reflect shareholders’ confidence and not actually performance) but I didn’t have the knowledge of the mechanism.
I mean, isn’t GiveDirectly one of the most effective forms of altruism? (Again, kind of a chasing the idea here, haven’t fully fleshed out the connections yet) How is bottom-driven growth not good?
(Mind you, I’m not opposed to income inequality on principle. In times of prosperity, I believe the gap actually gets larger? It’s just that I don’t find the mechanisms of that gap increasing in the current situation to be beneficial. There’s no reverse causation.)
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@Vox
There are different kinds of investment. Doing R&D is a totally different kind of investment than investing in a (housing or other) bubble or putting money in an offshore bank account.
In the past, there was a very high tax rate and money couldn’t just be moved out of the country easily. So the best way to avoid paying tax was to reinvest it in R&D, business ventures, etc. So this is what businesses did: the good kind of investing.
Furthermore, the higher taxes enabled a lot of fundamental research that is critical for major advances in the long term. Nowadays, R&D is much more short term and thus no longer transformative.
Today, Apple has billions of dollars sitting in offshore accounts. They are actually disincentivized from bringing it back and investing it in speculative new technology. Ironically, the Mac could only be made due because of speculative research done by Bell Labs. Research that Apple itself refuses to do.
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@ Aapje:
Solution: stop taxing Apple’s profits and making them move them offshore.
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It’s only ironic if you misunderstand Apple’s business model; not all tech companies are trying to make money off R&D, and Apple isn’t really one of them. Their thing is good interfaces, good design, high build quality, and tons of work going into their corporate image/walled garden/hivemind/cult; they’re not trying to be cutting-edge on a technical level. You more or less can’t be, in fact, if you’re in the business of selling things that Just Work.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach.
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@Nornagest
It is ironic that a company that is seen as innovative is actually being anti-innovation, taking advantage of companies that actually come up with new technology. If all business acted like Apple, they would be far less successful (and technological progress would stagnate).
Businesses can be/do two things. Bells Labs did rather fundamental research, while AT & T built a solid phone system. These two activities were very different, yet they could coexist in the same corporation.
There is no reason why Apple couldn’t use a portion of their huge income to set up a subsidiary that does fundamental and semi-fundamental research, aside from the perversity of the current incarnation of capitalism (note that I’m not against capitalism, but against the short-term, a/immoral cynical capitalism that we have today).
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It’s worth noting that Bell Labs was only able to do that sort of speculative, fundamental research because AT&T had a national monopoly and could charge whatever they wanted for (fairly crappy) telephone service. After the monopoly was broken up and they actually had to compete for customers, they largely stopped doing fundamental research (you will find many of their former researchers in the E.E. departments of universities in New York and New Jersey, and if you ask they will speak wistfully of the freedom they had when they worked in Bell Labs).
Regarding Apple, they do currently have a mountain of cash that they could use for fundamental research if they wanted, but their corporate history includes a long, profit-less period that they only survived because they had a mountain of cash saved up when they went into it. They are going to be averse to spending their current mountain if they don’t have to.
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Okay, so Apple did capitalize on Bell Labs and Xerox PARC’s failure to exploit the technologies they developed back in the Sixties and Seventies. But so did every other surviving company in the PC space and a number outside of it. That doesn’t make Apple uniquely bad, nor anti-innovation — if an inventor isn’t the one to popularize their invention, is that the popularizer’s fault? Apple hadn’t taken over the world in those days and didn’t have much leverage against the likes of Bell, so nasty coercive tricks are out of the question.
And it certainly doesn’t give it a responsibility to use its cash reserves to research cheaper SSDs or faster CPUs, much less the kind of blue-sky research that Bell and Xerox were doing. They are giving us new stuff that people want, as evidenced by all the people buying it.
It just so happens that that doesn’t involve much basic research. Which is fine, and thinking otherwise betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the field. Tech companies don’t automatically have an interest in that type of innovation just because they’re in tech! There’s a huge number of different niches in the industry, capitalizing on all sorts of other stuff: design, scalability, and human interface problems, to name three.
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My objection is not to Apple specifically. They are just a good example, due to them hoarding all this cash and leeching on innovation by others.
But my problem is with how we are doing less and less fundamental research. It’s not that I think that Apple should necessarily do that, but they shouldn’t be able to offshore all that money & avoid paying taxes. If they paid a fair share of taxes and then the government would use part of that money for fundamental R&D, that would be fine with me.
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“But my problem is with how we are doing less and less fundamental research. ”
What is the evidence on which that claim is based?
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“Today, Apple has billions of dollars sitting in offshore accounts. They are actually disincentivized from bringing it back and investing it in speculative new technology.”
Is there any reason why Apple can’t set up offshore research facility?
As for whether it makes sense to say that too much money chasing too few opportunities for investment, I think one indicator would be whether investors turn out to be choosing a higher proportion of investments which turn out to not pay off.
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They would not go to the companies where they can be most efficient, but rather to companies which they prefer for other reasons.
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This is a thoughtful comment, and IMHO, anyone who disagrees with it without understanding its implications should think about it more.
(It’s also, not coincidentally, what I was planning to say.)
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To elaborate: maybe it’s true that CEOs are natural workaholics and would work 100 hours a week no matter what they were paid. But without market prices guiding them to serve the wishes of consumers, they might choose to spend their time, say, running a private foundation instead of running Wal-Mart.
Also, the idea that CEO salaries are determined by zero-sum relative status-seeking is suspicious. The logical conclusion of that argument is that a company can be just as effective hiring the guy who will be CEO for $100,000 a year as hiring the guy who demands $5 million a year.
But if that’s true, why are the shareholders wasting that much money? Is their “class solidarity” so strong that they are willing to give up money just to keep one of their own in the lap of luxury?
If CEOs are not producing value equal to their salaries, then the solution is simple: companies can just pay them less. And if they were out to maximize profits, they would. As a result, we should not expect CEO salaries to be above CEO productivity, except where they are the actual owners.
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And it’s not just shareholders. IIRC, companies owned by private groups like Bain capital pay about the same as publicly held companies, so some of the smartest and greediest people in the world believe that they’re getting, on average, what they pay for.
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Vox’s answer is the correct one. CEO salaries are a good example of Chesterton’s fence. It’s easy to pronounce from the comfort of our armchairs that they’re too high, but when you’re actually on a corporate board making decisions about CEO compensation, it should become clear that these salaries serve a purpose.
One theory I like is that the CEO’s salary isn’t entirely to attract and encourage the CEO himself but to serve as a prize for every other executive in the company. You pay the CEO $1 million more than his marginal product because the VPs will see that, and they’ll put in more effort in the hopes of one day being CEO, and that extra effort will add more than $1 million in expected revenue.
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I think people are a bit to quick to roll out Chesterton’s Fence. Sometimes a stupid fence is just a stupid fence, especially when it’s really not that old of a fence.
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Chesterton is right that fences do not spring from the ground like weeds, nor are they built by wandering madmen escaped from the local asylum. If it is “just a stupid fence”, then you as a presumed smart person with a well-developed theory of mind should have no difficulty explaining why other people felt it was a good idea to build it. Not just “they were stupid”, but how their stupid thought process actually led to that conclusion.
This is a useful intellectual exercise, good practice for dealing with important problems, and it makes it much easier for you to convince us to go along with tearing down the fence.
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Sometimes it turns out that the fence was built to keep out chupacabras, but in order to say that you need to go find the guy with a hammer and a herd of goats.
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Garrett’s on the right track here. But it goes further…
Quick SSC poll: Say you were making $500K for the last ten years (SVP money). Then you were asked to become CEO for a boost up to $750K. This will come with significantly less you-time, less family-time, and you might end up getting fired in the next year for something that’s not even in your control. Does anyone here really take the job? What salary multiplier does it take for you to accept the job?
Astute readers will also notice what happens here when you increase top marginal tax rates. Hint – people don’t say “Oh well, it’s going to a good cause”
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Amusingly, we know one CEO’s answer to that question: (Dr. Evil pinkie gesture) One Million Dollars
This would be Marissa Mayer, though I suspect in her case the money was secondary; what she wanted was the CEO title and position.
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The CEO title and position at a substantial size company alone is very valuable. Even if you get fired a year later for cause you are forever after in the CEO class will have your choice of soft landings.
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Sometimes a stupid fence is a stupid fence, but market prices are neither stupid nor arbitrary.
Less family time? I’d need 2 million: one million for me, the other million to bribe my partner to let me stay at the office all the time.
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@Vox
My opinion is that shareholders are irrational, believing in things that sound plausible, but are actually wrong*. History is littered with examples of mass delusions (and in fact, mainstream society suffers from several mass delusions right now, some of which the writer of this blog has addressed).
Hold onto your hats, since I’m actually going to provide evidence for my claim:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highest-paid-ceos-are-the-worst-performers-new-study-says/
* There may also be a social element, where shareholders are simply afraid to make CEOs unhappy and retaliate by lowering dividends, even if they believe the salaries are unwarranted and don’t make the CEO perform better.
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@SUT et al.
CEOs are already disproportionally workaholics or otherwise people who place less value on family life. Judging whether CEOs would accept a lower salary by asking non-CEO’s, who do not have the same characteristics, is a sampling error. Unless all you guys are CEOs, of course.
Secondly, basic demand/supply would result in the SVP salaries going down or people to become CEO even when preferring to be SVPs. There are only so many SVP jobs, so at a certain point, people have to compromise. Everyone has to compromise in their job choices. The idea that CEOs wouldn’t and would take their ball and go home, is a pure Ayn Rand fantasy.
Finally, I’m not asking for communism, but rather a return to the wage distribution that we had in the past, when there was no problem finding good/enough CEOs. IMHO, it’s up to you guys to prove that/argue how something that worked in the past suddenly can’t work again.
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http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-compensation-chart-2014-6
It’s not a very old fence. It’s been around only since the late 80’s and it’s construction is very well documented.
There are a lot of possible explanations. One of the good ones I’ve heard is that since executive pay is publicly available data, every time a company hires a CEO, they essentially have to pay him more than average, since paying him less is almost like admitting that you’re hiring a worse than average CEO. This raises the average for the next CEO hired by a different company.
It’s not the only factor. Off the top of my head, there’s also that corporations are getting larger and more globalized, more mergers, and the rise of stock options as compensation.
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I’m skeptical of your theory, because it (and the research you cite) implies that stock prices are predictable based on a simple and publicly available metric. If true, then we really ought to start a fund that invests in companies with the lowest CEO pay; we’d beat the market and become billionaires. But that leads to the question, why hasn’t someone else already done this? Why hasn’t the author of the original research done this? He must realize that his theory implies he’s sitting on a gold mine.
Is high CEO pay the fence, or is freedom of contract the fence?
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While the theoretical corporate finance literature suggests there should be really big effects from bad governance, mis-aligned management incentives, etc. it’s extremely hard to find any significant factors in the empirical data.
If we look at just CEO pay there does seem to be a negative effect on stock returns for high pay. But! The stocks don’t underperform directly because they give too much money to the CEO. The issue seems to be how pay affects their decision-making. Beating the market with this approach does not seem that far-fetched. The effect isn’t that big, and it probably isn’t very consistent either, and correlates with things you don’t want it to correlate to, which is why it might not be “exploited” entirely.
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If true, then we really ought to start a fund that invests in companies with the lowest CEO pay; we’d beat the market and become billionaires. But that leads to the question, why hasn’t someone else already done this? Why hasn’t the author of the original research done this? He must realize that his theory implies he’s sitting on a gold mine.
Stock prices are (slightly) predictable based on many simple and publicly available metrics. Value and momentum stock return “anomalies” have been known for literally decades and the industry is only now really exploiting them fully (overexploiting them?) with the proliferation of “smart beta/strategic beta” products.
There are many true facts about stock returns that you can’t build a trading strategy around – too much variance, too much of a pain to get the data in a timely way, transaction costs too high, liquidity, not enough diversification, prone to occasional huge drawdowns just when they’d hurt most, etc.
Also – if someone *did* figure out a way to incorporate CEO pay into a trading strategy, they probably wouldn’t be telling everyone about it. It wouldn’t shock me if some secretive quant fund somewhere was incorportating CEO pay into some signal.
I do know some investment companies use ratings of companies’ corporate governance as part of their process, though I’ve never been exposed to the details of that.
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-Is high CEO pay the fence, or is freedom of contract the fence?
Has there ever been complete freedom of contract? Maybe excessively high CEO pay is what happens when you start tearing down fences that prevent complete freedom of contract.
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Chesterton’s fence doesn’t really work when the fence is built across a road with someone manning a tollbooth: in some cases, there’s a really clear incentive structure for someone to build a fence (institute a social norm of high pay for their social class) that can adequately explain the existence of said fence without reference to a hypothetical herd of bulls on the other side of it.
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New Hampshire!
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this analysis all ignores the incentive effects
And yet we had a comment in a different thread that paying workers more won’t increase productivity.
I do wonder about this split, which I see quite often; we can’t increase pay for lower-paid workers because that’s not efficient, but you have to pay the going rate and more if you want to get the best management. Why not argue either that by paying the highest wages you get the best people all round, or else that if your management has to be bribed to do their jobs then they should all be fired?
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There is no contradiction here.
Low-wage workers are paid an efficient wage. As are CEOs.
If low-wage workers were paid more, you would attract better people. But there’s only so many workers able to produce value equal to $15 an hour. If you make it illegal to hire below that, those workers won’t be hired.
If CEOs were paid less, you would attract poorer-quality people to be CEOs. Just the same as what kind of what kind of investment bankers you’d get if you tried to pay them $15 an hour.
Now, one common and ridiculous minimum-wage argument is that increasing wages from $8 an hour to $15 an hour will actually more than double worker productivity and pay for itself. But if this were the case, businesses would need no prompting from the government to do so. The argument presumes that the government knows better than Wal-Mart what is profitable for Wal-Mart.
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It’s not clear that the CEO compensation is ‘efficient’ in any meaningful sense. As I recall, someone published a paper showing that CEO compensation and future stock price were negatively correlated. See http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/CEOperformance122509.pdf
There are of course multiple possible explanations for this phenomenon, but in general it’s hard to prove that CEOs are producing value commensurate with their compensation – most people seem to want to make handwaving arguments in this direction based on the assumption of rational actors with some ability to accurately assess CEO competence, but it’s not clear that these assumptions are valid.
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Right; CEO productivity is almost impossible to measure (unlike a low-level worker), so it’s hard to tell if they are being overpaid. Of course, that’s not really an argument for government intervention, either.
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@ bbartlog:
I am not arguing that every CEO is paid the exact right amount.
I am saying that if there were any demonstrable way to show CEO was too high in general, companies would pay them less. Unless you think large companies just don’t care very much about profits.
The fact that CEO compensation is negatively correlated with stock price doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. It’s possibly quite like the correlation between weight and use of diet programs: fat people are more likely to be on diets, but that doesn’t mean diets make you fat.
Similarly, companies doing poorly may be more likely to hire a hotshot CEO to turn things around. And it is one-hundred percent compatible with the data to suggest that they do provide that value, but not enough value to keep the stock price from declining.
It’s like the Steven Kaas-ism: “Why waste time sitting and theorizing when we can JUST LOOK at the data and answer a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?”
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I am saying that if there were any demonstrable way to show CEO was too high in general, companies would pay them less. Unless you think large companies just don’t care very much about profits.
What no this is crazy. CEO pay is practically the textbook definition of a principal-agent problem.
I’m not familiar with the empirical literature on this but you can’t just invoke efficient markets here.
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CEO pay is definitely not a textbook example of the principal-agent problem. CEOs do not determine their own pay, in general; rather, their board does. While it is now quite common for CEOs to sit on, and sometimes even chair, the board, this does not in and of itself mean the board will fail to exercise its fiduciary obligation to look out for the interest of the shareholders. Unfortunately I think it’s not unheard of for that to happen. But (with the caveat that I am also not too familiar with the literature) I suspect it is less common than generally imagined.
There is a separate strand of evidence suggesting that CEOs at the most successful companies (think Tim Cook and his ilk) are vastly underpaid, but are rich enough that they don’t care. The incentives are weird here, with compensation playing much more of a status-symbol role than in other sectors of the economy. This, I understand, was why when Steve Jobs stopped getting paid $1/year, he demanded such an outlandishly large pay package from Apple’s board.
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While it is now quite common for CEOs to sit on, and sometimes even chair, the board, this does not in and of itself mean the board will fail to exercise its fiduciary obligation to look out for the interest of the shareholders. Unfortunately I think it’s not unheard of for that to happen.
The business press treats it as common for CEOs to dominate their boards. I don’t see any reason to doubt it.
For CEOs being underpaid, I guess that’s possible too, you could probably come up with factors pushing in that direction. Point is there is really no reason to expect it to be the “correct” pay by any non-circular definition of “correct”, because there’s no reason to expect errors to cancel out here.
(BTW, the arguments I’ve seen that CEOs are vastly underpaid look at the value they create. While perhaps interesting, this is not a correct metric. Almost everyone creates far more value than they capture as wages, so everyone is vastly underpaid by that measure.)
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@Vox
The proportion of wages going to CEOs has rapidly increased over the last decades (which didn’t happen before). Does that mean that there is a shortage of good CEOs now, that didn’t exist in the past?
How do you explain this? Did education become much worse? Was there a sudden explosion in the number of corporations and thus job openings?
Note that during the same period, many more foreigners became CEOs in the US, which indicates that the CEO market became more global, which would normally increase the quality of the ‘supply.’ So you’d have to account for that and thus the cause of a reduction in supply of good American CEOs would have to be quite significant, to offset the globalization.
PS. You exhibit the same belief system that I abhor most economists for: an absurd belief in the rationality of market actors, despite tons of evidence that people often act irrationally.
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But Vox, a lot of places are paying $8 an hour wages and demanding $15 an hour productivity. If really-only-worth-$4 an hour workers are so bad, they’ll be let go easily (and you probably do get a lot of churn in very low paid jobs, which means you’ve a lot of people patching together incomes from part-time or full-time but badly paid jobs, government welfare, and perhaps minor criminality; that doesn’t solve much for society).
Just as you find it hard to believe there is an inexhaustible supply of worth-$15 an hour-workers, I find it hard to believe each and every potential CEO is worth top dollar plus bonuses plus golden handcuffs plus gardening leave.
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I find that hard to believe. If there were lots of people with a productivity of $15 per hour only getting paid $8, why isn’t anyone making a fortune hiring all those underpaid people for 9 or 10 dollars per hour?
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Moreover, productivity in the economic sense is not an innate quality of people. That is a common misconception.
A worker at Starbucks today has a vastly higher productivity of labor than a seamstress 300 years ago. That’s not because the Starbucks barista is genetically superior, or works harder, or anything like that. It’s because the barista is part of a more capital-intensive production chain.
It is certainly possible that, one day, everyone will have $15 an hour productivity. That will be brought about through technological improvement and capital intensification.
But right now, in the current environment, the most valuable work some people can do is worth less than $15 an hour.
***
And what makes wages go up is not improvements at one specific factory or even industry; it is economy-wide productivity of labor.
Table-waiting technology has barely improved since the 1700s, but waiters today are paid far more. Why? Well, it’s because the workers who are waiters could also be factory workers or something where the technology has improved, and so the restaurant owners have to bid against the factory owners for the limited labor supply.
The alternative options available to the waiters increase the economic value of their labor, which also causes restaurateurs to have to raise prices to reflect the fact that the tables are now being waited with more valuable labor.
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@Aapje
“The proportion of wages going to CEOs has rapidly increased over the last decades (which didn’t happen before).
Does that mean that there is a shortage of good CEOs now, that didn’t exist in the past?”
CEOs received significant nonmonetary compensation in the 1950s.
Also change in pay doesn’t mean a shortage; it could mean the benefit to having the best CEO has increased.
“How do you explain this? Did education become much worse? Was there a sudden explosion in the number of corporations and thus job openings?”
Globalization taking off again after the 1970s? Once you have a bigger pool, things become more winner take all.
“Note that during the same period, many more foreigners became CEOs in the US, which indicates that the CEO market became more global, which would normally increase the quality of the ‘supply.’ ”
Isn’t this two way? If American CEOs can run foreign companies, this means the US has to pay good CEOs more in order to get the best.
“PS. You exhibit the same belief system that I abhor most economists for: an absurd belief in the rationality of market actors, despite tons of evidence that people often act irrationally.”
Economics doesn’t require market actors to be rational. It just requires that not all market actors are irrational in the same way. That isn’t a high bar to meet.
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Re New Hampshire: there was also a “Free County Project” in which libertarians tried to take over Loving County, Texas, population 82. They weren’t exactly run out of town on a rail, but close enough.
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Messing with Texas is a rookie mistake.
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Regarding the CDC recommendations on drinking: from the (non-scientific, anecdotal selection of) feminists that I saw talking about it on the Internet, people were less angry about the suggestion that actually pregnant women should refrain from drinking, and more angry about the suggestion that any woman that could become pregnant – IE, any sexually active woman on birth control – should refrain from drinking.
Now, I mean, agree or disagree with that, whatever, but I feel like it’s at least an important degree of separation.
efb
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Re: Y Combinator and basic income: Cowen’s second law says that there’s a literature on everything, and the literature on basic income is actually pretty interesting. EconLog has a lengthy summary (see website link).
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“Noah Smith: Some new evidence suggests, contra economic theory, that free trade with China has cost jobs without necessarily compensating through greater benefits somewhere else. David Friedman, any thoughts?”
The paper doesn’t claim ‘no greater benefits’; it merely claims employment wasn’t compensated for and that this is different from previous decades when workers did find higher paying work. This suggests either the magnitude of change is larger, the US economy is different from the past or that the US economy has barriers preventing adaption.
Free trade theory doesn’t say that everyone will benefit, just there will be net benefits to both sides (usually in the form of cheaper goods and increased consumer surplus). You can have net unemployment gains from free trade.
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My response to this research was, “Oh no, the US economy is too rigid to respond to shocks! How can we make it less rigid?” If people think this justifies trade restrictions, they’re essentially saying, “Oh no, the US economy is too rigid to respond to shocks! How can we shelter it from shocks?”
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China also counts as “somewhere else.”
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Having read the paper, I agree with Samuel and Garrett. The key take-away is that the size and rapidity of entrance of China was a one-time event which overwhelmed the adaptiveness of the labor markets, with little likelihood that something of similar magnitude will occur in the future.
This paper is extremely important as it:
1). Helps explain the stagnation or lower growth rate in labor rates in the US over the past generation
2). Helps explain the trends in inequality (capital and skilled labor were even more in demand during the transition)
3). As Garrett notes it reveals the danger of market rigidities, potentially including those caused by our safety nets which kept those in affected industries in dieting communities rather than migrating to better opportunities.
This is a really important paper and it points to a lot of errors in how people frame some important economic issues.
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It’s a bit misleading to say that SPARC is run by CFAR, and fairly misleading to say that SPARC is run by MIRI (disclaimer: I am a SPARC instructor). CFAR donates people and curriculum, MIRI donates (donated? not sure) money, and both were important factors in getting SPARC off the ground, but SPARC is run by a separate group of volunteers centered around Paul Christiano.
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I’ve changed it for now, but Paul seems to say that CFAR runs it here. Maybe that’s changed?
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The idea that subsidies raise the cost of college is so mind numbingly obvious that I’m forced to put on my tin foil hat and speculate why people still don’t acknowledge it. In your “paranoid rant”, you mentioned college as a way to indoctrinate students in supporting left wing beliefs. My theory is that progressives know that lowering the price of college is as easy as eliminating subsidies but they also know that fewer people would attend it. With less people attending university, that means less people getting indoctrinated in progressive thinking. Now their favorite solution is of course to make the government pay for all schooling but they would rather have students deep in student loan debt than give up control of society.
Or maybe it’s because progressives don’t understand economics. Who knows?
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I haven’t thought about the issue in much depth, nor have I talked to any other progressives about it, but if I were to sketch why it is, I would say:
1) Progressives most likely think that, while tuition subsidies play a part, there are other factors that play an important role in rising tuition costs – in particular, funding being cut for political reasons in public universities and colleges, and a variety of other incentives and policies in private ones, and probably think that you can address rising tuition by addressing those problems.
2) Progressives also most likely think that tuition subsidies play an important role in social mobility (really, absolutely sincerely believed, from what I can tell in others, fwiw) and think that’s a relevant, valuable trade-off for the role they play in rising tuition costs. They would therefore be extremely reluctant to cut tuition subsidies without some kind of mechanism to replace that effect.
I will say that it’s disquieting to me seeing how much of the conversation on the left focuses on the “make education cheaper for students” piece as opposed to the “address the costs of higher education” piece, but nothing’s perfect, I guess.
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I think it’s even simpler than this. The idea that subsidies increase prices is not mind-numbingly obvious to anyone. That’s why Professors drill the idea so hard in Econ 101 classes.
However, anything taught in Econ 101 probably lacks staying power. Most of my fellow business students started supporting rent controls by their senior year, because they were now actually paying rent and didn’t like seeing their rent increase. This despite our required introductory classes all taught by a Canadian Libertarian who spent a LOT of time specifically hammering rent controls.
Most Progressives probably intuitively think that college is expensive because:
1. College is getting more expensive, just like everything else, but more so, because college is so much more important, and colleges are so much more technological and teaching more these days.
2. There are more people in college.
3. State legislatures have cut funds to colleges.
To the extent they think about subsidies, they probably think subsidies just make college cheaper for people, and without the subsidies, practically no one would be able to afford college.
They are almost certainly arguing for subsidies from good faith and do not realize the unintended consequences of their actions.
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I suspect that you’re correct.
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But what about that whole GI bill thing in the 40’s – 50’s? Wasn’t that a huge artificial injection of demand for higher ed?But college was still affordable on a part time job for the Greatest-Gen’s kids.
The main difference today is how businesses treat a $50K/year degree. In times past, that would be seen as shameful, or wasteful at the very least (my impression as 29 y.o. correct me if I’m wrong). Today, it’s often difficult to get an interview without the prestigious and expensive degree.
Along the same lines: if the nordic countries had a broad culture where “pimping out” your car gave you status, it would be difficult to continue their welfare state. That positional treadmill just eats up every dollar you throw at it, without increasing actual utility.
The remedy does seem to exist though: it’s adopting a curmudgeonly I lived through the depression attitude to how you evaluate the college credential – “What do you need a rock climbing wall for? I thought you were studying music?” If everyone did that, we really could afford to send everyone to college.
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Good question, but we don’t have enough detail to evaluate that claim. So I can’t offer any answer to you that would be reasonable either.
Hmmm, what does this paper say:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7452.pdf
The GI Bill was probably much smaller in affect than the current student loan regime, tbh. That’s my gut check, anyways.
Regarding college indicator:
I am also 29. I can tell you from the experiences of others that education requirements have increased massively.
On the other hand, I also work in a mixed department of ages and education requirements, and this composition has changed year to year. There is no comparison between the average college grad and the average non-college grad. The average non-college grad (in my department) is pretty dumb and unwilling to learn. They are absolutely willing to do the same rote tasks over and over and over again, but don’t ask them to learn.
The college grads are burdened with practically all knowledge-related work, and those that graduated with traditional degrees from traditional 4 year unis are much better equipped.
To make an anecdote: I was once, while still a temp, requested to lead a seminar to the entire department, that essentially consisted of teaching unit conversions, IE: multiplication and division.
This is not hard stuff, but practically all the non-college grads struggled MIGHTILY, and even the “Graduates” from the 2 year programs or “graduated later in the life” struggled
My Wife recently ran into this problem at her job, when one of her technicians OD’d a patient. Because division is hard. I would strangle that dumbass to an inch of his life. You don’t know division and you are American? Go fuck yourself, you’re just lazy.
That doesn’t mean the college experience made us smarter…obviously division is something any 4th grader should be able to do. But it is an amazing signal for employers.
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The problem I think is college is exactly that, a signal. 4 years of education to prove you can pass college algebra which is about 50% stuff you were supposed to learn in 4th grade. Having tutored college algebra I’m totally down with the observation that a terrifying number of adults don’t understand fractions, but it’s still horribly inefficient for employers to insist on 6 figures of debt and 4 years of lost wages to prove that somebody can follow that stuff.
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If you see a bunch of people struggle mightily to learn division, this suggests that not understanding division is not just a matter of laziness.
It might be that the intelligence needed to make it reasonably easy just isn’t there. I don’t know if there’s something you have trouble with that most people don’t, but if there is, I suggest you think about the experience.
It might be that they’ve been taught arithmetic so badly that they have misconceptions about how to do it.
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@TG
I agree with you. The current does not make sense to me. It also does not make sense to a lot of smart people like Peter Thiel, which is why we are even having this discussion.
The Overton Window is moving, just have some faith in the discussion process.
@Nancy
I disagree entirely with your apologist mind-set. Division is indeed hard to learn, for every primary school age student in the United States. Algebra is also hard to learn, for many junior high and high school students throughout the United States.
Adults of the US should still be expected to know both. These are important mathematical skills that apply to daily life: setting budgets or purchasing things from stores come to mind instantly.
Again, this experience of teaching adults division was at work. At work! My work force will pay for NO training and would never set a department-wide meeting unless it was absolutely necessary. It was absolutely necessary for these people to know division, they just hadn’t DONE it in their jobs for decades!
And to parry your point it’s not essential since they hadn’t done it: no, disagree entirely, these people collectively cost tens of millions of dollars and no one closely supervised them.
Again, my Wife had a technician OD a patient because she did not perform her calculations correctly, and she has learned through the grapevine that many of her technicians do not know division, multiplication, and unit conversions.
They absolutely NEED to know it, they just have been passing off the work or using incorrect short-cuts for years and gotten away with it.
Until now.
I have little sympathy. I have an entire team in India that fails on almost observable metric our business has, but they can do freakin’ division. If they can do it, Americans who have all had 12+ years of formal education can do it.
If they can’t, then I think our discussion should revolve around reducing education expenses, rather than sending these dullards to university and watering down yet another layer of American education. They won’t learn division in 4 years of college anymore than they did in 12 years of primary school, they’ll just get rubber-stamped diplomas so they can get “good jobs” where they expect to get lots of money despite not knowing division.
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With regards to education at the level of elementary school math:
You can trivially find on the Internet a world’s worth of explanation, examples, practice problems, and background information, for free. You can also find people who, because they care enough to maintain these free resources, will gleefully point you in the direction of other resources.
ADBG may not have phrased his statement politely, but I agree with the substance of it; the limiting reagent in the alchemy of education these days is by no means availability to educational materials.
Anybody who has access to the Internet, the ability to read English at a high-school level, no major intellectual disability, and (the actual limiting reagents, IMHO) the drive to Google “How can I learn math?” and the dedication to stick with the independent lessons even when something more interesting, that their social group would reward them for following instead is demanding their attention.
Getting an independent education is simple. It is also incredibly difficult, in the same way “I’m going to lose weight by cutting calories and exercising more!” is. Summarizing the failure to do so as laziness is simplistic, reductive, and not at all helpful for actually getting people to solve the problem, but it’s still more accurate than looking for an external limiting factor.
But, to bring it back to the comment, just as people paid to haul several standard deviation’s worth of American out of a burning building really need to be fit and strong, people who are dispensing medicine really need to know how to divide, and be comfortable enough with division that when a decimal place slips its position, 200 / 50 = 40 looks immediately wrong and gets investigated and corrected immediately.
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Nancy is right, although I would adjust the emphasis. A small minority of people are probably unable to learn division. But on the other hand, the teaching of basic maths in the USA kind of seems to be in a terrible state.
I mean, there is some evidence that many of your teachers don’t understand division. Of course that makes it much harder for students to learn.
And here’s an education professional saying that the choice is between useless rote learning and useful skills exactly sufficient to buy a Big Mac. (Literally, that’s the example he used.) Ahhhh!
@ Robert Liguori
How would these people know that:
1. such resources exist;
2. they would benefit from them?
They’re thinking “I’m OK at division — I got a B- on that test 15 years ago”, or “yeah, math is hard for me, but math is just hard, you know? unless you’re some sort of genius.”
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Nancy is right, although I would adjust the emphasis. A small minority of people are probably unable to learn division. But on the other hand, the teaching of basic maths in the USA kind of seems to be in a terrible state.
In the USA, a larger-than-usual amount of people might be unable to learn division. OTOH, I don’t particularly see it that USA is particularly terrible at education.
http://isteve.blogspot.no/2013/12/graph-of-2012-pisa-scores-for-65_4.html
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As for the first, I may just be in a bubble, but I’d assume knowledge of search engines has reached saturation. There are people who literally doesn’t know that they can type in “How can I learn math?” into http://www.google.com and get very salient results back, but I find it unlikely that the smartest person these people know doesn’t know this as well.
For the second, well, in the case of the pharmacy tech, one would hope “So I don’t kill people.” would be a sufficient motivation, but clearly it isn’t.
Plus, my argument wasn’t that most people wanted to learn math but couldn’t. Someone who saw no benefit to learning math will almost certainly not learn math, no matter what educational opportunities they are offered. I don’t personally study theology, despite there being a wealth of free resources, and despite knowing that there are quite a lot of people who judge me intellectually delinquent for not learning all about the god of their choice.
But if the Grand Theoarchy of Those People is introduced and I’m put up against the wall for my heathenish ways, I have no business claiming that the reason for my theological influence was lack of teachers or educational material. If I cared, I could learn. I don’t care. Arguing “But you have no reason to care!” sounds very much agreement that it’s the caring that’s the missing portion to me.
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@ Nita
I disagree that these workers receive no feed-back. Their jobs require division, and have required division for years.
Similarly, I know that I suck at computer programming. I suck at macros and I suck at Access. At least the US taxpayer hasn’t shelled out hundreds of billions of dollars with the expectation I would know these things!
My impression based on anecdata is that Corporate America slashed expenses over the past several decades and these workers can no longer pass off their division-work on other people.
These people always knew they sucked at division, they just didn’t care much because they were not accountable for knowing division. This is indeed a failure of Corporate America and the Public Education system, but I refuse to acknowledge there is not a personal failing here as well.
I also reject the notion that the solution to this is to subsidize more college education. Please stop wasting my money.
EDIT: With respect to Rob (and I agree with him for the most part), I view this as a moral failing because these students were not expected to learn division by themselves. The United States has made a colossal commitment to educate all citizens, no matter how dull, and that included division.
I do not assign a similar moral failing for people who fail to learn outside the education system, or cannot lose weight, or whatever.
People need to take responsibility and need to take ownership of their choices, and stop expecting Bernie Sanders to fix their problems for them.
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What does “division-work” even refer to?
It can’t be the act of performing division because we have tools for that.
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Besides the act of performing division, “division work” also means knowing when you have to do division, which number should be the divisor and what the result should look like so you can notice obvious mistakes.
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>Besides the act of performing division, “division work” also means knowing when you have to do division, which number should be the divisor and what the result should look like so you can notice obvious mistakes.
Can we agree, if only for sake of semantics, that the ability one needs to do division-work is not division but rather (very basic) modelling.
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An example was provided: dosing a patient in a hospital.
Here’s a retail example: a doctor writes a prescription for 40 units of insulin three times daily. How much insulin does the patient need for a 30 day supply? A 90 days supply? (Typical insulin is 100 units per mL and vials are typically dispensed in 10mL increments.
I am constructing a floor. I need to budget 20% of waste. My house is 24 feet by 10 feet. How much wood do I need? What’s the expected price of using an oak floor vs. a laminate from home depot? How much should I budget for tax?
I have $100 left in my bank account and I need to budget my food and gas for the week until my pay check comes in. How much ground beef can I afford? How much gas do I need to buy this week?
To some extent. For the most part, people build fluency and it becomes rote. If you are constructing the same model every single time and your boss tells you to use the same model every single time, it ceases to rely on your own modeling skills.
Either way, if you cannot do this, me paying your college bill is not going to fix your problems.
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I’m going to invoke my tutoring experience and say that the things you get from searching for math help are not in any way a solution for adults who need math help, they’re a solution for people who are going through a math topic for the first time, and unfortunately they are exactly the same solution that classrooms provide. They don’t help with retention problems, they don’t help with people who can successfully point to the circle that’s half shaded (because they have in fact used a measuring cup at some point in the last 30 years) but don’t understand that half and 1 divided by 2 are the same thing, they really really do not help with single mothers who are constantly distracted by their baby and need a babysitter more than a tutor.
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Definite Beta Guy, the specific point I disagree with you on is your claim that people don’t know division because they are lazy.
I suspect the real reason they don’t know division is that they believe being able to do division is that being able to do division requires being a special sort of person (good at math) and they aren’t that sort of person. Admittedly, this belief encourages not making an effort, but I’m willing to bet at least some of those people are making considerable efforts in other parts of their lives.
I believe part of what’s wrong with conventional schooling is that it teaches people that if they can’t learn a subject in school, they can’t learn it at all. And the teaching in school tends to be pretty bad, so there’s a lot of excessive despair.
Meanwhile, I think your claim that people are lazy for not having learned things you think they should be able to learn is a lazy claim. It shields you from making an effort to find out what’s actually going on.
I’m not denying that people would be better off if they knew division and that it’s very important for some jobs.
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Nancy,
This is a rather black-and-white issue.
1. These people have had division in their job responsibilities for years (decades, in some cases!)
2. They don’t know how to do it.
It is obvious that these job responsibilities have not been fulfilled at all, or they have been passed on to other people. If you don’t agree with my moral assessments, that’s fine, go ahead and ignore them. Or disagree. It’s not really that important to the overall point.
My non-moral assessment is that they never cared to learn and never were held accountable, either by their work managers or their schools. The solution is to hold people accountable for their job responsibilities and for schools to actually test to confirm students actually have the required knowledge before rubber-stamping their diploma.
Saying they have a self-limiting belief is a different spin on “Never cared to learn.”
Wasting tens of billions of dollars on additional education isn’t going to change anything besides waste more money. We might as well pray to the Machine God for all the good it will do.
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>I suspect the real reason they don’t know division is that they believe being able to do division is that being able to do division requires being a special sort of person (good at math) and they aren’t that sort of person. Admittedly, this belief encourages not making an effort, but I’m willing to bet at least some of those people are making considerable efforts in other parts of their lives.
So as long as they’ve put an effort into something in their lives, they’re not lazy? That type of definition for laziness puts it outside the scope of all humanity short of, idk, severe mental disorder?
I’m lazy, yet I put in effort in a lot of things. I remember crying when I was learning division many many years ago, because I was by far the best student in my class yet I couldn’t get an intuitive understanding of it, the best I could do was look up stuff in a multiplication table in reverse or write out random multiplications until one of them matched. I got it after growing increasingly frustrated over the same afternoon. A lot of the reason I put in that effort wasn’t because of my inherent moral superiority and lack of laziness, but because my laziness was outweighed by my desire to maintain my reputation as the smartest.
If people aren’t learning division because they believe they’re not in the class of people who can learn division, that’s the fault of the educational system for not doing a good job providing incentives to go through the anguish of learning division. By calling them lazy we’re adding to that incentive, same with punishing them for coming to work without knowing division. It would be cruel if they’re actually cognitively different enough to be unable to learn division except by ungodly effort, but asserting that has some far more serious implications..
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Is division explicitly listed as part of job responsibilities?
Are the managers who haven’t insisted on having subordinates who know division lazy, too?
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“Algebra is also hard to learn, for many junior high and high school students throughout the United States.
Adults of the US should still be expected to know both. These are important mathematical skills that apply to daily life”
My guess is that a majority of high school graduates never use algebra and are never in a situation where algebra would be very useful. Do you disagree? Examples of daily life situations in which knowing algebra is important?
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Wouldn’t any word problem with arithmetic steps be algebra? But, I think most clever people could figure out agebraic problems without being able to devise a general theory of algebra (or being exposed to the idea of “unwrapping the package”).
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“Examples of daily life situations in which knowing algebra is important?”
I’m in a job which requires no math skills whatsoever, yet I do find myself using very basic algebra from time to time in daily life when I want to know the answer to a question like “what would I have to multiply this number by in order to get this other number?” I guess someone more mathematically inclined might automatically know to divide the second number by the first, but remembering that what I am basically asking is (n1)x=(n2) and that I need to therefore divide n2 by n1 to find x makes the operation more intuitive for my brain, at least. But anything much more complicated than that and the daily life uses seem to be more few and far between for most people who aren’t engineers, etc.
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@Beta Guy
Subsidies may affect the number of customers. If the market is saturated with suppliers, resulting in a price close to production costs, then subsidies would only increase the prices if the increase in customers would desaturate the market. If the market remains saturated with suppliers, the price would remain production costs + a little extra.
Another possibility is that elasticity may be minimal or even zero, in which case the number of customers doesn’t increase (by much). Thus the prices would remain (almost) the same.
Anyway, just correcting your misconceptions about markets in general. Of course, the education market is highly hierarchical (and quite elastic), where the objective quality of an education is often less important than appearing more educated than other people. This means that the prices could increase quite a bit, although it may depend on how the subsidies are granted. If there is an income limit to the subsidy and if the subsidy level is at community college level, rather than at Harvard level, the upward price effect may be very limited.
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Aapje,
Yes, I would agree with that, but, like you said, the supply side of the education market isn’t structured like that. Education is hierarchical and class-oriented.
There are only so many slots at Harvard.
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True, but most students don’t go to Harvard. Things get more complicated when you include less prestigious colleges.
Furthermore, the US is rather unique in ‘your’ ability to create the most expensive systems (like education and health care) even though the results are not really better than in other 1st world countries. If the people you are criticizing don’t just want subsidies, but also limits on tuition fees (as is common in Europe), the equation changes completely. For instance, in my country there is no problem with tuition fee increases, despite subsidies which are much larger than available in the US.
We have our own problems though, colleges are paid for each diploma, which puts downward pressure on the quality of education.
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“Subsidies may affect the number of customers. If the market is saturated with suppliers, resulting in a price close to production costs, then subsidies would only increase the prices if the increase in customers would desaturate the market.”
I don’t know what you mean by “saturate” and “desaturate.” But if we assume that your saturated market represents the standard perfect competition model, your argument only holds if all inputs are available in perfectly elastic supply.
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I take his statement as meaning a perfectly elastic supply curve, at least for the relevant price points. Obviously college is not perfectly elastic.
I also doubt most progressives have enough knowledge to think “oh, perfectly elastic supply,” but they probably can intuitively assume the “Supply” of college will increase over time.
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@David Friedman: I use algebra regularly when I actually get HVAC work though I know a lot of people manage without (seems like way more work). But also when I say college algebra I don’t mean just algebra, I mean division, fractions, percentages and decimals, which are all rolled into math 1050 ‘college algebra’. In short the ability to know how many Big Macs 10$ will buy.
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My impression of HVAC work is that there’s books of tables with the algebra (and calculus) already done and the installer has to fill in the numbers and do straight arithmetic, no “solve for x”?
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Not quite books (and no calculus, even the genuine engineers just use rough +/- 15% algebra approximations then tune the assembly till it works). But yeah, tables of different equations, or really the same equation in different shapes. It’s less work than learning algebra, but more work than if they had learned it in High School (given that they spend 2 years in math classes regardless of if they learned anything or not…).
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I get the impression progressives, at least educated progressives, realize subsidies make things more expensive. Their goal isn’t to reduce the cost of college. It’s to reduce the cost directly imposed on students. If that results in a greater total cost, but most of it is transferred to the rest of the population, I doubt they’d object. I imagine most think the increase can be offset by other measures that reduce cost, but that’s a separate issue from the effect of just the subsidies.
Of course, we’re getting a whole bunch of speculation here on other people’s thoughts. I’m sure there are people here who support subsidizing college tuition who can speak for themselves.
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I find it odd that it’s the progressives favoring this approach, given that taxing all people so that upper middle class people can go to college more easily is regressive.
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Isn’t it a common progressive goal that almost everybody should go to college?
I don’t think they have thought that through, but they do seem to be consistent in wanting to tax everybody except the poor in order to provide a benefit to everybody including the poor. Which is the sort of economic redistributionism that most people instinctively and uncontroversially support (see e.g. state-funded primary and secondary education).
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Milton Friedman made a pretty compelling argument that college subsidies are essentially a middle-class welfare system, done at the expense of the poor. The same is true for Social Security.
I don’t think it’s an intuitively obvious thing, though. It did not occur to me before I heard Friedman explain it.
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Multiple goals. Again, any progressive feel free to chime in, but I believe what they actually want is for the population of college graduates to be drawn proportionately from all classes, not to be predominantly upper middle class. Not necessarily that everyone should attend and graduate, but the poor should have as good a chance if that’s what they want to do as anyone else. Accomplishing this would take a lot more than just price manipulation, but that’s why progressivism is an entire program, not a single isolated policy proposal.
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@Adam
Assuming that ability is distributed equally between classes, that is indeed the goal.
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Milton Friedman’s argument is a bait-and-switch that he explains right at the beginning.
He claims college subsidies benefit the students who, even if they are from the lower income class, join the higher income class after graduation. To which a supporter of college subsidies would say “See, it helps the lower income classes.”; the supporter is considering their income class before the benefit, Friedman after it.
Also, this was apparently from 1994. College subsidies and the distorting effect thereof have increased quite a bit. I’d argue nowadays that the main middle-class beneficiaries of college subsidies are college employees, and the effects of college loans are probably a greater drag on the middle class than the subsidies help them (compared to a low-subsidy world where college was much cheaper)
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For something a little blunter and more specific than what Milton Friedman said, social security is a way of transferring money from black men to white women.
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Ooh, I love some good tinfoil hat speculation. How about this. The rich elites run everything. Paying for your kids’ college education has tax benefits. The more expensive college is, the more it hurts the middle class and the poor. The cost is negligible to the rich, so they come out relatively ahead of everyone else.
(Disclaimer: I don’t really believe this.)
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It actually only hurts the middle class. The poor get full subsidies, the rich can afford it. The middle class gets a combination of loans and blowing any savings they may have. Insert your own conspiracy theory here.
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Aah, good point. Annnd the plot thickens.
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Well the middle class mostly votes republican so who gives a fuck what they think?
/sarcasm
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I guess it depends on what you mean by middle class, but Democrats have the edge in party identification among those in households with $30k-40k, $40k-$50k, and $50k-$75k. Republicans have a 1% edge for $75k-$99k, and then the two are tied for $100-$150k and $150k+.
The Republicans do better when you add Republican leaning independents and Democratic leaning independents respectively, but the numbers are close (<%5) for every bracket above $50k.
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/2014-party-identification-detailed-tables/
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“In your “paranoid rant”, you mentioned college as a way to indoctrinate students in supporting left wing beliefs.”
I don’t think I actually said that. I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong, but it seems too simple and on the wrong level.
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You didn’t directly say it but it certainly seemed implied to me. Of course, I’m posting a paranoid rant based off your paranoid rant so nobody should be taking my comment too seriously.
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I’m no history scholar, but I’ve noticed “students” are often on the front lines of the 20th century’s populist movements. Particularly the Iranian revolution and Chinese cultural revolution. Now I understand these were not today’s accounting major, but what were they…what was their society’s original role for them was / why were they such dry timber?
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I’m pretty sure the Cultural Revolution’s students were high school and not college age.
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The usual solution in this sort of situation is to make the subsidies subject to a cap – in this case, if you choose a college where the tuition fee is more than $X, you don’t get a subsidy. No doubt there’s a reason this wouldn’t work in the US.
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This seems like an obvious solution. Can someone explain the problems with it?
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Because it works like every other ‘capped’ subsidy in the inventory – everyone who is interested in getting customers using the subsidy ups their price to just under the cap, and everyone who intends to discriminate against those using the subsidy up their price to just over the cap.
Net result is a higher cost to the government, pricing non-subsidy users out of the market, and increasing discrimination.
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Hmmm. I don’t see why a capped subsidy would result in any higher price rises than an uncapped subsidy would – they’re still competing with one another, after all. Nor why anyone who wants to discriminate against subsidy-users couldn’t just say “no subsidy users”, or price themselves high enough that nobody who needs the subsidy can afford them anyway.
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It makes it really easy for firms to collaborate in fixing prices when there’s a nice and easy Schelling Point for them to work with. It happened with credit card companies back when there was a mandatory max interest rate; everyone just hung out right under the cap. Get rid of the regulatory cap, interest rates dropped
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It’s not that college is brainwashing people so they have leftist political beliefs, or any sort of specific political beliefs for that matter.
The purpose of college, like all institutions, is to perpetuate itself. They would totally push for fascism if it would help them survive.
It’s not that progressives fear less people will go to college leading to there being less progressives. It’s just colleges themselves that are defending themselves from irrelevance.
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The important thing is that your speculation implies that most people with political beliefs that are not the same as yours are arguing in bad faith and are actually involved in some insidious plot to (mumble mumble mumble) rather than achieve some set of goals that they sincerely desire for positive, humanistic reasons, even if they are somewhat misguided.
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You do realize that my comment wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, right?
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House subsidies, in the form of mortgage tax deduction, also exist with the same predictable result, and it’s hard to imagine any liberal conspiracy effecting that.
I think it’s simple, the voters want their college / house subsidized, end of story.
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I could respond to this, but IME the main purpose of calling the mortgage interest tax deduction a “subsidy” is to say “See, you’re subsidized too. That makes you no different than someone receiving an welfare check and public housing, so quit complaining about government redistribution efforts”
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No actual argument as to why you don’t consider the MITD a subsidy, and while in the process of not presenting any argument you took the opportunity to impugn Nonnamous’ motives in a way that even if it were true would be an irrelevant ad hominium.
Fractally worthless.
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I could be extra snarky and point out that what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Or I could point out that the mortgage-interest deduction is actually the remnant of the pre-1986 state of affairs where all loan interest was tax-deductible for individuals; it’s not that mortgage interest is now taxed less, it’s that other interest is now taxed more. Or I could note that considering a tax deduction a “subsidy” requires assuming the government somehow has a natural claim on a percentage of your gross income, so any downward adjustment of that represents the government giving money to you. None of those, however, would be convincing, and the last is obvious.
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>considering a tax deduction a “subsidy” requires assuming the government somehow has a natural claim on a percentage of your gross income
No it doesn’t. It just requires that the government have an enforceable claim, which it does.
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@ rockroy mountdefort:
What exactly is “enforceable claim” supposed to mean in this context?
If a tax deduction is written into the law, then they don’t have a legally enforceable claim to the money. If you just mean that they theoretically could rob you, well yes, but then every penny everyone keeps is a “subsidy”.
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So the jirga would be perfectly acceptable to you if it was implemented as a tax deduction for Muslmis rather than an additional tax for Christians and Jews?
Please cut the crap. There’s no difference between a tax expenditure and sending a check.
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Would such a tax deduction be distortionary? Yes.
Would it be unfair and unconstitutional? Yes.
But is it a subsidy? No. That’s just changing the meaning of the word “subsidy”. I mean, I don’t really care to dispute about definitions. If you want to call it a subsidy, fine. But it is not the same as what is traditionally called a subsidy.
If you want to use the word “banana” to mean “human being”, fine. But then don’t talk about making banana bread.
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“There’s no difference between a tax expenditure and sending a check.”
This is a very common conflation I hear coming from the likes of Nancy Pelosi and which always drives me crazy. “Taking less of your money” is different from “giving you money.” Does the government have an enforceable claim on all of everyone’s money? Well, yes, in the sense that if they decide to seize your bank account and 100% of your assets on some pretext no citizen could stop them; but they would at least need a pretext… for now.
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I guess it’s a formalist / realist divide.
As actually practiced in the real world there’s very little difference in outcome between a government policy designed to favor a politically powerful interest group via giving them money vs via allowing them to pay less in taxes than a similarly situated person not in the favored interest group.
But if you have an entire massive philosophy built around the notion that taxation is theft and your favorite reductio about 100% taxation always at hand and ready to go, then I guess they look very different. So cynical politicians frame their corrupt policies to have the correct magic words and that’s good enough.
Thinking about it, why is jirga tax deduction scheme unfair? If houses 1,2, and 3 on a block got robbed you wouldn’t “that’s unfair, houses 5 and 6 should have been robbed too”. The taxation is theft crowd should be all for more people keeping their own money even if they happen to all be Muslim.
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@ anonymous:
I am against distortionary tax deductions.
At the same time, I am against eliminating them unless this comes along with lowering the general rate.
Suppose I come in and say I’m going to punch everyone in the face, but I’ll let you off if you’re left-handed. That would be unfair. But it would be quite perverse for the left-handed people to say: “That’s not fair! Punch the right-handed people in the face, too!”
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“built around the notion that taxation is theft”
Libertarianism isn’t built around the notion that taxation is theft, it’s built around the notion that what would be wrong for you or me to do remains wrong even if you are a king, noble, or democratically elected official.
As for whether I would favor some special tax cut for Muslims even if nobody else could get the tax cut, I would. I want nobody to get punched in the face, but if the bully says “how about I punch everyone except those with red hair?” then I’ll say fine. It’s inferior to not punching anybody, but it’s superior to punching everybody, even if the determining factor is arbitrary or unfair.
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It’s certainly true that when looked at right on the bottom line, a reduction in government income is the same as a government expenditure. But not anywhere before that point.
If you call something a subsidy because it reduces the government income compared to some other state of affairs, you must have a state of affairs in mind where there is no subsidy. If the mortgage income tax deduction is a “subsidy”, then what about the business expense deduction (without which the income tax becomes a gross receipts tax)? How about the standard deduction and personal and dependent exemptions, are those subsidies as well? How about progressive taxation, is that a subsidy for those in lower tax brackets?
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While we’re at it, can we address why no one blames medicare and medicaid for rising health care costs? Like college tuition, health care costs just seem to be this thing which magically gets super, super unaffordable over time. Lucky we have these massive government-backed loans and insurance programs or no one could go to college or get medical care, I guess!
My best guess is 1. most people cannot connect the dots on even a basic economics issue 2. few people who could connect the dots have an incentive to do so (certainly not politicians, professors, or doctors), and third, and, I think, most importantly, medicare, medicaid, and student loans are “good” programs. They help people. To point out anything bad about them is simply in bad taste and makes us wonder who’s side you’re on.
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3. People who do connect the dots tend to get shouted down as wreckers and crack-pots (granted, some of them are) so even if you do notice there’s a personal incentive to keep one’s mouth shut and conduct your medical business extra-nationally if able.
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While we’re at it, can we address why no one blames medicare and medicaid for rising health care costs?
Anyone who talks to doctors about this, quickly comes to the understanding that Medicare and Medicaid are the notorious cheapskates in the health-care business. It is the traditional employer-provided health care plans that have handed out most of the virtual blank checks that drive health care cost expansion.
Yes, they are for-profit businesses with an economic incentive to minimize costs. Bad publicity and lawsuits are real costs.
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As are strikes and turnovers. I’ve had employer healthcare that was more cheapskate than medicare, average length of employment at that company was 4 months. There were other issues besides having been de facto lied to about getting health insurance but if they had been at all interested in spending money on employee retention negotiating a better healthcare deal would have been more efficient than higher wages.
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Well the weird thing is that decoupling health insurance from employment by eliminating tax subsidies for employer-provided plans would be politically much, much easier to do than eliminating or even cutting medicare or medicaid, and yet it never seems to gain any traction. This is one plus side to Obamacare (that it helps decouple employment and insurance), but that, to me, is just another case of “eliminating the bad government program that caused the problem in the first place is not an option, so let’s layer another government program on top of the old one to make it slightly less awful.”
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I wish I could remember the name of the original essay or author, but there’s some libertarian essay where the guy talks about (something like) “primary regulations” versus “secondary regulations”.
The primary regulations are the thing that creates a problem in the first place. For example, the Wagner Act giving government-backed monopoly powers to labor unions.
The secondary regulations are regulations-of-the-regulations, limiting the problems they cause. For instance, right-to-work laws making it illegal for unions and employers to agree on “closed shop” or “union shop” rules.
The secondary regulations are restrictions on freedom that wouldn’t be necessary if the primary regulations didn’t exist. But given the existence of the primary regulations, libertarians may either be for the secondary regulations (“it makes a bad situation better”) or against them (“it heightens the contradictions”).
This applies to Obamacare very clearly with the individual mandate. The steps:
1) Primary regulation: the rules tying health insurance to employment. As a result, you lose your insurance when you lose your job.
2) Secondary regulation: in order to solve the problem created by the primary regulation, we make it illegal for insurers to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. But this makes no economic sense, as you can’t buy fire insurance after your house burns down.
3) Tertiary regulation: in order to solve the problem created by this secondary regulation, we force everyone to buy insurance.
The problem, of course, is that by “deregulating” just the tertiary or secondary level, you make the problems worse. It’s only if you deregulate the whole thing that you fix the problems and end up with something better than the combination of all three levels.
The really big problem is: how do you “gradually” repeal and replace this system, when each gradual step toward making it better actually makes it worse?
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Is there any good reason to do it gradually other than the political difficulties of doing it suddenly?
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@ onyomi:
The political difficulties are the major problem, yes.
But there’s also the “button question”, which is: if there were a button you could push to have laissez-faire tomorrow, would you push it? And there are many reasons not to push it, since this would be very disruptive. For instance, it’s one thing to eliminate Social Security gradually. But it’s another to eliminate it tomorrow and get rid of it for the 85-year-olds currently on it and who rationally planned on its existence.
Also, in real life, revolutions are not a matter of pressing a button and usually screw things up worse.
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I doubt it’d be that much easier. The so-called “Cadillac tax” provision of the ACA would effectively roll back the subsidies for the most expensive employer-provided plans (albeit in a stupid, indirect manner) and unlike the rest of the ACA, it’s gotten intense bipartisan opposition. So far there have been a couple of delays to its implementation, and it’s likely to be pushed off repeatedly and indefinitely, like various Medicare cuts.
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If there were two magic buttons that:
1. slashed the government by say, 90% starting tomorrow, leaving basically some defense and law courts
2. slashed the government by say, 90% over the course of 10 years
I would press button 2.
But if my only options were button 1 or leaving the status quo as it is, I’d press button 1 in a heart beat.
I’m sure people would say “easy for you to say, you’re not 80 years old and dependent on medicare,” etc. but I have friends and family who are, and who would suffer immediate negative consequences, as my field of academia would likely suffer immediate negative consequences, so it’s not like I’m saying it from a total ivory tower, either. There would be pain, but the status quo creates tremendous pain right now, not only for us, but for many foreigners, so I would push it.
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@ onyomi:
I agree with you. If it’s Button 1 vs. status quo, I’d push Button 1.
On the other hand, in real life radical changes and extreme disruption might push people off of liberty altogether. Like the absolute chaos in Russia when they (of course, very corruptly) privatized everything overnight.
The economist George Reisman talks about a similar problem in transitioning to a one-hundred percent reserve gold standard. Even if the end goal is good, we don’t want to kick off the new monetary regime by creating the greatest depression of all time. (Which is what would happen if you, for instance, restored the dollar to its old definition of 1/20th of an ounce of gold.) Like, not only is it not worth it, but everyone would then hate the gold standard.
(He doesn’t think we should therefore abandon the goal, but he points it out in the context of having to think carefully about how to do it.)
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“Even if the end goal is good, we don’t want to kick off the new monetary regime by creating the greatest depression of all time.”
Understandable, and a real problem when doing the right thing will generally involve transitory pain, but I think this consideration also has to be weighed against peoples’ ability to see cause and effect.
Let’s say, for example, that President Ron Paul says “I’m cutting the federal government by 80% and putting us back on the gold standard by the end of the year; this will result in a nasty short-term depression and spike in unemployment, but within 1-2 years you’ll see the economy come roaring back, and things will be better than ever before by the end of my first term.”
Assuming his predictions came to pass roughly as he said they would, I think most people would be able to suffer the shorterm pain so long as the promised good did materialize within relatively short order. The lesson learned would be that serious fiscal and monetary restraint, while painful in the short run, is very beneficial in the long run.
Conversely, imagine newly elected President Paul says, “we will gradually cut the size of the federal government and move towards controlling inflation over the course of the next four years.” By the end of his first term we will probably just be reaching the trough of a depression and everyone will blame him for it. He will lose reelection and his free-spending successor will get all the credit for the latent beneficial effects of his gradualist “tough love” policies. The lesson learned will be “that’s what you get when you cut government spending!”
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Medicaid not so much because it’s mainly done at a State level. States actually really care about their budgets. The Feds on the other hand, see Medicare as a jobs program and trying to do anything to combat rising costs there is an issue of loud interest groups.
If the government wants to pull back on say, prescription drug coverage because the drug manufactures won’t give them a lower price, they’re going to get screamed at by the drug companies, the insurance companies, and the Medicare recipients. The average voter who has to pay for this is barely effected by this one program so they don’t really care. Thus the government caves and everyone else ends up paying for it.
Basically the only time you’ll see Medicare payments cut is when you can directly score the savings and they’re being used to counteract a different jobs program of some sort. Anything which takes more than 1 easy step to do is dead in the water
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It’s not just the subsidies, although the subsidies certainly don’t help. There are some other very real economic reasons why health care, education, and housing have all gotten more expensive.
First off is the whole “saving for retirement” thing. There’s very few things that people can do today in order to be taken care of thirty years from now when they’re old. This is especially true under market norms – the best option you have is to trade the fruits of your labor for a promise for the same later. Housing and education make a fantastic area to generate these promises, while healthcare has people over a barrel so they can be looted of their hoarded promises.
Second is the increasing real productivity of the American worker. If it’s approximately as hard to make an iPhone as it is to visit a doctor for an hour, those two things will cost approximately the same amount. If it gets twice as easy to make an iPhone, and the dollar-denominated cost stays about the same, then the doctor visit should double in price. The real economy is more complicated, of course, but this basic relationship has been driving up the costs of services compared to the prices of manufactured goods. This force drives a huge chunk of the price increases in education and health care in particular, and also affects housing (mostly land prices).
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I’m not sure if I’m the only one who’s noticed but Caplan seems to only make safe bets. There’s nothing wrong with that of course but he does have some pretty strong beliefs on the empirical effects of things like open borders. Is he willing to make some kind of bet based off those beliefs?
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Also, commenting on the bet itself, in contrast to what Cowen says, I don’t think he learned anything. He made a ridiculous bet about the unemployment not going below 5% for 20 years and was promptly defeated after three. You would think he would update his beliefs but instead he just criticizes betting itself. And this is coming from the guy who said “betting is a tax on bullshit”!
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The sad fate of Alex Tabarrok: writing on a blog that everyone treats as being Tyler Cowen’s alone.
Cowen himself has been expressing skepticism about betting your beliefs for quite some time:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03/should-you-bet-your-views.html
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Well I’m thoroughly embarrassed. I knew that Tabarrok was a co-blogger and even read the piece where the quote came from and I still missed that.
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No need for embarrassment. The way I read marginal revolution is that I automatically assume that Cowen is the author of each post until the style seems sufficiently off that I check. Usually the style is off in that Tabarrok is being way too clear about what he really thinks to be Cowen.
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@FrogOfWar: this comment is sufficiently non-Straussian
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Caplan’s belief about open borders is an “if…then” kind of belief. He’d need some kind of natural experiment to bet on, and since no country is likely to throw open its borders any time soon, those might be hard to come by. However, he could make some kind of bet involving the small number of immigrants we have today. For instance, “Syrian refugees will not commit any terrorist attack killing more than 100 people in any country between now and January 1st, 2018.” It’s not really central to his open borders argument, though. Maybe “Syrian refugees accepted into Germany in 2015 and 2016 will collect less welfare payments per capita than the native-born German population in 2020.”
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my intuition would be pretty similar to your, some measure of how Syrian refugees are integrating into Germany seems like a fruitful place to start
of course, then the question comes to whether or not the measurements being bet on are actively being gamed (which seems to be the central question concerning the unemployment bet)
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I lost a lot of respect for Cowen from that post. An outcome occurred that he clearly regarded as extremely unlikely. He doesn’t seem to be updating his views nearly enough in response to that. Also he’s clearly signalling a reluctance to test any of his other views in such a way again. Very poor.
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He seems to have updated his believe on the importance of the unemployment rate as an economic indicator.
That may not be the lesson that you wanted Tyler Cowen to learn, but you must concede that it is a lesson learned, and I would argue that it’s quite plausibly the correct lesson to learn.
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I thought more than once that I should put some deep thought into thinking up good measurable bets around his open borders positions and then challenge him to either bet his beliefs or publically fail to bet his beliefs (not that I have any particularly impressive public platform to do so)
as of right now, I’ve yet to do the deep thinking necessary to flush out what would be some good bets to challenge him on (so I guess score this round for him)
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>compared to 40% for intelligence
Could you provide the source?
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I think it’s in the study and article linked.
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Oh, ok. I skimmed through the study’s full text, but couldn’t find anything resembling this figure. Probably need to look closer.
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“This week in academic intolerance: Christian college kicks out professor who says Christians and Muslims worship the same god. I didn’t even know that was up for debate!”
What was your previous understanding of this, if you don’t mind me asking?
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That Muslims obviously worship the same God as Christians and Jews, but have a different holy book and an extra prophet. Unless it’s a different guy who created the heavens and the earth and controls lots of angels and made Adam and Eve and appeared to Abraham and led the Israelites out of Egypt and guided David and Solomon and will one day judge the world and bring the righteous to heaven and the wicked to the eternal flame. I guess the idea that two different gods, totally by coincidence, did all of those things is more likely than that the name “El” is cognate with the name “Allah”.
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Your point is basically correct, but there is a complication. From the Muslim point of view, Christians are splitters, deniers of the unity of God. So one could argue that Muslims and Jews worship the same god, while Christians worship that god plus two extras.
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Are you referring to the holy trinity of the Catholic church? It seems to me that most reasonable people accept that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are Abrahamic faiths which share an Abrahamic deity, in the broadest sense.
Is the doctrinaire muslim objection referring only to Catholicism? I had thought that the 3rd Christian extra was specific to Catholicism (and never heartily explained at that).
Clearly Islam and Christianity diverge on the Muhammad / Jesus question. Is the deification of Muhammad that much different from the deification of Jesus?
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The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, as well as most Protestants, are also Trinitarian. Or are you using ‘catholic’ in the broadest sense?
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I was referring to the doctrine of the trinity as viewed by Muslims. I believe it is shared by most, although not all, Christian denominations.
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@David Friedman
Technically, only Trinitarians are Christians. The rest may be Christian heretics, like the Cathars, but Christian they are not.
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Huh, I am not myself a Christian, but I thought I had it fairly well understood. I was certain the Holy Ghost was peculiar to Catholics. Certainly the broad emphasis by non-Catholics (in my experience) is on Jesus primarily and then Jehovah. I honestly had no idea…
And in response to Anonymous:
I understand that there are “Christian” faiths which only essentially require you to “take Jesus into you heart” “as your personal savior” or some such. That’s what I’ve heard, though I may have been misled.
Are unbaptized deathbed conversions heresy?
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@Rick
>Are unbaptized deathbed conversions heresy?
That sounds like a contradiction in terms. Conversion is accomplished *with* baptism. It may count if baptism was intended, but the prospective convert died before it could have been carried out. (This ought to be fairly uncommon – in case of threat to life, anyone, even an unbeliever, is permitted to perform baptism.)
>I am very certain that there are “Christian” faiths which only essentially require you to “take Jesus into you heart” “as your personal savior” or some such. That’s what I’ve heard, though I may have been misled.
There are all kinds of vaguely Christianoid religions and cults out there, yes.
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@Rick, re: Trinitarianism
“I understand that there are “Christian” faiths which only essentially require you to “take Jesus into you heart” “as your personal savior” or some such. That’s what I’ve heard, though I may have been misled.
Are unbaptized deathbed conversions heresy?”
I think there’s a distinction here between ‘Christian’ and ‘saved’. If you want to distinguish Christianity on any other basis than ‘calls self Christian’, the easiest place to do so is the Nicene Creed, which is definitely Trinitarian. But saying that the Nicene Creed is the shared core of Christian agreement doesn’t mean that you have to be able to recite it at the Pearly Gates, so to speak. I’m not sure any branch of Christianity says you have to understand the Trinity to be saved, which is just as well because the doctrine is pretty complex and almost every Christian I’ve talked to accidentally falls in to some heresy or other about it.
The question of whether baptism is strictly needed for salvation I think depends on the church. My understanding is that the Catholic Church has said things on this (specifically in the context of people outside the church through no fault of their own, i.e. not exposed to it) that from the outside seem to contradict each other.
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That’s a reasonable summary of Evangelical soteriology, and given the prominence of Evangelicals in American religious consciousness I’m not surprised that you picked this up. But even Evangelicals profess the Trinity, even if they allow that you theoretically could be saved without it.
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The university in question is evangelical protestant, and almost certainly trinitarian.
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” Technically, only Trinitarians are Christians. The rest may be Christian heretics, like the Cathars, but Christian they are not.”
Only if you define Christians as “those who believe in trinity.” And since trinity didn’t even exist in the time of Jesus, that would make first Christians non-Christians which is a tad absurd.
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How could it not exist in the time of Jesus when he was 1/3 of it? And also all of it?
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@suntzuanime
“How could it not exist in the time of Jesus when he was 1/3 of it? And also all of it?”
As I posted elsewhere, this is the overview of the “how” :
https://www.quora.com/What-are-Tim-ONeills-specific-objections-to-the-Christian-belief-that-Jesus-is-God/answer/Tim-ONeill-1
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@antimule
>Only if you define Christians as “those who believe in trinity.”
I define Christians as those who have received a valid Christian baptism, and have not since apostatized.
>And since trinity didn’t even exist in the time of Jesus, that would make first Christians non-Christians which is a tad absurd.
I suggest you read the Nicene Creed again. Christ exists before and after He is born.
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“I suggest you read the Nicene Creed again. Christ exists before and after He is born.”
Nicene Creed was much, much later and in totally different theological climate. Historical Jesus saw himself as a messiah and apocalypticist in he context of Second Temple Judaism. And in Judaism messiah was definitely not God (see book of Enoch). First hint that anyone thought that Jesus was (in some sense) God was in gJohn, written anywhere between 90-120.
It then took centuries to hammer out the Trinity.
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That’s like saying that before Newton came upon gravity, things fell up.
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“That’s like saying that before Newton came upon gravity, things fell up.”
It is like saying that Newton knew that he was God, but somehow never gotten around to say that he was to anyone.
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Christ explicitly asserts His Godhood.
“I and the Father are one.”
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“Christ explicitly asserts His Godhood.”
In synoptic gospels? No he didn’t. Where?
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See my edit.
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“I and the Father are one.”
There are two problems with this.
First of all that is in gJohn. Last and the least historically reliable Gospel. Chance that Jesus said anything there is slim, because his way of speaking is totally different there than in synoptics.
Second, that particular statement can also be translated as “Father and I are of one mind.” As is used elsewhere as such.
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I was certain the Holy Ghost was peculiar to Catholics.
All the non-Unitarian Protestant churches, the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox might have an opinion on that one
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” Is the deification of Muhammad that much different from the deification of Jesus?”
Compare:
“The is one God, Allah, and his prophet is Muhammad.”
“I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, …
I believe in the Holy Spirit, …”
“Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
It’s polite to say that Chistians are monotheists too, but I don’t think most religious Jews or Muslims actually think so.
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Is the deification of Muhammad that much different from the deification of Jesus?
Very different, since Muslims don’t deify Muhammed. They also consider deifying Christ a very big no-no, which is a pretty significant part of Christianity.
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Not only is the theology of the deification of Jesus different than that of Mohammed, but the practice of the deification is not only widely different, but reversed.
Jesus is the Son of God, yet Western Christianity is extremely tolerant of blasphemous mockery and irreverent depictions.
(I call to mind an “Easter” celebration in SF where the first prize for the fancy dress costume went to a fellow dressed as ‘Jesus fucking Christ’. (To his credit, he said that his was only a silly shtick, and that Hunky Jesus was much better looking and should have won.))
Mohammed is only the human mouthpiece for the word of Allah, yet mockery in word or print is verboten. *shrugs*
Different strokes, man.
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There are several branches of unitarian Christianity. John Adams would have considered himself Christian, I’m fairly certain, and he was not a trinitarian.
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This debate on what a Christian is is pretty much ‘if a tree falls in the forest’… the word Christian can obviously be used differently by different people.
Nicene Creed is just an incredibly helpful point at which to draw the bar, perhaps the only compelling one apart from self-identity or ‘whatever I believe is the right sect’. And Nicene Creed is Trinitarian.
In practical terms, the historical descendents of the early church are almost exclusively Nicene, at least nominally (although as I mentioned upthread, I think most Christians hit heresy quickly if asked to explain theology!)
I say all this as a matter of historical reference, even though I personally think it is very unlikely that Jesus, his disciples or even Paul thought in terms of the Trinity. (Although I do think it’s a beautiful, intricate and compelling way to square a very difficult circle). So ‘Christian’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘what Christ taught’.
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>There are several branches of unitarian Christianity.
If they’re unitarian, then they’re not Christian.
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@ Anonymous:
What do you get out of playing this definitional game?
If “Christianity” is defined to be trinitarian, they’re not Christian.
If “Christianity” is defined in a more reasonable manner, based on essential similarities in doctrine, they are.
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Saying, “Any non-trinitarian is a non-Christian”, is absolutely, hilariously wrong from anything but a sectarian perspective. Defining Christianity on the Council of Nicaea is almost as ridiculous: Were there no Christians before 325?
Christianity is indeed kind of hard to define in a broad but definitive way, but believing that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and the God of Abraham is the One True God is probably a good start. You can bolt the Trinity onto this belief or not, but it allows for the broad range of non-Catholic Christian sects that existed in pre-Nicaean times and have existed since without falling into sectarian nonsense.
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I was certain the Holy Ghost was peculiar to Catholics.
blinks
that is not only no, but HELL NO
The Trinity is Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.
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“I’m not sure any branch of Christianity says you have to understand the Trinity to be saved, ”
The standard orthodox view is that if you think you understand the Trinity, you are wrong.
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I define Christians as those who have received a valid Christian baptism, and have not since apostatized.
And what is needed for a valid baptism?
1. water
2. the intent to perform the baptism that Jesus Christ instituted
3. the formula, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
See? Trinitarian.
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Historical Jesus saw himself as a messiah and apocalypticist in he context of Second Temple Judaism.
and how in blue blazes do you know that?
First hint that anyone thought that Jesus was (in some sense) God was in John, written anywhere between 90-120.
Nonsense. All the Gospels had Jesus claiming authority to forgive sins. Not sins against him personally, mind you. Sins. All sins. Which, as the Gospels also indicate, is God’s prerogative, hence the anger at Jesus’s claim.
More to the point, do you have any evidence that they DIDN’T think it before then? (This is important because much of Christianity was orally taught.)
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“Last and the least historically reliable Gospel. Chance that Jesus said anything there is slim, because his way of speaking is totally different there than in synoptics.”
Much simpler explanation: the synoptics heavily covered his public speeches, and John focused on more personal interactions with the inner circle of apostles. One would expect a different style of speaking to two different groups.
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“There are several branches of unitarian Christianity.”
I’ve never heard a definition of Christianity that includes unitarians and does not render the term uselessly broad in meaning.
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It’s a pretty ancient and universal religious belief that the gods of other religions are actually demonic impostors. It says something about the success of secularism that this has recently become replaced with “other religions are mistaken in a way that has no supernatural origin”.
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This doesn’t seem correct to me—the Greeks and Romans famously interpreted the gods of the other polytheistic societies in their own terms, so for example, Herodotus considers Amun to be the Egyptian name of Zeus. And the Eastern religions are syncretic, so you have gods like Chhinnamasta which are recognized by both Hindus and Buddhists. I’m not an expert on the topic by any means, but my impression was that the idea that followers of other religions worship false gods was a specific innovation of Judaism, carried over to the Abrahamic religions (which is part of why Judea was such a troublesome province for the Romans, despite the Romans being tolerant of most other alternative religious practices).
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I was always annoyed by this question back when I was a Christian, because it seemed to presume that God didn’t exist, as if “God” referred to something that comes into being by us worshipping him, not a pre-existing person.
If we’re just talking about God as a concept, then yeah it makes sense to ask whether Christians and Muslims have roughly the same idea in mind. But if we’re talking about God as a being who exists independently, then asking whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God seems pretty weird, since they both agree there couldn’t be two of him.
It’d be like if some people think President Obama was born in Hawaii and some people think he was born in Kenya, and then someone comes along and asks whether they’re talking about the same President Obama.
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As a current Christian I am puzzled by the question in the same way, and that analogy expresses perfectly in what way it is puzzling. I was trying to come up with something similar but couldn’t find anything so satisfying.
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While I agree that Muslims obviously worship the same God, compare to Mormons, who use the word God but are clearly talking about something else entirely (their “God” is humanoid and so on.)
If someone believes Obama is a lizardman, or a computer, or a group of five actors all playing “Obama”, it’s not unreasonable to distinguish between their idea of Obama and the actual Obama.
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While I agree that Muslims obviously worship the same God [as Christians]
It is obvious to you that Muslims worship Jesus Christ?
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Muslims believe that Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. Christians do not believe that Muslims worship the same God as Christians, but believe that Muslims think that they do.
Certainly a comparison of the character of YHWH, the Holy Trinity, and Allah as portrayed in their respective holy books bears this out.
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This is what I’ve consistently hard expressed from evangelical Christian teachers.
They believe Muslims worship the moon god, who would be a false god under evangelical Christian beliefs.
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Ah, *some* Christians believe that.
I’m not sure if it’s even a majority. It’s certainly not some sort of core doctrine, even if you ignore the debate above that anyone is a Christian if they believe it in their heart or something.
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This was my general impression back when I was religious. OTOH, it wasn’t something commonly discussed in church, so I don’t know what the official stance of my church was (and I’m guessing most Christians don’t know either).
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I don’t think any serious Christian theologian would dispute that it’s reasonable to believe the God of the Islamic religion is descended from/started out the same as/was inspired by/whatever the Christian God, or at least the God of the Old Testament.
However, making the statement implies such a serious theological error that it is incorrect in principle, at least according to some Christian sects. To be Christian, at least to those sects, is to believe in the divinity of Christ, which means Christ is part of God. Muslims don’t believe in the divinity of Christ, so by definition, historical origins notwithstanding, they don’t worship the same God.
To make a seriously oversimplified comparison, it’s like a Satanist claiming to be a Christian: after all, Satanists believe in the same God: they just think that the worshipping ought to be aimed differently. Or, if you want a really fun example, consider the Satanists of David Weber and John Ringo’s “Prince Roger” universe. They believe that God has been kidnapped/imprisoned/whatever by rebel angels and that Satan is leading the insurgency against His captors.
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It all depends on how you individuate gods. I could deny that the Department of Agriculture is not a legitimate part of the United States Government, but that doesn’t entail that when I use the term “United States Government”, I am not referring to the actual United States Government. I’m sure an argument could be made that gods are individuated differently than governments, but given that the question hinges on a relatively arcane ontological question, I don’t think it’s obvious whether Muslims do or do not worship the same God (and most Christians probably don’t have a well thought-out belief on the matter; many protestant denominations probably don’t have an official position on it either).
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Yeah, the identity conditions for non-existent objects falsely believed to exist are difficult to work out. To adapt a classic example, suppose that you and I both read in the Salem Times that there is a witch running amok through Eastern Mass. My mare dies, your crop fails, and we both blame the witch for our misfortune. Are we blaming the same witch? Which witch are we both blaming?
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Right, but even if there were a God, I don’t think the individuation conditions would be obvious.
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While the question of Christ’s divinity could be viewed as a relatively arcane ontological question, that does not diminish its importance in the view of people such as are being described.
Just as one example the doctrine of apostolic poverty is considerably more arcane, and less central to the doctrine of the faith, than the question of Christ’s divinity, and look at all the trouble THAT caused.
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I can see Scott’s structural, from the outside, let’s find ways to get along, point of view, but I doubt that there’s any way to be sure any two people are praying to the same entity, and for that matter, you can’t prove that one person is praying to the same entity from one moment to another.
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Exactly. In fact, it’s not unheard of for a person to petition the god of mercy in one breath (when speaking of themselves) and then with the next call on the god of justice (wrt their neighbor.)
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“Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken.”
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No they really don’t. YWHW and ALLAH are not the same god, they are different gods. Jews and Christians worship YWHW, while Muslims worship ALLAH
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Well I’m convinced. The ‘seriously lol’ brought me most of the way there, but then the ‘come on’ really crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s on the argument. Bravo!
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But what about English-speaking Christians? Don’t they worship GOD instead?
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In addition to what Evan Thorn said, what also about the Malay-speaking Catholics who have traditionally used ‘Allah’ to refer to the god of Christianity (and who recently fell foul of an extraordinarily childish law reserving the use of the word for Muslims only)?
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This is actually a very difficult theological question. Good arguments could be made on either side. Here’s my crack at both from a Christian perspective (since we are talking about Wheaton):
They’re the same God
Muslims worship the God of Abraham and Moses, just as we do. They recognize Him as the all-powerful creator of heaven and earth. They reject the Trinity and Jesus, but so do the Jews, and we agree (are doctrinally obligated to agree) that the Jewish God is our God. Sure, Muslims have an impaired understanding of God, but the same could be said of many Christian denominations. Indeed, it’s not like any of us have a perfect understanding of God, or are even capable of such a thing.
Allah is not Jesus
Christians worship Jesus, but Muslims explicitly reject that Jesus is God, and they reject all of the Christian scriptures. This is not a minor point of disagreement. The analogy to the Jews elides too much. After all, Jesus himself accused the Jewish leaders of worshiping the Devil; obviously it is far from enough to claim to worship the God of Abraham. Earning your way into heaven is anathema to the Christian, yet this forms the core of Muslim practice. And let’s not ignore the way Muslims treat Christians who are under their power; by their fruits you will know them.
Denouement
Either of these arguments could carry the day, and while I’m not aware of many denominations having taken official stances, it wouldn’t surprise me to see different ones come down on different ends.
But for people outside of Christianity to come in and tell them they are wrong for their stance? It would be like me bursting into a synagogue to tell the Hasids that they are wrong about whether or not it is allowed to flip a light switch on the Sabbath. Who are you to poke your nose into someone else’s doctrinal disputes?
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“and they reject all of the Christian scriptures. This is not a minor point of disagreement.”
I’m not sure “reject” is the correct term. As I understand it, they regard the New Testament as the accounts of the companions of Issus Ibn Maryam. So in the same category as hadith based on accounts by companions of Mohammed.
“And let’s not ignore the way Muslims treat Christians who are under their power; by their fruits you will know them.”
Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.
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“Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.”
I remember this being very contestable, one obvious one being number of attacks on Christendom vs number of Crusades.
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I think “reject” is very much the correct term, in that they reject it as scripture, and consider what we have to be heavily corrupted accounts. Many Muslim countries also reject the Bible in even stronger ways, by limiting its production, or only allowing it to be printed in foreign languages or owned by foreigners.
As for the historical treatment… I’m skeptical. Partly because the people I see make the claim are usually the same people who try to paper over the Muslim world’s current sorry state. But mostly because I live in the present, and in the present there is no question who treats whom worse.
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“I remember this being very contestable, one obvious one being number of attacks on Christendom vs number of Crusades.”
That isn’t actually an argument. “Treatment of Christians” is different from “wants to conquer territory owned by Christians”. Given everything to the North and West of Islam’s starting point was Christian owned not attacking Christians wouldn’t leave them with many options.
Additionally crusades weren’t the only wars fought by Christians against Muslim so it is odd to use them as a metric- for example Sicily (where the dependents of Vikings who settled in northern France were hired by Italians to kick out the arabs).
“As for the historical treatment… I’m skeptical. Partly because the people I see make the claim are usually the same people who try to paper over the Muslim world’s current sorry state. But mostly because I live in the present, and in the present there is no question who treats whom worse.”
That doesn’t follow either. For starters the worst offenders today are Islamic sects that didn’t exist before the 18th century (Wahhabism) or 20th century (Islamists).
I’m also not seeing why you should be skeptical- letting people having the own religion and community but treating them as second class citizens and taxing them is incredibly common in human history.
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@Samuel Skinner
Well, it sort of gestures in the direction of an argument, which is what I was going for.
The Muslims could have tried conversion not by military conquest, like, say, Christianity. And for the immediate counterargument of “yes, but the Christians conquered too”, the Muslims conquests are central to their narrative as a victorious religion, in the same way Christians go on and on about sacrifice and martyrdom.
That is true, the metric isn’t perfect, but we also forget the warring against Asian Christianity at the time in our focus on the Europe vs the Middle East.
“I’m also not seeing why you should be skeptical- letting people having the own religion and community but treating them as second class citizens and taxing them is incredibly common in human history.”
I am always sceptical. “Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.” is making a claim with very obvious contemporary implications. I have no idea how you would come up with a metric of this-religion-is-better-than-this-religion-at-dealing-with-heathens-or-heretics, and I’m extremely sceptical of one which maps so neatly onto contemporary political concerns.
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@Frog Do:
The question of whether Christians or Muslims were more aggressive may be contestable, but I was talking about how each treated members of the other religions under their rule. Muslim al-Andalus had a sizable population of Christians and Jews. They had to pay a tax that the Muslims did not have to pay but did not, I believe, have to pay the tax that the Muslims were obligated to pay. The law was biased in some ways in favor of Muslims, but the other Peoples of the Book were allowed to settle civil affairs in their own courts under their own law.
After the reconquista was completed, all Muslims and Jews were required to convert or leave Spain.
There were times and places, such as Southern Italy under Norman rule, where Christian rulers were as tolerant as Muslim rulers. But under Muslim law and Muslim rulers toleration, although not equality, was the norm. That was not the case under Christian rulers.
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“The Muslims could have tried conversion not by military conquest, like, say, Christianity”
They did. Indonesia and Sub-Saharan Africa were converted by trade.
“And for the immediate counterargument of “yes, but the Christians conquered too”, the Muslims conquests are central to their narrative as a victorious religion, in the same way Christians go on and on about sacrifice and martyrdom.”
Uh, there was the part where Christians became the state religion and proceeded to crush the pagans that was sort of important. I’m not sure how that is less creepy than ‘Deus Volt, but arabic’.
“That is true, the metric isn’t perfect, but we also forget the warring against Asian Christianity at the time in our focus on the Europe vs the Middle East.”
Aside from the Eastern Roman Empire, who fits that category?
“I have no idea how you would come up with a metric of this-religion-is-better-than-this-religion-at-dealing-with-heathens-or-heretics, and I’m extremely sceptical of one which maps so neatly onto contemporary political concerns.”
Islam explicitly recognizes protection for ‘people of the book’. They are second class citizens and face discrimination, but there are still Christians in Egypt, Syria and much of the Arab world (although pretty much none in the peninsula).
Meanwhile there aren’t any of the original Muslims in Spain, Portugal or Southern Italy.
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“Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.”
That’s a fairly low standard. However, so far as I know, the recent habit of driving out Jews and Christians is something new.
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“Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.”
Leaving aside whether or not this is true, is it even relevant?
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@David Friedman
A strange argument. The example of Spain during a certain time period implies Muslims are generally tolerant, the example of Italy under a certain time period is just a weird aberration and proves nothing.
@Samuel Skinner
You misunderstand my point, I think. Both religions conquered and converted by trade. One derives divine mandate in the narrative by sacrifice, the other by conquest. This is going to shape how both cultures see the world, as either a fallen world needing missionaries or a World at War.
I was thinking of the Nestorians, in this case.
And Christianity specifically recognizes love for all mankind and charity for the poor, yet the implementation of that leaves something to be desired.
@Nancy Lebovitz
I’m sure this is just one of those things that people do, in history.
@hlynkacg
Well, it’s a part of Jaskologist’s argument, which we are discussing.
@everyone
I’m not trying to win some sort of points scoring contest here, saying one is better than the other. I’m saying blanket statements like that are probably way too hard to measure, and trying to provide counterarguments for the argument that Islam treats Abrahamic religions better than Christianity. Islam has explicit legal protections for other Abrahamic faiths (since others existed when Islam became a thing, from an outside perspective), Christianity has explicit protections for Gentiles converting (since that was the major division of religion when Christianity became a thing), and Judaism … also has ways for Gentiles to convert, but it’s more complicated. I think rules-as-written is distracting from rules-as-implemented, here.
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When I make plans for my New Zealand vacation, I don’t worry about whether the Maori liked to eat outsiders 200 years ago. I care about whether they do so today.
If you ask me about Muslim treatment of Christians, I am going to be care about what they do today.
Those Christians in Egypt you pointed to? They are under frequent, violent assault, church burnings, and heavy governmental restrictions which don’t even let them repair church toilets without explicit permission from the government. The situation is a lot worse in other parts of the Middle East.
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hlynkacg, the reason changes in behavior are relevant is that pointing them out is an answer to people who talk as though religions have permanent natures.
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@Frog Do:
Spain was a particularly striking example. But, outside of Norman southern Italy, how many areas under Christian rule had a significant population of tolerated Muslims? Pretty nearly every place under Muslim rule had a substantial population of tolerated Christians and Jews—the terms for the other tolerated religions were built into Islamic law.
The case of Jews isn’t as striking, since there were substantial Jewish populations under Christian rule. But even there, the only case I can think of where Muslims deliberately drove out the local Jews is the neighborhood of Medina in the years immediately after the Hegira. Compare that to the multiple cases of Jews being expelled from countries under Christian rule. Not just Spain in 1492 but England in 1290, France 1182, … .
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” One derives divine mandate in the narrative by sacrifice, the other by conquest. This is going to shape how both cultures see the world, as either a fallen world needing missionaries or a World at War.”
I’m not sure what you mean here by divine mandate. Jesus dying and rising from the dead isn’t really connected with ‘fallen world needing missionaries’.
“I was thinking of the Nestorians, in this case.”
They didn’t have a country, but were a subject community under Muslim states. I’m not seeing any warring.
“When I make plans for my New Zealand vacation, I don’t worry about whether the Maori liked to eat outsiders 200 years ago. I care about whether they do so today.”
You argument was about whether or not Muslims worship the same God. Unless you are declaring that Muslims did until 200 years ago and then suddenly changed, behavior of Muslims in the past is relevant when you declare that Muslim behavior is relevant for judging such a claim.
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Whenever someone tries to argue that Islam was spread by the sword but Christianity wasn’t, I immediately think back to Columbus writing to the King of Spain that the “Indians” he had encountered on his voyages “would make good Christians.” And Cortez forcibly converting almost every Mexican village that he passed through on the way to Tenochtitlan. And Pizarro presenting the Incan Emperor with a Bible, then when Atahualpa rejected it (because his culture didn’t have writing, so he naturally had no idea what a book was), massacring the royal guard and taking him hostage.
Suffice it to say that the process by which Latin America became Catholic involved far more than a bit of peaceful proselytizing. Which isn’t even bringing up the brutal persecution of Roman Pagans after Christians took power in the Roman Empire, the forced conversions of Muslims and Jews after the Spanish Reconquista, the forced conversion to Christianity of virtually all of the African slaves that were brought to the Americas, and the forced conversions of Muslims by Christian militias in the Central African Republic happening right now.
And that only counts outright forced conversions. If we count incentivized conversion via proselytizing and discriminatory treatment after imperial conquest (which the vast majority of conversions to Islam under Muslim rule qualified as, since outright forced conversions were generally rare), then we can also toss in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and about half of Africa, among other places.
Anyone belonging to a religion with this kind of history has no right to sit on a high horse about “spreading your faith by the sword.”
There was also pretty much the entire Arab world in the 30 or so years after the 1948 establishment of Israel.
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@David Friedman
But, outside of Norman southern Italy, how many areas under Christian rule had a significant population of tolerated Muslims? Pretty nearly every place under Muslim rule had a substantial population of tolerated Christians and Jews—the terms for the other tolerated religions were built into Islamic law.
Surely it is relevant here that the reason there were so many Christian populations under Muslim rule is that Muslims conquered those Christian populations. The many areas under Christian rule without tolerated Muslims were simply areas Muslims had not conquered. It’s not like a bunch of people in Muslim lands converted to Christianity and were tolerated, while a bunch of people in Christian lands converted to Islam and were driven out.
Spain would be an example of Christians conquering a (formerly Christian) Muslim country. But beyond that, you probably need to look into the colonial age for a good equivalent, and it seems Europeans mostly let Muslims keep their religion.
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Frog Do says: Well, it’s a part of Jaskologist’s argument, which we are discussing.
Is it? It seems to me that you’ve have all wandered off on David Friedman’s historical tangent.
Nancy Lebovitz says: the reason changes in behavior are relevant is that pointing them out is an answer to people who talk as though religions have permanent natures.
In that case, there seems to be a pernicious assumption that Christianity’s past sins invalidates any progress it has made since, just as Islam’s past virtue absolves it of today’s sins.
While I can see the appeal of this framing, I doubt that it will be any comfort to those currently staring down a Wahhabi sword.
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@Nancy Lebowitz
It might be hard to believe, but there are even people who believe religions have permenant natures, too.
@David Friedman
Until we have some sort of systemic framework for discussing this, it’s just going to be anecdotes, which is my problem. Not setting up a systemic framework, but making grand claims about Muslims being more tolerant than Christians is political cheering, not an argument.
@Samuel Skinner
It’s integrally connected from within the Christian way-of-looking-at-the-world, the beliefs from the inside, and how they publically present themselves.
Nestorians existed before Islam, which really shouldn’t be surprising a point.
@NN
Is anyone is making that argument? This reads like a lot of political cheering, which again, is my problem.
@Jaskologist
Thank you. There’s a big problem of path dependence here which I still think people just aren’t engaging with at all.
@HlynkaCG
This wild tangent is almost certainly my fault, I assume David’s perspective is extremely common and also (to me, at least) incoherant, which is why I wanted to talk about it.
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Jaskologist
“Surely it is relevant here that the reason there were so many Christian populations under Muslim rule is that Muslims conquered those Christian populations.”
No, it is not relevant. In fact it is the opposite of relevant. The reason that you are in the gulag is irrelevant to the question ‘is the gulag shitty’. If you wanted to ask a different question you should not have asked ‘is the gulag shitty’.
” But beyond that, you probably need to look into the colonial age for a good equivalent, and it seems Europeans mostly let Muslims keep their religion.”
The best time to see the fruits of Christianity is the time period when European states were becoming secular?
Frog Do
“Until we have some sort of systemic framework for discussing this, it’s just going to be anecdotes, which is my problem. Not setting up a systemic framework, but making grand claims about Muslims being more tolerant than Christians is political cheering, not an argument.”
Lets look at what David actually said, shall we?
—“And let’s not ignore the way Muslims treat Christians who are under their power; by their fruits you will know them.”
Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.—
Historically speaking, generally treated- these are not grand claims and the ‘antedotes’- you know the list of all the Muslim populations that went under Christian rule prior to the 16th century(?) certainly support it.
“It’s integrally connected from within the Christian way-of-looking-at-the-world, the beliefs from the inside, and how they publically present themselves.””
And? I’m not seeing a connection between ‘Jesus died on the cross’ and ‘we have to do lots of missionary work’. Either it is from other historical stuff (in which case pointing out the whole subversion of the Roman Empire is sort of relevant) or it is from whole cloth in which case pointing out Islam’s early history isn’t so useful for understanding their ideals. Because “Muhammad and friends conquered a lot of territory” does not tell you much about how they treated subjects.
“Nestorians existed before Islam, which really shouldn’t be surprising a point.”
Er
“That is true, the metric isn’t perfect, but we also forget the warring against Asian Christianity at the time in our focus on the Europe vs the Middle East.”
Again, what warring are you talking about? I’m not aware of a Nestorian state that was being conquered around the time of the Crusades.
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Again, what warring are you talking about? I’m not aware of a Nestorian state that was being conquered around the time of the Crusades.
According to Wikipedia:
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“It might be hard to believe, but there are even people who believe religions have permenant natures, too.”
Ah, but what do those fundamental natures consist of? What they teach? Or what their followers do (in general, not in specifically religious practice)?
I remember a discussion — here, IIRC — where someone was criticizing modern alleged Thor-worship by comparing it to of ancient times, someone else claiming both had equal claims, and other people that since the modern group was claiming continuity with the old one, it had best follow its practices, just as your mother’s meatloaf appears on your table only if you follow her recipe.
And I had a rip-roaring discussion once (elsewhere) with a woman who claimed to be a Gnostic and then was furious when I assumed that she held the most basic tenets of Gnosticism, claiming that merely because that was the beliefs of Gnostics didn’t mean it was the beliefs now (followed up by some truly silly claims about Christian doctrine changing).
But in both cases, what was at stake was, what was taught. True, one teaches “this is the proper way to honor the god” and one “this is the nature of the universe” but both beliefs.
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“No, it is not relevant. In fact it is the opposite of relevant. ”
It is completely relevant. The question of how the situation came about is entirely relevant when it is the explicitly and openly taught tenets of the religion that produced that oppressed second-class subject.
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@Samuel Skinner
I really, really do not understand your objections here, but will reply as simply as I am able to understand, in order:
I disagree, they are grand claims, grand precisely because they are vague! “[C]ertainly” “[I] know the list of all the Muslim populations that went under Christian rule prior to the 16th century(?)”. What am I supposed to be agreeing with here? What do all correctly-thinking-people know? This seems to me to be increasingly obvious political cheerleading.
“I’m not seeing a connection between ‘Jesus died on the cross’ and ‘we have to do lots of missionary work’.” This is more or less the point of Christianity? More generally, do you genuniely think the stories people tell about themselves and their past don’t matter, don’t influence behavior at all? “Because “Muhammad and friends conquered a lot of territory” does not tell you much about how they treated subjects.” Well it does, trivially, they are subjects? Conquering a people implies some level of common treatment? This paragraph the one I understand the least.
“Again, what warring are you talking about? I’m not aware of a Nestorian state that was being conquered around the time of the Crusades.” I suppose the Jews were never persecuted from the diaspora to 1947? Does war and persecution only happen to states? I was thinking of Persia and the surrounding territories, specifically.
Are we dealing with some specific period of history here? “Historically speaking, Muslims have generally treated Christians and Jews better than Christians treated Muslims and Jews.” doesn’t really imply a timeline, it implies that someone, somewhere told you that Islamic Spain was relatively speaking a pretty great place once upon a time, and this somehow vaguely generalizes? Again, the fact that these vague generalizations can just be tossed out is really weird to me, at least in the comments of SSC. If this was just The Internet, I’d get it.
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“it implies that someone, somewhere told you that Islamic Spain was relatively speaking a pretty great place once upon a time, and this somehow vaguely generalizes?”
And that the result of the
Reconquista was the expulsion of all Muslims and Jews who didn’t convert, with continuing efforts to find and punish secret Muslims and Jews.
And that I am reasonably familiar with fiqh, and all four schools of Sunni law have generally similar rules with regard to Christians and Jews, with differences of detail.
And the contrast between what happened to the inhabitants of Jerusalem when the crusaders took it from the Muslims, in contrast to what happened when the Muslims took it back.
And I have read a good deal of medieval Islamic literature, in which Christians and Jews routinely appear and are obviously not being driven out.
What’s the basis for your views on the subject?
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@David Friedman
This is why the reply was @Samuel Skinner, I am aware of your impressive background on the subject, what with you being a public person and all. I do enjoy reading your work on Islamic law, which I find very interesting. However.
We are still just comparing isolated incidents and using them to make general statements about all Muslims, and all Christians, throughout all history, ignoring any possible confounders and path dependence or really treating any of this as history. You still really aren’t addressing any of these objections, repeatedly stated. I acknowledge that you are more of an authority on the subject then me, and since it has come to the point where we are tossing out credentials then engaging with each other, I’m going to bow out as my judgement of “poltical cheering” is basically confirmed.
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Here’s another Christian stab at it:
http://jimmyakin.com/2006/12/allah_god.html
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The obvious counter-narrative is that Christians (or Muslims) do in fact worship that guy but the Muslims (or Christians) worship a false idol that doesn’t really exist and anyway wasn’t even present at the creation, you got the wrong guy.
In other words, is the other side heretics or pagans?
I’m somewhat bemused to realize that I have no idea which narrative is the modern consensus, on either side, or even which narrative was the consensus a thousand years ago.
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Can’t speak for a thousand years ago but in regards to the last century or two the common consensus is roughly this…
On the Christian side: Muslims are descendants of Abraham and thus worship the same God and are bound by the same covenant. However, their refusal to acknowledge the divine nature of Christ’s sacrifice and accept Salvation has put their souls in jeopardy. They’re basically in the same position as Jews, and just how screwed this makes them varies greatly from one denomination to another.
On the Muslim side: Christians are heretics who deny the unity of Allah by ascribing divine agency and powers to a mere human prophet. Just how screwed this makes them varies from one denomination to another.
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It’s too complicated to be obvious… thinking about how to discern if any two given conceptions of God resolve to the same individual being makes my head hurt. What can I even compare it to? Conan-doyle Sherlock vs Cumberbatch Sherlock? How do you decide whether “they’re identified as the same” has more value than “they act completely differently”? Is there even a way to objectively say if the two characters have the same identity? Does it even matter?
So I find this “same god” thing to be of little practical value except to conflate the individual doctrines of the two religions. Any institution that values doctrine will balk at it, and having attended one I’m quite sure evangelical universities value their doctrinal statements much more highly than silly things like tenure. Assuming that’s OK for the sake of argument, I find little to disagree with in their handling of the situation.
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Another approach: if God exists, that is, if the Universe has a unique creator, overseeing everything like a programmer, then anyone who claims to worship the creator is worshiping the creator, even if they do it in different ways, or even in ways that are vastly wrong compared to the true nature of the creator and what it should entails for proper worship of the creator.
Claiming that someone who worships the creator is worshiping not just a wrong idea of the creator, but an imposter, implies that there’s something else than the creator that can be worshiped — which is in contradiction with the idea of monotheism.
[of course this is a moot point because Abrahamic monotheism also admits the existence of Satan, demons and angels, so it’s not pure monotheism, but polytheism with a clever, elaborate makeover (to say nothing of the Trinity)]
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>Claiming that someone who worships the creator is worshiping not just a wrong idea of the creator, but an imposter, implies that there’s something else than the creator that can be worshiped — which is in contradiction with the idea of monotheism.
No? Anything can be worshipped. Not everything *should* be worshipped.
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Christians traditionally believe in many spiritual entities besides God (angels, demons). So you could worship those. Also, you could worship non-spiritual entities, like celestial bodies or idols.
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I believe in one President, and his name is Al Gore, elected in the year of our lord 2000.
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That’s a decent analogy. Say that a Canadian and an Englishman meet. Both share a drink in honor of the Queen of England, long may she live. The Canadian toasts, “To good Queen Susan, who will soon raise an army to put the Americans in their place.” The Englishman protests, “The Queen’s name isn’t Susan, it’s Elizabeth, and we get along alright with the Yankees these days.”
The Canadian replies, “Well in any case, we both honor the same woman, so does it really matter?”
There is and can only be one queen of England, only one person that is being referred to when that phrase is used. Is it then logically impossible for two people to both use the phrase and not be talking about the same person, no matter how fundamental the differences in understanding? I’m not sure if this is a question about logic, language, theology, or reality, which probably means it is a bad question.
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Cf. John Byrom:
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Pretty hard for a Christian to accept that someone who doesn’t worship Jesus Christ is worshipping Jesus Christ. You can argue about the trinity making it the same God but Jesus Christ is the central figure in a Christian’s life, more so than the Father or the Holy Spirit. That is why many Christians lol at the idea that Muslims worship the same God. Plus it is better to laugh than take offense.
“You worship Jesus Christ and hey that Muslim doesn’t worship Jesus Christ but he worships the same God you do.” That one is easy, even obvious. (Of course I’m coming from a Christian perspective. My answer may be more about sharing how others feel than persuading people that it is correct.)
Whether we worship the same God as the Jews… er… Well… No, because again Christ is the central figure. But this is not so easy. In the Jews rejection of Christ, no, Christ is our central figure, so how can He be the same God. But in our (Christian’s) acceptance of Christ, yes, we worship their/our/the God. So we worship the same God as the Jews but they do not quite worship the same God as us except they do, they just don’t know Him as well as we do. Except I think they do…
Anyway the Muslim part is easy. Not the same. They are Mohammedans.
Followers of Mohammed.
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“Anyway the Muslim part is easy. Not the same. They are Mohammedans.
Followers of Mohammed.”
They are Muslims. “Mohammedans” is a label applied to them by others. They very explicitly do not worship Muhammed.
Abu Bakr speaking to the people outside Muhammed’s door, with Muhammed dead inside:
“Lo! as for any who worshiped Muhammad, Muhammad is dead. But as for him who worshipeth God, God is the Living One and He dieth not.”
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You’re right. Calling Muslims Mohammedans is hostile-aggressive. They certainly don’t consider themselves Mohammedans. I was speaking from a very Christian defensive perspective there. There was a point to it, which I utterly failed to make.
Someone who claims Muslims worship the same God as Christians (Muslims or not) denies Jesus Christ is God because Muslims deny Christ, the central character in Christanity. This too is aggressive, or at least it is not neutral. If you deny Christ you deny Christianity.
I suppose this is a distinction without a difference to atheists, but it is important to many Christians, certainly every Christian I know, just as I think it would be important to a Muslim not to be called a Mohammedan, for the reason Abu Bakr (good quote!) mentioned, and others.
Very appropriate to discipline a professor for making such a claim, not just because it is rude or hostile to Christians & Jews, but because it shows an inability or lack of desire to understand the perspectives of different religious groups.
It Is shocking to me that people would consider it not up for debate. Just shows how small the circle of people I discuss religion with is.
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Wait, but God the Father still is God, right? So, perhaps Muslims are failing to worship all of God, but they still manage to target about a third?
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No, that would imply Christians are polytheists. It is probably more accurate to say they are majorly heretical, being decieved by a false prophet.
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Christians *are* polytheists. Sure I wouldn’t say so at a dinner party, but there’s no need to beat around the bush here.
Or maybe Zeus and Athena, Loki and Thor, Shiva and Vishnu are all consubstantial and everyone everywhere and everywhen has been monotheist.
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The idea that Muslims worship the same God the Father is problematic because there conception of Him is markedly different than the Christian perspective of Him. For example, Muslims chastise Christians for referring to him as God, the Father. They don’t consider the relationship that way.
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For what it’s worth, my view on the central controversy is that both the claim that Muslims worship the same god and the claim that they don’t are defensible, hence Wheaton ought not to have acted against a professor for making the former claim unless there is something in Wheaton’s explicit religious position that it clearly contradicts.
And I find the PR explanation someone offered plausible.
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Re: Purpleface looks like blackface:
When I was in marching band in high school, we did a video games-themed show, and one of the games we played music from was World of Warcraft. One of our drum majors dressed as a Night Elf, complete with purple makeup from the party store.
After one show, the police came over and tried to arrest him. Apparently, wearing blackface is illegal in our town. They let him off the hook after the band director explained about night-elves and that it was purple. It was a near thing though. We decided he would be a regular daytime elf for any future performances in that town.
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Yikes.
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The *actual* PC thought police showed up?
What country is this!
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I’m guessing USA. Few other places are so batshit insane about blacks.
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A) Might consider rephrasing that comment, unless you meant to inflame.
B) Almost certainly not the US, unless there’s something major missing from the story (cops were wrong, arrest attempt was on some other charge, college campus, yadda yadda).
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What Poxie said. A law against wearing blackface would not be enforceable in the United States. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one somewhere, but it seems very unlikely.
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Laws being unconstitutional doesn’t keep them from passing, it doesn’t even really slow them down. Nor do cops hesitate from trying to enforce them.
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>Might consider rephrasing that comment, unless you meant to inflame.
OK, that was somewhat inflammatory. Let me unpack:
Based on the OP’s lack of endemic British phrasings or idioms, inclusion of at least one American idiom (“to let someone off the hook”), the prevalence of American vs non-American but natively fluent English-speakers, and the popularity of school marching bands in America, I would tentatively peg BassicallyBoss as likely American. Americans tend to live in the USA. So far, this is only a weak indication.
However – a law against blackface mean that someone bothered to enact it. Further, that the police actually knew it existed, and tried to enforce it, possibly after someone reported it, means that blackface is actually a big deal where this happened. It can only be a big deal if the polity:
a) has a substantial black minority,
b) sees the black minority as a protected class.
Countries that don’t have a substantial black minority, and never had, are extremely unlikely to care about them. Countries whose primary ethnicity is western-designated protected class itself is not going to care about awarding protected class status to such a minority, either. That leaves only a handful of states.
Given a thriving video games subculture, kids doing marching band stuff, we can exclude third world countries, and just about everywhere second-world as well (doubly so because second-worlders tend to be unashamedly racist).
Off-hand, that leaves places like USA, and poorer matches of the UK, France, Canada, Australia, and maybe some tiny states like the Netherlands. My bet is on USA.
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Have you considered South Africa?
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Yes – have considered the entire former British Empire, but SA struck me as a poor fit overall.
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How’d you all do?
This incident happened in the USA.
As Poxie and Marc Whipple said, there’s likely something missing from the story. I wasn’t personally involved in the conversation with law enforcement, so it’s possible that my friends who were misunderstood the police, or the cops were wrong about the existence of such a statute. For it’s worth, I couldn’t find any evidence of such a law existing when I went looking for it later.
@Anonymous: I found your analysis particularly interesting, because the city actually has almost no black people. My (public) school at the time was about 0.5% black, and I’d be extremely surprised if the figure was over 2% for the city. I know you were thinking on the level of states, but the difference was still striking.
(Amusing anecdote for perspective: I was upset as a child when I learned about slavery in school because I didn’t think it would be fair for my friend, [very Indian first name] [very Indian last name], to be a slave. I wasn’t sure if he would have counted, but I didn’t know anyone else with brown skin.)
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TrivialGravitas:
Yes, cops don’t hesitate to enforce non-existent laws, such as “filming cops is illegal” and “I can just take your drugs to use/sell.” That is a problem, but it’s not a “we have unconstitutional laws against blackface” – or, generalizing, an “OMG thought police” problem.
Anonymous:
Forgive me for not seeing all your “where-did-this-happen” detective work in your initial post: “Few other places are so batshit insane about blacks.” I’m giving you the side-eye here. Yes, your statement was “somewhat” inflammatory. Maybe a bit more than somewhat, if you think about it.
Basicallyboss:
This anecdote doesn’t sound like it’s going to demonstrate much of anything about the legality of blackface anywhere, given your caveats, but I’d still be interested in more specific details if you are comfortable sharing them.
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Creepy, authoritarian numbered schemes have catchier pr now:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/world/asia/china-four-comprehensives-song-xinhua.html?smid=fb-share
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I don’t see why it wouldn’t be up for debate. If I insist that William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays, but when pressed to describe the attributes of William Shakespeare I say that he has the name Roger Bacon, lived in Bacon’s time, etc., have I *really* said that Shakespeare wrote his own plays? If I don’t attribute to the writer the attributes that you associate with Shakespeare, in what sense am I actually claiming that Shakespeare is the writer?
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What properties are you referring to? Because the trinity isn’t a requirement to be a Christian, much less believe in the God of Abraham (who notably didn’t believe in the trinity).
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A whole bunch of different things down to “sent Mohammed as his prophet” or “divinely inspired the Bible” or “has a set of commands that fit into this cluster instead of that one”.
There are probably secularized Christians and Muslims whose idea of God is vague enough that they don’t have conflicts of this sort, but they wouldn’t be typical.
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It feels to me though that the question of ‘is it the same God’ is more about whether people are pointing at the same thing than whether they are describing it the same way. Muslims and Christians agree on such large amounts about God’s actions as Scott has pointed out, that it seems to me that the argument is a dispute about a shared God rather than anything else.
Christianity sees itself as the capstone on Judaism, Islam sees Muhammed as the ‘Seal of the Prophets’ (as in the OT prophets and Jesus)… in both cases the ‘newer’ religion very clearly identifies itself as talking about the same thing as the previous ones.
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Do all Jews accept that Christians worship the same God as they do? There has been some acerbic comment on “Unsong” about “Judaeo-Christian values” that those values are all Christian and nothing Jewish, so plainly some Jews do not accept that Christians are co-believers.
For the same reasons, some Muslims and some Christians don’t believe that Allah is the same as the Christian God. I don’t know the full story behind the Wheaton College professor, and it seems murky on all sides, but on the other side Malaysia, for one, has banned the use of “Allah” as a reference to God by any non-Muslims.
My own view? Yes, you can legitimately talk about the Abrahamic religions as worshipping the same God, but I understand why some Muslims and some Jews and some Christians would object to that.
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With the Shakespeare/Bacon analogy me and you agree on Shakespeare’s actions (writing the same plays), it’s just Shakespeare’s name, time and place of birth, etc. that we disagree on.
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A similar dispute actually exists: there are Stratfordian and Anti-Stratfordian. But even if the guy who wrote the plays wasn’t the guy who left his second best bed to his wife but was instead the Earl of Oxford, he was still in a quite relevant sense “Shakespeare”.
An Oxfordian and a Stratfordian are both fans of the same playwright regardless of which one turns out to be correct about the details of his birth.
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People who believe that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare also actually exist.
But it would be absurd to say “they think the same guy wrote Shakespeare’s plays as you do, they just disagree on his name, place of birth, occupation, residence, appearance, etc.”
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@Deisach
“There has been some acerbic comment on “Unsong” about “Judaeo-Christian values” that those values are all Christian and nothing Jewish, so plainly some Jews do not accept that Christians are co-believers.”
Surely different values doesn’t mean different God? People argue about Catholic v. Protestant values (Protestants have a work ethic, dontcha know!) and I don’t think this means they’re arguing the two have different Gods!
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It is Francis Bacon who some people put forward as the author of the plays traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. Roger Bacon lived three centuries too early and wrote in Latin.
Question: when Jiro mistakenly identified Roger Bacon as a principal figure in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, was he referring to Roger Bacon, the man christened with that name, or Francis Bacon, the man who actually fits that description?
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Whoa whoa whoa. Let’s not just go assuming that Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon don’t refer to the same person.
At the very least we should leave professors free to conflate them, for the sake of academic freedom.
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In defense of the Bacon mistake, I will have to invoke Science Made Stupid (I hope the link to a single page works).
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That worked, but for posterity, it’s probably best to save to imgur.
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The Trinity is totally a requirement to be a Christian.
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Recognizing the authority of the Church that Christ established is totally a requirement to be a Christian, but then that’s none of my business sips tea
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I thought maybe you were speaking as a Mormon until the tea sipping bit.
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Too bad it didn’t survive the first hundred years then.
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getaloadofthishereticcam.jpg
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It’s a shame that apostolic succession was lost with the Donatists.
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“The Trinity is totally a requirement to be a Christian.”
Strange, as that would make Jesus a non-Christian.
Here’s the overview of current scholarship:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-Tim-ONeills-specific-objections-to-the-Christian-belief-that-Jesus-is-God/answer/Tim-ONeill-1
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Isn’t it perfectly obvious that Jesus is not a Christian? A shepherd is not a sheep.
(I glanced over your link, and it doesn’t seem to contain anything that I wasn’t already familiar with ten years ago. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to contain anything that wasn’t pretty well-understood a hundred years ago. This debate is pretty stale.)
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One of the things I remember being stressed in my (Christian) religious education was that Jesus was a Jew. I don’t know if this was meant to be mutually exclusive with him being a Christian, though.
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That was the first major theological crisis of Christianity, I think.
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Not much substantial to add but… from the wikipedia article on Circumcision in Christianity:
Two interpretations exist of Paul’s comment on those wanting to force circumcision on Gentile Christians in Galatians 5:12. The KJV reading “I would they were even cut off” suggests cut off from the Church, but most modern versions, following scholars such as Lightfoot, R. C. H. Lenski and F. F. Bruce, read as the ESV “I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!” – due to a reading of the Greek text apokopsontai[29] “be cut off” as Paul wishing that the circumcisers would castrate themselves.
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As someone that didn’t read the Christian Bible until 19 and didn’t have much investment in the subject, it was pretty clear that Paul was an obnoxious interloper who came in, took over, pushed out the apostles, and trashed a lot of what Jesus was about in the name of growth. And this is based on writings that were all written by or edited by followers of Paul, so you’d expect them to be shaded in his favor.
I get that y’alls religion is y’alls religion and you aren’t going to see it that way, but that’s how it reads.
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@anon
As an ex-Christian, that is sort of how I see it as well. Jesus is a somewhat above average oracular prophet and Paul is pretty much just a jerk.
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Jesus is a somewhat above average oracular prophet and Paul is pretty much just a jerk.
Alternately, Jesus established a religion with a superior moral code to anything else then available in the Hellenic world, and Paul figured out how to evangelize it to non-Jews who had the most need for such a thing.
Alternately alternately, the Lord God Almighty sighed and said to the blindstruck Roman, “I tried explaining all this to the disciples, but maybe something got lost in translation. So, OK, one more time…“
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That’s not really an alternate characterization, as it’s completely compatible with what I said.
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@Urstoff: You have an interesting definition of the word “jerk”, then.
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Mai La Dreapta:
Depends on whether you are using the word ‘Christian’ to mean ‘someone who reveres and tries to follow Jesus’, or ‘someone who believes the specific theological claims made by Jesus’. It would be weird for Jesus to be a follower of himself, but much less weird for Jesus to believe the claims that he was making.
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That objection was anticipated by James (the apostle). Belief alone cannot be the sole determinate of a Christian, it requires allegiance.
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>the trinity isn’t a requirement to be a Christian
Heretic!
EDIT: Dammit, ninja’d by MLD.
In any case, becoming a Christian requires baptism – *trinitarian* baptism. In this way, even the Protestants are usually Christians of some variety, whereas the likes of Cathars are not.
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The idea that nontrinitarians are not Christians is little more than an appeal to bloodshed. the trinitarians being better murderers does not give them exclusive access to the label of Christian (Talking more about Arians here, there are more sophisticated arguments against Cathars not being christian which derive from more credible arguments that they weren’t talking about the same god than the Christian/Muslim divide, though the bloodshed is still a thing).
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Arianism was an extreme minority within the lifetime of Arius.
And Cathars believe that the Old testament and New Testament gods are different and opposed to one another.
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@God Damn John Jay:
CHristianity was an extreme minority within the lifetime of Christ.
Arianism was huge in the time period that’s actually relevant, though.
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For the 87th time, not every theological conflict came down to which side did more killing. The Arian Controversy in particular did not. Trinitarians won the day at the Council of Nicea, yes, but Constantine proved uninterested in enforcing his own decree. Arians soon gained the upper hand politically; Athanasius found himself exiled no less than five times, and several of Constantine’s successors were Arians. Later on, the invading barbarian hordes, not known for shrinking from bloodshed, were almost all Arian as well.
Trinitarians nevertheless carried the day, and has been proclaimed by the overwhelming mass of Christians, across denomination. And while they disagree on much else, Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox are all pretty well agreed that denying the Nicean Creed puts one outside the bounds of Christianity.
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Arianism was an extreme minority within the lifetime of Arius.
But a minority associated with bloodshed on a vast scale.
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@Jaskologist You misunderstand fundamentally. This had nothing to do with the Romans and everything to do with the Germans (who were most of the Arians). The Merovingians kept winning the generational wars over who got to be in charge of Frankia until everybody had converted to make them happy, followed by the Karlings taking a much much dimmer view of the Arians in the christian-germanic territory they conquered.
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@TrivialGravitas
Nicaea was in 325. Clovis converted in 496. There are nearly 2 centuries of history in between those events, and during which the Trinitarians were often at a decided military disadvantage. It is a gross oversimplification to ascribe victory simply to “being better murderers.”
It’s not like the Merovingians even ruled the whole of Christendom.
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@ Jaskologist:
Right, obviously they won because God wills it.
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@Vox Imperatus
Clearly those are the only two options.
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Bold claim on the beliefs of Abraham.
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It is accepted by all the traditional churches that Muslims, Jews and Christians worship the same deity; for Wheaton College to implicitly claim otherwise would be heretical.
Of course what they’re actually doing is finding an excuse to fire their first black, female tenured faculty member.
It’s been covered well, in some detail, on Slacktivist (Fred the blogger there is a Wheaton alumnus, and well informed on the whole situation.)
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Principle of charity, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume they’re using it as an excuse to fire one of their more liberal faculty members (I’m assuming she’s liberal, given that she’s wearing a hijab in support of Muslims)?
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I don’t know what you mean by “all the traditional”, but it does not include any major denomination I am aware of.
This is very simple, the deity of Jesus Christ is part and parcel of christianity. He is the Son, he is God, he is the third leg of the Trinity. To muslims, he’s a prophet. So his dad isn’t god. Ergo we’re not talking about the same person. The mushy, ecumenical desire to somehow lawyer one’s way around the strictures of the faith to claim that everyone is the same and all paths lead to heaven and KUMBAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA is pathetic and heretical.
Just one atheist’s view.
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Well said. I cannot abide a person without the courage of their convictions. You are doing someone no favors by being wishy-washy about the fact that their beliefs are going to send them to Hell for all eternity so they won’t call you a meaniehead. If you really believe that, by God, say so.
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Exactly. As a wittier man than I said: “The modern church has one foundational purpose: to provide a venue for advising God of man’s will. Given how prone the latter is to significant fluctuation, our Creator is obliged to maintain vigilance in accommodating himself to it.”
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> It is accepted by all the traditional churches that Muslims, Jews and Christians worship the same deity; for Wheaton College to implicitly claim otherwise would be heretical.
No, no it isn’t. I’ve lived in Evangelical Protestant circles my entire life and it is pretty much a given by everybody there that Muslims do not worship the same God and do need to be converted or have their souls saved or whatever. It’s not a heresy, it’s a legitimate point of debate. To say that Muslims and Christians worship the same God would imply that Muslims are destined for heaven and not damnation. I don’t know a single evangelical Christian who would assent to that statement.
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https://www.chick.com/m/reading/tracts/readtract.asp?stk=0042
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It wouldn’t imply that at all. Directing worship to the same God yet denying the divinity of Jesus is perfectly conceptually coherent.
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Yup, and in my experience that’s pretty much the mainstream Christian take on both Judaism and Islam.
That said, denying the divine nature of Jesus and declining the lifeline offered by his sacrifice will land you in varying degrees of hot water depending on the denomination asked.
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” To say that Muslims and Christians worship the same God would imply that Muslims are destined for heaven and not damnation.”
Surely not. Someone can worship the Christian god and still commit a mortal sin.
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But at that point, what does ‘worship the same God’ even mean? Everyone who is worshiping is worshiping what they think God is, because we don’t have an address and a visible person who occasionally makes pronouncements about their position. So how much diversity do we allow in people’s description of God before we decide that they’re not worshiping the same God after all? It’s pretty clear that I’m worshiping the same God as the person in the pew next to me, even if we disagree about, say, free will. It’s less clear I’m worshiping the same God as a Unitarian. I’d definitely place Muslims, who not only deny the Trinity but also things like the role of grace, in the ‘different God’ category.
Or to put it another way, the question is how big you’re willing to make the error bars on ‘God’. I certainly would reject as heretical anyone who claimed that the error bars encompassed both the God I worship and the one Muslims do.
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>Of course what they’re actually doing is finding an excuse to fire their first black, female tenured faculty member.
Why would they give her tenure in the first place?
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They must have given her tenure before they found out she was a black woman.
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presumably, one faction within the university supported her tenure, and another opposed it, and it’s the opposing faction using this incident as a pretext to get rid of her
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I find the PR explanation someone offered more plausible.
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>It is accepted by all the traditional churches that Muslims, Jews and Christians worship the same deity; for Wheaton College to implicitly claim otherwise would be heretical.
As an actual Christian, I am offended.
I believe Jesus Christ is God. Literally. Simple as that, he’s God come in the flesh, human yet God. Muslims simply do not believe this. Muslims and would in fact consider it deadly heresy. How in the hell then, can it be claimed that we worship the same God?
I might as well claim we have the same parents, while insisting that your (“our”) dad has all attributes I would ascribe to my biological father and none of the attributes you’d accurately ascribe to yours.
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When it is said that Muslims, Jews and Christians share the same God, it does not mean that the three beliefs are identical. It is just than in the historical point of view, Mohamed created islam from the christian religion, he changed the rules by writting the Koran but kept the idea of God. Jesus Christ did the same with the Jewish religion and the new testament.
With your analogy it’d be more like : One said “this my dad, he is right-handed” while the other, pointing to the same person, “this is my father, he is left-handed”. They are giving different attributes to him but at the end of the day, they are talking about the same person
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The difference being, saying that there is historical linkage is not heretical from the point of view of any of them, whereas saying that they are actually the same is heretical from the point of view of all of them.
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Citation needed? Most Christian sects don’t even accept Mormon baptisms, due to the differences in understanding of the nature of God; I’m pretty sure “Jesus wasn’t a deity” qualifies as a much bigger difference in understanding.
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Agreed.
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There are political considerations to take into account, but this seems unchariatble. If she had worn KKK robes, and claimed the KKK worshipped the same god as Christians (a much less shaky statement to make), would we be having the same conversation? I make the comparison because Muslims are successfully genociding/displacing/cleansing the Christian communities of the Middle East right now, while the KKK ineffectually attempted the same thing centuries ago.
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That’s a weird enough statement that the charitable thing to do is to assume I’m reading it wrong, so: can you clarify?
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Probably poorly stated on my part. You have the displacement of historic Christian communities in the Middle East due to the current problems in the region done at least nominally in the name of Islam (probably way more complicated IRL), which seems to be sucessfully working from my understanding of the media. The KKK attempted to displace historic African American communities in the US at least nominally in the name of Christianity or Christian values (but was probably more complicated).
The point I was trying to make is that making a KKK – Muslim comparison is apt here, and not just trolling for the sake of it.
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Not quite sure it’s the same.
The more apt analogy is: Is the author of tractatus logico-philosophicus the same as the author of Philosophical Investigations?
They disagree with each other on every point of significance, but they clearly share a history, and can be traced out as following one from the other.
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Would your view change if you believed that the author of the Tractatus was omniscient, infallible, and unchanging, while the Philosophical Investigations were transcribed by some students who claimed that Wittgenstein had appeared to them in a cave?
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Suppose Wittgenstein is omniscient and unchanging and wrote the Tractatus. Suppose also that some students claim that Wittgenstein appeared to them in a cave and said “I am the guy who wrote the Tractatus, here is a new book for you”.
In both cases the *claimed* author is the same individual, they share a history. Now it might be that the students are lying, but they’re lying *about* the same Wittgenstein that wrote the Tractatus.
In the same way someone who thinks Obama was born in Kenya is actually still referring to the same Obama I am, they’re just wrong about his properties.
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What if I believe that someone named Fred, who was born in Kenya, murdered the real Barack Obama the night before his inauguration, and has masqueraded as him ever since.
Suppose you are a big fan of the current president. I say that I am a big fan of Barack Obama (the candidate), tragically deceased. I hate Fred.
Should I agree with the statement that we are fans of the same person?
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You can say they’re talking about the same Wittgenstein because they agree on what attributes Wittgenstein has, other than “is the guy who appeared in the cave”. If they kept mentioning things about Wittgenstein that the other people don’t believe are true of Wittgenstein, at some point they will have mentioned enough different things that it makes more sense to say they’re talking about someone else with the same name than to say they’re actually talking about the same person and he just has different attributes.
If I think the author of Romeo and Juliet was named Roger Bacon, would it be correct to say that I still think Shakespeare wrote it and I just disagree about Shakespeare’s name?
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Why are y’all getting hung up on semantics? Didn’t Yudkowsky give you guys a bunch of tools to catch meaningless distinctions like this and ignore them?
You’re either talking about [the person who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare] or you’re talking about [the person called Shakespeare who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon etc. etc.]. If the former is the case, then yes you are talking about the same person, though you disagree about the details of that person’s biography.
If the latter is true, then you are talking about different people. You must also think that this Shakspeare guy either didn’t exist or somehow had all these plays falsely attributed to him.
In the case of God, you’re either talking about Jesus Christ, the God of the Christians, in which case you can say definitively that this person is not worshipped by Muslims. Or you’re talking about the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the world, and Christians and Muslims worship the same God but disagree about God’s biographical details.
Depending on how the argument is framed, either position is reasonable.
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Sure. But Scott didn’t seem to think so:
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“In the case of God, you’re either talking about Jesus Christ, the God of the Christians, in which case you can say definitively that this person is not worshipped by Muslims.”
So this is why this question seems obvious to me. To me it is obvious that there is only one “natural” way to define which god we mean in this case. That is to say “that god which abraham worshiped”. All other features (inc Trinity) seem accidental.
If any of the three religions is correct then there is a god which exists. If any of the three religions is correct that god is the one that Abraham worshiped.
If you think the truth of Islam implies Abraham worshiped a false god then I’m confused. If you think the truth of Hinduism does not imply that Abraham worshiped a false god then I’m confused.
I mean, yes, there is obviously no content to this entire conversation seeing as none of the objects we are talking about exist. But still, I’m interested to note people carving ideaspace in very different ways.
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That’s a great philosophy question, and I agree with Jiro.
Let’s say we get home, and the chair has been broken, the porridge eaten, etc., and we both explain that (1) based on various clues and priors, Jiro believes that these actions were performed by a black bear named Pickles, who is now sleeping upstairs in the just-right bed; while (2) based on similar factors, I believe these actions were performed by a bear that many other people erroneously believe to be a black bear and refer to as Pickles, but is in fact a polar bear named Snowflake, and that Snowflake is sleeping upstairs.
Do we believe in “the same bear” sleeping upstairs? Depends on your perspective, I guess.
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The orthodox view on reference is as follows: when I say the name “William Shakespeare”, I am at all times referring to the man baptized under that name in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. This is true no matter how many properties I mistakenly ascribe to Shakespeare, no matter how many misapprehensions I suffer about the man. So if I say in one breath that (1) Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, (2) Shakespeare was the King’s Chancellor, (3) Shakespeare fell into disgrace after being accused of corruption, and (4) Shakespeare also wrote the Novum Organum, (1) is true (assuming that it is indeed the case that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet), while (2), (3), and (4) are false, because all four sentences are about Shakespeare the man, and Shakespeare wrote Hamlet but not the Novum Organum, was never appointed Chancellor, and never took bribes.
(There are very good reasons for accepting this view, which I will be happy to rehearse upon request.)
This picture is greatly complicated if it turns out that no man was baptized under the name “William Shakespeare” in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1564. So we need to separate the scenario where Yahweh does exist from the scenario where He does not. In the first case, it seems reasonable to take mortal names as our paradigm and say that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same deity– that is, all of their beliefs and sentences are about Yahweh– though of course some of those beliefs and sentences must perforce be false. In the latter case, the question of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same God collapses into to the classic witch puzzle I mentioned above. My inclination is to say that if Urstoff and I both read about a witch on the loose in the same newspaper (or both hear rumors about a witch on the loose which trace back to the same source), and I blame that witch for the death of my mare, and Urstoff blames that witch for the failure of his crop, we are both blaming the same witch. By parity of reasoning, whenever a Jew, Christian, and Muslim says or believes anything about Yahweh, their belief or sentence refers to or is about the same non-existent being.
My conclusion, then, is that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God.
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By this reasoning, it would indeed be okay to say “I think the same man wrote Romeo and Juliet that you do. It’s just that you call him Shakespeare and believe he lived in one time, while I call him Bacon and believe he lived in another.” I find this questionable.
Also, consider the witch example, except modify it: You think the witch killed your mare. Your neighbor thinks something destroyed his crops. You ask him what he thinks did it, and he describes something that is sort of like what you think of as the witch and sort of not. Is there some point where his description can be different enough that you would say it doesn’t count as the same witch?
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Huh? Your belief that (Francis!) Bacon wrote Rome and Juliet would be false, as would your belief that Shakespeare and Bacon were the same man. The only thing you would manage to get right is that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet (although you are still deeply confused about who Shakespeare was).
A key point in this story– in all of the stories, in fact– is that our beliefs about the witch have the same causal origins. But let’s distinguish several different cases here:
1. No name
Urstoff and I both read in the Salem Times about a witch on the loose. Urstoff relays the story to my neighbor, who blames the witch for the failure of his crop. I blame the witch for the death of my mare. Are we blaming the same witch?
–I have the strong intuition that we are blaming the same witch.
2. No name, change of incidental properties
Urstoff and I both read in the Salem Times about a warty, vengeful witch on the loose who likes to devour infants and fly on her broomstick. Urstoff, who has a poor memory, relays the story to my neighbor, but describes her as a beautiful, placid witch who likes to pray to the moon goddess and bathe in the lake. My neighbor blames the beautiful, placid witch for the failure of his crop. I blame the warty, vengeful witch for the death of my mare. Are we blaming the same witch?
–I have the weak intuition that we are blaming the same witch.
3. No name, change of kind
Urstoff and I both read in the Salem Times about a witch on the loose. Urstoff, who likes to tell tales, relays the story to my neighbor, but changes the witch into a colossal manticore. My neighbor blames the manticore for the failure of his crop. I blame the witch for the death of my mare. Are we blaming the same creature?
–I have the strong intuition that we are blaming different creatures.
4. Name
Urstoff and I both read in the Salem Times about a witch on the loose named Rhiannon. Urstoff relays the story to my neighbor, who blames Rhiannon for the failure of his crop. I blame her for the death of my mare. Are we blaming the same witch?
–I have the strong intuition that we are blaming the same witch.
5. Name, change of incidental properties
Urstoff and I both read in the Salem Times about a warty, vengeful witch named Rhiannon on the loose who likes to devour infants and fly on her broomstick. Urstoff, who is functionally illiterate, relays the story to my neighbor, but describes Rhiannon as a beautiful, placid witch who likes to pray to the moon goddess and bathe in the lake. My neighbor blames Rhiannon, who he takes to be the beautiful, placid witch, for the failure of his crop. I blame Rhiannon, who I take to be the warty, vengeful witch, for the death of my mare. Are we blaming the same witch?
–I have the strong intuition that we are blaming the same witch
6. Name, change of kind
Urstoff and I both read in the Salem Times about a witch on the loose named Rhiannon. Urstoff, who is a notorious liar, relays the story to my neighbor, but changes Rhiannon into a colossal manticore. My neighbor blames Rhiannon for the failure of his crop. I blame her for the death of my mare. Are we blaming the same creature?
–I have the weak intuition that we are blaming the same creature.
It seems to me that the pattern the Abrahamic God fits most closely is (5)– He is associated in all three religions with the same name, or set of names, and while a number of properties have changed in the various retellings He has not undergone any transformations of kind. This suggests, again, that Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the same god.
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It may be elegant or defensible to think that people are referring to the person baptized as William Shakespeare when they refer to Shakespeare, but I don’t think most people’s views are specifically that.
My guess is that it’s kind of a cloud centered mostly on the person who people at the time referred to as William Shakespeare.
For example, if it turned out that the infant baptized as William Shakespeare was accidentally swapped for another child, who grew up to perform on the stage, I think most people would think they were referring to that second guy.
I see your point – at a certain level, if God exists and you and I disagree as to his qualities, we are arguably referring to the same God. And if God doesn’t exist, but we are ascribing different qualities to the same fictional character, we’re arguably referring to the same God there too. (Certainly, if you talk about Kris Kringle and I talk about Santa Claus, it’s not unreasonable to say we’re talking about the same person, even if their qualities differ).
However, if we disagree about enough qualities and don’t know if God is real or not, I think it’s closer. (See my Pickles example, above).
On the gripping hand. it’s Wesleyan’s belief system. If they believe that their God is different from the God of Islam, then that’s a quality that they ascribe to their God, and denying that quality is inconsistent with their beliefs.
I can certainly say “I am referring to Kris Kringle, and one of the qualities that Kris Kringle has is that he is not the same person you are thinking of when you think of Santa Claus, and if you think he is, then your beliefs are not congruent with mine on this subject.”
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I think the chief conceptual obstacle here is accepting that people can be be wrong about who they think they are referring to. If you say “I am talking about Mao Zedong, and you are talking about Mao Tse-Tung, and those are not the same people,” you are simply mistaken. The same goes, I think, for Kris Kringle versus Santa Claus, or God versus Allah. The referent of a term is not in general stipulated by the speaker.
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I’m pretty certain there’s a substantial group of people who when they say “Shakespeare”, mean the guy who worked as an actor and writer for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later King’s Men under that name ca. 1590-1610. Who was probably baptized as such in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 and probably wrote the various plays attributed to W.S., but if there’s any ambiguity or uncertainty, any question of an imposter at work anywhere in the timeline, they mean the one with the established public career under the “William Shakespeare” name.
And another substantial group of people who when they say “Shakespeare”, mean the guy who wrote most or all of the plays in the First Folio and a few others beyond that. Who may or may not have been baptized as such in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 and who may or may not have worked as an actor for the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, but if there’s any uncertainty about that they mean the guy who actually wrote the plays.
I do not see any basis for unambiguously privileging one version over the other. And nobody cares about the baptized infant except to the extent that they are confident he grew up to be one or both of the other two guys; throw in the possibility of e.g. a faerie changeling, and they’ll mean the actor and/or the playwright but not the infant who grew up to live an obscure life elsewhere.
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Suppose, for purposes of reductio, that “Shakespeare” means “the man who worked as a playwright and actor with the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s and subsequently the King’s Men, who was the author of the Sonnets and the plays found in the First Folio.” And, for the sake of charity, let us further suppose that a man need not satisfy every piece of this description to be Shakespeare, only most of it. The acid test for meaning is substitution salva veritate, that is, with truth preserved– if “A” means “B”, we should be able to replace every occurrence of “A” in any sentence with “B”, and vice versa, without changing the truth value of the sentence (with an exception for substitutions within propositional attitudes).
Here are some facts about Shakespeare:
1. Shakespeare might have died of plague at age 10.
2. Shakespeare could have become a wainwright rather than a playwright.
3. Shakespeare could have moved to France as a teenager and spent the rest of his life here.
All of these sentences are true, I take it. But someone who dies of plague at age 10, or moves to France and spends the remainder of his days there, or opts to become a wainwright rather than a playwright could not be “the man who worked as a playwright and actor with the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s and subsequently the King’s Men, who was the author of the Sonnets and the plays found in the First Folio.” This means that each of these sentences implies:
4. Shakespeare might not have been the man who worked as a playwright and actor with the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s and subsequently the King’s Men, who was the author of the Sonnets and the plays found in the First Folio.
Given that (1), (2), and (3) are true, (4) must be true as well. Now, let’s apply the substitution test, starting with taking out “Shakespeare” and replacing it with the description:
5. The man who worked as a playwright [etc.] might not have been the man who worked as a playwright [etc.].
And now taking out the description and replacing it with the name:
6. Shakespeare might not have been Shakespeare.
But (5) and (6) are false, in fact, they are both contradictions. So we cannot substitute the description of Shakespeare for the name, which shows that it does not serve as the name’s meaning. This completes the reductio. “Shakespeare” refers to the man who was christened under that name in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, and is not a disguised description of any sort.
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Very few people care about the person christened at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and lots and lots of people care about the person who wrote Hamlet. That latter person is indelibly known as Shakespeare in 2016 even if he wasn’t in 1603.
If tomorrow very strong evidence was found that De Vere wrote the plays and sonnets, it’d be reported as “Scientists Discover Earl of Oxford Was Shakespeare”. Even though your rubric claims such a sentence is contradictory nonsense it would be easily understood. Further the plays would continue to be referred to as written by William Shakespeare while “Who was Edward De Vere?” would something you’d hear on Jeopardy from time to time.
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Your post does not prove the point you are trying to make.
Sure, if you mean “Shakespeare” to refer to “the playwright who, etc.”, then it’s a contradiction to say Shakespeare could have had some other career. And there’s nothing wrong with that because given the fact that there was such a playwright, it is not possible to suppose additionally that there was no such playwright.
If someone is clear that when he says “Shakespeare”, he means the person who wrote the plays, then it is obvious that Shakespeare could not have been a wainwright or died at age ten, or whatever. Somebody wrote the damn plays, after all.
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Are you so sure? Here are the first few google results which pop up:
“Did Shakespeare really write his own plays?”
“Probing Question: Did Shakespeare really write all those plays?”
“Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?”
“The Campaign to Prove Shakespeare Didn’t Really Exist”
All of these results seem to favor the theory of reference I’m defending– the causal theory– over the descriptive theory. On the descriptive theory, these headlines are uniformly nonsense: the answer to the questions in the first three would be “trivially, yes”, “trivially, yes”, and “Shakespeare, duh”, while the fourth headline would imply that no one wrote the plays traditionally attributed to Shakespeare, which seems, uh, dubious.
I agree that if you stipulate that “Shakespeare” was whomever wrote the plays, and your conversational partners assent, then “Shakespeare” does indeed refer to whomever wrote the plays. But I could just as readily stipulate that my pen is named Shakespeare. We are interested in the mechanics of reference for names as they are ordinarily used, not in hoked up and artificial scenarios.
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@ Earthly Knight:
Sometimes when people say “Shakespeare”, they mean the guy baptized under that name. Other times, they mean the guy who wrote the plays. We don’t have to, or have any reason to, pick one of the two which is “the right way” to use the word “Shakespeare”.
I don’t know what’s so hard to get about that.
“Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays” makes perfect sense to me. As does “Francis Bacon was Shakespeare” and “Shakespeare did not exist; it was just Francis Bacon”.
They are all ways of getting across the same basic point.
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Here’s a question for you: earlier on, Jiro claimed that Roger Bacon had been advanced as a possible author of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare, and I corrected him. Would it have been kosher for him to claim that by “Roger Bacon” he meant whatever man was involved in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and so my correction was unwarranted?
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@ Earthly Knight:
He did mean by “Roger Bacon” to get across “whatever man was involved in the Shakespeare authorship controversy”.
Your correction was to point out that this man’s name was actually Francis Bacon, and that “Roger Bacon” as typically used refers to a different man, not involved in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, who was born three centuries earlier.
In other words, when he said “Roger Bacon”, he meant to refer to Francis Bacon.
Now, if he had said, “No, I mean the man baptized under ‘Roger Bacon’, dammit! He wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” then I would interpret him differently.
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That argument goes in the wrong direction.
If you’ll recall, my original point is that if someone claims Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon, that is a different person. We don’t say “it’s the same person, he was just named Bacon and born in a different place”. (The analogy, of course, is that if important attributes of God are different, it’s not the same God).
Pointing out that Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon are different people is consistent with that. I referred to a different Bacon, just like Christians refer to a different God than Muslims. Saying “I’m referring to the same Bacon who is accused of writing the plays” would be the equivalent of saying they worship the same God.
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@ Jiro:
When you said “Roger Bacon”, did you really think the guy born in the 1200s wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Or were you thinking of Francis Bacon but got his name wrong?
It seems to me like the situation could be either way. But I think it is more likely to be the latter.
Of course, another possibility is that you weren’t clearly referring to anything at all, and that you were using “Roger Bacon” in the sense of “the European who discovered gunpowder, who lived in the 1500s, who was a monk, and who wrote the Novum Organum“, which doesn’t refer to anyone.
Anyway, I am not committed to the idea (as I take Earthly Knight to be) that it is demonstrable from the text or even known to you which of these things you meant to refer to, if anything.
***
To apply this situation to religion, if I would say that if God does not exist, then neither the Christians nor Muslims are referring to anything, so it’s not “the same one”.
If the Christian God does exist, then it seems to me a debatable question whether the Muslims are referring to a non-existent being, referring to the Christian God but getting many of his traits wrong, or referring to a demon.
For instance, if Muslims believe that Allah helped them conquer the Middle East, but actually it was a demon, then when they say “Allah is the being that helped us conquer the Middle East”, then they are referring to the demon.
If they say “Allah is the creator of the universe”, they are referring to the (we suppose) really existing Christian God.
If they say “Allah is the omnipotent God who has no ‘partners’ or aspects like the Trinity”, then they are referring to a nonexistent being.
And I don’t see why there has to be just one of these that the Muslims are consistently referring to.
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More on the referent depending on the context.
In one philosopher’s lecture on the history of philosophy, he jokingly introduces Francis Bacon as “Bacon, the one who didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays”.
Now, taken literally, that shouldn’t narrow things down any. Almost everyone didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays, including both Roger and Francis Bacon. But obviously, in context, you interpret it as “the man who has been accused of writing Shakespeare’s plays but really didn’t”, and it’s clear which one he’s talking about.
Even the sentence “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays” is perfectly intelligible and not contradictory. Because it’s obvious that the first instance of “Shakespeare” in that sentence means “the man born under that name in Stratford-upon-Avon, etc.”, while the second instance means “the playwright who, etc.”. That is, the sentence means “The man actually named Shakespeare didn’t write the plays which are written by the playwright who wrote them and who, in his capacity as the author, is popularly called ‘Shakespeare’.”
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Which gets us to the story of the scholar who spent many years proving that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer but by a Greek contemporary of the same name.
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As a clarification for when I said “whether the Muslims are referring to a non-existent being”.
Strictly speaking, you can’t refer to a non-existent being. This is another way of saying that they fail to refer to an existing being, i.e. they fail to refer to anything but think they are referring to something.
This is just like the fact that you can’t talk about nothing. But didn’t I just say something about nothing? Namely, that you can’t talk about it? No, because this is just another way of saying that something is the only thing you can talk about.
The term “nothing”, when meaningful, is a way of talking about something, indirectly. For example, when I say “I have nothing in my pocket,” I mean I have no tangible material objects there. I don’t mean that pure nonexistence actually exists inside my pocket.
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I don’t see why not. I often refer to Luke Skywalker, for example – well, not often, but you get my drift. I don’t really see why a hypothetical God would be any different.
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Sure. But he failed and said something false instead. This shows that “Roger Bacon” does not mean “the personage involved in the Shakespeare authorship controversy,” no matter what Jiro thought. If it did, Jiro’s claim that Roger Bacon was involved in the Shakespeare authorship controversy would have been trivially true, and not in need of any correction.
By the same token, “Shakespeare” does not mean “the author of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare,” no matter what the people who use the name think.
This seems to be where the confusion enters in. “Shakespeare” doesn’t fail to refer to Bacon because the man Shakespeare and the man Bacon had different properties (although of course they did). “Shakespeare” fails to refer to Bacon because there was a man baptized under the name “Shakespeare” in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, and all subsequent uses of the name are the effects of that original baptism. In other words, when I say “Shakespeare” it refers to the man Shakespeare because there is an appropriate causal chain linking my use of the name to the infant immersed in water in 16th-century England.
When it comes to Yahweh, on the assumption that He exists, all tokenings of His name or variants will have the deity announcing his name to mankind as their causal source, and so refer to Him.
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No. He wasn’t wrong that “Roger Bacon” was involved in the Shakespeare controversy. He was wrong about a different fact concerning “Roger Bacon” (as he used the term): namely, that his name was actually Francis Bacon.
You have the facts about which he was mistaken the other way around. He was right that “Roger Bacon” was involved in the controversy. And he was wrong about “Roger Bacon”‘s actual name.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with calling Francis Bacon “Roger Bacon”; the only incorrect thing is that this usage reflected a false belief on Jiro‘s part about what name “Roger Bacon” was actually given at birth.
If Jiro knew this and called Francis Bacon “Roger Bacon” anyway, he would not be factually wrong. Just very misleading and liable to confuse people. But it’s fundamentally no different from calling Chiang Kai-Shek “Jiang Jieshi”.
“Roger Bacon was involved in the Shakespeare controversy” has no intrinsic meaning outside the definitions you choose to give to the individual terms in that sentence.
Again, you are just engaging in absurd linguistic prescriptivism.
If you want to use the word that way, fine. But it doesn’t mean everyone has to or does in reality.
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Let me get this straight: you think that the sentence “Roger Bacon was a figure in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but he was actually Francis Bacon” is true?
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@ Earthly Knight:
Certainly. It’s true if you mean “Roger Bacon” to refer to Francis Bacon. The truth of the sentence is not independent of what you mean by the words. Obviously.
That usage is, of course, very confusing, and it reflects a different error: namely, it implies that you think Francis Bacon’s name was Roger Bacon.
Do you think “Alisa Rosenbaum wrote Ayn Rand’s novels, but her legal name was Ann O’Connor” is a false statement?
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Okay. That’s reason enough to reject whatever view you’re espousing, then.
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@ Earthly Knight:
If you want to make groundless assertions, sure.
Your intrinsicism about the meaning of words is totally baseless, as the arguments you give for it fail. It is therefore an arbitrary assertion, and I reject it.
How in the world do you think that the meaning of a sentence is independent of the definitions of terms you have in mind?
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I never got to respond to all of the people saying philosophy is a useless subject in the other thread.
This is a great example of how some questions in philosophy can really be useless, without the whole thing being useless. It’s like the dispute in astronomy over whether Pluto is “really” a planet.
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Maybe so. But the causal theory of reference and the attendant revival of essentialism has spawned some pretty surprising theses, for instance:
–One of the chief goals of natural science is to find real kinds of things which exist out there in nature and identify their essences.
–If you have been hooked up to a computer simulation since your birth, none of your beliefs are for that reason false (more carefully: you have no more than the usual quota of false beliefs).
–You could not have been born to different parents.
–Pain is not identical to any particular mental state.
–Linguistics cannot content itself with studying what goes on inside of people’s heads, because the meanings of terms depend on their referents. For example, what you mean when you say “Sirius” depends on actual features of the dog star.
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See, I think you are confusing the linguistic issue for the real issue.
Whether, when I say “water”, I am referring to “the stuff in the oceans” or “H2O” doesn’t have anything to do with whether water really does have any kind of intrinsic essence. It’s completely possible that, in some cases, I mean to refer to one and in other cases I mean to refer to the other.
If water has an intrinsic essence, maybe I’m still not referring to that essence. If water doesn’t have an essence, maybe I’m still attempting to refer to the essence, even though it doesn’t exist.
This is a good example of what I mean. This is not a linguistic question, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how we use words to refer to things.
It has to do with the nature of identity and what it consists in. If identity is having the same matter, then I couldn’t have been born to different parents. But then I’m not the same person as the baby who grew into me under that theory (I’m not really the same matter; particles are constantly leaving and entering).
If identity is having the same thoughts, personality, beliefs, etc., then I could have been born to different parents. (This theory also has a lot of weird paradoxes, and since your thoughts and beliefs are not exactly the same over time, it’s hard to see how you’d have any identity on this basis, either.)
If identity is having the same mind, spirit, etc., then not only is it conceivable that I could have been born to different parents, it is conceivable that I really was born to different parents many times in the past—i.e. reincarnation.
I think a huge part of the problem is ignoring the different ways we use language and the different ways we might want to interpret a piece of writing or speech.
For instance, suppose I ask you to “Fetch me the red screwdriver over there.” But you go and look, and there is no red screwdriver. Instead, you see a blue screwdriver and a red hammer. What should you do?
a) You can suppose that, since I wasn’t referring to anything real, you should return without either of the two objects.
b) You can suppose that I meant to refer to the red hammer, since they are both red, and return with the hammer.
c) You can suppose that I meant to refer to the blue screwdriver, since they are both screwdrivers, and return with the screwdriver.
In most normal contexts, such as if I am working on a home improvement project, you should pick c) and come back with the blue screwdriver.
***
Another confusion here is trying to interpret documents like letters and essays the same way one would interpret legislation or the Constitution.
Presumably, if you’re reading one of John Locke’s letters, you want to know what he thought. Therefore, the meaning you are concerned with, regarding a particular term, is whatever he intended it to mean.
But if we’re interpreting the American Constitution, we don’t necessarily want to know what the Framers intended. Is our purpose in having a Constitution to enact the will of the Framers? No, I think it is to create a government that will protect individual rights, whatever they actually are.
Take the Ninth Amendment; it says: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This implies that there are other rights retained by the people, and that these are protected by the Constitution.
And from here there are two kinds of questions judges could ask: a) what rights did the Framers have in mind? or b) what actually are those rights? Which question we think they ought to answer depends on what we think the purposes of judges is: to protect objective rights, or to enforce the subjective opinions of dead men.
Now, it’s conceivable (though it’s not my view) that there are no such objective rights. In that case, the Ninth Amendment doesn’t objectively refer to anything. And judges would have to either dismiss it as meaningless, or else decide that, in order to avoid construing it as meaningless, they have to construe it as enforcing the subjective opinions of the authors. It’s possible that either one of those options could be more convenient, given their purposes.
Anyway, the point is that whether we are going by an objective or a subjective theory of reference depends on the context and the purpose of the language in question. And it’s a linguistic and jurisprudential issue, in my opinion, not really a distinctively philosophical issue.
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Anyway, my take on this, both for the witch and God/Allah.
You can’t refer to a non-existent being. You can’t talk or think about nothing. You can only talk or think about something. As Parmenides put it:
When people talk about God or Allah, they are not referring to something which does not exist. They are not referring to nothing, i.e. “nothing” is not the referent. They are failing to refer at all.
“God” or “Allah” have a sense, but not a referent. That is, you can vaguely understand what they would be referring to and what it would be like if it existed (though it has contradictory qualities). However, they aren’t talking about anything. It’s the same as talking about “the greatest integer”; you’re not babbling, but there is just nothing that you could be referring to.
At least, they are not referring to anything if you understand them in the sense of attempting to refer to something objectively existing in external reality. They may be interpreted as referring to something if you think of them as actually referring to the idea of God which they have in their minds. In which case, the referent they have is perfectly real—and they are not talking about nothing or a non-existent thing—but they are seriously mistaken about its properties.
In that sense, it’s like Harry Potter. As an objective being, Harry Potter does not exist, and you can’t refer such a non-existent thing. But he exists just fine as an idea in people’s minds, which is produced by reading Rowling’s novels. On the other hand, it’s a stupid question to ask whether Rowling and Yudkowsky are talking about the same Harry Potter. Everyone has his own idea of Harry Potter; there’s no real character to which these ideas correspond.
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“God”, or better, “Yahweh”, had better not refer to any ideas or set of ideas. Otherwise the following claims will be true of God: he exists exclusively within a few miles of the Earth’s surface, he is entirely encased in human flesh (aaah!), he grows much bigger on Sundays…
I suppose I do not see why we can’t refer to things which don’t exist. We certainly speak as though we can. If I mention Daffy Duck, and you tell me that he’s an unintelligible, pantsless sailor, it would be perfectly natural for me to respond “You’re thinking about Donald, I’m referring to the other cartoon duck.”
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None of those things apply to people’s ideas of God. Their ideas of God are not in space; they doesn’t exist “inside” human flesh, and they doesn’t get bigger or smaller.
But Donald Duck is, in the sense we can talk about him, real. He is a really existing example of a fictional character depicted in certain cartoons.
Now, there is no is actual referent that these cartoons are pointing to. But when we talk about “Donald Duck”, it seems to me that we are not talking about a non-existent thing but about what is shown in those cartoons.
For example, if I say “The Christian God is vengeful”, well that doesn’t refer to anything if I mean it strictly in the sense of an objectively existing being. And it’s neither true nor false. But if I mean it to say “The character depicted in the Bible is vengeful”, then I’m referring to the textual descriptions in that book, and there’s an objective answer to whether the idea of God you get from reading that book is vengeful or not. (Unless, of course, the book says contradictory things about God.)
However, it seems like an ill-posed question to ask whether the Gods depicted in the Bible and the Quran are the same one. To ask whether they’re the same or not the same implies that there is some really existing thing outside the pages of those books to which they are referring.
It’s like asking whether Rowling’s Harry Potter and Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter are the same one. Both books get across the idea of a fictional character named “Harry Potter” with certain similarities but also certain differences. Whether they’re “the same” is a question I wouldn’t know how to answer.
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What in the world do you think an idea is?
You’re all over the place here. Donald Duck is a “really existing example of a fictional character,” while Harry Potter is an idea?
We frequently do need to make judgments of identity for fictional characters, though. For instance, you might need to explain to someone that the Batman of Batman Begins is the same Batman as the Batman of The Dark Knight Rises but a different Batman than the Batman of Batman Returns.
You also haven’t really addressed the point. In ordinary language we speak as though you can refer to fictional and mythical characters, as in “I was referring to Daffy, not Donald”, or “I was referring to Fred Weasley, not George.” Your view, I take it, is that when we speak this way we are confused or mistaken?
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@ Earthly Knight:
Either a quality of the mind or an object in the mind. Not a physical object that has a certain size, location, etc.
Donald Duck and Harry Potter are both ideas, and both “really existing examples of fictional characters”.
They are in a similar ontological status as colors. Donald Duck and Harry Potter are not “in” the pages of their respective comics/books, as if there were little creatures running around in the pages. Donald Duck and Harry Potter are ideas in individuals’ minds which are produced by looking at the appropriate works.
They are therefore real—real ideas—and they are based on objective facts—symbols and drawings on paper—but they also don’t have an intrinsic existence outside of human minds.
The Dark Knight Rises presents its character of Batman as having a backstory including the events of Batman Begins. But there is not some kind of externally existing Batman to which they are both referring.
In the same way, it’s fair to say that the Quran presents Allah as being the same God depicted in the Old Testament. But there is not some externally existing God to which they are referring.
In the sense that you can refer to them and say something about them, you are referring to the ideas you have of them.
There’s nothing wrong with saying “You’re referring to Daffy, not Donald,” insofar as Daffy is the idea presented in certain cartoons and Donald is one presented in different cartoons.
In the same way, if someone says “The Muslim God has three aspects: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”, you can correct him and say “No, you’re thinking of the Christian God.” So long as you’re talking about the ideas of the two Gods that you get from reading the respective books.
But Christians and Muslims don’t claim to believe in their ideas of God. They claim to believe in an intrinsically existing being.
It’s true that insofar as they an consistently say anything about the God they believe in, it must be “real” in some sense. A real idea. Because you can’t talk or think about nothing.
For instance, go back to the example of “the greatest integer”. There is no such thing. But if you say “the greatest integer is even”, and other people say “I see your point; it must be even”, then the group of you have got to have some (mistaken) idea of the greatest integer which is making you think it’s even. If you were really talking about nothing, you couldn’t agree on whether it was odd or even.
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This is… unhelpful. What in the world do you think a mind is?
Earlier you said: “to ask whether they’re the same or not the same implies that there is some really existing thing outside the pages of those books to which they are referring.”
So when I say “the Batman of Batman Begins is the same Batman as the Batman of The Dark Knight Rises,” is it true that this “implies that there is some really existing thing outside” the frames of those movies named Batman?
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@ Earthly Knight:
What do you think a “physical thing” is?
The physical is what we observe through extrospection. The mental is what we observe through introspection.
You can’t try to prove the existence of the mind by reference to physical facts, nor prove the existence of the physical world by reference to mental facts (a la Descartes).
Ultimately, “mind” is defined ostensively: you say “Just introspect! It’s that.” And if you don’t know what I mean by “introspect” (when I give synonyms, etc.), there’s nothing I can tell you. Just as there’s nothing you can tell me if I pretend not to know what you mean by “extrospect”.
Again, whether they are “the same” is a question without an answer.
The Dark Knight Rises presents its Batman as being the same as the one in Batman Begins. (The same is not true the other way around, since Batman Begins came first.) There is no answer to whether it “really is” the same. That would imply that there is some externally existing Batman which they are both referring to.
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In your view, is the mind located in space? I would like, for instance, for my mind to be located where my brain is, and occupy roughly the same dimensions.
So when I say that the Batman of Batman Begins is the same Batman as the Batman of The Dark Knight Rises, but not the same Batman as the Batman of Batman Returns, am I saying something true, false, or neither?
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@ Earthly Knight:
No, it is not located in space. That would imply that it is a physical thing. But it is not a physical thing. It is a mental thing, and being located in space is incompatible with the properties of mental things.
I’m not sure what precise theory in philosophy of mind you are endorsing. You don’t seem to be going for property dualism. You seem to be saying that we have a mind and we have a brain, and they are both physical and occupy the same space. That seems redundant to me.
In any case, my point of view is interactionist, “entity dualism”, with only minor differences from the view put forward by Bryan Caplan in this essay.
It depends on how you mean it.
If you mean to refer to Batman as an externally existing entity, it is neither true nor false. It’s like “The King of France is bald”.
If you mean “Batman Begins presents its Batman as the same as the one in The Dark Knight Rises,” this is false: the first movie doesn’t refer to a movie made later.
If you mean “The qualities of the Batman presented in Batman Begins are not incompatible with the qualities of the Batman presented in The Dark Knight Rises, but are incompatible with the qualities of the Batman presented in Batman Returns,” this is true.
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Well, if your views on reference require us to be dualists, we ought not to accept your views on reference.
But there are still big problems if the names of fictional characters are supposed to refer to immaterial ideas. For instance, the following claims will be true of Batman: that he weighs less than 2 kilograms, that he is invisible, inaudible, and odorless, that he has never fought the Joker, that he does not wear black…
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@ Earthly Knight:
That obviously depends on whether dualism is true. And as I see it, it is.
“Batman” does not exist and nothing is true of him.
And the idea of Batman has no weight (not “weighs very little” or even “weights zero grams”), is invisible, inaudible, and odorless. The idea of Batman has never fought the Joker and does not wear black.
However, it is not true that the idea of Batman is not thought of as weighing a normal human amount, being visible etc., fighting the Joker, and wearing black. Those things are part of the idea of Batman which you get from watching the movies.
Batman does not really fight the Joker, i.e. in external reality. Rather, one of the qualities of your conception of Batman is that you think of him as fighting the Joker.
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Does the name “Batman” refer to nothing at all, or does it refer to an idea? Your claims are not only wildly implausible, they are not even consistent from one comment to the next.
If it is a consequence of your view on reference that it is false that Batman fought the Joker, false that Batman weighs somewhat more than 2 kilograms, and false that he knows how to speak, your view is wrong.
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@ Earthly Knight:
Your dogmatic attitude is extremely annoying. I don’t mind if you disagree. I do mind your mistaken opinion that your beliefs are so obvious as to stand for themselves without argument.
They are not inconsistent. If they appear so, it is because you are deliberately (mis)interpreting them in an uncharitable manner because you are apparently certain that I am an ignoramus.
The term “Batman” can be used in a sense in which it is intended to refer to an externally existing thing. In which case, it refers to nothing at all. In the sense in which it does refer to something, it refers to an idea.
This is the part where you’re supposed to justify your assertion, i.e. why you think it is wrong.
Are we in disagreement that the sequence of pictures in the Batman movies produces in the viewer an idea of a character who fights the Joker, weighs more than two kilograms, etc? I don’t think so.
At the same time, there is no externally existing Batman. The idea of Batman does not fight the Joker in external reality. And the idea of Batman does not even fight the idea of the Joker, as if the two ideas were literally having a little battle inside your mind. Rather, part of the idea of Batman is the idea that he fights the Joker.
***
And yes, our language here is imprecise. That is because reality is not determined by the way we subjectively choose to speak about it—and we don’t just happen to speak about it in a single, intrinsically correct way.
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The following conclusions are intuitively absurd:
–Batman has never fought the Joker.
–The mind is not a material thing.
–The sentence “Roger Bacon was a figure in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but he was actually Francis Bacon” is true.
We should reject any thesis about reference that has these as consequences. Why? Because there are theories of reference that do not have any consequences so absurd.
I am not sure what more justification you could expect. I very much doubt that your views are consistent, but even if they are, that does little to commend them. There are many consistent but profoundly stupid lines people could take on reference. We’re better off with one of the ones that isn’t profoundly stupid.
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I’m not a substance dualist (more a pluralist), but saying that “the mind is a not material thing” is intuitively absurd is pretty outlandish.
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@ Earthly Knight:
There is no actual meaning to “intuition” here, other than: “a vague feeling that you have developed from your experience with similar situations”.
It is possible that your vague understanding is mistaken. If you think it isn’t possible, well, that’s dogmatism.
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Here is a consistent theory of reference for names: all names refer to my pinky. Should we accept this theory? Why not?
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@ Earthly Knight:
No, because there is no evidence that when I “Francis Bacon”, I mean to talk about your pinky.
Just as there is no evidence that, when someone uses the name “Roger Bacon” but has in mind all the facts about Francis Bacon except his first name, he is necessarily “really” referring to the man born in the 1200s. That is just as arbitrary as saying that it refers to your pinky.
Likewise, since what is not is not, one can’t refer to something that does not exist. For it to have properties to which you could refer, it would have to exist in order to have those properties.
Thus, when one talk about “God” (supposing he doesn’t exist), insofar as one can agree with other believers about his properties, they must be referring to their idea of God, confusing it for something which has an external existence. The ontological argument is a perfect example of this.
That is, in one sense, they are not referring to anything: it’s clear they they don’t mean to refer to their idea of God but to an externally existing God. In another sense, they are referring to their idea of God: that is the explanation of why they agree on what this being is like. They got the idea from the same book and tradition.
In the same way, there are two senses in which you could talk about Batman. In one sense, Batman does not wear black because he does not exist; it is neither true nor false to say that he wears black. But—in normal discourse—that’s not what you’re interpreted to mean. There must be some way we can agree that “Batman wears black.” And the explanation is that this must be another way of saying “Part of the idea of Batman, as related by the movies, etc., is that he wears black.”
Where I basically disagree with you is on the idea that there is a single, superficially obvious meaning to the sentence “Batman wears black.” No, the meaning is not “in” the words. The meaning depends upon the context in which you use the words.
It is just the same as how the truth value of the sentence “The Sun will rise tomorrow” depends on how I intend it. If I mean that the Sun will actually move around the Earth and come up above the horizon (as people intended for centuries), it is false. If I mean that the Sun will appear to rise above the horizon because of the rotation of the Earth, it is true. The actual historical development of that expression is that we revised the meaning from one to the other, while keeping the words the same.
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If the intention of the speaker is decisive, then I can assure you, when people talk about Batman, they intend to be referring to the Batman who fought the Joker, rather than your idea-Batman or your non-existent Batman, neither of which have ever fought anything. Your view about the intention of the speaker determining reference is inconsistent with your view about the referents of names of fictional characters.
But there is another problem here. Suppose that when I say the name Columbus, I intend to refer to the one and only man who was the first European to set foot in America, who proved that the Earth was round, and who was the captain of the Santa Maria. But then I am referring to the one and only man who was at once Leif Erickson, Eratosthenes, and Juan de la Cosa. How does one refer to a contradiction?
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@ Earthly Knight:
Yes, and if they intend to refer to an externally existing Batman who fought the Joker, they are confused, and they are not really referring to anything.
Since it is nevertheless possible to understand them, there must be some other sense in which they can be interpreted as referring to their idea of Batman.
The first sense is the speaker’s intended referent. The second is the reinterpretation of it by the education listener such that it makes sense. It’s almost like “steelmanning”.
This is like the case I gave of constitutional interpretation. I think the interpretation we should go by is that things like the Ninth Amendment refer to objective principles of natural rights. But supposing (as I do not believe) that there are no such principles, one would have to reinterpret it as referring to the Framers’ subjective opinions about what they considered rights. Otherwise, it would simply be meaningless.
In any case, we make judgment calls about how to reinterpret people all the time. This was my “red screwdriver / blue screwdriver” example.
You can’t refer to a contradiction. Thus, you aren’t referring to anyone in this case. This is the precise kind of case I gave before:
Of course, another possibility is that you weren’t clearly referring to anything at all, and that you were using “Roger Bacon” in the sense of “the European who discovered gunpowder, who lived in the 1500s, who was a monk, and who wrote the Novum Organum“, which doesn’t refer to anyone.
When your description is almost totally in line with Francis Bacon, it’s clear you meant to refer to him (even when you get his name wrong). When it’s almost totally in line with Roger Bacon, it’s clear you meant to refer to him. But when it’s evenly split between the two, who knows which one you meant to refer to?
In such a case, so far as your statement can be given any meaning, it’s only possible to say that you are referring to your confused idea of a person who is the combination of Roger and Francis Bacon.
That wasn’t what you meant to refer to, in the strict sense. (You thought there was a real person who has a combination of all the traits of Roger and Francis Bacon.) That’s the sense in which your statement has no referent. But there’s another sense in which I can guess what really inspired you to say such a thing.
Anyway, my theory is essentially the same as that used by most early modern philosophers; as Berkeley put it: that we should “think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar”. Instead of throwing out expressions like “the Sun rises” or “Batman wears black”, we should reinterpret them in a sensible way.
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Cynic’s interpretation: Scalia suggested Kagan because he knew that her position in the DoJ would require her to recuse herself from several important pending cases (which it has).
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Kagan was actually appointed a year later. There would have been a whole new set of ‘important pending cases’.
Honest interpretation: Scalia was 100% right. Right now, either Kagan or Roberts is the smartest member of the Court.
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Wasn’t this a plot point in The Diamond Age?
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Damn I love that book.
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In related news, holy shit, self-flying passenger drones!
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Our flying cars are finally here!
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Still waiting on my Moller Skycar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar
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As a fan of HPMoR and some Japanese light novels, I’d recommend skipping EY’s new novella. Writing in the light novel style accentuates his flaws as a writer, he seems to view it as a license to skip over any part of the story that bores him as a writer, and just focus on writing self-indulgently clever lines.
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Thanks for the recommendation. I probably wasn’t going to pick it up anyway, because I was worried about just that sort of thing. It’s good to have evidence besides just my suspicion.
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I read the sample pages. They didn’t convince me to pay the $0.99, although a buck is less of a deterrent than having that cover in my Kindle rotation; I already have more embarrassing art there than I need.
The stripped-down style doesn’t help, but I think its worse sin is trying to pull in some light-novel quirks that would ordinarily be a side-effect of the translation from Japanese. (Starting with the title. That was… questionable.) Doing so would have been a bad idea if it had worked, but they don’t come off sounding quite the same when they’re written by a native English speaker, so it just ends up clunky for no good reason.
Stuff like this happens all the time in anime fandom and I wish it didn’t.
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Do you have any recommendations for embarrassing cover art to put in my Kindle account?
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Ha. Maybe Empowered, if you’re into kinda-animesque Western comics?
When it comes to embarrassing covers, of course, the gold standard is the first edition of Saturn’s Children, but I can’t claim to have that in my Kindle account. (I have a hardcopy. Its spine faces the wall.)
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So the style is like a poorer version of the dialogue in PKD’s The Man in the High Castle?
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I haven’t read that, although I keep meaning to.
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I enjoyed it, though I have a very strong bias in favour of rationalist fiction.
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I thought it was ok. A few good giggle moments though disappointing compared to some of his other fiction. It felt rushed, a bit unpolished and reused the same joke too often.
Worth 99 cent but I thought EY would do more for his first pay book.
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I agree with this. I didn’t mind giving EY $0.99 at all, but the prose style was not my cup of tea. He’s written much better and hopefully will again in the future.
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Or as it’s also known, Home.
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To what extent is the heart-rate/violence connection mediated by the fact that physical fitness causes low resting heart rate and physical fitness causes violence to be easier to carry out and more likely to be successful? From a brief glance at the paper it didn’t look like they ruled that out.
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Re: Light novels I am going to shill My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, which, despite its title is excellent because it’s kinda like someone got a beta copy of Robin Hanson, made him a lot more bitter and antisocial then threw him into high school and forced him to help other students.
I’m kinda ambivalent about recommending the anime, since it cuts out a lot from the Light Novels, where the narration is a main part of the appeal but… for who watch anime and decided to pass based on the ridiculous title, I think that’s a mistaken prejudice.
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I highly recommend the anime. The things they cut from the LNs are mostly the exasperating LN “faff around” tropes, which means that the anime is a lot more to the point about the franchise’s interesting themes.
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I’ve always wanted to see a teen comedy where someone takes a young Niccolo Machiavelli and has him solve high school students’ stupid romantic problems with hilariously unethical schemes. Is this what I’m looking for?
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And presumably his experiences doing that explain the story he later wrote about the demon Belfagor and his wife.
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Isn’t this sortof the idea behind Clone High?
(Note, I haven’t watched Clone High)
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Dunno, I’m not much of a cartoon person. Doesn’t it star Abraham Lincoln and Joan of Arc or something?
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And Ghandi, JFK and Cleopatra.
From what I remember, it has not a lot to do with your idea.
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A lot of it is him being overly cynical, I wouldn’t characterize him as Machiavellian, but the right mix of bitter self-awareness which allows him to see solutions that his more idealistic classmates miss because they think that X is about X AND NOT ABOUT SIGNALLING.
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I’m pretty sure this is just “saved by the bell”
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It’s worth noting that the strategy of a political ideology moving en masse in order to use democracy to take control of a state in the name of their ideology has been used before. Will be watching this one with interest, as my usual go-to dismissal of people claiming that political polarization will lead to another American Civil War is “let me know when another Bleeding Kansas happens and we can talk”.
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The China thing has me completely dumbfounded. Not that people are finding that it was bad for America, but that the conventional wisdom to the contrary has persisted for so long, and still does. What happened to all the antiglobalization movements of the late 90s? I was young, but I remember that being the big left-wing thing back then. Where did they go? History has essentially proven them right, yet not only you don’t hear them gloating, you don’t even hear *about* them at all. It’s like that entire political movement was expunged from history and from people’s memory. Was it all in my dreams?
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The left has essentially moved to a more “globalist” worldview where both free trade and open borders are the goal. Of course there is some tension since democrats were usually considered the working class party but those days seem to be behind us(at least for white people). So the group most likely to gloat over being right about this study has moved on and republicans probably won’t take the mantle.
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Where does Bernie Sanders stand on the matter? I hear that he is maybe the last high-profile left-wing politician in the US to still show interest in the old working class angle, but I’m not sure to what degree.
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Bernie Sanders
Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.
Ezra Klein
Really?
Bernie Sanders
Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation
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On the one hand he’s right, and I’m glad somebody on the left is finally acknowledging that the Kochs are libertarian, but man reflexive Koch demonization gives me the willies. Especially when it comes from a communist.
Relatedly, I’ve seen a couple articles floating about that claim the microcephaly epidemic in South America is actually related to a particular pesticide rather than Zika. Which is maybe worth investigating, except that every one of these articles seemed to think that the most important thing was that the pesticide was manufactured by a Monsanto affiliate.
Am I absurd to reject offhand anything with this strong whiff of “two minute hate”?
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Nothing says right-wing like not believing in nation-states.
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I would say it’s unwise to reject a claim off-hand because of that whiff, but it is wise to be more skeptical of a claim because of it.
Put it this way: is the fact that a person or institution is hated strong evidence against the claim that the person or institution does bad things? Rejecting claims off-hand based on the hatred would imply that it is.
I would argue instead that a person or institution being hated is weak evidence for the person or institution doing bad things rather than strong evidence against.
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I wouldn’t be too hard on Sanders because of that. Labeling open borders as a Koch brothers conspiracy is pretty much the only way he has any hope of getting past the left wing base’s programming.
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I probably shouldn’t have said “reject”, I should have said “ignore”.
Basically, if you’re looking at data about disease rates and pesticide use, and the big thing that jumps out at you is “MONSANTO!” or if you’re thinking about the implications of an oil pipeline and the salient feature in your mind is “KOCH BROTHERS!”, then to me you’ve demonstrated that you are either unable or unwilling to be rational on the subject – you’ve demonstrated motivated reasoning – so I’m going to discount your other claims (which is a shame if your other claims are true).
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s evidence for the alleged bad people, but it does seem like evidence that they aren’t quite as bad as the accusers are making them out to be, and/or that there’s another side of the story. Certainly, it provides evidence that the accuser is particularly susceptible to confirmation bias.
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Gbdub: What makes you think Bernie Sanders is a communist? Why do you find that term more appropriate than, say, “socialist” or “social democrat”?
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When I clicked the Vox link I thought you were paraphrasing or the article was satire. Its real. What the….? I was probably going to vote for Hillary (although undecided) before I saw that, but, that about clinches it. Immigration is about the easiest way to improve the well-being of the typical person, and Bernie Sanders is way too protectionist for my tastes.
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Now, I don’t expect any politician to endorse full elimination of border restrictions, but, I think if Hillary was being interviewed it would of gone like this:
Klein: What do you think of open borders.
Clinton: **hesitate** **squirm** I think we need comprehensive immigration reform that allows hard working people to come to this country. But that proposal goes impractically far…..blah…blah…**business speak**….Dream Act…blah…blah
And that would of been a better response than what Sanders did. Sanders’ response was pretty much: “You think that whole thing where we restrict peoples’ life opportunities based on the arbitrary plot of land they we born in is unjustifiable? LOL! You must be a libertarian.“
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>“You think that whole thing where we restrict peoples’ life opportunities based on the arbitrary plot of land they we born in is unjustifiable? LOL! You must be a libertarian.“
Well, he’s not wrong.
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If immigration is restricting peoples’ life opportunities based on the arbitrary plot of land they were born in, then property is restricting people’s life opportunities based on the arbitrary family they were born in.
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You think that whole thing where we restrict peoples’ life opportunities based on the arbitrary plot of land they we born in is unjustifiable?
We don’t restrict peoples’ life opportunities based on the arbitrary plot of land they were born in. We mostly restrict peoples’ life opportunities based on the arbitrary womb they were born out of, often including a presumption as to who the sperm donor was. A small minority of the world’s nations, 30 out of 194, then also offer the privilege of citizenship to people born out of the wrong womb in the right place. But some form of jus sanguinis applies everywhere, with jus soli a rare perturbation.
And good luck arguing people out of the bit where their hard work and sacrifice benefits their children first and foremost.
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The obvious reason for Sanders to take this position is that open borders reduces the appeal of having a large welfare state.
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Ok. The last part of my last comment was phrased in an unnecessarily incendiary way. Apologies.
I don’t think that immigration restrictions are fully analogous to property. Namely, private property is to some extent based on the property owners’ ability to engage in free exchange. But immigration restrictions involve the government forcing all property owners in a country not to deal with a certain population. Even when they would be willing to.
To some extent, governments will need to differentiate based on where/how someone was born (unless a science fiction style world state somehow forms). But I think, both in terms of the cost produced, and otherwise, such restrictions are inherently negative and should be kept to a minimum.
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@g – I was being deliberately a bit provocative and imprecise. That said, Bernie Sanders the Democratic Presidential Candidate may well be a “socialist” or “social democrat”, but Bernie Sanders the human being seems to be a “small c” communist, or at least strongly sympathetic to it.
He wrote Marxist articles, lived on a pro-Stalin kibbutz, visited Cuba and the USSR (without a real diplomatic need to do so), etc. The degree to which he engages in class warfare rhetoric goes well beyond your standard “gee whiz universal healthcare would be nice”.
I mean honestly it seems like the only reason not to call him a communist is because that’s such a taboo in American politics. I don’t know, is there a better word for “super serious about the socialism and class thing guys, not just in it for the bigger public welfare programs”? Just Marxist maybe? “Communist sympathizer” sounds worse, but maybe is more accurate? Fellow traveler? It’s of course all complicated by the fact that Bernie’s kibbutz was more purely communist than the actual Communism of the USSR (which was more like a socialist dictatorship)…
Anyway this is a roundabout explanation for a bit of snark, which was my dislike for his going to the bourgeois boogeyman well – a tactic I associate more with communism than “academic” (or democratic) socialism.
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I think the usual word is “socialist”. Marxism is a rather specific thing, communism in common parlance is restricted to it, and I don’t think Bernie Sanders qualifies — the Bernie Sanders of 2016, at least, I’m not sure about the Bernie Sanders of 1976.
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The problem isn’t that calling someone a communist is taboo, rather it is that it was so widely done to such a broad range of people that it lost all meaning.
Think about this way: calling someone a communist, or worse yet a commie, gets an eye roll, not a shocked look.
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@ John Schilling:
This is the crux of the whole issue: are your compatriots like your family?
I took a really good class on “Justice & Immigration” in college, and the professor had a useful typology of three different views of the political community:
a) The political community is like a family, where you have natural obligations to look after each other first and help each other out. You don’t decide who else is in your family, nor can you just stop being part of your family.
b) The political community is like a club, where you have constructed obligations, made by contract, to one another. The members of the club decide whom to let in, and if they want to kick someone out, they can do that, too.
c) The political community is like a neighborhood, where entry and exit is open, and obligations to one another are minimal. You may help each other keep the sidewalks shoveled, but anyone is allowed to move in who can afford it.
The question is which one of these ideas of the political community is justified. A great number of people just assume that the political community is like a family or a club without arguing for it.
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@Vox
Your professor seems to have forgotten that neighborhoods historically have not worked that way and quite a few still don’t.
Within living memory, people regarded their neighbors as a sort of type “a” extended family. Which was often not far from the truth: even in the US where migration is extremely frequent, you would generally live with people very closely related to you.
To this day, some neighborhoods are in fact gated and have private security to ensure that random strangers don’t spend too much time loitering on the sidewalks. And many others employ measures such as condo boards or homeowners associations to keep their neighborhood culturally uniform, to the extent allowed by modern housing law. They are much more like a type “b” club then anything else.
Depersonalized type “c” neighborhoods where people e.g. don’t know their neighbors by name are both extraordinarily recent and a sign of a greater societal breakdown of trust.
TL;DR: if your nation really is a type “c” sort of association, it is probably not a great idea to make that situation worse by bringing in people who are even more alienated from the local culture than your own people are.
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@ Dr Dealgood:
I anticipated this objection.
It’s an imperfect analogy. Neighborhoods can be more like clubs or families, true. But despite that, in the vast majority of neighborhoods, entry and exit is not collectively controlled, and any member of the neighborhood can sell to anyone he wants and move.
Now, the outcome that I actually support (and, for example, David Friedman supports) is less coerced national cohesion and greater voluntary local cohesion. But the voluntary part is the important part. There is an enormous difference between communities voluntarily deciding to impose certain rules by consensus (such as with a condominium association), and having 51% of the people in a neighborhood tell the others how they have to live without their consent. Or deciding that henceforth, no one in the neighborhood is allowed to sell or rent to a black person.
And we don’t want everyone in the whole country to be like one big family, like one big club, or even anything other than the most depersonalized, atomized “neighborhood”. We want everyone outside of their chosen communities to regard one another as strangers.
That’s actually one of the major advantages of free immigration: it makes it harder to retain the illusion that all Danes or Swedes or Americans are some big family that owe special things to one another. That is, immigration decreases support for the welfare state. The only obligations you have to a fellow American are the same you have to any other stranger: not to rob him, kill him, or meddle in his affairs.
***
And really, while local cohesion of some minimal degree may be necessary and desirable, I don’t even support too much of that. I am in favor of “atomization”; as Ayn Rand said:
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Vox Imperatoris, I don’t think I’d use condo/homeowners associations as an example of consensus. They’re rather often a case of 5% of the population (the people with the time to spend on the board) telling everyone else how to live. Often enough with some corruption thrown in (e.g. the landscaper for the common areas is a board member’s relative).
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@Vox Imperatoris
At risk of starting up another heated discussion… One problem with the idea of opt-in communities, in which the community members get to set the rules and decide who gets to join the community and who doesn’t and it’s nobody else’s damn business what rules they decide on, is that it allows for the possibility of communities excluding people based on factors that, in popular view, it is simply fundamentally immoral to take account of when making decisions.
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@ The Nybbler:
Yes, but a private homeowner’s association can’t take over your house without your consent.
And when it’s created, it requires 100% consensus, regardless of how much time any individual resident subsequently spends on the board.
Now, if you get down to it and you think about a homeowner’s association enduring over many generations, I suppose it’s possible that there could be a “homeowner’s association” with enormous tyrannical powers that you are bound by because your great-grandfather consented to it. For instance, “By living here, you agree to be stoned to death if you convert away from Islam.” I do think there is something wrong with that. That’s why I think there’s got to be limits on the power of people to bind themselves in regard to the future (e.g. no slavery contracts), and especially to bind their descendants.
For example, if you could take your own property and write a restrictive entailment stipulating that it can never be sold, it seems like giving way too much power to previous generations to allow this to bind for the indefinite future. Eventually, there would be nothing but such entailed property.
In any case, it is far less likely that a homeowner’s association with such powers could ever be voluntarily formed, and if it were, it couldn’t grow very large while still requiring unanimous consent.
I don’t want to dissolve the regulatory-welfare state in order to have, as Henry Sidgwick put it, “a thousand petty fortresses”. On the other hand, the thousand petty fortresses might be better than the status quo.
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@Vox: I am pretty sure that (to follow the analogy) you and I have both inherited from our parents homes in a gated community whose policies have traditionally been welcoming to all but the most blatant troublemakers but whose by-laws allow the elected board – in spite of minority dissent – to lock the gates to all but residents and block resale of homes to unapproved buyers. An increasing number of our neighbors are thinking this might be the way to go in light of recent problems. Now what?
And yes, that means the house you inherited isn’t as valuable as it would have been if it came with full allodial title. If that defect makes it worthless to you, feel free to walk away. Otherwise take it for what it is.
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@Vox,
(Just picking one sentence out because I see it as a concise summary of your point. I consider this to be a response to your entire post.)
I’m huge on small-scale voluntary associations, to the point of being an Amish / Plain People fanboy, but the thing is that you can’t do that with total freedom of movement. You need some sort of Meidung so that you can take rulebreakers and, figuratively or literally, run them out of town on a rail; and you need to be extremely careful not just in allowing outsiders to join but also in regulating your interactions with them. You must allow everyone to leave if they want to, but you mustn’t allow everyone to come in just because they want to.
Exit and entry rights are both covered under the theoretical umbrella of Freedom of Movement, but the two are vastly different in practice. Lock a stranger in your house and you’re a kidnapper, lock him out of it and you’re practicing prudence. No society, on any scale, can be run on the principle of total freedom of entry.
And unlike you, I don’t see that as a feature but a bug.
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@ John Schilling:
One major problem with that is that this “gated community” was never established by consent. It was established by pretending that there is some concept of “collective consent”, and that the majority can consent on behalf of the minority.
That is the same principle by which the Confederacy seceded, on the basis of the “right to self-determination” of white men to rule black men.
And even if it were established by consent, I say bylaws of the “gated community” we have now are contrary to natural right and are therefore invalid. “Inalienable” rights are rights that cannot be alienated, even if you “want” to. Moreover, as Locke also says, you can never delegate to the government a right that you don’t legitimately have in the state of nature, such as the right to rob other people, kill them or restrict their liberty.
I mean, if this regime is justified under your theory of “libertarianism”, there is something wrong with your theory. The Soviet Union was a legitimate government under your theory.
On an unrelated note, if you really think the current U.S. immigration laws are “welcoming to all but the most blatant troublemakers”, you really need to check your facts.
@ Dr Dealgood:
I hate the Amish. I am not joking. They are sincerely an evil, backwards society with an enormous number of abuses going on within their membership.
In any case, freedom of movement does not mean the freedom of some random individual to enter in upon your private property. You are just conflating these two things. Free immigration doesn’t mean the right of a Mexican to immigrate to your living room.
What free immigration means is that no one American has the power to compel another American not to trade with, employ, rent to, or sell to a Mexican.
The question of when something stops being a voluntary, proper “homeowner’s association” and starts being a coercive government is a complex one but a crucial one. Because at some point, we move from individual property rights, to collective ownership over the individual and the tyranny of the tribe. The key to resolving it is determining to what extent a person may agree to bind himself in regard to the future, or to bind his children or his property.
For instance, if people want to go and start a commune, I object morally, but I don’t want to force them to stop. But what if they make it a rule that anyone who breaks the rules and “hoards” property to himself should be executed? I am certainly not in favor of letting them do that, even if it is one-hundred percent consensual at the time they adopt the rule. And how much right do they have to subject their children to senseless and harmful practices? That last one is an extremely complex question.
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There’s a large third group besides the immigration restrictionists and the open border people they love to debate. Viz. a large group of people that thinks that’s nothing inherently immoral about regulating immigration* but that the current level of restrictions is either fine or too restrictive.
I’m fairly certain that this third group is much much larger than the second. Even if all these anti-open-boarders analogies were slam dunk convincing, you are still left with the inconvenient fact that you don’t have the votes on the homeowners association / congregation elders / among tenants in common / etc.
It may be more fun to argue with open border people, and certainly don’t let me stop you, but I’m not sure it is terribly fruitful. And if thereby you come to believe that they are the main obstacle to “building a wall” you’ll have been lead seriously astray.
*Or what amounts to the same thing with an “in a perfect world” caveat.
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@Vox Imperatoris
I think you are conflating two separate issues.
On one hand, there is the problem “what contracts should people be able to make?”. Unless you are willing to say you’re fine with people selling themselves into slavery, you need some kind of limitations on possible contract terms. I would agree with you on that. (Of course, deciding what those limitations should be, and setting up a system that actually produces the correct limitations, is another matter.)
But you are also making claims along the lines “51% of people shouldn’t be able to decide for the remaining 49% that they must do things X Y and Z”, where these things are not specified as being obviously bad things e.g. slavery. Is this just a restatement of the issue I mentioned in the previous paragraph – that people shouldn’t be able to agree to contracts with terms you consider especially bad – in which case, why mention the 51% at all? Or is the problem that a community should not be allowed to set itself up such that a marginal majority can make changes for everyone, even if everyone involved agreed to abide by majority vote? Should 51% of people not be able to decide what time is too late to play loud music in the community? If not, why not, and what is the correct percentage, and how did you determine that this percentage is correct?
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@Vox,
The house metaphor isn’t perfect, society as a Gestalt entity isn’t perfectly equivalent to an individual, but it’s hardly as far off as you think.
Collective ownership by a corporate entity is entirely reasonable and natural in certain circumstances, which are totally compatible with libertarianism. Putting aside the obvious example of a joint stock company, think of a Georgist land tax. It’s hardly absurd to think that the certain common goods belong to a particular nation in a literal sense. Preventing trespassers from freely wandering about is the right of any property owner, whether that property is owned by a business corporation in the name of shareholders or a national government in the name of it’s nation.
I hate the Amish. I am not joking. They are sincerely an evil, backwards society with an enormous number of abuses going on within their membership.
I’m very curious about this statement, and would like to talk about it in a different comment tree so as not to clutter this one even more.
To be honest, your version of rights sounds just as paternalistic as those of the States you oppose.
I can’t make choices about what sort of rules I live by, the disposition of my own property, or even about how I raise my own children? If I want to join a Community of Goods, of my own will, too damn bad: putting my possessions into a common pool has been judged by my betters to be restrictive of my property rights. I really need to learn that Objective freedom means doing what other people think I ought to be doing.
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@ Anonymous:
No, it is not merely a restatement.
The “no slavery contracts” thing is a limitation on what you can do even if you have unanimous consent.
But you are conflating the formation of a political community with the decision-making rules of that community once formed. For instance, you can form a condo association that requires only a 51% vote to tell people what color to paint their walls. But you can’t just impose this condo association on people who never consented to be bound by these rules in the first place.
Actually existing governments have both problems: they never were formed by consent in the first place, and even if they were, much of what they do would be unjustified even with unanimous consent.
To give two examples, the problem with the government running schools is that this was never based on consent.
The problem with the Drug War is that imprisoning people for using drugs would be contrary to natural right even if the victims agreed to it beforehand.
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@ Dr Dealgood:
A Georgist land tax is absurd. There are no common goods that belong to a nation in a literal sense.
The reason the government can’t prohibit “trespassers” is that they don’t legitimately own the land. Because what you actually mean is that a group of armed thugs sent by bureaucrats in Washington can tell people that immigrants have to leave my land, simply because a majority of the people voted for this, which somehow counts as “consent” on behalf of the minority.
But yes, there are some situations where “joint ownership” is valid. However, there is also a point where it goes too far. One major aspect of a joint-stock corporation, for instance, is that you are allowed to sell your shares at any time, and they can only be established by consent.
I support actual liberty, i.e. autonomy, i.e. freedom from other people telling you how to live your life, i.e. “setting man free from men”. I don’t support the “right” of a group of people to set up some theocracy which will be binding on them and their descendants forever. Even if they have unanimous consent in doing so.
The point of individual rights is that they are freedoms necessary for productive existence as an independent, rational being. If you could alienate them, if you could give another person your right to life, your right to liberty, your right to property, this would defeat the purpose. The purpose of protecting rights is not to allow people to do whatever they want; that’s anarchy (in the perjorative sense of “chaos”).
The purpose of protecting rights is to allow people to live free from coercion by others, as independent, rational beings. So what possible purpose could there be in, for instance, the government’s upholding of the “right” of someone to agree to be bound by sharia law, such that he will be stoned to death if he commits adultery? If someone wants to kill himself for no reason, or to do something really unwise with his own property, that’s one thing.
The problem is when someone expects the government to enforce his past decisions on his present self, in a way contrary to the rational requirements for living as a human being. There is no reason why they should enforce such an agreement.
And obviously, you don’t have the unlimited right to raise your children in whatever way you want. You do not own them; they are not your property. They have rights to life, liberty, and property, too, but you hold them in trust until they gain the capacity to properly exercise them. And as the trustee, you have certain enforceable obligations to them. As I said, the exact nature of those obligations is probably the most complicated and difficult question in political philosophy.
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“is that it allows for the possibility of communities excluding people based on factors that, in popular view, it is simply fundamentally immoral to take account of when making decisions.”
Surely an overstatement. Does anyone believe it is immoral to take account of such factors—religion, race, political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation—in deciding who to marry? Who to date? Who you feel like arguing with?
The popular view you describe (with which, of course, I disagree) seems to be pretty much limited to market transactions such as hiring or renting. And even then, only to one side of those transactions. I don’t believe there is any legal rule against, or support for a legal rule against, a potential employee turning down an employment offer because of the employer’s race, religion, etc., or a potential tenant choosing not to rent from a particular landlord on similar grounds.
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And this is why people throw around the “beep-boop, I’m a Glibertarian” insult. Your statement is completely divorced from reality; for one, atomized societies have existed – this is more or less modern America, except for minority ethnic groups (this will become important later) – and they do not result in libertarian utopias, they result in people wasting resources and time trying to screw one another over, while also trying to prevent themselves from getting screwed over. When this happens, power begins to accrue to winners in these conflicts, and you end up with tyranny anyway.
La Rasa says “hola.” It’s important to focus on your examples, particularly who they are not. You will not get 300+ million people (let alone over 6 billion) to realize the past 200,000 years of human evolution was all a lie and there was no reason have tribes in the first place, for much the same reason everyone doesn’t beat their swords (and fighter planes, and warships, and nuclear weapons) into plowshares – whichever tribe “defects” wins in a walk. The only immigrants who seem to be willing to cast aside ethnic solidarity are the ones from Europe, and even that isn’t complete and has taken generations.
Not to turn this towards the dreaded “race” issue, but you simply have not been paying any attention at all if you think ethnic minorities are going to cast aside their ethnic loyalties, as blue-tribe whites have.
How does a libertarian, in good faith, prohibit developers from creating homeowner’s associations and mandating that home-buyers join as a prerequisite for purchase. Because that’s how Homeowner’s associations are formed in America.
No, it most certainly does not. It means a minority, for their own benefit, import a servant class that will drive down wages (and thus, production costs), while externalizing all the risks (higher crime, ethnic strife, poorer communities) onto the existing lower and middle classes.
The founding principle of America – and at least nominally, all modern liberal democracies – is that the government is organized by the people for their own benefit. The American government was created to ensure the rights of Americans, even if this were not to the benefit on non-Americans. You’ve no right to demand that Americans bear no loyalty to their fellow Americans, which would in every meaningful sense mean America no longer exists, because you think you can make a quick buck.
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@ nyccine:
Sorry, I don’t share your view that “atomization” (in the sense I mean it is responsible for the rise of the welfare state, etc.
Your argument is the same old conservative argument that’s been repeated for at least three centuries: that man has got to be either a slave to the local community, the Church, and tradition, or else—once these bonds are dissolved—a slave to some kind of tyrannical central state which looms over everyone. I believe that a third alternative is possible: that man can live as an independent being existing as a equal with all others in society, without his interests’ being fundamentally in conflict with others’.
My basic disagreement with you is that you hold a fundamentally adversarial view of people’s interests. That’s pretty much it. If that’s true, there can only be a war of all against all, at least until some of the people form temporary alliances to get other people before they get them.
I don’t believe that Hispanics are fundamentally different from the other groups that have successfully assimilated into liberal, bourgeois values that characterize the best part of American culture.
Hell, to a large extent, American culture has been so successfully exported around the world that large populations are being “pre-assimilated”.
I think alarmism about Hispanic immigration is hysterical, short-sighted, and fundamentally the product of outgroup bias. Therefore, the solution is to fight that bias, not to kowtow to it.
A libertarian does not prevent that. There is nothing wrong with that.
But a rational libertarian does prevent someone from saying “Here is my little Taliban community. Anyone who moves here agrees to be executed for blaspheming against Allah.”
Again, I do not share your adversarial view of the relationship between rich and poor.
Yes, I think immigration benefits the rich. It also benefits everyone else.
Immigrants drive down nominal wages. But insofar as they can be more productive in America compared to their situation in their home countries, they also lower the prices of the goods and services the poor and middle-class buy, thereby raising real wages. The nominal wage loss is one-time; the real wage gain is continual.
Moreover, native workers start with certain enormous advantages over most potential immigrants, meaning that the native population moves up in relative class. For instance, a middle-class or even a formerly lower-class American family becomes able to afford a maid or a nanny because the cost of basic menial labor is no longer being inflated by protectionist immigration barriers.
In fact, the reason immigration barriers don’t benefit the poor is the same reason high “protective” tariffs don’t actually benefit business. The steel manufacturer is hurt by the abolition of the steel tariff—but he his helped by the abolition of every other tariff. Each lower-class American is hurt by the immigrants that compete with him to produce the things he makes, but this is more than cancelled out by the immigrants that compete to lower the price of everything he buys.
But what the hell, maybe tariffs are a necessary part of “making America great again”, too.
America was most certainly not founded on the idea that Americans have the right to enrich themselves by violating the rights of others—if this were even possible in the long run, which it is not.
As James Madison put it:
Moreover, if your adversarial, amoral, Hobbesean view were correct, it would be no argument that I should feel some kind of “solidarity” with my fellow Americans. Rather, it would show that I should gang up with some of my fellow Americans to oppress the rest. Maybe with the help of some willing foreigners.
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If immigrants competed with all members of society equally and raised the price of all things equally, this would be true, but they don’t. The competition disporportionately harms poor people, and the reduction in price disproportionately helps rich people. So even if they balance out on average, they don’t balance out for the poor.
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“The competition disporportionately harms poor people, and the reduction in price disproportionately helps rich people. So even if they balance out on average, they don’t balance out for the poor.”
They don’t “balance out on average.” Just as in other cases of gains by trade, the gain is larger than the loss. It’s still possible that some people lose on net, but it doesn’t automatically follow, as in your argument.
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Moreover, the gain is a continual gain produced by each new productive immigrant per year. The loss is one-time per immigrant.
They drive down nominal wages once. But after doing so, they keep producing for the rest of their working lives.
So even if in the short run, it is net negative for (some of) the poor, in the long run it is net positive.
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@ nyccine:
I forgot to add an additional but very important point.
People like you keep complaining that “La Raza” are sticking together and maintaining their ethnic loyalties.
But what the hell do you expect them to do, so long as there are a very large number of people who are openly hostile and discriminatory toward Hispanics, and who want to throw many of them out of the country?
I guess you’re saying that the whites should get in on the game and form the “National Association for the Advancement of White People”. I think there have been a few groups like that…
The point is, groups like the NAACP and La Raza are mainly formed in response to majority discrimination, in order to provide a means to help their members address it. They are not groups out to despoil and pillage the white race. The NAACP itself is basically dying, as are many black colleges, etc. precisely because black people no longer find them as necessary as they once did.
You’re basically saying “we’ve got to subjugate the Hispanic race before they subjugate the white race”. It’s one tribe versus the other. How about we have a government—and a system of objective laws—that enforces the “king’s peace”?
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I call shenanigans. The NAACP was indeed formed in response to majority discrimination, but La Raza? Hispanics have not in fact been historically discriminated against in the US. They’ve generally been a poorer subgroup, but that’s because they’re coming from poorer countries. We didn’t do that to them.
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@ Jaskologist:
Give me a break. Yes, anti-Hispanic discrimination was far less extensive than anti-black discrimination. But if you don’t think that there has been discrimination and intolerance toward “wetbacks” and “spics”, I don’t know what to tell you.
For instance, there was that one time the federal government sent betweem 500,000 and 2 million people “back” to Mexico, over half of whom were U.S. citizens.
And they sure as hell didn’t circulate as social equals with non-Hispanic whites in places like mid-century Los Angeles, etc. There were race riots against them.
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Also, unless you’re specifically thinking of the NCLR, which is a pretty limited organization, ‘La Raza’ isn’t a U.S.-specific thing and mostly refers to taking pride in mestizo unity across all the former Spanish colonies. It is about shedding centuries old tribal divisions to become one big mixed race.
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@ Adam:
Correct.
I was referring primarily to NCLR, but by metonymy to the whole idea of organizations aimed at advancing Hispanics as a race. You’re also right that much of it is not only aimed at extra-Hispanic discrimination but also at intra-Hispanic discrimination: getting people to stop thinking in terms of the Spanish colonial caste system, with its rigid racial designators.
Yes, there is something very wrong when people take this too far and think of themselves solely in as “members of a race” and not as individuals. But I have a very different opinion of a minority doing this to fight back against mistreatment than I have of a majority doing it to fight to maintain legal privileges.
I am the first to say things like the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers are very harmful and counter-productive. But they didn’t materialize out of the aether, either.
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[Setting aside the question of whether the claim is correct, because I’m sure there will be more than a few people who would strenuously argue with that] – at least in the US, I would say that the left is more or less still fairly anti-globalization. But the Democratic Party has been dominated by the centrist wing of the party for the last ~25 years, and the leftists outside the party have been more concerned with protesting other things (war, race, sexuality, etc). And also the particularly militant view of anti-globalism became sort of… old fashioned, stodgy, unappealing.
However I think that the basic strand of thought is still there, and I think you can see it, for instance, as one of the constituent parts of Bernie’s appeal economically.
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Yes. It seems pretty clear to me that identity politics are promoted by blue elites to divert attention away from the traditional working class issues. Still, I am surprised by how thorough their success has been. I can see a party changing course decisively, but what happened to the actual individuals who were against globalization? Did they just leave politics? Did they see the error of their ways and merged back into orthodoxy?
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I would guess they just aged out of serious protesting. My impression is the WTO Seattle protesters were mostly in their 20s and 30s, as are the most serious BLM protesters today. Hard to put yourself in the way of actual police violence when you’ve got a family, or are at the age where a truncheon is likely to cause you serious problems. Plus it probably feels like a lost battle at this point — identity politics seem more up for grabs.
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“Bad for workers who lost their jobs” isn’t the same as “bad for America”. If you consider the (almost certainly oversimplified) 4-class model, the underclass and gentry benefit from cheaper goods, while the job losses go to the labour class.
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I think a lot of people were convinced by the argument:
“Globalization has lifted millions in China and India out of poverty and vastly improved their lives. To argue that globalization is bad is equivalent to saying it would be preferable for all those people to have remained impoverished so that a much smaller number of Americans could keep relatively high-paying blue collar jobs.”
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Preferred link including sample chapters 0-4:
– http://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/girl-intercorrupted/
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I liked the story.
(Edit: Removed small spoiler about someone with the middle name Moloch)
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Can we kill all mosquitos in the world to eliminate mosquitos?
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You’ve got my vote.
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God wills it!
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I was a bit incredulous about the study on fertility differences after exposure to capitalist TV. Perhaps because I grew up in East Germany at the time, and am therefore more opinionated than it is justified.
Of course, the described effect is a lot smaller than the birth rate difference between East and West (1.7 vs. 1.4), because economic policy trumps cultural influence. If I read the study correctly, we are talking about a 4% effect (+/-3%, for a sample of 1000 women). The authors only seem to summarize the result in quantitative terms (“reduces fertility”).
The big elephant in the room is that the study does not look at total TV consumption. At the time of the survey (1988/1989), East Germany had two TV channels, which broadcasted between them a total of 177 hours of programming per week, with a high rate of educational and propagandistic content, and often less appealing entertainment value. At the same time, West Germans had (on average) a choice between 9 channels, which competed for the attention of the viewers. As a result, “watching a lot of West German TV” may have been synonymous with “watching a lot of TV”. (No data on the actual hours spent in front of the TV is given.)
The study does not give us information about wether East German TV audiences were indeed convinced by the alleged West German efforts at promoting small families. After all, West German TV also promoted freedom, democracy and consumerism, with the paradoxical result that East Germans that could receive West German TV channels were MORE happy with living in East Germany. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen)
I find the hypothesis of a causal relationship between spending more hours in front of the TV (after controlling for educational attainment, social status, religiosity, marital status and income) and having fewer children quite plausible, without any reference to ideological influences. In my hasty reading, I may have missed the part of the study where the authors are excluding this obvious interpretation?
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You the guy who blogged a photograph of himself and Marvin Minsky the other day?
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I suppose I am one of those guys, one of those other days.
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Israel is turning increasingly oppressive and violent… against Israeli Jews:
http://972mag.com/torture-is-just-another-symptom-of-the-occupation/114989/
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/adam-shatz/israels-putinisation
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If torturing members of all groups rather than Palestinians shows that Israel is acting especially badly, then torturing only Palestinians must show that Israel is not acting as badly. I am awaiting a press release from this group to that effect.
(Also, note the word “alleged” in there.)
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Angela Duckworth has a book coming out about the awesome power of grit. She has personally benefited a lot from grit (e.g., winning a MacArthur “Genius Grant”) even if no one else has.
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The problem isn’t that grit, possibly aka conscientiousness, isn’t awesome (I certainly wish I had more), but that as with so many other good qualities it may be very difficult to increase one’s native endowment.
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Try as I might, my brain is still reading that New York Times article as satire, not something anyone working at a major publication would actually believe. Then again, sufficiently advanced Satire is indistinguishable from reality.
I’m also intrigued by that resting heart rate one.
Was I a hyper kid and a bit of a delinquent as a teen until my granddad got me involved in boxing. I also had a resting heart rate in the low 40s and I remember my parents being worried that I might have inherited my dad’s low blood pressure.
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The attempt to ‘revive’ Confucianism appears as if it’s motivated not by a belief in Confucianism as true, but as useful in some way – either as an identity, or as likely to lead to a good outcome or good outcomes. If those who take up Confucianism do so as an identity (in the mold of the ‘identity’ that ‘ethnic’ people are supposed to have, in the view of modern Western progressivism) and do not believe in its truth, then it will be but a costume, an identity-construct, empty, and ungrounded in and not arising from lived experience.
And it is still not an alternative to modern Western universalist liberalism, but an even-more complete caving in to one of its assumptions about how the world is (that there are multiple ‘peoples’ with their own ‘cultures’, etc; this is also one of the bases of the idea of ‘appropriation’, and so on) – and an attempt to actually confirm to this worldview and your place in it through what is a ritual enactment of the role that this worldview assigns you (one of the ‘peoples’ with a ‘culture’, etc); a complete caving in (in that the Confucian identity is assumed as ‘your’ ‘cultural’ identity as demanded by this worldview; a placing of this identity as completely subservient to the worldview in which it performs the function of such a role), and not at all any kind of a rebellion. A return to Confucianism, were it genuine, would look and feel wrong, and out of place, and be discomfiting to a modern person; it would feel like as if something were ‘wrong with history’, so to speak. (My language here is imprecise as I’m trying to capture a felt sense I suspect may accompany a true revival.) The Western progressive worldview demands that ‘native peoples’ perform a ritual rebellion against it by ’embracing’ their ‘culture’; and the Chinese people mentioned in this article are, I think, doing exactly this, and not actually reviving genuine Confucianism.
Because a true revival would have sought what Confucianism/Confucious sought, not minding too much if the forms this took in the modern world were unrecognisably different from the ancient ones.
It is only truth that can dethrone Western universalism (to the extent that it is untrue, of course; and perhaps its current internal contradictions as well, if they are forcibly denied for too long), not such revivals and identity-constructs; and a lived truth grounded in experience at that.
Let us see what happens.
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@ Aneesh Mulye
The attempt to ‘revive’ Confucianism appears as if it’s motivated not by a belief in Confucianism as true, but as useful in some way
Thank you very much. I apologize for my ignorance but must ask with honest crudity.
We say things like “I/Christians believe God made the world, there is one Heaven and one Hell, no multiple lives nor rebirth.” We also say things like “I/Christians believe in doing XYZ, or in Kindness, Forgiveness, etc.” That is different meanings of ‘believe’.
I wonder what your true Confucian believes in the first sense? Cosmology, one might say.
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I get the sense that all those Eastern-type religions are a lot fuzzier on cosmology than Judeo-Christian ones are.
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Having actually studied Confucious a little bit, I think Aneesh is off base, because Confucious was all about doing things that were likely to lead to good outcomes. His opinion on cosmology was that it was beneficial for everyone to respect the traditional gods and participate in the same rituals to maintain a sense of community and foster trust; he didn’t really seem to advocate believing in them at all.
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@ Protagoras
Beware of attributing to Aneesh something that was in my question to zim.
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You wrote:
“We say things like “I/Christians believe God made the world, there is one Heaven and one Hell, no multiple lives nor rebirth.” We also say things like “I/Christians believe in doing XYZ, or in Kindness, Forgiveness, etc.” That is different meanings of ‘believe’.”
I’m a religious Jew, not a Christian, but as a religious Jew I don’t really see those as two different senses of “believe.”
I believe that G-d creates (present tense) the world, that there are post-physical consequences to our actions and choices (that we have choices!), and so forth. Because of these beliefs (this perception of reality), I also believe (perceive reality to be such) that I ought to act in a certain way; namely, a way which comports with His expectations of me.
In both cases, “I believe thus” is synonymous with “I perceive reality to be thus.”
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This is not universalist liberalism. It’s the opposite of universalist liberalism.
It’s one of the base assumptions of a certain wing of Left identitarianism, but that wing is neither universalist nor particularly liberal.
(It’s been a while since I read Confucius, but I actually remember him being fairly universalist in his assumptions [if highly illiberal in implementation]; he talks a lot about relationships between ruler and governed, but I don’t remember him saying that those are influenced much by national or ethnic character. Of course, the people promoting him this time around might be interpreting him in a weird way.)
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Precisely. Cultural relativism and historicism are diametrically opposed to universalist liberalism.
The only difference between left and right identitarianism is what “identity” they align themselves with. Universalist liberalism denies the conflict.
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It’s funny, in the last OT I was musing about secularish alternatives to meaningful ritual and there was Confucianism right under my (Sinologist’s) nose. Confucianism arguably is the school of secular ethics and ritual with the oldest, most extensive pedigree in the world, I’d say. Confucius specifically declined to comment on issues of “spirits and ghosts.” Of course he had a basically Chinese cosmology, but that wasn’t at all key to his teachings.
In fact, most of the early Confucian ritual theorizers like Xunzi specifically talk about how ritual works because of its effects on the practitioners (as opposed to, say, because it pleases the gods). Xunzi, the third most prominent early Confucian, was, in fact, a vocal atheist.
I also think Confucianism is eminently practicable in today’s world, though some its demands would strike a modern person as excessive (unmarried men and women can’t hand things directly to one another; 27 months of eating a bland diet and wearing rough clothes after the death of a parent, etc).
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Related: New Yorkers meet a cuddly, accessible Confucius:
http://www.ecns.cn/2016/02-18/199578.shtml
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A file system that is truly in the cloud: https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
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“If Clinton wins the primary, will Sanders backers be too bitter to support her in the general? I’m betting ‘no’”
I’m betting they will still vote for her, but be less willing to volunteer, show up at events, &c, than they would otherwise be if the fight hadn’t gone sour. Thus, they might cost her votes in indirect ways. Support is not a binary variable.
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For what it’s worth, I’m seeing memes on facebook about supporting Hillary even if you like Sanders better because it’s really important to defeat the Republican candidate.
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Yeah, but they’re being posted by Hillary supporters.
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Wasn’t particularly surprising to me given the earlier study Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil, which looked at the impact upon fertility rates of access to soap operas (containing smaller family sizes).
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When seeing families with lots of children, my mother used to say “looks like they don’t own a TV”.
The way she explained to me was that people with no access to cheap entertainment are so bored that they literally have no better thing to do than making lots of kids. Not sure how true her reasoning on the causality is, but I’m pretty sure the correlation at least is true.
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Depending on the temporal and spacial context, this may also have been because poverty, which is associated with higher fertility, caused the absence of a TV. (This explanation would not work in recent times, but I believe that there was a time in the past when poor people didn’t have so many TVs.)
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Maybe. Where I’m from, TVs were a priority acquisition even for poor people. More important than, say, a fridge or a motorcycle. What you say definitely applied in my mother’s generation, when TV was still a luxury.
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Re: place names. Anyone want to visit Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein?
(Translates to “Two buffalo shot stone dead with one shot fountain”)
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If I managed to shoot two buffalo dead with one shot I would not let anyone forget it ever, and I would definitely write it out on a mountain in giant letters. I mean, killing one is hard enough!
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No, killing multiple buffalo with one shot is easy. Just use artillery.
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What I think more likely is the attempt to eradicate will be almost successful, missing a tiny minority of mutants capable of withstanding the substances levied against them, which will become the new dominant subspecies and we’ll have to invent stronger poisons.
EDIT: Have no idea what happened there. Wanted to comment on mosquitos.
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There’s more than one way to drive down populations. One highly successful approach is to release lots of healthy males carrying a deadly trait.
There’s some chance that a small portion of the population will either avoid the deadly allele or evolve to detect and avoid such males but then they can just collect some of that population and engineer them with a new deadly gene 10 years later. Lots of freedom here.
If the mosquito population gets low enough you could even cause a bottleneck in the population making them less diverse and less able to evolve resistance to future attacks.
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I still think it’s easy to fuck up, like they fucked up bedbug extermination.
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It might be easy to screw up in theory, but in selected species it has worked remarkably well. WP has a good run down.
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The year is 2050. Ian Rand is leaving his Nashua home when he is approached by his friend Bart Bob.
“Hail, brother!” Bart says, “In the name of liberty! Would you like some marijuana? Or to exchange bitcoin?”
“Sorry, brother,” Ian replies, “But today I feel depressed.”
“Depressed, brother?” Bart exclaims, “Depressed? In Libertopia? But here we have the greatest civilisation known to man! Why, there are no politicians, no policemen, no border guards…”
“We don’t need border guards,” Ian sighs, “No one been able to drive here since the government stopped fixing the roads.”
“That’s the beauty of it! But, brother, tell me, what ails you?”
“I’m bored.”
“Bored? Why, brother, how can you be bored with marijuana, assault weapons and anarcho-capitalist book clubs?”
“I don’t know,” says Ian, with a shrug, “I don’t know. I just think that – I just think that now we have got the libertarian utopia we always dreamed of I have realised – I have realised that all I ever wanted was to argue with statists…”
“I understand, brother,” Bart says, with a nod, “I understand. Come. The ambassador from Idaho is visiting us and you can argue with him about monarchism.”
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Hahaha!
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Butch Otter says hello!
(Yes, the governor of Idaho is named Butch Otter. Well, Clement Leroy Otter, but I’m not sure which is more awesome. The more you know….)
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This is an appropriate place to link to this video of the 2014 Idaho GOP Governor’s debate.
Butch Otter was being challenged by an upstart Tea Partier, so he arranged to have the debate open to all comers, including an ex-biker who believed he was called by God to be President of the US, and an elderly man who had served time in prison for illegally homeschooling his children. You can watch the video for yourself to see how having the two extra participants serves to make the Tea Partier look even more crazy compared to Otter. It’s some real political genius.
Also it’s pretty hilarious to watch.
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This is the best. “(Question about same-sex marriage). (Answer:) Discrimination! Let me tell you about discrimination. In nineteen ninety-, belay that, in nineteen sixty-four, the Blacks got the Civil Rights Act passed. We bikers! Discimination? the cops, we are COP-MAGNETS, like a Playboy bunny wearing a mini-skirt gets hit on all the time! … [Gay people] have TRUE LOVE for each other, they love each other more than I love my motorcycle …”
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Uh, okay.
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idgi
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Re: the maths schools – this is the worst possible analogy to use for what the reporter is trying to communicate that the “problem-solving” schools are doing versus the “cram schools” and ordinary schools:
NO. No, no, no, no, no, and if the reporter (though I suppose I should really say “colour piece writer”) understood what they were writing about, they’d see the error. You can teach a class of kids (to stick with the analogy) to sing a piece by ear, but if you want them to understand how to sing or play a piece they’ve never heard, then they have to be able to read music. And if they’re really going to understand what is going on in a piece of music, then there’s the whole vocabulary and concepts of musicology to encounter later on.
The “singing Tosca” group are, in fact, the “learn the times tables” group in the ‘duelling teaching styles’ example the story presented; they’re learning the piece/concepts by ear/by rote and simply reproducing it, but they couldn’t write it out or read the score if given. The “lectured on musical notation” group are the ‘Russian school’ kids – they’re learning the underlying concepts and being given the tools to use.
Grrrrr. This kind of sloppy, slick-on-the-surface but unthinking metaphor is why I grump like a troll under my bridge. The imagery obviously appealed to the reporter (producing something beautiful and high-level and difficult versus boring old drudgery to show the difference in the product the two rival approaches were turning out) but, to quote the “Two Stupid Dogs” cartoon: “Aw, ain’t that cute? But it’s wrong!“
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I think Art Tatum and George Shearing would probably disagree with the idea that knowledge of notation is necessary for musical excellence. Being able to write out a score is not a particularly useful skill in any area of practical musicianship, in comparison to the ability to learn a piece by ear.
Being able to read music is a useful skill (especially in classical music) but a lecture is on how to do it isn’t the way to learn it. I think the analogy works as a comparison between learning something basic an easy way, and doing something much more impressive (although I’m not sure how useful having a group sing an aria would be).
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This is correct; “understanding musical notation and the vocabulary of musical theory” is only a subset of “understanding music” — music theory, like a grammar book, is descriptive, not prescriptive; it merely describes, compartimentize and put labels on patterns and systems that already exist in an intuitive form — and thus can be learned without passing through the medium of formal music theory.
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Being able to play by ear is the rote memorisation that the article is decrying. Learning that such things as scores exist and that there is a method for writing down music so that you can learn by yourself a piece you have not heard played or sung beforehand is the ‘teach the children how to think so they will understand the concepts, not the times tables’ that this new/old/Russian/whatever approach is praising.
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But this analogy breaks down because historically most composers and improvisers could not read scores — when they existed at all. Music as a written language is a lot more recent and music literacy a lot more restricted in distribution than the equivalent things for human languages.
Written music has allowed the development of music that involved much larger orchestras and therefore more complex harmonic texture, but it was never essential to composition and improvisation, even in relatively recent times — although some important jazz pioneers (like Duke Ellington) were classically trained, others (like Django Reinhardt) were completely illiterate musically.
In fact, an ongoing problem in the performance of music for which only score, and no recordings exist, is the reconstruction of the actual interpretative details, which were typically not written.
As the result, the same piece by Bach, played on the same instrument, without deviating an inch from the information given by the score, can be rendered in completely different ways depending on whether the performer follows the modern canons of interpretation of common practice music, or if they rather go for historically informed performance.
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I assumed that was a reference to a mathematicians lament.
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The problem with the China free trade jobs analysis is it includes the Great Recession and subsequent jobless recovery.
If the control group is Europe, where protectionism is stronger, jobs were even worse during the period.
But both examples ignore obvious impacts. In the 1930s there wasn’t free trade with China and jobs sucked. In World War II we traded a lot more with China and jobs were excellent.
Should you rent or buy a home? Obviously the Great Recession is going to give a very different answer than 1990s home buyers got.
Finally, tariffs on China won’t solve the problem. An iPhone will cost $900 and still be made in China. Simply put China might be taking our jobs, but trade restrictions won’t bring them back. Looking at Europe, unemployment will just get worse.
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World war 2? I think you mean something else since the Japanese controlled the Pacific and Chinese coast. Post war, the commies took over and we didn’t trade with them until the 1970s (Nixon).
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Why on earth didn’t the South Carolina poll ask the same questions of Democrats as Republicans? Or did they and did they simply choose not to include those answers? It’s almost like they had a pre-set view of what Republican voters would be like, but given that it’s a private business that does not (as far as I can see from their web site) have any particular political affiliation, that doesn’t make sense. Though there is this perhaps indicative phrase in the summation:
It reads oddly: “Let’s ask the racist xenophobes in-depth questions but the pure, kind, good Democrat voters only need to answer a few basic questions”. If the purpose was to do an attack on Trump (“religious and racial intolerance supporters”), then this poll is perhaps slanted, perhaps not a completely impartial one, perhaps not totally accurate? I really do not understand why they didn’t ask the internment, mosque, flag, etc. questions of the Democrat voters (33 questions versus 11). That does make it sound slanted to me but I really have no idea why they’d have an axe to grind – unless it was commissioned by someone who wanted to paint Trump and his support in the worst light possible, which sounds like intra-party shenanigans. Seeing as how this is a private business that conducts commercial polls, somebody must have hired them to do so, and that raises an interesting question of who and why, given the unequal polling questions.
I think the barbecue sauce question is to do with identifying what regional areas the voters come from, apparently there are big differences between what kind of sauce is favoured in any particular place
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I was wondering the same thing.
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What about Earth, Texas for most generic place name?
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Positivly creative compared to Newton/Newtown.
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Man, the ideas in that gene-drives.com seem like a recipe for disaster.
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It represents the worst constructivist impulses of the LessWrong fragilista types.
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To be fair, negative utilitarians are a small minority on lesswrong.
It doesn’t look like the author is planning to actually implement it and they seem suitably uncertain about the outcomes. It doesn’t seem like a bad thing to simply lay out the options for comment.
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I’m not even talking about negative utilitarianism, I mean, like, the naive belief that extremely complex systems can be made strictly better with some smart-sounding models. Like high modernists of the mid-20th century.
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Well.. in reality many many things can be improved massively by relatively modest interventions.
If you live in a social group which glories in not doing anything and mocks anyone who attempts to do anything then you’ll only ever hear much about historical interventions which failed.
On the other side of the balance sheet there’s things like providing smallpox/polio vaccines, crop rotation and getting doctors to actually wash their hands.
All terribly terribly simple ideas based on smart models which were more correct than the models that the people around them were using.
Often they run into the problem that most people are cunts and none of these things have gone smoothly yet all have been overwhelmingly positive.
Most positive world changing ideas are simple.
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@Murphy
I’m just saying that interventions aren’t good per se. Obviously things can be figured out and made better (you’d have to be insane to not believe this) but not every suggested changed is good, even if they sound smart, particularly for very complicated systems.
Mid-20th-century economics is a great example of this. Most of the managerial prescriptions are considering ludicrously naive by today’s standards, even though everyone back then considered it to be super “scientific.”
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Interventions aren’t automatically good. Indeed they can be very harmful. Communism for example was a fairly complex idea that was based on some incorrect premises and ended up being very harmful.
Whether an intervention is simple or complex tells you very little about how effective it’s going to be. Ideally we’d test interventions on a small scale and base as many choices on good blinded RCT’s as possible to make it more likely that we could rule out bad interventions.
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Very entertaining disaster! I say go for it, the shitstorm will be hilarious. Especially when something goes wrong.
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The link to the Cards Against Humanity subreddit sends the reader to the top posts of the last 24 hours rather than of all time.
Also let me register my distaste at your linking to the CAH subreddit. It seems clear to me that CAH is an unpleasant game that should not be promoted / encouraged.
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>It seems clear to me that CAH is an unpleasant game that should not be promoted / encouraged.
Isn’t it just Apples to Apples with “offensive” subjects?
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Right, but CAH normalises the joking about offensive things by allowing the players to say them from behind a cloak of irony. I’m not a fan.
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I’m… not sure I get the problem.
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tkmh is morally opposed to humor.
The only jokes to be allowed in the new regime will be the kind of morally upstanding and inoffensive ones we all know and love from Christmas crackers.
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> tkmh is morally opposed to humor.
I’m not seeking to ban CAH, only pointing out that I think its jokes are weak and harmful. Good jokes that are edgy or offensive are possible, but not in the CAH way. It’s a sneering, cynical way of making a racist joke without appearing to be a racist. The joke is “it’s funny because you can’t say those things”. But you can say those things, its just that people don’t choose to because they find them morally reprehensible.
CAH delivers a way for you to say offensive things without taking any responsibility for them. It’s cowardly.
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Right….
So offensive jokes are only acceptable in your world when people really mean them with all their heart?
Breaking taboos for the sake of them being taboos has a long tradition in humor.
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Go easy on tkmh. Without people like them, CAH would be less fun.
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>tkmh is morally opposed to humor.
Geez Louise, talk about overreaction.
>It’s a sneering, cynical way of making a racist joke without appearing to be a racist.
Do you think that one cannot make racist jokes without being racist?
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> So offensive jokes are only acceptable in your world when people really mean them with all their heart?
No, of course not. I’m saying that whether a joke is offensive depends on context, and it’s up to the person telling the joke to decide whether or not they think it’s appropriate. What CAH does is bypass that decision and set up a context in which it’s always appropriate to say those things – you’re not really saying them, you’re just playing the cards. In isolation that’s fine, but in practice it could be hurtful to other people you are playing with / could have other undesirable consequences (e.g. reinforcing the belief of an actual racist playing the game that their horrible shitty views are culturally accepted).
> Breaking taboos for the sake of them being taboos has a long tradition in humor.
I’d argue that breaking taboos is not the same thing as being deliberately offensive.
> Go easy on tkmh. Without people like them, CAH would be less fun.
Another part of it is that by marketing itself as ‘for horrible people’ CAH neatly sidesteps questions about its ethics. It allows the people playing it to think of themselves as an ingroup and to see anyone who disapproves as uncool / just not their kind of person. I should say here that none of the cards I’ve seen in CAH (I’ve played 3 or 4 games) are offensive to me personally, but I’ve decided that I’m just not comfortable playing it.
> Do you think that one cannot make racist jokes without being racist?
No I don’t think that. I do think that it’s quite difficult to create a situation in which one can safely make racist jokes, and I don’t think CAH always provides that situation. The real objection is that the game itself appears to relieve you of responsibility for deciding if it’s okay.
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So you’re saying that CAH creates a safe space for crass jokes.
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> So you’re saying that CAH creates a safe space for crass jokes.
Sort of. More accurately it creates the impression of a safe space for those jokes. It fools the players into thinking that this is a situation in which crass jokes have no consequences.
On one occasion I played, there were about 20 of us in the game and there was one black guy there, who had come with his girlfriend, and didn’t know anybody else (I’m from rural England and my friends and I are overwhelmingly white). In the course of the game someone had to read out the “black people” card as the punchline to one of the crass jokes. It was horribly uncomfortable. I’m confident that none of us would have made that joke with a black guy we didn’t know very well in the room if we weren’t playing the game.
Seperately, as you quite rightly note below, CAH just isn’t that funny. The first time I played it I cried with laughter (before I thought through the ethical implications). Now, even putting moral objections aside, I find it tiresome and unfunny. The best two-word description I can think of for CAH is ‘diminishing returns’.
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Which will be a huge problem the day that people start being forced to play CAH.
I know this is going to be a radical idea for you but if you don’t like playing it you can simply choose not to play.
If you’re easily offended and don’t want to be offended then don’t play a game where the aim of the game is for the other players to offend you.
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> I know this is going to be a radical idea for you…
I really wish you wouldn’t keep on assuming that you know how / what I think.
Obviously people can choose whether or not to play it. I’m explaining why I choose not to play it. I think you are mistaken in thinking that the point of the game is to offend people. People don’t like being offended: if that was the point of the game it wouldn’t be a success. The point of the game is to create an environment that gives the impression of transgression, while absolving the players of any responsibility for / consequences of the transgression. My point is that people may not be aware at first that this is what’s going on: I wasn’t when I first played it.
So I encourage my friends (in a non-combative way) not to play, on the basis that they wouldn’t make those jokes without the game allowing them to. You might argue here that I have no right to impose my morality on others, but I’m not imposing, I’m seeking to persuade them.
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Seconded. Although people can do what they like, I doubt many SSC readers find CAH particularly funny.
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I think it’s hysterical if played with clever players, and tedious and stupid if played with non-clever opponents. However, this is how I perceive most games.
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How funny did you find the examples on the link? To me, they consisted of 2 mediocre fowl/foul puns, and a few “lol Hitler is funny”s. Or do you mean the humour you find in a combination of cards depends on who played them?
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Sometimes it does depend on who played them…and whose turn it is. One of my own favorite plays:
‘A broken condom is a slippery slope to… my worthless son.‘
…played when my dad had to read it out.
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I’ve only played twice, so maybe this wouldn’t hold up, but once I was trashed and once I was sober. It was funny when I was trashed.
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I’ve played four-player games a couple times with two clever players and two dull players. It was like we were playing in two different languages—the clever players loved clever plays and thought dull plays were stupid, and vice versa.
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It’s very funny the first time, and incredibly boring on any subsequent play.
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I doubt many SSC readers find CAH particularly funny WITH A NAKED DEAD TODDLER CORPSE ON THEIR BACK.
…he said, as he played his CAH card.
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Well, it’s not like they don’t explicitly market it to horrible people.
As a horrible person myself, I love it.
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Speaking as an actual horrible person, the “horrible people” who like CAH are fucking posers.
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Hrm. I’d argue that, but I think liking cats disqualifies me from being a genuinely horrible person.
On the other hand, I respond to passing ambulances with “Yay Death!”, I root for the tentacle monsters in Japanese hentai, and for a very long time my fondest ambition was to exterminate the human species. I like to think that puts me at least in Doctor Horrible range, if not actual horrible range.
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I would argue that is just edgelord territory. Do you have the capacity to be cruel to individuals? To ruin a person’s day, not just to hate broadly defined groups of humanity? To be mean to a waitress, or a janitor, or a service worker to their face?
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Psssh, you think that’s bad? I often act immaturely.
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@Frog Do: No. Hell, I don’t even have the capacity to be cruel to individuals in video games. Admittedly I’m not very good at the whole being horrible thing.
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As ridiculous as it sounds from a theological, historical point of view, I bet there are many, many US Christians who either explicitly or subconsciously think of Allah as an entirely different god from their god.
I think this is because of the pull to turn religions into ethnic markers. For white, conservative Americans, Christianity is not just some religion from the Middle East, it’s the religion of white people–of Europe, of Christmas and Easter, of Constantine and Aquinas, and the Pilgrims and the Pope and the Church of England. It’s a religion for white Europeans. (And this explains the seemingly irrelevant controversy over whether or not Jesus was “white,” with liberals predictably saying he wasn’t, and conservatives predictably coming up with reasons why he was).
I don’t mean that to sound racist or imply that they’re racist for thinking that. I don’t think they have a problem with Koreans being Christians (if they know that many of them are). I just think they think of it as the religion of “their” ingroup. Muslims, due to recent world events and politics and media coverage, are very much the “outgroup” of conservative, white America. Culturally, ethnically, racially, geographically. Therefore, they worship a different god.
I think the more educated among the US faithful know this isn’t the case, of course, but I think there’s often a big gulf between religion as the theologians conceive it and religion as it’s actually practiced and intuitively understood by the great majority of the faithful. For the latter, ethnic identity is a big part of it, and, I think, a constant undercurrent pulling in that direction.
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Some months back, I attended a service at what turned out to be a very traditional Mennonite church. And by “traditional,” I mean “dressed like Amish in clothes they made themselves,” and “no instruments used during worship.”* I think I can safely assume that they were all ethnically German and that this means something to them in a way far beyond what it does to most of us “German” Americans. They even sang a few songs in German.
Anyway, I was there to hear a talk by Brother Yun, a prominent Chinese Christian who ultimately had to flee the country due to the persecution he faced there. The other half of the service was about an organization which works to rehabilitate (primarily Yazidi) women who were made into ISIS sex slaves, with which this church had been heavily involved.
Don’t fall for the left-wing stereotype of bitter clingers. Even the most parochial white Christians in the US are well aware that they have differently colored fellow believers. They are aware of the way Muslims treat their brethren in every country where they have power over them, treatment which ranges from second-class citizenship to extermination. And they are especially aware that they only get to hear about this treatment within their churches; the entire left-wing doesn’t even consider it worthy of mention.
* Interestingly, they did use a MacBook to project a video at one point in the service. We make odd compromises with modernity.
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For white, conservative Americans, Christianity is not just some religion from the Middle East, it’s the religion of white people–of Europe, of Christmas and Easter, of Constantine and Aquinas, and the Pilgrims and the Pope and the Church of England.
Ehh. I think you’re onto something, but I’m going to insist that you push out your borders just a hair. Every group thinks of their particular cluster of Christianity as ‘the’ true version, and so thinks of God as particularly responsive – and reflective of – them. Hence you get icons and images from across the world which show the Holy Family as having dark skin, or wearing deerhide & tradecloth clothing, or having almond eyes.
Most of the Christians I know – both Catholic and not – are comfortable in a particular range of religious practices, and services which are still Christian and yet vary too far from their accustomed “sort” seem off. Non-random examples: Mexican-centric masses, vs American Black masses, vs Polish-centric masses in the midwest, vs Scots-descent masses in the Puritan North East – all of these have very different rhythms, emphasis on speed or repetition, participation by the laity, interior decor, etc. Now, two parishes in the same town can be very different, but there are also wide regional variations. The north-of-Boston service starts on the dot of the hour, and runs straight through, no pauses. The Mexican-centric one starts seven minutes after the hour – ish – and allows for a lot of time to greet people around the collection and distribution of the host. The visitor from the African-American church is wondering why no one in the audience is clapping as they sing. There is room for a person from each of these to look at the others and have fairly serious concerns on theological grounds – is there a lack of respect? Is there too much formal ritual and not enough true faith? Is the emphasis on pleasing the people or on obeying God?
I do think that there is a wide concept of Christianity as a global/universal faith – perhaps more overtly in Catholicism than in Protestantism – with local variations. I think if you asked most people that they would say their own local church home would be the ‘true’ faith, and that the others – including the one across town of the same ethnic makeup – are not quite up to snuff, but still the same sort of thing.
(And let’s not forget that the reason there were two Catholic churches in the same town was because one was Poles and the other Italian, and all the Irish went up the road to the church in the next town. The ethnic divisions are not new, they just look different this year.)
Having said all that – I wonder how much ‘Judaeo-Christian’ heritage is seem as joint, vs just Christian, outside of the Northeast where the cultural and population influence of Jews is much, much higher than it is in the rest of the country. And these are all , vs I think a lot has to do with the ritual practice of that religion –
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Most churches seem far more universalist (in the non-theological sense) than that; holding fundraisers for missionaries or having them come speak at a church is a very regular thing at lots of churches.
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“conservatives predictably coming up with reasons why he was”
I haven’t ever actually seen an example of this, though I don’t doubt you could produce some I doubt it’s a norm. Or if it is, it is probably because Americans associate Jesus with being Jewish, and the Jews they are more familiar with are those who have mixed with Europeans for a few centuries, rather than those who lived in first century Jerusalem.
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The easy control group is Africa, where Christains and Muslims live in close contact, and ask them about their beliefs. Or there’s the thousands of years of Christian and Muslim wrestling with the subject. Why do you immediately jump to a racial analysis being the most important factor? I suspect you’re mapping Christian Evangelical to xenophobic American whites on the interior, but Christian Evangelicals are infamous for their support of Israel and missionary work, given the growth of the religion in the third world. I kind of suspect this is just clever Blue Tribe stereotyping of Red Tribe.
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“Or there’s the thousands of years of Christian and Muslim wrestling with the subject.”
More than a thousand years, less than two thousand.
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From an outsider perspective yes, though I’m sure both Christians and Muslims will quibble on how long truth has been human-knowable from their perspective.
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Muslims think of their religion as extending back long before Mohammed—he’s only the final prophet. But I don’t think Christians imagine that Christianity existed before the incarnation, even if Jesus did.
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It’s complicated. I believe the mainstream Christian position is that the Jewish prophets before Christ were getting instructions from the same dude as Jesus was, that those instructions were faithfully reproduced for the most part, but that Christianity per se marked the start of a new relationship (“covenant”) between man and God.
The Muslim position on the other hand is that Jesus and the Old Testament guys were getting instructions from the same dude as Muhammad, and that the expectations around the man/God relationship never changed, but that a lot got lost in translation before Muhammad transmitted the authentic version. It’s a different approach to the problem, but both religions think that the prophets before their major one were faithful, if not Christian/Muslim as such.
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@Nornagest, I’m a Christian, and I endorse what you call the mainstream Christian position. However, we’d also add that while the previous prophets faithfully reproduced God’s message, there’s a lot that He didn’t even try to reveal before Christ came – so a lot of truth simply wasn’t human-knowable before Christ.
What impact this has to the question of who’s worshipping the same god is, as discussed upthread, debatable.
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@Nornagest:
I think the Muslim position is that the Prophets before Mohammed, including Jesus, were Muslims. Their teachings kept getting distorted, so God had to send down a new prophet from time to time to correct the errors.
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Uhh, that article about training the immune system makes me think of homeopathy, turns out it’s the immune system that has memory, not the water!
Mosquitoes, why not cure them instead of exterminating them? They are carriers only after all.
I use twitter in a very personal way indeed, I follow 13 people one of which is a fictional character and the other a 99 year old who unfortunately passed away last year (RIP Bill Sleeper)
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Indeed, one of the proposals is to use gene drive to make a gene for an anti-malarial drug quickly spread through the population. There’s a really complicated proposal in which the drug is only produced when encountering blood.
But that doesn’t do anything against Zika. If you kill off the mosquito that carries both Zika and Dengue, that’s two birds with one stone. (Though maybe a malarial mosquito will expand into the vacated niche.) Also, concern about Zika is new, so (1) people want to deal with it now, even though malaria is much worse; and (2) people don’t know so much about it, whereas they know a lot about how mosquitoes defend themselves against malaria.
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“Noah Smith: Some new evidence suggests, contra economic theory, that free trade with China has cost jobs without necessarily replacing them elsewhere. David Friedman, any thoughts?”
People don’t actually think that ‘economic theory’ predicts that free trade will always lead to job gains do they?
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People who know economic theory rarely think in terms of “job gains” at all.
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Yes. Yes yes yes. “Job gains” is a purely political term.
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At least the lay understanding is that free trade will always lead to economic benefits on both sides. Which is probably true, but “created jobs” is a singularly poor metric for economic improvements.
A point frequently misunderstood in political debate is that creating more work without also creating more products and more demand for them is actually a bad thing. It only means that more people will waste their time on pointless activities.
Trade mainly increases efficiency, i.e. the amount of goods generated by a fixed amount of work/capital. If the demand for goods stays the same, you’d expect that to reduce the demand for labor, and thus either reducing work hours, reducing wages, or increasing unemployment.
It’s mainly a quirk of our economic and social system that we think of “more work” as a good thing. But we don’t need work, we need products and services. And if they can be produced using less work, we should do that. When this leads to social and/or economic problems, it’s usually indicative of broken social systems – and we should fix those instead of artificially keeping people busy. I want to live in a world where each eliminated job is celebrated!
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First of all, I want to live in a world where eliminating a job doesn’t buy the advantages of more efficient production at the cost of putting the person who used to do it at risk of starvation or homelessness. Then we can get to work on eliminating jobs and celebrating.
Until that’s done — and I very strongly agree it should be — creating jobs is usually an economic improvement, and any account of economic theory that says it isn’t is failing to engage with an important reality, namely the brokenness of our social systems.
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The point is that total employment is determined by macro policy (mainly the Fed), not trade policy. Thus thinking about trade policy in terms of net job gains is nonsensical. Here’s a brilliant essay on this:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/vulgar.html
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“cost jobs” is a bad measure of whether something is an economic improvement. Like, number of jobs is a measure of aggregate demand divided by average productivity: if you increase productivity without improving demand, you’re going to kill some jobs.
In other words, if you replace forty Chinese workers with six Americans while making the same amount of stuff, you’re going to reduce overall employment, make the world a more efficient place on average, and reap the predicted economic benefits of trade.
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I wouldn’t say that Wheaton’s actions are a good example of “academic intolerance” of the sort we’re normally concerned about around here.
Christian colleges have ideological requirements. In fact, this is the reason they exist at all! And all professors at these institutions know that they must abide by them.
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” Christian colleges have ideological requirements. In fact, this is the reason they exist at all! And all professors at these institutions know that they must abide by them. ”
Yeah, but that makes the whole concept of tenure a sham. They can do as they want, but they don’t get to call what they offer “tenure.”
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I don’t think outright heresy costing you your job at a Christian college is much more of a violation of tenure than calling for the violent armed overthrow of the United States costing you your job at West Point or downgrading students who don’t agree with your premise that it should be permissible for professors to require students to have sex with them in order to pass classes costing you your job at, well, pretty much anyplace. There are some things you just don’t do, not because they are philosophically iffy, but because they threaten the entire structure under which tenure exists in the first place.
YMMV.
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Most remarkable to me is that so many outside the evangelical community think it their right (nay, duty!) to tell evangelicals what their doctrine is supposed to be.
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Yeah, but it’s not at all clear that there was any reason to think “not saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same god” was an ideological requirement at Wheaton, until suddenly it was and someone was losing their job.
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My understanding is that her statement did not directly result in her dismissal. Rather, it prompted the administration to ask her to clarify her views. She then refused to cooperate with this process, and the whole thing blew up into a political firestorm.
By itself, the statement is ambiguous and could have many innocuous interpretations. However, I can see why it would prompt concern about her beliefs.
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I hope ALS research gets some new winds. It looks a lot like Alzheimer’s research. Lots of interesting leads but not new results. It is just hard I guess.
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Yay for Humansville! I drive through there every few months.
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It seems like everyone writing on the Wheaton thing doesn’t really know what they are talking about. Speaking as someone with connections to the Wheaton community, and who teaches at another Christian college, I doubt very much that the real issue is a theological conflict. After all, the majority of the rest of the faculty — including the faculty in theology! — came out in support of Dr. Hawkins. Nor is it, contra the Slacktivist hackjob mentioned upthread, a matter of race, except very incidentally. (Seriously, read Slacktivist for a while and you’ll find out that he says everything he doesn’t like is due to conservative Christians being racist, sexist, or hating poor or gay people.)
No, I’m pretty sure that the underlying issue here is a matter of PR. You might think this doesn’t make sense; that the *result* of the kerfuffle was a PR disaster that they are now trying to mitigate. And this is true. But it’s also true that the *cause* of it is almost certainly them trying to mitigate a different PR disaster.
A bit of background for this to make sense: Wheaton has the unenviable position of being (a) a high-profile school, with a (b) theologically conservative Evangelical identity, which is nevertheless (c) not in line with many politically conservative Evangelical leaders.
In particular, its professors and students are much more politically liberal (though this is relative, of course) than its donor base. This means that the administration wants to keep from getting too much negative attention from e.g. Franklin Graham (I’m not entirely sure what relationship they have with him in particular; Billy Graham was closely associated with the college and they house a lot of stuff about him, including a small museum), for fear of alienating too many conservatives.
Of course, they also face a lot of scrutiny from the left, especially in academia, who by-and-large *really* don’t like religious schools with actual theological commitments. And they don’t want to alienate them too much either, because this jeopardizes their good standing as an elite liberal arts college with a national reputation.
You can see where this is going. With social media allowing any statement or action of its professors to be immediately shared with the world, the administration’s PR job is very difficult. They can’t exactly clamp down on professor’s speech formally (except maybe insofar as it contradicts the statement of faith), but things that a professor says could easily be really bad PR for the institution if someone gets outraged about it.
Which is what happened. As far as I can tell, this is what occurred. Dr. Hawkins’s public facebook post caught the attention of some of the conservative culture warriors, who immediately started creating a huge stink. So the Wheaton administration asked her to take her post down/edit the post/write a disclaimer, and she refused. Not without reason, I should say: soft censorship in service of PR is still censorship. So they made a show of asking her to explain to them how what she said fits with the statement of faith, etc. — something they’ve apparently done before, for similar reasons. (This, by the way, is about the only way this has to do with her being black: in line with the traditions in the Black church in the US, she’s a lot more publicly vocal about things than most of the professors, who seem more inclined to play the PR game and not make waves. Perhaps she also gets more scrutiny from the outside because of her background as well; I don’t know.) At any rate, the theological substance of what she said, while controversial, is not outside the bounds of things other Wheaton professors have said before. She just managed to attract national attention for it.
She’s understandably mad about this, and things escalate because neither she nor the administration wants to back down (they tried to make a really boneheaded offer involving suspending her tenure), etc. etc. and eventually the only way to end the disaster is something like what happened. Pretty much nobody is happy with the results.
In summary: Wheaton administration badly mishandles a PR blowup, and creates an even worse one by mistreating a professor in the process. Theology and race are only tangentially involved.
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Thank you. These are the reasons I love SSC.
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I did not attend Wheaton, but I have friends who did. My impression when I visited was always of a community deeply concerned with gaining the approval of The World. Your post reads to me like another data point for that impression.
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> After all, the majority of the rest of the faculty — including the faculty in theology! — came out in support of Dr. Hawkins.
In support of her comment theologically?
I wouldn’t downplay the theological angle here. I would think that many people had serious misgivings about her statement from a theological perspective. Of course, it’s not clear exactly what she meant.
And there are two sides to the culture war here — many of her defenders seem motivated by ecumenical or political considerations.
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I don’t know how many agreed with her statement (though there are at least a few), but my impression is that they felt her statement was not out of the bounds of either orthodoxy or the Wheaton statement of faith, which was the ostensible dispute.
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“(Seriously, read Slacktivist for a while and you’ll find out that he says everything he doesn’t like is due to conservative Christians being racist, sexist, or hating poor or gay people.)”
This stood out to me in an otherwise informative comment. Fred Clark has other pet peeves, most famously bad fiction writing and bad theology. His years-long critique of the Left Behind novels is probably less than 5% culture-war agitprop.
(I post this so that anyone reading your excellent comment who is unfamiliar with the Slacktivist oeuvre doesn’t write him off as a SJW or whatever. He’s a very interesting blogger, and the LB posts are pretty awesome as works of literary criticism.)
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I read the Left Behind MSTing and liked it, but while you’re right that it’s not agitprop his reading is (ill) informed by unconsciously accepting progressive ideas as truth.
For example, he cannot fathom that Carpathia is the Antichrist and simultaneously sincerely believes in world peace and disarmament. Yet the authors are people who saw the original Peace movements of the cultural revolution firsthand, and were living in a society where many of those ex-hippies currently held significant political power at the time of writing. The first horseman carries arrows without heads after all: conquest through Kulturkampf is perfectly in keeping with the character of the Antichrist.
That said, I appreciated that he was never really a dick or a demagogue about it.Edit: Apparently he’s a dick now? Sorry to hear that…
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I’m not sure which Slacktivist posts you’re talking about w/r/t the pacifist Antichrist. I can’t do a detailed search now, but I am pretty sure he cited Bob Dylan’s song about Satan coming as a man of peace when addressing this. In other words, he was willing to address the concept of Antichrist as “pacifist.”
But this is forest for the trees stuff. There is no way LaHaye and Jenkins’s picture of how the last battle will play out is remotely plausible, and Fred Clark does everyone a public service in (slowly) trying to get people to throw those books in the trash.
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>The first horseman carries arrows without heads after all
No, no he does not. The verse in question:
“I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.”
Nothing about arrows, headless or otherwise.
Now, people point to the fact that the text mentions a bow, but not arrows, as proof that he will conquer through peaceful means, but this strikes me as very ad-hoc. It’s very dubious to take what the text does not say as positive proof of something. The text doesn’t mention a lot of things – is the fact that the text doesn’t mention a bowstring also significant? What about the lack of horseshoes for his horse – perhaps that means the Antichrist will be an environmentalist?
Second, to make that interpretation work you have to completely skip over the second half of the verse – “he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.” Does that sound like a description of a man who conquers peacefully, through subtle cultural control? Do hippies and SJW’s ride forth as conquerors?
I would say that L&J started by deciding that the Antichrist would be a peaceful leader and twisted their interpretation of Revelations to fit it, rather than reading Revelations and deciding that a peaceful man was the most natural interpretation.
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@Aegeus, while I think you’ve got a decent interpretation of that passage, the fact remains that a whole lot of people before L&J were talking about an ostensibly-peaceful Antichrist.
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Haha yeah, this is why second generation atheists shouldn’t do exegesis. Mea culpa.
That said, it doesn’t make sense to go from white -> red in that way with both of them representing armed conflict. Since when does conquest come before war? The best way that you could spin it is that the conqueror bent on conquest shows up and gathers people with the intention of going to war, then hands it off to the second rider before the actual fighting begins.
The non-military conquest explanation still seems more plausible to me.
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Obvious example I’m sure the ancient world never forgot: Alexander the Great. Or any number of succession wars, really.
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@Evan: Yes, a lot of people have talked about a peaceful Antichrist, but that doesn’t make it good theology. That’s Fred Clark’s whole point – it’s an old right-wing conspiracy about the UN taking over, given a Bible-colored paint job.
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And my point’s that you can’t blame L&J for the Bible-colored paint job, and it’s not even clear that they understand how far out it is from the actual text of Revelation. Plus… I see how convenient it’d be for the notion to have started from conspiracy theories about the UN, but I’d be interested in actually tracing through its history.
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I was perhaps a bit uncharitable to Fred Clark in the parent comment. I actually started reading him some years ago (when he was still on his own site, rather than Patheos) because I liked his Left Behind critiques, and at the time his culture war stuff was much more subdued and well-directed. The non-LB portion of his writing has gotten way worse since the start — at least as of about two years ago when I quit reading him regularly. I’m not sure if SJW is the right term, but certainly he had become extremely nasty towards his ideological opponents on the right, and ready to impute awful motives (of the sort mentioned) to just about anyone conservative.
I guess I felt kind of betrayed, because I used to see him as a sane, if a bit leftish, voice in Evangelical Protestantism, and then 70%+ of his blog gradually turned into aggressive culture war outrage.
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I don’t know if I would put it quite that strongly, but his writing does seem to have become more polarized, and it’s similarly part of the reason why I stopped following the blog. A shame, too, as it had a lot of interesting content in it as well — like this post on performative belief, or this one on how rapid a development the evangelical opposition to abortion was. But for me, the overall return on time invested in filtering out the noise crossed into the negative numbers a while back.
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I think it’s pretty clear that Clark’s writing has become more politically polarized.
I would encourage close readers to think about what external events (in his life, in pop-Xian culture, and so on) might have brought this about.
I strongly disagree with the hinted-at premise I think I’m hearing from commenters here that it’s because he’s joined the Cathedral. C’mon, people.
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What’s the Cathedral?
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Best not to go down that particular rabbit hole.
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@TK-421
The shadowy conspiracy that controls our minds (specifically the left-wing one).
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@ TK-421:
It’s basically the collection of left-leaning academics and people influenced by their worldview.
But to really understand the context, you will have to look up the writings of Mencius Moldbug. The idea of its being a “distributed conspiracy” to destroy civilization is a central part of his theory.
You’re probably getting this impression from the other comments, but: I think many of his posts are interesting, but you should take him with an enormous pile of salt.
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It’s kinda like the Patriarchy, but for right-wingers.
Less glibly: it’s shorthand for a theoretical self-reinforcing but uncoordinated societal tendency towards atomization, anti-traditionalism, grievance politics, and basically everything right-wingers hate. The mechanisms by which it allegedly propagates itself and gains its appeal are too complicated for this post, but can be summed up as journalism, the academy, and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideals.
One of the pet theories of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
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It’s kinda like the Patriarchy, but for right-wingers.
This is, quite possibly, the best description I’ve ever heard of the concept.
Edit: Aw, you went and edited the glib version while I was in the middle of posting my glib support of it! I guess in the interest of fairness, I should do the same.
Basically, I think this is a particularly apt comparison, because they both codify and personify a set of vague, uncoordinated societal trends, both of which are probably not best dealt with by talking about and treating them as if they were a single unified movement.
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Gotcha. I’m aware of who Moldbug is but I haven’t read any of his stuff in depth… his political leanings are not really my jam. I asked because my first word-association reaction to “the Cathedral” was “and the Bazaar”, which didn’t seem to make sense contextually.
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Two things Re: SKYNET
1) Why are they throwing around numbers for false alarms as if they weren’t right there in the leaked documents?! The only important question here is whether they mean false positive rate or false discovery rate.
2) Ars Technica is at it again. They might as well have said, “The NSA’s SKYNET program may be launching thousands of nukes!” They’re clearly JAQing off. There is no evidence in any of the slides that this is actually connected to any kill chain or even that this data is being used at all. There aren’t any organizations for fusion of intel, transition organizations, authorities, or any of the things you would need for this to actually be a thing in a kill chain. My best guess is that this is at the stage of purely being an internal research effort. “What can we do with this data and machine learning? Let’s test some things and evaluate them.” In fact, we can be pretty sure that Ars’ insinuation is false, because other documents leaked by the Intercept on the drone program confirmed that all targets must be personally approved by the president. If this big data technique has grown well enough to be usable at all, it’s surely to merely identify possible terrorists – people to investigate.
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This. Ars writes a whole article talking about how many people a given false positive rate would kill, then admits on page three they have no information on how the model is used.
Personally I’d like to see the link description changed–it’s perpetuating the unsupported implication that being flagged by the model carries an automatic death sentence.
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Regarding the guns and homicide study, I see two problems (keeping in mind I’m looking at the journo’s coverage not the study). One is the use of hunting licenses to establish gun ownership levels. This would seem to fuck over the data by burying the state that has both one of the highest gun ownership rates and lowest homicide rates. In Utah the number of hunting licenses is far below the number of hunting license applications, you either have to have a lot of money or win a lottery to hunt with a rifle. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if other high gun ownership states have run into similar problems. They should have stuck with just the firearm suicide numbers, or used the number of firearm background checks (caveat, that doesn’t work for I think Kentucky where firearm background checks happen monthly for concealed carry holders).
The second is that they seem to have looked for only a correlation with firearm homicides and ignored substitution effects. While the data show nonsignificant positice correlations with non firearm homicides this sort of data jiggery makes me extremely suspicious there’s not other issues with the data that are less obvious.
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On a related note, this:
combined with some of the analysis that author posted in the comments on our last gun post round these parts, makes me think that studies aren’t adequately controlling for underlying martial rowdiness. Race will get you some of the way, Scott’s “percent southern” measure will get you some of the way, but neither one captures the extent to which the population is descended from Ulster Scots, for instance. And indeed I remember that VerBruggen (in the comments last time around) found that a bunch of mostly white, mostly rural states in the mountain west were driving a lot of the guns/homicide correlation after controlling for the usual covariates. These states have low black populations, and they aren’t southern according to the measure Scott used, but Jayman reliably counts them as contiguous with initial areas of Scotch-Irish settlement. And personal experience suggests much the same; I know a fair number of people whose parents or grandparents migrated to the rural west from the rural south, and you’ll see quite a few pickup trucks with Confederate flag bric-a-brac in Idaho. (Hell, even in California’s farm country.). The theory, then, is that some combination of cultural and genetic factors predispose whites of Scotch-Irish ancestry to like guns and get in fights, which strikes me as pretty plausible.
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I wonder how much of race gaps in crime can be accounted for by southerness given that damn near 100% of black people in the US are either southerners or descended from people who left the south not many generations ago.
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How sure are we that pterodactyls can kill eagles?
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Apparently we’re not very sure they can kill them with their own natural weapons, which is why we’re considering arming them with AK-47s. I’m not sure those would be the optimal weapons for air to air combat against fast moving foes, though; I thought they were known for being less accurate at long ranges than some other weapons. That’s not usually a big deal, since combat very, very rarely occurs at ranges long enough for the AK’s accuracy to fall off much, but a fast target could escape to long range fairly quickly (and might be hard to hit at short range anyway because of the speed). So maybe pterodactyls with sniper rifles would be better? Or just use SAM batteries against the eagles, if we want to be really sure. Perhaps nuclear warheads on the SAMs to be extra, extra sure.
I suppose hunters who hunt birds would have more practical suggestions, but they’d probably be boring.
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(Flying) birds are universally hunted with shotguns at short range. More instinctive, both eyes open shooting (you need to acquire the target, establish appropriate lead, fire, and follow through). Very, very hard to hit a fast moving target with a single bullet. A sniper rifle would be even worse, since the scope would restrict your field of view too much to track the target.
So envision a pterodactyl in an Elmer Fudd hat with a double-barreled shotgun.
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I suppose hunters who hunt birds would have more practical suggestions, but they’d probably be boring.
Forget practical. I want my pterodactyls armed with flamethrowers. Because dragons.
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Dragons are frequently described as fireproof or at least fire-resistant, for obvious reasons. Or do you mean you want the pterodactyls to LOOK like dragons? In that case, objection withdrawn.
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Check out the link about raptors (Australian raptors, of course it’s Australia) spreading fire. Fight fire with fire.
We have been selecting wild animals for intelligence.
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The entire problem is that the eagles are spreading fire, though. This seems like it would only exacerbate the problem.
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TRUMP/SANDERS 2016
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Not quite as crazy as it sounds.
If some weird transporter accident created a Bernie J Trump hybrid with Sander’s labor support and relative sincerity combined with Trump’s personality he would easily be the best candidate on either ticket. Sell nativist pro-union ideas in a language blue collar whites speak and you’ve got a huge untapped demographic available on both sides of the aisle.
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That used to be the Democratic core. Now it’s up for grabs. Coastal liberals and identity politics activists are the dominating voices of the party, but they need more than that to win the general.
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This is simplistic – though you and Dealgood make good points. The two parties don’t have “cores,” they are coalitions. People will join the coalitions even though they don’t agree with the “dominating voices” that we all pay attention to.
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I don’t know, I think “union-friendly working class whites” really did used to be the largest and strongest group within the Democratic party.
I understand that both parties are coalitions, but my point was that what was once a large, influential, and reliably Democratic voting bloc is now legitimately considering Sanders and Trump as both having some valid points.
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Gbdub:
That is more nuanced, certainly, but I still doubt that we can talk about working-class white union members as this formerly-reliable-Democrat bloc that is now up for grabs. The US political situation is way more complex than that.
Now, if YOU or PEOPLE YOU KNOW are torn between Trump and Sanders, that’s interesting. But this “Reagan Democrats”-style stuff is BS.
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I’ve been saying from the very beginning of this race that Trump and Sanders are just two sides of the same populist coin. They tap into the same anger among the American people, about the same things, just with one targeted at the blue tribe, with gentler rhetoric, and the other targeted at the red tribe, with harsher rhetoric, and a different Enemy Responsible For All Of Your Problems in either case.
(Obviously those aren’t the only differences, but to me, at least, the similarities that do exist are striking, despite how different they may appear at first glance.)
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IMO Trumpism is a result of the absence of Sanderism. It’s the beleaguered white proletariat revolting in every sense of the word because they’re sick of being told to check a privilege which, mostly, only accrued to the white bourgeois. Unfortunately, neither of those classes have recognized themselves in America for a long time, so we got a white bourgeois which saw the obvious benefits of historical and present white supremacy that it enjoyed and loudly assumed that anyone who denied it must be stupid and/or racist, and a white proletariat that saw nothing of the sort and assumed with equal loudness that anyone claiming otherwise was crazy and/or evil.
If that kind of class analysis hadn’t been anathema for half a century, then the distinction might have been understood and we might have avoided a lot of angry confusion. But instead, here we are. IMO Sanders isn’t the other side of the coin so much as it’s a way too little, way too late effort to prevent it from being cast in the first place.
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I don’t find the heart rate vs. violence correlation surprising. Resting Heart rate is largely an indicator of resting metabolic rate. People with poor cellular energy metabolism (e.g. hypothyroidism or old age) have a reduced heart rate. A low metabolism causes impaired function in nearly every way, including reduced intelligence (see symptoms of hypothyroidism – http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypothyroidism/symptoms-causes/dxc-20155382).
There is disagreement on the mechanism of reduced resting heart rate in athletes, and if it represents improved health. For example, chronic stress from over-training suppresses the metabolic rate, as the liver stops converting T4 to T3 (the primary regulator of energy metabolism) during physical stress or starvation (e.g. euthyroid sick syndrome) to conserve glucose.
I am disappointed that this (and other similar prospective cohort studies) fail to even discuss the interplay between metabolic rate, age, and stress with heart rate. Could these more violent individuals be people with an untreated metabolic dysfunction, or people living under high physiological stress- e.g. people with euthyroid sick syndrome resulting from a physically demanding lifestyle coupled with inadequate access to food?
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The gun study I find particularly interesting because in a subtle way it fits pretty well with the political views of a lot of pro-gun types. The tl;dr of the study is that guns make murder more common among people who know you, but not among strangers(which also fits with the suicide data). In other words, more gun ownership makes existing crises more likely to be fatal, but doesn’t step up the number of lethal confrontations with random thugs. For people who have functional, civilized social networks(or who believe they do), this threat seems distant and largely meaningless, while the crime they care about isn’t worse at all. In fact, the sort of crime they care about is made better by increased gun ownership(at least in their minds), because they feel they can better deal with it.
Why pro-gun advocates look at gun crime as being among strangers and anti-gun advocates think of it as being among friends is left as an exercise for the reader.
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It’s a purely correlational study, so it doesn’t show that guns “make” anything; at best it shows that murder is more common among non-strangers with guns than non-strangers without guns.
> Why pro-gun advocates look at gun crime as being among strangers and anti-gun advocates think of it as being among friends is left as an exercise for the reader.
I think that’s not true. Pro-gun advocates generally look at gun crime as being largely among criminals acquainted with each other. Anti-gun advocates are more varied; some model crime as a completely random process, whereas others propose a model where those close to the victim “snap” and (if they have a gun) kill.
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I am taking an online class on machine learning, and building a recurrent neural net that learns to output text one character at a time was the sixth exercise we did. If you stack multiple networks you can even get full sentences that read like gibberish normal sentences. Training them on political speeches can produce some hilarious results.
To really see the power of recurrent networks, go find the Oxford machine learning course videos on youtube. In lecture 13 the presenter (a guest lecturer from Google Deep Mind) shows off a network that learns to copy the handwriting of samples you give it, and will start outputting whole words of very human-looking writing one letter at a time. Then he shows how he trained the network to output specific strings of text in the handwriting style he chooses, as long as the style is part of the training data. Toward the end he applies the same network to human voice. He gets a network that outputs a voice saying words pretty well, kind of like someone learning English.
There is also an amazing convolutional neural network that takes two images as input and outputs a single image with the content of the first but the style of the second. You can give it a photo and your favorite painting, and output the photo in the style of the painting. Google image search “Neural Net Artistic Style” to see a bunch of examples with different art styles applied. Or you can see the original paper with some great examples at http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576
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What course are you taking?
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I’m taking the Udacity Machine Learning/Tensorflow class. It’s been pretty interesting.
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Thank you!
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I generally support people branching off into legally isolated communities in order to let everyone achieve their goals simultaneously – but if I were a non-libertarian New Hampshirite right now I would be pretty upset.
Yeah, probably.
But on the other hand, a bunch of people promising to influence the State to leave you alone is a pretty low-threat group.
(Bonus joke content, because that never, ever stops being funny.)
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> But on the other hand, a bunch of people promising to influence the State to leave you alone is a pretty low-threat group.
Compared to Fascists or Stalinists, perhaps, but otherwise that assumes that you agree not only with Libertarian values, but also Libertarian predictions about reality. Many people do not.
> (Bonus joke content, because that never, ever stops being funny.)
That joke was never, ever actually funny. Then again, most political images and political cartoons aren’t, or are only funny to those that already agree with them, so take that as you may.
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Of course it’s only funny to those who already agree with it, absolutely.
(I still think it’s funny – because “never, ever stops being funny” can and must mean only “to me”.
I can’t stand mean-spirited political “humor” or attacks on individual politicians, but half-mocking my own side and half-mocking the sort of opposition whose first response is “but how will we have rooooooads?!?” is still funny.
To me.)
(On the substantive topic, I still think it’s pretty low-threat, if only because of the size and relative wealth of New Hampshire – and the extreme ease with which one can reject a libertarian minimal or merely-smaller state and go back to a bigger one if one finds it’s sufficiently displeasing when the predictions fail [however they would, if they do].
I am, of course, thinking more Hayek than Rothbard; a bunch of anarchists is a self-correcting, if horribly messy problem.)
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FWIW, I would feel severely threatened if I thought that, tomorrow, my entire state ended up Libertarian. As far as I understand, the Libertarian approach to “leaving you alone” is the elimination of several services that I consider essential, e.g. health care, public education, scientific research, environmental/agricultural/medical oversight, and — depending on the brand of Libertarianism — even public safety and infrastructure maintenance.
Yes, my taxes will be lower and I will be free to pollute rivers and possibly even shoot people if I wanted to; but the downside is that I, not being a millionaire, would now have to live in a state full of polluted rivers, dodging bullets on my way to work. It’s not an optimal tradeoff.
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First entry I saw on Moe history was Wu Zetian, Empress of the Ming Dynasty
WTF?
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This isn’t as robust as it looks. Their natural experiment is based on a situation where one administrative region of the GDR (Dresden area) mostly didn’t have western TV reception while the rest of the GDR mostly did: http://imgur.com/m3CRS25
They do acknowledge that “our empirical identification strategy crucially relies on the assumption that simply living in
the region around Dresden does not explain fertility behavior (beyond the mere effect of
Western TV consumption)” and try to address this, but overall this is much more of a correlational study than a random one.
If someone wanted to work on a smaller granularity than “GDR administrative region” you might get something more randomized based on things like hills blocking signals? Or seeing if it replicated in the northeast.
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So, does anyone want to bet on whether Republicans in the Senate will have the spine to hold up their commitment to block Obama’s Supreme Court nominations until the election?
I would say they definitely should do so, but, to quote Timothy Sandefur on this: “I never underestimate Republicans’ willingness to cave.”
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I think they definitely shouldn’t but will. Seems we are both pessimistic in opposite directions.
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I say this depends on if a major media controversy “coincidently” happens at the same time or just before the actual nominations process they won’t, if not they will. Do they have the cover to act like elites?
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I hope you don’t mind that I’m ignoring your actual question (no knowledge, no opinion) in favor of this but:
When I was younger and deeply immersed in Democratic / Progressive Party (they were on our local ballots too) politics, the big complaint every person on the left had was that our side had no spine. That Democrats would rather eat each other than actually stand their ground and fight the issues, even facing a well organized and fanatical Republican opposition.
A few years back when I started reading Steve Sailer, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and various libertarians I started seeing the same complaint by right wingers about the Republicans. Almost word for word the same. And the more I looked into it the more it seemed like something even mainstream Republicans felt: hence the Tea Party, the Donald, etc.
I don’t think each party is caving to the positions of the other, or that one side is delusional, or that this is the result of compromises with which neither side is happy. It seems more like the people on top are just exactly the same people regardless of the letter after their name. That if an Establishment position comes up against a Democratic or Republican position, it will win ninety nine times out of one hundred.
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I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here.
I don’t believe in the concept of “the Establishment” as a cabal with a secret, nefarious agenda.
I do believe in the establishment as, basically, the careerist faction in both parties. I don’t think the two parties’ establishment wings are exactly the same, either. They resemble each other because the main priority of both is getting elected and maintaining a career as a professional politician—and not a backbencher but someone near the top of the heap.
In college, I knew people in the College Democrats or College Republicans who were like this. They don’t really have opinions; they just know what you’re supposed to think on every issue. And they are very attached to the status quo, never proposing any kind of radical changes.
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That Democrats would rather eat each other than actually stand their ground and fight the issues, even facing a well organized and fanatical Republican opposition.
This is probably a universal thing; your most dangerous rivals are those within your own party, not the opposition.
In my own county there is (or was, has quietened down a bit but still rumbles away under the surface) a vicious intra-party local dispute in one of our national parties where they were clawing out each other’s eyes in an election campaign over which candidate would campaign in what half of the county. Because Candidate A assumed and claimed a certain region as his own natural constituency and wouldn’t tolerate other candidates from his own party campaigning there, there was blue murder when Candidate B (from the same party running to win a seat in the same election and return two candidates to the national parliament for the party) allegedly campaigned in a particular village in Candidate A’s territory. They preferred to stab one another in the back than put up a united front, for fear they’d lose votes to the party ‘rival’.
It’s pretty much agreed amongst all the parties that certain candidates will campaign in the east of the county, others in the west, and the city belongs to others again
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I’m familiar with the same pattern in the ideological rather than political context. Left wingers spend more time fighting each other than fighting right wingers, libertarians devote a lot of energy to arguing with other libertarians, … .
I think there are two explanations. One is that it is more fun to argue with someone who agrees that you have the fundamentally correct view of the world even if you have some details wrong than with someone who thinks you and all who agree with you are nutcases.
The other is the idea that a movement has a fixed pool of resources, so if you persuade people to spend them in the ways you mistakenly approve of, they won’t be spent in the ways I correctly approve of.
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It’s not only more fun, it’s more productive.
You can hardly even have a discussion with someone who fundamentally disagrees with you on everything. And if you can, you just end up rehashing the fundamentals.
But in debating people who agree with you 95% of the way, you can get into interesting questions you never considered before.
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A devout catholic may argue with another devout catholic about how a certain principle X does not correspond with principle WYZ, and might *win* that argument within their educational framework.
But where does he start on principle X when arguing with a devout jain? Or an atheist? Even if principle W and Y are in agreement, it could be with a very different framework. If the closest things to “axioms” are utterly different, where to begin? For a large portion of believes, you simply can’t in any meaningful way.
And that’s if we are considering simply logical framworks to debate in, and not the more…complicated real life variants of emotion, propaganda, logic, and life experience all rolled into one. Trying to debate an “axiom” in another person can lead to a deadly response, while debating principle M three layers of logic above, its simply an intellectual exercise.
I think this is a good reason why there are engineering patents and mathematics results from all over the world, while other aspects of intellectual life are quite varied.
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@Vox: It’s not only more fun, it’s more productive.
Uncompromising extremists expounding doctrine at the more pragmatic members of their own faction always think they are being productive.
The reality is that when I am tempted to join the Death Eaters, or worse the Republicans, it is almost always the work of libertarians like yourself. I have learned nothing interesting from engaging with you, only “rehashed the fundamentals”, and I doubt that I am alone in this.
So I’m not clear on what you are trying to produce here, but I suspect you are failing at it.
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@ John Schilling:
The feeling is mutual.
The reason is because I fundamentally disagree with you. While you call yourself a “libertarian”, our respective political philosophies have nothing essential in common.
Anyway, I am hardly an “uncompromising extremist” member of the same faction of which you are a member. I try to maintain a balanced mental attitude and an intellectual tolerance toward people who disagree with me. I am a member of a different faction from you.
It is by engaging with people like you that I become tempted to join the folks at the Ayn Rand Institute and condemn all “libertarians” as intellectually corrupt moral relativists. Yet I actually don’t think so.
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@Vox: This brings us back to the question of what it is you are trying to “produce” here. If your faction is so exclusive as to categorically reject people like e.g. me, then either it is tiny and impotent and likely to remain so or it is seeking support in places I cannot envision. Who, if not people like me, are you trying to reach with the frequent and lengthy political and philosophical essays that must represent a substantial commitment of your time? Or is this just a private recreation for which we are the audience?
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@ John Schilling:
I have had interesting exchanges with posters like David Friedman, blacktrance, onyomi and several others. And I have had several people, including people who often disagree with me politically like Nita, tell me that I am a valued commenter.
I mean, other people are free to judge here, but I don’t post for your benefit. And obviously, I don’t post on SSC because I think it is going to change the world. It is a form of recreation.
Generally, though, I am trying to reach people who broadly agree with the values of the Enlightenment and modernity. In that respect, I think Scott Alexander, for instance, is much closer to me than you are.
As I have linked before, I basically agree with Timothy Sandefur that there are three types of libertarians: a) the “paleo-conservative” group centered around Lew Rockwell and the later Rothbard, who see the welfare-regulatory state as an outgrowth of the modernity they reject, b) the “radical Whig” type who view themselves as a variety of liberal, in which Objectivists are included, and c) the “sensible shoes” i.e. policy-oriented type.
I see myself as part of the second group, and I think its values largely overlap with the third. (I think of people like Matt Ridley and Virginia Postrel.) But on all fundamental levels, they are contrary to the values of the first.
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@ Vox Imperatoris
Eh, I’d like to remark that I also consider John Schilling a valued contributor. Most of his comments are some of the best material on SSC — informative, fair, well-reasoned, and often insightful. But occasionally (about 2% of the time?) he gets really annoyed and posts something angry and… not as good.
Luckily, I have no idea what John’s political views are, or what has caused this particular heated exchange, so you’ll be spared further ‘splaining from me.
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You’re taking a recreational activity pretty seriously if you insist on dividing people into exclusionary factions. But have at it and enjoy, if that’s your thing.
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@ Nita:
I think some of the things he has to say are valuable, as well.
I meant to say that, in the debates over e.g. immigration, I have gotten about as much from his posts as he has apparently gotten from mine.
That’s not to say that I haven’t gotten anything from his posts on other subjects. Though I don’t know if he has the same opinion about me on other subjects.
@ John Schilling:
The categories are not “categories of libertarian on this website”. They are categories of libertarian in real life.
Posting on this website is recreation. That doesn’t mean I consider politics as a whole a recreational activity.
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I think it depends mostly on what their constituents think. In that respect, the Senate is not as insulated as the House, so it’s possible that purple state senators get enough pressure to cave.
Some of that will depend on who Obama picks – whoever it is, I think it’s a safe assumption that they will be Borked, so if Obama is smart, he’ll pick someone with a strong resume from an allied marginalized group, so he can spin this as “Republicans hate .”
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Well, if they can bait Obama into making a recess appointment, they’ll hold up. But that’s not going to happen. If Obama is fool enough to make a bad appointment (either obviously politically unsuitable or with an insufficiently-buried skeleton), they’ll manage to run out the clock. But if Obama manages to find someone with no scandals attached and not to the left of Mao, they’ll probably cave.
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One problem, in the present situation, is that anyone who is intellectually impressive will have taken positions that the opposition can demonize—Posner being the obvious example. So you end up nominating someone who is, or at least has pretended to be, a nebbish—and then have to argue that your nominee is qualified for the top job.
As a replacement for Scalia.
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Posner is too old at this point anyway. He’ll go down as his generation’s Learned Hand.
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I’ve seen Posner’s name mentioned as a compromise proposal – he’d be appointed in the knowledge that he wouldn’t stay very long and the next President would get to appoint a long-term replacement, but at least there would be a full complement of nine justices in the interim. Former Justice O’Connor has also been mentioned in this context.
I don’t think it’s particularly likely, and anyway Posner is probably too heterodox to get this Senate’s approval.
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I could theoretically see them reaching a compromise if Obama is able to find an appointee that is with them on some issues but not on others, such as, say, agreeing with both the Heller and Roe v. Wade decisions. However, between the fact that it’s Obama making the appointment, and the fact that such a Justice is probably a magical unicorn that only exists in my imagination, I don’t see it as very likely.
Barring something like that, though, I think they can wait him out. The Republicans in Congress may be prone to caving on a lot of issues, but I think caving on this one would be career suicide to any of them, even the ones from purple states, and they know it.
That said, I agree with what was said in the previous thread, that publicly announcing their intention to block any appointee was a bad tactical move, and precludes even the slight possibility of the sort of magical unicorn appointee I was talking about earlier. However, the sheer fact that they were willing to make such a statement tells me that they all realize just how thoroughly it would ruin their careers if they let the appointee get through, so I think it’s safe to say they won’t.
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It’s a suicidal move, because what Obama will do next is go and dig up the most impressive possible candidate that is also completely anathema to the republican party.
The republicans are committed to rejection anyway, so he has no reason whatsoever to compromise, and can just go for making the republicans look maximally bad.
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Does the Republicans rejecting someone completely anathema to them actually make them look bad though? I suspect there are a lot of moderates who would be uncomfortable with replacing Scalia with someone far-left, and the reaction might just as well be “Well, no duh, what did Obama think they were going to do with that?” Hell, now that the Dems have made us all aware that Kennedy was appointed late in the Reagan administration, it would be rather awkward for them to ignore that Reagan appointed a moderate after his preferred candidate was rejected.
Seems to me the smart play would be for Obama to appoint a highly qualified moderate – the Republicans would be tempted to take the deal, which might hurt them with their bases, and would take the issue off the table for the election (where I suspect a Supreme Court vacancy probably helps the Republicans more). If they do reject the moderate nominee, then they do look extreme.
As an aside, I don’t know where we got this idea that Congress is supposed to merrily go along with the President’s agenda even if it is directly opposed to their own, lest they be labeled “obstructionists”, but it’s one of the more annoying memes of the Obama era.
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I don’t know that it is possible to pick a Kennedy or an O’Connor. Certainly Reagan didn’t think he was picking moderates when he selected them (though admittedly he knew that Kennedy was to the left of Bork).
Moderates, at least in recent times, seem to happen when nominees expected to be conservative get lifetime appointments and begin multi-decade process of moving to the left. It’s unrealistic to expect a Democratic President to pick an expected conservative and cross his fingers.
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Interesting note (to me at least):
Up until this issue with Scalia’s replacement started, I had no idea that the term “Borked” had a specific origin. I always just assumed it was a fun, onomatopoeia-ish term for when something gets in the way of a plan. The more you know!
That said, yeah, I don’t think that blocking whoever Obama appoints will hurt the Republicans, at least not nearly as badly as allowing a liberal appointment to go through would hurt them. Anyone who was going to be sold on that narrative has long since bought it, and anyone who was on the fence, even if they accept the overall narrative about Republican obstructionism in general, is well aware that the Democrats would be doing the exact same thing in their position. If they let the appointment through, on the other hand, they know they would have a literal revolt on their hands among their base. (Presumably, this is why they made the announcement in the first place, though I still think it was a terrible strategy; to forestall this revolt before it even begins.)
Also, yes, appointing a moderate would have been the smart thing for Obama to do… Before they announced they would block anybody, no matter what. That’s a big part of why I think that announcement was a bad move. Right now, Obama has little choice but to make the appointment that will get his own base the most fired up.
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I don’t know where we got this idea that Congress is supposed to merrily go along with the President’s agenda even if it is directly opposed to their own
I recall Diane Feinstein (D-CA) doing just that for one of Bush II’s appointees. Perhaps it was customary till then, and the contrary policy was just coming into use.
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@ gbdub:
Exactly. If Congress is supposed to go along with the President, why the hell do they even exist?
The whole point is that if Congress doesn’t want the President to do something in which they have a say, he doesn’t get to do it.
For instance, if Congress doesn’t want to fund a certain healthcare law, why do they have some kind of obligation to fund it anyway? Just give the President the power of the purse if that’s what you want.
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One dimension of the situation that I haven’t seen much discussed is that Republicans might be choosing between Obama’s candidate and Hilary’s candidate.
Suppose Obama proposes a reasonably moderate candidate. Republicans would rather have the conservative candidate that a Republican president would propose, but they would rather have Obama’s moderate than Hilary’s left winger, and blocking a candidate for four years will be harder and more politically expensive than doing it for one year.
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@ David Friedman
One dimension of the situation that I haven’t seen much discussed is that Republicans might be choosing between Obama’s candidate and Hilary’s candidate.
Frying pan vs fire, devil vs deep blue sea. But so far, all they’ve done is threaten. ‘I support X to replace Scalia, vote for me’ may be useful to some Republican candidates starting now, and build up GOP voter lists. But as time goes on, if Hillary does look like winning, they’ll still have a few weeks to approve Obama’s nominee and close that possibility.
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@ David Friedman:
If Republicans can force Obama to appoint a moderate, why can’t they force Hillary to do the same?
Anyway, I simply don’t think the Republicans should approve a liberal justice—as a replacement for Scalia—under any circumstance. It completely tips the balance of the Court. If they have to have eight justices until the Republicans lose the Senate, fine.
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As I think over it, I would prefer Hillary’s appointee to Obama’s. I have a hard to picturing her choice being worse, and Clintons aren’t nearly as allergic to compromising with the other side.
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/wwwbbubb/
Please excuse this old Clintonista while she chokes with hysterical laughter.
@ Vox Imperatoris
If Republicans can force Obama to appoint a moderate, why can’t they force Hillary to do the same?
@ Jaskologist
As I think over it, I would prefer Hillary’s appointee to Obama’s. I have a hard to picturing her choice being worse, and Clintons aren’t nearly as allergic to compromising with the other side.
Er, sorry. You’re both quite right. Compromise is what the Clintons were criticized for in the 90s and since. But compared to Obama….
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“If Republicans can force Obama to appoint a moderate, why can’t they force Hillary to do the same?”
New President Hillary would be in a more politically powerful position than almost lame duck Obama, even assuming the Republicans hold the Senate. New Presidents get a free bucket of good will and political capital which is theirs to spend on things like the ACA. That said, Hillary does strike me as more likely to nominate a moderate than Obama.
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“If Republicans can force Obama to appoint a moderate, why can’t they force Hillary to do the same?”
Because the political costs of stalling for one year are lower than for four years. In addition to which, there will be two more senatorial elections before the end of Hilary’s term—eight if she is reelected—and they might lose one of them.
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I don’t know where we got this idea that Congress is supposed to merrily go along with the President’s agenda even if it is directly opposed to their own
It doesn’t matter where we got that idea; the matter is that we have it. The general perception in American politics is that the president is The Man and congress’s job is mostly to back his play. That’s why we have 25% of the electorate supporting an outright socialist for president but no viable socialist congressional candidates that I know of, and 15-20% supporting whatever it is we want to call Trump and no noticeable support for a Trumpian “reform” candidates in the House or Senate.
If the President nominates Supreme Court Justices who aren’t obviously extremists, or proposes budgets that aren’t similarly out of whack, and we end up with an eight-justice court or a persistent government “shutdown”, the voters will blame congress, not the president, and punish the congressional majority party in the next elections. They don’t have to provide an acceptable historical answer to the question of how they got that way, they don’t have to justify themselves or listen to anyone explain why they are doing it wrong.
Supreme court confirmations are expected to be contentious and take months; having a vacancy come up nine months before a particularly contentious election probably gives the Republicans enough latitude to stall until we get a new president. Trying to stall until 2020 would very likely mean the end of the GOP.
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@ Vox Imperatoris
So, does anyone want to bet on whether Republicans in the Senate will have the spine to hold up their commitment to block Obama’s Supreme Court nominations until the election?
Might depend on things like whether they watch the numbers on how many Democrats are registering to vote as this makes more and more news. They’d be better with Obama’s choice — than Hillary’s.
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The previous contentious confirmations have taken 3 to 4 months from nomination to final vote. I’d say it’s certainly possible to stretch one nomination out into the middle of the summer, by which point the press’s focus will be on the presidential election (and we’ll be in the traditional “Thurmond Rule” range). Alternatively, two 4-month nominations, both voted down, would take us practically to the election.
Now this would have been far more plausible if McConnell hadn’t outright said that he would reject any nominee and it should be up to the next president to decide. Though this does give some extra time to hem and haw about how unprecedented an appointment during an election year is, etc., etc., and push the actual start of Senate hearings out a few weeks.
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If I were Obama, I’d be strongly tempted to say: Okay, Republicans, name your top 10 picks; I will consult some Democrat colleagues and we’ll name our top 10, promise that no one will obstruct whoever is nominated then we roll a D20 to decide.
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Who gets to roll the die?
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In the event that a SC nomination is blocked until the next president takes office and:
1. The President is a Republican and Democrats hold the Senate, why would they not continue blocking nominations?
2. The President is a Democrat and Republicans hold the Senate, why would they not continue blocking nominations?
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Because the nomination presents an opportunity for some quid-pro-quo.
The question is will the senate display the brains and baraka capitalize on it? Or will they revert to seeking executive approval like a battered spouse?
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There’s no reason that they can’t do this. Nothing say the Senate has to approve Presidential nominations, or that there have to be nine justices on the Supreme Court.
In the end, if the public wants another justice on the Supreme Court, the question is whether Congress or the President convinces the public that their cause is right, and forces the other to cave.
For instance, with the most recent government shutdown, the media narrative was “Obstructionist Republicans won’t pass a budget.” But they did pass a budget: one Obama wouldn’t sign. The narrative could just as well have been “Obstructionist Obama won’t sign the budget.” So who was to blame for the shutdown? It depends on who is right in that dispute.
(The thing I don’t understand is that you hardly even hear Republicans pushing that side of the story.)
But anyway, it’s like political brinksmanship or “chicken”: the thing is to have more will and make the other guy swerve. One way to win at this is if you are less affected by the “collision”. For instance, if you’re driving a monster truck in a game of chicken against a motorcycle, you know the other guy is going to swerve. And if he doesn’t, he’ll die and you’ll barely be affected.
If the Republicans had balls they would feel less affected by the prospect of a shutdown. But they are too scared of the media narrative painting them as obstructionists, instead of effectively pushing the counter-narrative that Obama is an obstructionist who won’t let the government function at all if he can’t have his healthcare law funded.
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Vox Imperatoris says: The thing I don’t understand is that you hardly even hear Republicans pushing that side of the story.
I hear it all the time on the ground/local level but it never seems to make it to the national news.
*Dons tinfoil hat*
I wonder why that might be…
*Doffs hat*
Edit:
Well that’s disconcerting, the comment I linked too appears to have gone down the memory hole.
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I notice a lot of people suggested Scott make that comment into a post of its own, so maybe that’s what he’s planning to do? I’m not sure what the benefit of … iting it out in the meantime is, but my best guess is he wants to make it more nuanced somehow before everyone starts attributing it to him. It was a good comment, though.
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@HlynkaCG
Spandrell has preserved the post on his blog.
https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/picking-sides/
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@ Anonymous
What a peculiar post.
Spandrell certainly can’t be trying to do the thing described in the intro — manipulating an “asshole ruler” into rejecting their “good general”. You don’t manipulate someone by announcing outright that you’re interested in depriving them of a valuable resource.
So, what is he trying to do?
Trigger Scott’s well-known anxiety? Give his audience the pleasure of fantasizing about “winning” the “war”? Perhaps both?
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You don’t manipulate someone by announcing outright that you’re interested in depriving them of a valuable resource.
Why not? It works for Vox Day.
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Got a suspicion that he was expecting the typically contrarian comment section to shred holes in it, and realised that it wasn’t helping the cause of progress when the responses were largely split between “pretty much” and “wow, that’s scary but plausible”.
Or just #thingsiwillregretwriting
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@ Leit – I don’t think so. The responses were highly consistent with the “SSC *commentariat* leans right” hypothesis (Internet: This is not a statement that each, every, all, commenters are ultra-right and no, zero, none, commenters are slightly left). Also, it was going to take a large amount of effort, PLUS deep familiarity with the left, to write a considered response. And that’d be a thankless task. But very little effort to say “Right on!”, with the reinforcement of in-group reward.
But Spandrell’s post strikes me as a strategy likely to backfire, if it does anything at all. It’s declaring that side as trying to provoke the torment of the person they’re trying to influence, which doesn’t seem to me a way to win friends and influence people (to one’s side, rather than away from it).
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>So, what is he trying to do?
Gloat. He probably thinks it’s already happening and it’s unlikely to stop.
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@Seth
“””Leit – I don’t think so. The responses were highly consistent with the “SSC *commentariat* leans right” hypothesis (Internet: This is not a statement that each, every, all, commenters are ultra-right and no, zero, none, commenters are slightly left). Also, it was going to take a large amount of effort, PLUS deep familiarity with the left, to write a considered response. And that’d be a thankless task. But very little effort to say “Right on!”, with the reinforcement of in-group reward.
“””
Although it certainly appears that SSC leans right, I don’t think you can deduce it from the reaction to that post. I myself am fairly left- I am in favor of bigger minimum wage, more taxes on the rich, free contraception, and (depending on how automation progresses), maybe basic income. I won’t defend those positions here, I am merely pointing out my leftist leanings.
However, none of that means that I have to support things like creeping credentialism, attacks on nerds or crazier parts of Feminism. And criticism of the crazy left by the sane left is nothing new. Postmodernism is now pretty old in academia – we had old lefties like Alan Sokal slamming the SJWs of their time for saying crap like Newton’s Principia Mathematica being a “rape manual.” New SJW is mostly a crude version of the same thing, and aimed at popular culture.
And it should be noted that these attacks against silicon valley for being too “bro” are very, very new. As recently as 2012 elections, tech people were widely praised for their part in helping Obama defeat Romney. It used to be the right that was accusing games of promoting violence and anti-social behavior. It is only now, with fragmentation of left into the various camps that techies became “bros” and games became sexist.
(Having said that, I am not sure if there really is a straightforward connection between credentialsim and SJW-ism. It is probably more complex.)
And I must also say that the very fact that SSC commentariat leans so right (despite Scott not leaning right at all) is to me the indictment of the left as it exists now. Too many leftists simply ignore anything that is even slightly against the current ideologies and causes. I also see people from the left accusing dissidents of being trolls way too often. As if they can’t conceive of anyone disagreeing with any detail of their ideology. This rush for “safe spaces” is going to be the end of us.
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@Anonymous
That blog post from “bloody shovel” is something else. I made the mistake of reading the comments **hurk**.
@onyomi
I think he remove it because it got a lot of attention from people outside of this site, a lot of it from the type of people you don’t want attention from. Also see the note in the open thread where Scott asked people not to mention things posted in an out of the way fashion.
@Nita
I think that kind of is “bloody shovel”‘s intent. Or at least to make that comment of scott’s out there enough that it becomes well known.
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“Although it certainly appears that SSC leans right”
What does that mean? What is the implicit neutral point you are comparing it to?
You self-identify as left, so anything less left leans right relative to your view of the truth, just as anything less libertarian than me leans left relative to my view. That obviously isn’t what you mean, but I’m not sure what is.
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“What does that mean? What is the implicit neutral point you are comparing it to?”
I suppose I mean, “leans more right than is average in western (American + European) culture.” It seems strange to find that part of what I wrote controversial, out of everything else written.
Although, I should have written that SSC *commentariat* leans right, not Scott. Scott is actually as left as I, despite complaining about portions of the left. Too late to correct now.
What do you think of the rest of my post?
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@Antimule @David
The other way to define how the community “leans” is relative to the population as a whole. My impression on that is
1. Centrist on economic issues, with large variation between posters. Market friendly, but sympathetic to large scale anti-poverty policy and some economic intervention.
2. Libertarian on social issues ie. strongly protective of civil liberties, and skeptical towards both left-wing and conservative proposals for wide-scale cosersively enforced social change.
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I seriously doubt that comment is coming back. On reddit and on tumbr, he explains that he deleted it because it started to go viral.
So has Nick Land.
http://www.xenosystems.net/quote-note-220/
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“I suppose I mean, “leans more right than is average in western (American + European) culture.” It seems strange to find that part of what I wrote controversial, out of everything else written.”
I think it’s controversial because I don’t think it is correct – it’s certainly not true of Americans (who make up most of the likely audience). Remember how many creationists there are in the US vs. how many are here? How many social conservatives are actually here? Maybe it’s true the blog is rightish of “all English speaking people in North America and Europe”. But I’m not sure that’s a fair baseline either.
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@Nita – “Spandrell certainly can’t be trying to do the thing described in the intro — manipulating an “asshole ruler” into rejecting their “good general”. You don’t manipulate someone by announcing outright that you’re interested in depriving them of a valuable resource.”
…Anon already mentioned Vox Day. It seems to me that both Vox and this Spandrell person see themselves as sufficiently toxic relative to the current mainstream, and Social Justice as sufficiently strident, that they can pretty much do that at will. And even if they’re wrong, the attempt costs *them* nothing, so why not try and see?
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“leans more right than is average in western (American + European) culture.”
I think whether or not one includes Europe in that calculation is a very decisive factor. If the claim were that the SSC commentariat is to the right of the average US+European view then I’d actually accept that because the average European view is far to the left of the average US view.
But, while we have a decent representation of Europeans on here (it’s a much more transatlantic commentariat than I encounter almost anywhere else), I’m pretty sure SSC is still majority American by a pretty good margin. By the standards of America, SSC is slightly left-leaning, and Scott himself is significantly left-leaning, especially on social issues.
Perhaps a fairer metric would be to measure the views of the commentariat not against some arbitrary US and/or European median view, but against the populations which they represent. That is, if SSC is 60% US, 30% European and 10% other (I guess the real figures are on one of the surveys somewhere?), then, in order to be perfectly representative (though it’s arguable whether or not that is desirable), we’d need to weigh the average American view say, double.
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On the “leans right” question …
My suspicion is that the perception is relative to an environment, academia plus associated blue cultural areas, that is well to the left of at least the U.S. average. The bubble problem.
Including Europe is hard, because left/right issues don’t necessarily map across societies. The Scandinavian countries are left of the U.S. in terms of income redistribution, generally right of the U.S. (i.e. more pro-market) in terms of government regulation.
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I feel like getting one more justice onto to court before the election is probably important enough that some degree of undesirable ideological shifting should be toleradble.
If the voting results get kicked to a court case again they’ll return a 4-4 deadlock, which is bad juju.
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4-4 means they uphold the lower court’s decision. It’s the same as if they didn’t rule.
This is fine. For instance, if Bush v. Gore had been 4-4, the decision of the Florida Supreme Court (in favor of Gore) would have stood.
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In hypothetical perfect compliance with the law world the lower court”s ruling stands, and back in year 2000 real world people probably would have sat down, shut up, and taken it.
Would they today? Democrats might, but I doubt it. I don’t think there’s even that much chance Republicans would. The highest court in the land failing to give a ruling at all would delegitimize the loss.
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RE: Purple-face incident.
(I hope this post satisfies Scott’s rules regarding race and politics)
I am a student at Stellenbosch University (in South Africa) where the incident occurred. It’s interesting to see my university mentioned here. Unfortunate that it’s in such a bad light, I suppose. (I am happy to answer questions that would reasonably be known by a random student at the uni, if anyone happens to be interested).
Not directly related to the above incident, but to give you a rough idea of the political climate here at Stellenbosch (and South African universities in general) as told from my perspective (white male):
At Stellenbosch in particular, there is a group called ‘Open Stellenbosch’ whose stated aims are to ensure Stellenbosch is open to students of colour. In particular, one of their major causes is to try to have the university provide all tuition in English in addition to / instead of Afrikaans (which, note, is useful only to students of colour who are more fluent in English than Afrikaans). This group is known (at least among my in-group) for their radical and racist views.
Recently there have been a growing number of student protests. Mainly picking up momentum last year with the #RhodesMustFall movement (to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at UCT), and the #FeesMustFall movement across SA protesting the high cost of university tuition. During that protest, at many universities there was a great deal of vandalism, although it was very minor at Stellenbosch by comparison. At Stellenbosch, a large number of students camped outside one of the administration buildings, preventing staff members from entering (and leaving, I think). The Student Representative Council (SRC) Chairperson and one other member called the police to come clear them from the building. This move was unpopular with many students who were in support of the protest. This month there was a call to have a vote of no confidence in the SRC chair and member. At the student parliament, a subgroup of Open Stellenbosch disrupted the proceedings. One of the members got up on stage and, in his own words, disrupted the meeting because they were ‘outnumbered by the whites’ and so wouldn’t have their vote of no confidence passed. Video on FB here: https://www.facebook.com/319895538134510/videos/337640436360020/?pnref=story
(“These white people come to vote for Diamond and Mynhardt to remain in the SRC.” “We are not going to vote.” “I am the chairperson now” *Applause*)
Full (bad quality) video of the student parliament here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yiDvPWc-Jc&ab_channel=JonathanWotherspoon
The parliament took place in a church, hence the cross. The red beret is in support of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the political party in SA with the third-most votes and who have themselves disrupted parliament on numerous occasions. (not necessarily a bad thing – I pass no judgement on their decision to do so here). See here for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIW0EjaX7hQ&ab_channel=SABCDigitalNews
For an idea of the general state of the South African government, see the State of the Nation Address here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o03ylUv1VnM&ab_channel=SABCDigitalNews (note, this does not paint the country in a good light).
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How many such people are there in South Africa? How many of them are students at Stellenbosch, and how many of them are students of color?
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The question is not how many such people there are in South Africa, but how many such are in the Western Cape.
The dominant population group in the Cape is the Cape Coloureds. Yes, very imaginative name, I know. Anyway, they’re pretty much universally Afrikaans-speaking non-whites.
The Cape province in general has always tended toward Afrikaans, though whites from elsewhere in the country have been moving there over the past few years, including many primarily English-speaking whites from areas like Johannesburg. “Many” being a relative measure, seeing as whites are still a minority in both areas.
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According to Wikipedia:
-Demographics for the Western Cape-
49% of the people of the Western Cape described themselves as “Coloured”, while 33% described themselves as “Black African”, 17% as “White”, and 1% as “Indian or Asian”. Afrikaans is the plurality language, spoken as the first language of 50% of the province’s population. IsiXhosa is the first language of 25% of the population, while English is the first language of 20%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Cape#Demographics
-Demographics for University of Stellenbosch in 2009-
According to the 2008 language profile of the university, 60% of its students stated Afrikaans as their home language, 32% had English as their home language and 1.6% of students had Xhosa as their home language.
The language policy is still an ongoing issue for the University, since it is one of the very few tertiary institutions left in South Africa offering tuition in Afrikaans. Due to this, it is held in very high regard by the Afrikaner community, with the university even being considered a central pillar of Afrikaner life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellenbosch_University
Note that a.f.a.i.k. the North-West University is more Afrikaans than is Stellenbosch (source: my brother who studied there).
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>I am a student at Stellenbosch University (in South Africa) where the incident occurred.
I stand corrected.
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Suspect you’ve got your incidents crossed over with BassicallyBoss’s thread further up.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen in South Africa, but it probably wouldn’t be in the Cape.
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I’m confused now. Is it not the same incident?
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No, BasicallyBoss had the friend dressed as a Night-Elf who was almost arrested for blackface. Stellenbosch University is where the students were suspended for dressing as purple aliens.
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Aha! Okay, thanks. I missed the other one.
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I don’t think there is much of a connection between new programmes that teach gifted youngsters, and victory in the IMO. IMO teams contain the 6 best mathematicians aged 15-18 (usually) in a country. The level of mathematical ability needed is so high that those who have it will not need any encouraging to get into problem solving.
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That doesn’t mean they won’t benefit significantly from being placed in a program where that desire is encouraged and trained. It’s common that those kind of kids come from families where the parents, though not dumb, are not familiar with higher math. Learning by reading books and self-study is possible, but it’s usually worse than learning by focused teaching by experts. For that matter, most libraries don’t stock higher math textbooks (or many advanced books on any subject).
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Certainly, future engineers, and even maths professors (maybe the top 1% in ability) likely benefit from these programs. However, I think potential IMO team members (the top 0.00001%) are on so much of a higher level that firstly their ability will be obvious, and secondly that they will do well enough in national competitions to be considered for the IMO without extra resources.
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Here’s a countervailing thought experiment. You have two identical twins, separated at birth. Both are of exceptional (and identical) mathematical ability. One is adopted by a math professor. The other is adopted by a typical white-collar office worker of some sort. It seems intuitively obvious that the one who is raised by a math professor is going to benefit from a much higher level of access to information about advanced math. It’s not that he’s more likely to go into math in the long run (that’s a given) or even that he’s going to be better in the long run. But if the first kid learns about multivariable calculus at age 8, and the second doesn’t do so until he talks his middle school math teacher out of one of her college textbooks at 11, then the first kid is likely to do better at IMO.
(In fairness, I don’t know much about how math competitions work. I did competitive geography instead, but I could definitely see this occurring there.)
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I don’t know much about competitive geography, beyond the little someone involved with it told me. However, I get the impression that there is a lower ceiling on essay competitions — the geographer at 0.0001% is much more similar to the one on 0.5% than the mathematicians at the same percentiles. So in your example I that either both twins would get on the IMO team, or neither would. At a lower level, there certainly would be a difference: I could imagine the professor’s son coming 2000th in a national competition, but the other twin not taking part at all, because no-one realises how good they are.
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The contrast here is not between kids who learn multivariable calculus at 8 and 11. (Also, the median middle school math teacher probably doesn’t have a college textbook on multivariable calculus.) The contrast is going to be between the kid who learns calculus, and more, in elementary/middle school, and the kid who is exceptional in his (or her) small town because he takes *algebra* at 11, and doesn’t really have any other resources beyond the classroom until he takes a couple of community college classes in high school.
It’s probably completely obvious who I am at this point, but anyway: my parents are well-educated, but I lived in such a small town. I was (basically) the latter kid until my parents took the advice of some friends and sent me to a summer program between middle school and high school, where I learned (among other things) of the existence of the relevant contests, and was able to leverage that experience to attend another summer program the following year, and so on. If my parents hadn’t been wealthy enough, or were otherwise not inclined to send me to these camps once they became aware of them, my story would have been very different — as it was already rather different from most of the other top-level USAMO/IMO caliber students, who had opportunities from an earlier age.
(As I noted in a comment below, I wasn’t on the IMO team, but did eventually place highly on the USAMO.)
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I’m not so sure of that. Let’s take this even farther. One twin is raised by a math professor. He has the optimal environment, and learns as fast as humanly possible. The other one is raised by rednecks in rural Appalachia. Neither of his parents is very good at multiplication, and there isn’t a calculus book within 10 miles of him. Even if they’re tied for ‘best mathematician of the decade’, it’s hard to see the latter being tied with the first one in terms of math skills at age 15. He’ll catch up by the time grad school rolls around, but he’s going to be behind because he has to work much harder to get access to information.
As for numbers, there are approximately 4 million children born in the US each year. The IMO bracket covers 4 years, and 6 members on a team means that IMO gets (approximately) the best 1.5 mathematicians per year, or 1 in 2.66667 million. That’s .000056%, or close to 6 times your estimate of the eliteness of these kids.
As for geography, it’s hardly essay competitions. It’s like the spelling bee, only instead of having to spell odd words, you have to be able to tell the difference between small European countries. (I’m American. No offense meant to anyone from those places.)
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@Universal Set
Certainly, knowing of the existence of such contests is a big part of being able to do well on them. But speaking for myself, I don’t think there is anything other than internet resources that helps massively. My best maths competition result was qualifying for the BMO1 (best 1000ish 16-18 year olds). If I’d gone to Eton maybe I’d have got into the BMO2, but I don’t think there’s any way I could have got into the IMO. And from the perspective of someone who has 4 months to prepare for a different very challenging maths exam, I think doing papers (which is a possibility for anyone) will be much more helpful than classes.
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We have experimental evidence on the equivalent of the mathematical genius brought up in Appalachia. His name was Srinivasa Ramanujan.
I don’t know how early he demonstrated his ability, but it’s at least possible that not having been trained as a mathematician was an asset, since it meant he approached problems from his own original angle.
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@ David Friedman:
Still, he seems very much an outlier to me.
Perhaps a clearer example is motorsports. If you want to become an F1 driver, you’ve got to start practicing from a young age. If you never get behind the wheel of a car until age 18, you don’t have a chance. Surely there are some people who have the innate talent to be F1 drivers but just don’t get exposed to it early enough.
I think the story with mathematics is probably not too different. Sure, there may be some people who beat the odds and somehow end up getting into it anyway. But I think there are probably just as many people who would be good at it but don’t get exposed, or don’t get exposed in the right way.
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I think one of the key aspects of Appalachia as an example is the isolation from the rest of the world. Think of the old cliche of the coal mining community (the examples I can think of are the main characters family in Zoolander and Monty Python, which are both parodies). I have previously speculated that being within a city means better access to schools, social services and jobs.
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@Universal Set:
I didn’t know about the existence of these contests (I almost certainly wouldn’t have been interested anyway–I’m not the competitive type–but the fact remains, I didn’t know about them).
I did go to CTY (both sections, but chose “verbal” topics the first two summers). DH got in but his parents went, “Thousands of dollars for summer camp?!? OF COURSE NOT!” and I don’t think they ever even learned what they’d turned down–I know when I met him, *he* sure didn’t know what they’d taken it upon themselves to turn down for him. (And I’ve known some parents who didn’t even sign their kids up for the test.)
“The contrast is going to be between the kid who learns calculus, and more, in elementary/middle school, and the kid who is exceptional in his (or her) small town because he takes *algebra* at 11, and doesn’t really have any other resources beyond the classroom until he takes a couple of community college classes in high school.”
…IMX many school systems don’t offer algebra to 6th graders, don’t allow grade-skipping, won’t allow a 6th grader to attend a higher grade for another subject, and taking community college classes in high school is unheard of. I mean, just, FYI.
…but I guess your assumptions here mean things might be better for Da Kidz than they were for my generation (and the slightly-younger kids I tried to help as a teen). That would be cool if so.
@bean, old article touching on your point:
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@David Friedman:
I wouldn’t put him at IMO level, which is approximately 1 in 2 million in the US. He was probably two or three orders of magnitude beyond that. Remember, this is someone who couldn’t study anything but math.
@Cord Shirt:
There has been a fair bit of progress in opening advanced classes to younger students in some places. Admittedly, I went to a district with excellent gifted programs, but most places I have even some familiarity with the school setup would allow really exceptional students to move ahead at least to some degree.
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@Cord Shirt
You are right in that it is not standard practice in many places to accelerate students at all, even exceptional ones, at all. It it my impression that this has been getting better over the last ~20 years, though.
[Personal anecdote follows: I believe I was the first person in my school to ever take algebra before 7th grade, and the number who took algebra in 7th grade was very rarely more than 0 per year (out of about 150 students per grade) until after I passed through. This was accomplished only after constant pressure from my parents. Had my parents been less involved, things would have gone less well.]
For those following along: opportunities vary immensely by location. If you are lucky enough to live in one of a select few metro areas (Fairfax/Alexandria VA, with TJHSST, and New York, with Stuyvesant, are the most prominent), you can attend a local or regional magnet school with lots of smart kids (including multiple people qualifying for USAMO every year). Similarly if you live in a state with a residential math/science academy (and have parents willing to send you), or if you manage to attend a school like Phillips Exeter. Of course, this is at the high school level, and middle-school (and earlier) opportunities are even more location-limited.
If you live in a wealthy suburb with good schools, you probably have a math team and access to information about contests, as well as schools willing to let you advance more quickly than your peers. It’s not as good as the previous category, but there’s plenty of opportunity for someone proactive.
Otherwise, your opportunities range from “they might let you skip some classes or a grade if you are really good and your parents push hard” to “actively harmful”. I’m under the impression that the former of these is most typical, but I could be wrong. The new resources are game-changers for people in situations like these.
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“There has been a fair bit of progress in opening advanced classes to younger students in some places. ”
Fifty some years ago, when I was a high school senior, I was able to take a college calculus course. It helped that my high school belonged to the University of Chicago.
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@David,
I was actually able to do that, too, in Whittier, CA (yes, I’m from Richard Nixon’s hometown). We were able to take Calc I and Calc II as offered by Cal State Fullerton. They also had a program through a local community college where high school juniors and seniors could take classes, and I did that for English Composition, but it was only practical in the summer.
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Another place with an excellent magnet program is St. Louis. Most of the school districts outside of St. Louis City itself will send students to the regional Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students (PEGS), which starts in 1st grade. And if math is the issue, there are some 5th graders who take algebra, although not that many. It’s usually a 6th grade class, taught at the middle school.
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In-My-Opinion(heh) a simple grounder to think about these things is sports.
There’s sports/problems where natural talent dominates, such as the 40 meter sprint. I think of these as certain type of word/3D geometry problems. Sure training helps, but this is a highly genetic run. There’s sports where talent dominates after precise training, such as the high-jump and shot-put. I think of certain types of factoring and combinatorics problems. And there’s sports where significant practice helps greatly, though talent obviously clearly matters and makes the most interesting results, such as gymnastics. Actual mathematics research goes into this category, where its difficult to impossible to make any contribution without years of significant training, however the most appealing results come from extreme training and talent in conjunction.
Occasionally, one find a Putnam fellow in the states who didn’t compete in math contests in high school.
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I agree that this probably does not have a ton to do with the US winning the IMO last year. In the past 16 years (many of which predate a lot of this explosion in programs), the US has never placed below 6th, and was in the top three 13 times. (The 90s were a little more spotty, but the US has a track record to placing in the top few spots most of the time.)
However, I think you understate the effect that the programs mentioned in the article have had on even the top performers. The issue is not so much encouragement to get into problem solving, but opportunity to learn and be challenged. Art of Problem Solving, and the many new summer programs, really have changed the landscape. I graduated high school in 2004, and in many ways I, not having access to the opportunities present in select locations (e.g. TJHSST), was very lucky to get to participate in summer programs which challenged me. Now, with AoPS and all the new camps, many more people have this access, starting even earlier than high school, and that means more people who have the opportunity to grow mathematically and perform at the highest level.
Edit: To assure you that my little personal anecdote has some meaning, I should note that, while I was never on the IMO team for the US, I did place in the top 12 on the USAMO in 2004. I would never have been close to this level if I hadn’t had opportunities, starting in high school, that went beyond what was available in my local area. The top few people are not necessarily *automatically* so; resources and opportunity do count for a lot.
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A slight issue I have with the contests is that last year, 11 out of 12 top scorers on the USAMO took the AOPS training course.
The SAT has enough criticism for being “gamed”, but that’s a pretty absurd number far outside chance.
I don’t want to call “unfair”, more so that top talent across the country isn’t being located properly.
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Kim Jong Il defined Three Fools, which were people who smoke, people who don’t like music, and people who don’t know how to use computers.
Confirmed /r/pcmasterrace user?
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Amazing Russian propaganda poster, found on reddit: https://i.imgur.com/INppnVa.jpg
Literal translation:
Smoking kills
More people than Obama,
However he kills very many people.
Don’t smoke.
It is not necessary to be like Obama.
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I wonder what reaction that’d get among Red Tribe Republicans if it was set up here in America…
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Ironically, red tribe Republicans are very big fans of Putin.
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Really? I thought Red Tribe positions were reflexively anti-Russia because Communism. The pro-Putin people seem to be more alt-right.
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I agree with you.
I think if you ask the average guy with a pickup truck whether he likes Putin, the answer is going to be “no”.
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Eh. “Very big fans” is putting it strongly. “Admire his chutzpa and trolling patterns” – yes. Think he’s making it obvious that he’s outmaneuvering Obama on several fronts, yes.
Think that making photoshops of Putin riding bears is hysterical, absolutely.
The impression I get from most is that they agree with McCain – they look at Putin and see KGB, and that is to be fought decisively and with resolve.
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How could anyone be pro-putin? Well, at least from the limited knowledge I have of.
It seems like some strange worship of the military-industrial complex and simply appearing “hard” as a ruler.
Though, that *is* the stereotype of certain right-leaning subtypes of the bunch. You don’t hear much about militaristic gun-toting hippies.
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How could anyone be pro-putin?
How could you possibly be anti-Putin? My only objection is that he’s not of my ethny, and part of a polity that is historically at odds with mine (“the enemy has a better, more virtuous general than we do”). I would love for a transethnic Putin clone to be ruling my country.
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@ Anonymous:
Where the hell did the word “ethny” come from? I have only heard right-identitiarians use it.
I take it to be an abbreviation for “ethnicity”, but who started it.
Also, if you think Putin is actually a good ruler for Russia, you’re either an idiot or very misinformed.
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>Where the hell did the word “ethny” come from? I have only heard right-identitiarians use it.
>I take it to be an abbreviation for “ethnicity”, but who started it.
No idea. It seems to mean what you infer. Wikipedia redirects from “ethnies” to “ethnicity”.
>Also, if you think Putin is actually a good ruler for Russia, you’re either an idiot or very misinformed.
How about “neither”?
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@ Vox Imperatoris
After a bit of googling, my best guess is that it’s a calque from French or German “ethnie”. The proper English term would be “ethnic group”.
(According to Google Ngrams, “peak ethny” was in 1981.)
To me, “ethny” has an unfortunate cutesy flavour, which clashes with the glorious image our ethny-loving friends are trying to craft.
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@Vox – “Also, if you think Putin is actually a good ruler for Russia, you’re either an idiot or very misinformed.”
…I’ve tangled with Nita before on this question, but eh.
Let’s accept upfront that Putin is not a good ruler for Russia. If you could replace him with one of his predecessors, which one would you pick?
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@ FacelessCraven:
The fact that I don’t think Putin is a good leader doesn’t imply that I think his predecessors were better… They were bad in different ways.
Yeltsin was in some ways better but in other ways a lot worse—on the other hand, a lot of that was due to the situation he found himself in.
If I had to pick one…I don’t know, Georgy Lvov? 😉
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@Vox – “If I had to pick one…I don’t know, Georgy Lvov?”
…Assuming that was a serious answer, and after a quick trip to wikipedia, would it be fair to say then that you think Putin is the best ruler Russia has had in the last hundred years?
Perhaps not? perhaps there are other picks you’d take ahead of Putin?
…I’d like to see Russia not be a basketcase, which puts me at odds with my understanding of US foreign policy post-USSR. My assessment is that Putin has done quite a bit to reverse his country’s slide into irrelevance and inevitable breakup. That’s arguable, of course, since one interpretation of events is that steps taken to reverse that slide will end up accelerating it, but I’m honestly not sure what the better move would have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism
The very idea of Chekism is horrifying and perverse beyond belief, but at some point screaming and gesticulating further seems pointless.
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@Vox:
I think this depends on how you define “good”. It may very well be the case that Russia cannot be effectively governed by anyone except a hardcore dictator. If this is true, then even if some moderately enlightened reformist leader managed to somehow gain power, he would soon find himself besieged at his own dacha — plunging the country into a period of turmoil, political uncertainty, economic ruin, and possibly civil war. The citizens of Russia would, perhaps, be justified in considering that outcome to be less “good” than whatever reign of terror their current dictator is propagating.
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I think “big fans” is overstating it.
Do we enjoy watching him take the left down a peg? Yes. Find memes about bear calvary and supervilliany amusing? Certainly.
Is he still “the Opposition”? Absolutely.
Edit: ninja’d by Keranih.
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“Is he still “the opposition”? Absolutely.”
I think this is part of why they respect him. It’s not that they want Putin to tell America what to do, it’s that they want their own, American Putin, which role some now believe Donald Trump can fill. Scary part is they could be right.
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“Big fans” is still a big stretch though. I voted Republican in both the last two presidential elections, but I’d still vote for Obama over Putin (unless we were in or about to be in a real shooting war…!
That said, Putin has absolutely schooled Obama on foreign policy, and I suspect Putin understands Obama much better than the reverse.
I “respect” Putin as a dangerous, skilled adversary with a plan and the will to execute it. But I have zero admiration for his cause or many of his methods.
I think we’d be better off if Obama had a similar level of respect for him.
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My point is just that, in a few decades, red tribe has gone from (arguably rightly) viewing the Russians as our atheist, socialist arch-nemeses to wishing our leaders could be more like their leader. This is probably more a result of changes in Russia than changes in the US red tribe, but it still strikes me as ironic.
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@Onyomi,
I think you’re underselling how much of this is due to changes here.
Nobody on the right would feel tempted to trade Reagan in for an American Putin. Nor Eisenhower nor Nixon. And even with their distaste for their policies I think most would still rather have kept FDR Truman and JFK.
The thing is, all of those men were (at least in the public eye ) Statesmen and they each projected America’s dignity and greatness. They weren’t gods but they were leaders that you could look up to.
By contrast our current crop of Presidents have been national embarrassments. They show no strength, no discernable talents aside from a sort of low cunning, and are thoroughly despicable human beings.
Putin is a cartoon character, the caricature of a third world strongman. But even that is beyond what our own politicians have to offer.
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Not sure about the rest, but Robert Welch got pretty far by calling Eisenhower a Communist (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Welch,_Jr.#Welch.27s_The_Politician and Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm), and there was plenty of hate for Kennedy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wanted_for_treason.jpg, and William Manchester records further examples). Mostly the work of a noisy minority, of course, but there were enough of them to get Goldwater nominated over Rockefeller and William Scranton in 1964 and give two or three states to George Wallace in 1968. Goldwater wasn’t much of a Putin figure, but between him and Wallace…I can see it.
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@ Gdub and Dr. Dealgood
I consider my self solidly “Red Tribe” and pretty much agree on all counts.
@ Psmith
I think that you are committing a serious category error. I’d wager that if you asked a representative sample of Red Tribers their opinion of Dwight D Eisenhower the response would be overwhelmingly positive, and the vast majority would look at you like you had a penis growing out of your forehead if you tried to tell them that he was a communist.
Further more you seem to be forgetting that fear of communist infiltration isn’t nearly as “paranoid” as it would seem today when A) Communism had racked up a body-count that made the Nazis look lazy. B) Many prominent public figures were openly supportive of this. and C) There were actual communist infiltrators in the mix.
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@ Hlynkacg:
I’m the last person to defend Communism, but this comparison is not one-hundred percent fair. The major reason that the Nazis did not kill more people than the Communists is that the Communists, with the help of the Western Allies, defeated the Nazis. They allied with Stalin precisely because they figured he was a lesser evil.
And it isn’t clear that they were wrong in that judgment. The Nazis had a program for outright extermination not only of the Jews but for many of the Slavic peoples they were planning to conquer. And the rest they planned to distribute as slaves to German “soldier peasants” living on fiefdoms in the East.
Now, the Soviet Union was a tyrannical state. But it’s easy to argue that the Nazi state would have been significantly worse if they hadn’t been stopped.
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@Vox
I’ll grant that, but at the same time there seems to be a tendency to forget that “the lesser of two evils” when one of those evils is literally Hitler, may still be pretty damn evil.
Point being, if someone were to remain vocally pro-Nazi after VE day I would expect them to attract a certain amount of negative attention. Especially if there were still sizeable groups of Nazis wandering around inciting revolutions and looking for a rematch.
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@ HlynkaCG:
Well, I’ve got your back there.
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@Hlynka, well, I’m not saying anything about present-day opinions broken down by class. But I think my sources show that there was plenty of right-wing desire for an authoritarian, Putin-esque right-wing leader even in the days of supposed well-meaning consensus and serious statesmanship. Hell, quite a bit of the law-and-order support for Nixon in 1968 and 1972 seems compatible with the desire for a Putin of our own. I agree that Eisenhower and Kennedy are sainted now, and even that Eisenhower was mostly well-regarded by the right of his own time, but certainly not entirely. And Kennedy definitely not.
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@Vox: I agree with you, with the caveat that Nazism didn’t last longer than Marxism-Leninism. From a pure utilitarian perspective, we have no grounds to say that Hitler was worse than Stalin.
But a Platonist would say that since the Real and the Good are the same, being even more evil is exactly why Nazism self-destructed in 12 years.
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@ Le Maistre Chat:
This is just the difference between judging which one did the most harm and judging which one was more immoral.
I mean, tornadoes kill a lot of people, but are tornadoes immoral?
The book Darkness at Noon has a really great and in-depth discussion of this, calling it the difference between “objective morality” and “subjective good faith”. Ironically, the communists themselves tended to dismiss concerns about “subjective good faith” and focus only on the objective consequences. So by their own standards (as Koestler interprets them, but I think he interprets e.g. Trotsky pretty fairly), the communists were more evil than Hitler.
In my view, yes, ultimately we care about objective consequences. So if someone runs over a pedestrian accidentally, we can say this is an evil thing, if we mean “evil” in the classical sense of “bad” or “not good” (as in the “problem of evil”).
But we also have to recognize that human beings act on the basis of subjective intentions, and for that reason it’s not appropriate to treat a cold-blooded murderer and an accidental killer the same way. Punishing the accidental killer doesn’t accomplish anything, if he wasn’t reckless.
Yet that is the dynamic that Koestler often presents being used by the Communists: if a man orders the use of the wrong type of fetilizer, causing a harvest to fail, it doesn’t matter that he acted in “subjective good faith”. He is “objectively” a saboteur or a “wrecker” and can therefore be charged and executed as such.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book.
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“Mostly the work of a noisy minority, of course, but there were enough of them to get Goldwater nominated over Rockefeller and William Scranton in 1964 and give two or three states to George Wallace in 1968. Goldwater wasn’t much of a Putin figure, but between him and Wallace…I can see it.”
???
Support for Goldwater did not depend on people believing that Eisenhower was a communist. And it wasn’t based on his coming across a strongman in any sense, but on his supporting policies that his supporters thought obviously right and, as it turned out, a majority of the voters did not.
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@ David Friedman:
Yeah, I thought that comment was kind of mysterious.
I like Goldwater, but I also can’t help but like the amusing anti-Goldwater slogan: “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
And “In your heart, you know he might.”
Almost as good as when, as the Watergate scandal was developing, anti-Nixon people got out the old bumper stickers from his re-election campaign saying “Nixon’s the One”.
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@ Psmith:
In addition to what David Friedman said, the two strongest candidates for “authoritarian, Putin-esque strongman in American politics” are Richard Nixon and FDR, and of those two it is FDR who has enjoyed the greatest amount of success and lasting popularity.
Classifying the authoritarian impulses as a “right wing” thing strikes me as a bit disingenuous.
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“In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
And “In your heart, you know he might.”
Maybe this is just me having no sense of humor, but those slogans, as well as that whole campaign by LBJ (commercial implying Goldwater will cause nuclear war) actually make me really, really angry. Because they remind me too much of the way Ron Paul was always labeled “a loon,” a “nut,” “a cook,” etc.
For whatever reason, “cooky,” “nutty,” etc. tends to be one of the slurs that best sticks to libertarianish candidates like Goldwater, and maybe libertarians bring it upon themselves to some extent by not distancing themselves from the infamous John Birch Society types discussed in the previous thread, but it also strikes me as extremely unfair to tar someone as intellectual and clear-sighted as Goldwater or Paul as “nuts,” or “cooky.” It’s a way of saying “this person isn’t even in the Overton window, so please don’t even think about what he’s saying.”
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Well, you were there and I wasn’t. But Perlstein says that a lot of Goldwater’s support came from John Birch Society members (including, I recently learned, my paternal grandmother) who worried that the Republican establishment as personified by Rockefeller and Scranton in the 1964 primary was soft on socialism. I’m certainly not saying Goldwater = Putin. For one thing, the Goldwater campaign seems to have tried to work a tricky balancing act in keeping the Birchers at arm’s length rather than wholeheartedly embracing them. And Goldwater himself seems to have expressed a very un-Putin-esque reluctance to campaign hard; in addition to his famous tendency to be impolitically blunt and honest, Perlstein’s book relates several stories of Goldwater missing meetings with party bigwigs in the primaries in order to fly his airplane or mess around with his ham radio. For another thing, Goldwater’s domestic policy stances were, of course, remarkably anti-authoritarian and unlike Putin’s. As I see it, the Goldwater campaign is a counterexample to Dr. Dealgood’s point in that much of his support (according to Perlstein) came from people who were not just opposed to but actually contemptuous of national right-wing leaders for being insufficiently far right, and in that many of these supporters were specifically attracted to Goldwater’s promise of an aggressively anti-Soviet foreign policy. Does that make any more sense?
Yes, and I’m certainly not saying that the impulse is unique to the right wing. I was originally responding to Dr. Dealgood saying that it would have been historically unthinkable for the American right to prefer a Putin-esque figure to various historical presidents. My claim is that in fact historical support for Goldwater’s foreign policy and Wallace’s and Nixon’s domestic policy stances kind of fits the mold.
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“But Perlstein says that a lot of Goldwater’s support came from John Birch Society members”
I expect that a lot of JBS members supported Goldwater, but that doesn’t add up to a lot of his support.
According to Wikipedia, “By March 1961 the society had 60,000 to 100,000 members.” Also, “In 1964 Welch favored Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination, but the membership split, with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and one-third supporting Richard Nixon, who did not run.” That suggests about 40,000 to 66,000 JBS members supporting Goldwater.
Goldwater got about 27 million votes in the election.
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This is certainly true of the general election. My impression is that far-right groups were more active during the nomination process. Small but well-organized groups were able to sway the nominations more effectively than the general election, since most state party organizations didn’t hold primaries or caucuses.
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I just noticed that there’s technically a grammatical error in that sign, at least as a I understand the rules.
“Обама” is a man’s name, but in Russian, a man’s name can only end with a consonant. Masculine names that end with an “a” are indeclinable (as are feminine names that end in a consonant, or names of either gender that end in a vowel besides “a”).
However, the sign declines his name as if it were feminine, in the sentence “Не надо быть похожим на Обаму.” It should really be “похожим на Обама”. (“Похож на” is the Russian idiom for “similar to”.)
The opposite applies to something like “Джейн Остин” (Jane Austen). You wouldn’t decline her name by the rules applying to men’s names, such as “похожим на Остина”.
I doubt many people will care about this, but I just thought it was interesting.
***
This also makes it possible to tell between Bill and Hillary in Russian, simply going by the name “Clinton” (Клинтон).
Билл Клинтон declines like a Russian man’s name. But Хиллари Клинтон does not decline like a Russian woman’s name.
So if you see Клинтона, Кинтоном, Клинтону, и т. д., you know they’re talking about Bill.
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This is actually very interesting. My Russian is abysmal, so I’m probably wrong, but I thought that Obama’s last name needs to be declined as a feminine noun (whereas his first name needs to be declined as a masculine one.) “похожим на Обама” sounds very unnatural to me, which means zero given how bad I’m at Russian, but then some sources out there seem to confirm it: http://blogs.transparent.com/russian/word-of-the-week-%D0%91%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA-%D0%9E%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0-barack-obama/
[EDIT: whereas what you said about Jane Austen and Hillary Clinton sounds right.]
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Hmm…
Turns out I’m right for the wrong reason.
Foreign masculine first names that end in an “a” do decline. But foreign surnames that end in a vowel don’t decline. At least according to that source.
And that makes sense because all Russian male nicknames end in an a/я as if they were feminine. So, for instance, with the Japanese male name Кира, it declines as if it were feminine, just like Дима or Саша.
I was right about all the other cases: feminine names ending in a consonant don’t decline, nor do names ending in any other vowel.
Edit: spam filterrrrr!!!! I had to remove the link showing that I’m right for the wrong reason. Search “russian rules for declining foreign family names”.
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Ok, I did some more searching. I think Obama does decline.
There are many sources, wiktionary being one of them:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Обама
But if we have any Russian native speakers here who know the answer and if Obama shouldn’t decline, then let’s go fix wiktionary. =)
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@ Nadja:
Okay, I don’t know what to say on this anymore.
I checked the Russian Wiktionary, but the only “Obama” it lists is the city in Japan.
I can see how they could have conflicting rules on this, or maybe it’s just not clear how foreign surnames decline. For instance, Дюма (as in Alexandre Dumas) does not decline. Maybe that’s because in French it ends in an s? But in Russian it doesn’t, so that shouldn’t matter.
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@ Vox
[Edit: Oops, missed Nita’s comment. She’s already explained all of this. Thanks, Nita.]
Is the wiktionary link I tried to paste in my last comment working?
As per Wade’s Comprehensive Russian Grammar, as a general rule, foreign last names ending in a stressed -a or -ya don’t decline in Russian. That’s why Dumas wouldn’t be declined. Last names ending in -i, -e, -y, -o usually don’t decline either (as in Goethe, Garibaldi, Zola.)
The stress is important. Obama is stressed on the penultimate syllable, which – together with the -a ending – make it feel like many ordinary feminine Russian nouns, so it comes very naturally to Russians to decline it the way they do. There is no rule that prevents foreign last names ending in -a, but not stressed on the last syllable, from being declined. Wajda, Zola, Kurosawa also decline (again, as per Wade.)
Here’s another great discussion of the subject: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1202
(There’s some interesting stuff in the comments, too, especially regarding the history of declension of French names in Russian.)
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Correction to my last comment: the second “Zola” was supposed to be “Goya”. Zola doesn’t decline for the same reasons Dumas doesn’t. “Goya” declines for the same reasons Obama does.
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“Обама” is definitely declinable in Russian, because its ending has the same, uh, phonetic shape, as “Sasha”, “Nikita” and other native Russian names. This works for last names as well as first names. (Russian last names that end in -a also exist, but I’m too lazy to find one at the moment.)
“Дюма” is not declinable because the stress makes the ending completely different (to a Russian ear :)). Although, sometimes people will decline words like that intentionally, to amuse themselves or others.
Also, a couple of small quibbles with your translation: it’s “although he kills very many people” and “don’t be like Obama” (literally, you’re right, but the actual meaning is closer to “don’t”).
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I knew we must have some native Russian speakers on SSC! =) Thanks for the explanation.
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Well, while I was writing that, you did a whole investigation! Glad to confirm your results
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This is hilarious.
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I found the Trump / Atlas Shrugged hilarious, it would make a good skit.
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>The theory was that New Hampshire was small and already pretty libertarian
I think the NH primaries blew that idea to shreds.
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If you translate “libertarian” to “anti-establishment”, the premise makes more sense. And there are libertarian cases to be made for Sanders and Trump.
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RE:Twitter site
TIL: Most tweets are not in English.
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The third one I got was porn.
Whether you take this as a warning or an endorsement is up to you.
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Most of the ones I got were in English, but a lot were in Arabic or some other language that uses the same family of scripts. Which ones did you get?
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On the Mercatus Center’s “What $85 Buys” article, color me unimpressed. They’re just citing Comcast’s advertised pricing in two urban markets, and I’m skeptical that someone buying a standard Comcast package could actually pull twenty SD Netflix streams at once.
But since I’ve had a devil of a time finding information about trends in dollars-per-actual-megabit of internet costs (the best thing I found was The Cost of Connectivity, and it doesn’t have historical data), I’m just going to have to wave my hands and say that these metrics are yecchy.
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It doesn’t account for price, but Akamai’s quarterly “state of the internet” measures real-life bandwidth in a variety of ways.
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”grit” accounts for 0.5% of variation in academic achievement
The finding is that grit accounts for an additional 0.5% of variation in GCSE exam scores after Conscientiousness and the other 4 Big Five personality factors are already accounted for. The fact that grit and Conscientiousness are very similar is part of what makes this number so low, because the variation that would be accounted for by grit has already been accounted for by Conscientiousness.
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Thanks!
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That makes a heck of a lot more sense.
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How much is captured by Conscientiousness?
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If they’re so similar that there’s only a 0.5% non-overlap why bother calling it by a different name other than to sell books?
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Because you need new spin. You have to show you’ve come up with a new concept or at least updated an old idea. ‘Grit’ is the kind of short, modern, slangy name that sounds easy on the ear and makes a great self-help book title. “Conscientiousness” is so old-fashioned, it’s got cobwebs on it, and it sounds like the Bad Old Days when children were seen and not heard and it wasn’t all about Me and My Okayness
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My understanding is that Duckworth was originally interested in studying self-control and its importance in helping people succeed. However, at some point she looked at her own life and compared herself to people who were more successful than her. She did, in fact, score high on self control, but somehow she hasn’t accomplished as much as others, hasn’t changed the world, hasn’t built anything big. So she was trying to figure out what it was that she was lacking. She came up with grit and started testing her Grit Scale. I don’t think she was aware at the time how similar grit ends up being to Conscientiousness. (I have no strong opinions on how similar they are, BTW. I know very little about this subject. Just addressing the question of how the grit research came about.)
Edit: actually, now that I think about it, in the light of what grit is supposed to account for, the results of this study make sense. Duckworth was very successful at whatever she did, but she jumped from one subject to another and didn’t stick to any one thing for too long. So grit is supposed to account for self-control and the “sticking to one thing” part. Why would grit matter in exam results in 16 year olds? Obviously, as much as it overlaps with conscientiousness, it matters, because you have to study before you go out and play. But the sticking to one thing part is just not an important predictor of how well you’ll do in school exams. School is all about learning a little bit about multiple subjects.
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She did, in fact, score high on self control, but somehow she hasn’t accomplished as much as others, hasn’t changed the world, hasn’t built anything big. So she was trying to figure out what it was that she was lacking. She came up with grit and started testing her Grit Scale.
It’s almost parodic in its Americanness when you put it that way: “Well gosh darn it, why ain’t I President of the United States and a Nobel prize-winner in my field and the world’s foremost baroque harpsichordist and an Olympic gold medal winner in the 100m, 200m and over hurdles as well? What is wrong with me? Don’t I work as hard as the others? Let’s have a look-see here – gee, looks like by comparison with the real can-do kids what I’m lacking in is – grit“.
Sounds like she needs to ring up the local sand and gravel merchants and order a tipper-truck full of chippings
More seriously, it also explains why she “came up with her Grit Scale”; an ambitious, hard-working person who felt she was not achieving as much by comparison with her peers – no wonder she didn’t stick with the old label of “conscientiousness” but invented a new term that could be all her own and marketed to within an inch of its life. Anyone could do work on conscientiousness and be just one more in the field, but as the discoverer of the concept and inventor of The Grit Scale (and I’m sure that’s TM or R or C) – et voilà, her own lab and best-selling book (has she done the rounds of the chat shows with it? I’d be very surprised if not!)
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I don’t think that’s very charitable. Possibly my fault for retelling that story at all. I learned if from the book “How Children Succeed”, and never verified it.
Also, you have not addressed my edit at all and just went with the assumption that this one study proves that conscientiousness and grit are one and the same. I honestly don’t understand why you’re taking such great joy in making fun of that woman.
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@ Nadja,
(Btw, sadly I fear one of the keys is in the final word of your last sentence.)
As a USian, I see quite a difference in the common meanings of ‘conscientiousness’ and ‘grit’. The former focuses on doing what other people have instructed you to do; or at least they will be evaluating the outcome and pleasing them is important (or at least they will be evaluating your ‘conscientiousness’ regardless of the outcome of your work).
‘Grlt’ as defined here seems to focus on an attitude we might call ‘pig-headedness’, ‘cussedness’ … determination to ‘fight along this line if it takes all summer’, to be re-energized by opposition. It may lead to going on kicking the Coke machine the harder the more times the boss tells you to stop; or it may lead to ‘I’m going to solve this problem however many new approaches it takes.’
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@ houseboatonstyx
Yes! Thank you for articulating the distinction.
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I’ve been trying to dissolve the “do Muslims and Christians worship the same god” question like a good little rationalist, and I think I might know where the confusion is arising. From a Protestant point of view, worship is all about faith, a personal connection with God. To say that Muslims worship the same god means that they have faith in God, which means Islam is legitimate, which is obviously a huge outrageous heresy. From a Catholic or Jewish perspective, though, worship is more about stuff you do in service to God. This can include emotional labor like having faith, but it’s less core to the idea, and you certainly aren’t expected to have a personal relationship with Him. So from that perspective it’s a lot easier to say “yeah, they started out trying to worship the same god but then they got led astray and started following a false prophet with the wrong sort of fruits and now their shit’s all fucked up and they’re doing it wrong”.
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The theology is (speaking from the Catholic viewpoint, and of course there are RadTrad Catholics and “more Catholic than the pope” types who would vehemently disagree) that the Abrahamic religions agree:
(1) God is real
(2) God is one
(3) This God has revealed Himself to us
(4) This God is the God of Israel (given the Jewish precedence in time; Christianity and Islam – and please remember, Islam is younger even than Christianity – both follow in claiming to be worshipping the Name represented by the Tetragrammaton)
Where Islam and Judaism agree is that God is one and has no son or co-partners. Christianity is Trinitarian but says that these are not three separate Gods but three Persons in one God. But explaining the Trinity without veering into heresy is tricky
From the Catechism:
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I think it may be even easier to dissolve than that. Muslims worship a god which is quite similar to the god worshipped by Christians and has a fair bit of backstory in common with it. By comparison, Mormons worship a god which is really very similar to the god worshipped by Catholics, and has a great deal of backstory in common. And Lutherans worship a god which is so similar, and has so much backstory in common with the god worshipped by Methodists, that any distinctions are pretty trivial to anyone who hasn’t succumbed to the narcissism of small differences.
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Perhaps Trump would advice Mouch that the the FBI had the authority to compel
AppleRearden (i) to research how his metal might be used to make a device that could penetrate terrorist strongholds, (ii) draw up blueprints for such a device, and (iii) provide them with a prototype.Report comment
I think throwing Project Xylophone into the pastiche would a) be a bit to on-the-nose and b) risk showing that one had actually read the book the full way through, an unacceptable risk.
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CEOs are workers – did you mean to write shareholders?
Or if not when are we going to stop paying psychiatrists ridiculous salaries and start giving the money to the workers instead. The cleaning ladies at mental institutions could be netting as much as $1,000 more each year.
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I agree, but to steelman the argument, one could argue that paying them a high, but not outrageous salary, and rewarding them with other kinds of status, would work acceptably well and allow redistribution of the money to more favoured recipients.
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There’s a specific problem re:CEO pay.
A well intented but bad regulation was added requiring that CEO pay levels be public. The intent was to make sure that shareholders couldn’t be deprived of information about what the people running the company were choosing to pay themselves.
Unfortunately people are idiots and CEO pay became a status symbol for a company. They didn’t want to signal that they’d hired a worse CEO than their competitor and the simplest way to avoid that was to pay their CEO more than their competitor was paying theirs.
This led to a feedback loop where CEO pay became completely disconnected from CEO performance ,ability or contribution and ended up more related to the companies PR and advertising budget.
If it was legally required that hospitals publicly disclose the pay of the senior consultant in each department you’d see the same kind of feedback loop as hospitals tried to signal that they had the best consultants.
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So, bad for everyone except the CEO’s.
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Pretty much.
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Wait, you mean yet another regulation meant to stick it to the rich had the opposite effect? Who’da thunk?
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More a regulation intended to protect the super-rich shareholders from the people are the top end those who actually have to work for their money.
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Now why would the rich pass legislation against their interests?
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Lots of other institutions have published salaries. Nonprofit presidents have published salaries. In many states, every government employee, including university and hospital staff, has published salaries.
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When everyones pay is public then it waters it down. If you can only see the CEO pay you might assume that a company is willing to pay more to attract talent if they pay the CEO more. If you can see everyone’s pay then you can see if the same company pays it’s programmers and engineers at a sub-par rate.
Compared to a big PR campaign CEO pay is a relatively cheap signal where paying everyone more isn’t cheap.
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Also not all institutions are trying to signal the same things and not all institutions are subject to the same feedback loops.
If a charity pays it’s CEO an obscene amount then donors can get more upset about it than shareholders do about CEO pay.
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When the then-nonprofit (though not a charity) New York Stock Exchange paid its CEO Dick Grasso a nine-figure deferred compensation package, it was a major scandal, Grasso was fired, and a multi-year court battle over the pay ensued. And within a few years NYSE and all the other stock exchanges converted to for-profit status, ensuring that massive executive pay would never be a scandal again.
[Full disclosure: I work for a competitor of NYSE.]
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Actually university president (and university sports coach) salaries also seem to be in a positive feedback loop.
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You mean medical school deans, not presidents.
/s
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Crusty old deans
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The fact that so many medical school deans are paid more than university presidents might be evidence that university presidents are not subject to such effect. In particular, they are not egged on by a higher-paid subordinate. (Though maybe they don’t think of the medical school as part of the university, but an entirely different school that shares branding.)
But I doubt that it’s much evidence that medical school administrators are subject to such games. It would have to overcome the more prosaic (and private) explanation that a medical school administrator negotiating salary has a BATNA of remaining a practicing physician. The administrators are probably not actually the best paid at medical schools, but they are paid entirely and directly by the school and thus show up on filings. The practicing physicians are paid some salary for teaching, but most of their income comes from patients, which might be arranged not to count for these reports.
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Scott has advocated for policy changes that would reduce the pay of medical doctors.
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Give it to the residents too and I’m sold!
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By the logic of “it’s good to pay CEOs more money than they can spend, as they invest the surplus and that helps the wider economy”, it would equally be good to pay cleaning ladies more money than they can spend, as they would invest the surplus and that would be good for the economy.
What I can’t wrap my head around is the attitude that paying those with lower wages even less is good because it encourages them to work harder, but paying those with more money than they can spend even more benefits is not alone good, it’s necessary to get the best.
If your business depends on good, smart, productive workers, then attracting the best by paying the best wages is a good idea, no? And if it’s a matter of “we have to employ even bad workers to keep unemployment and welfare down, so let us pay low wages”, then what happens when even those low-wage jobs disappear? Because in the name of cutting costs, haven’t you seen things like self-service checkouts at supermarkets? Those mean fewer human workers doing the same work (shelf-stacking, stocktaking, cleaning, etc.) as the former larger number of workers were doing, for the same wages (because the work load goes up but the money for it doesn’t) and so that is a benefit to the business. But where are the unemployed former till operators? What jobs are they doing, when the labour requirement is shrinking? This is a problem being kicked down the road and it will have to be dealt with sometime.
I understand that a good CEO is vital to the success of a company. I even understand that giving a global workforce a small individual pay increase mounts up to a lot of money when the cumulative amount of pay increase plus withholding taxes etc. is accounted for. I even understand that one CEO getting paid millions in pay, bonuses and benefits is maybe cheaper than paying 100,000 global multinational widget makers on the shop floor an extra thousand a year each.
But there are a lot of CEOs out there who are just average, or not particularly suited for the business (because experience and success in one field does not necessarily transfer over to another), yet their contracts apparently lock the companies into paying them huge benefits even when they have to be fired (or “decide to spend more time with their families”) – and nobody seems willing to challenge that, possibly because when it’s all the same relatively small group setting salaries who is going to rock the boat? Someone mentioned a court case going on for years to force a company to pay the agreed money to a sacked CEO, and it’s not the only time I’ve heard of this. But imagine a sacked ordinary employee demanding the company honour the contract they signed before being fired – how would that be entertained? I think it would be held up as an example of the kind of greed that makes businesses unproductive and why workers are selfish.
Employers’ groups are very well aware of the dangers of unions negotiating higher than feasible wages for their members, we’re always getting dire warnings in press releases about the threat to the economy of the demand for wage increases. But employers’ groups – like everyone else – are much more generous to themselves when setting pay levels, and will complain about interference if e.g. the government makes suggestions about pay caps or doing away with benefits.
Someone like Steve Jobs may well be worth much, much, more to a company than twenty thousand assembly line workers in China when it comes to lop-sided remuneration. But not every boss or manager or board member is Steve Jobs, yet that’s the level of “we need to pay the most to get the best” mindset.
Again, why is it that the stick is deemed the best motivator for the poor (you can’t improve productivity by paying more but you can by setting levels, cutting hours and threatening the sack if higher rates of productivity aren’t reached for the same money) but the carrot for the better off (you have to pay the going rate or you won’t get the good managers, you need to have excellent stock options, pension pots, etc. or no-one will take the job)? I do think there’s an element there of classism, however disguised.
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Because this is an absurd strawman. No one is arguing that CEOs should be paid an indefinite additional sum of money because “they would invest it and it would boost the economy”. The argument is that each company—not the government—is the best judge of what salary is appropriate to draw in the quality of CEO they need.
The argument is that the current level is efficient—maybe not in the sense than an omniscient being couldn’t do better—but in the sense that real-world government compulsion is not going to do better. The argument is not that it would be better for companies to pay CEOs twice or three times as much.
This is even more of a strawman. You really need to think more carefully about what the other side is arguing.
No one—certainly no one who knows what he’s talking about. but I would even say people who don’t know what they’re talking about—is arguing that paying low-skilled workers less makes them “work harder”, and that it is good for this reason.
The argument is that low-skilled workers should be paid what their labor is worth, as determined by the laws of supply and demand. If workers produce $20/hour of value, they will be paid $20/hour. If they produce $5/hour of value, they will be paid $5/hour.
Making a law such that you are not allowed to pay less than $20/hour means that anyone whose labor is worth less than that doesn’t get hired.
No, not necessarily. You want the most cost-effective workers.
Suppose you have the choice between two bricklayers, one who can lay 10 bricks per hour, and the other who can lay 20 bricks per hour. Which one do you want? The one who can lay 20? Not necessarily: not if the one who can lay 20 demands more than twice the wage.
Wage competition is how the less skilled and education compete against the more skilled and educated. If all bricklayers had to be paid the same, only the most skilled ones would be hired. But if the less skilled ones are allowed to bargain down their wages and work for less, then there is a place for all of them.
You don’t want to pay $200/hour to hire superstar workers to stock the shelves at Wal-Mart. Those people are better of being lawyers or something, where their ability can be put to better use. Because while a $200/hour worker may stock shelves faster than a $10/hour worker, he doesn’t stock them 20 times faster.
That is the exact fallacy here: there are not a limited number of “jobs”. Not as long as man’s reach exceeds his grasp.
Automation does not “decrease the number of jobs”; it frees up people from the jobs in which they are currently working, so that they can do something else, which is now more productive.
If we invented a pill to cure all illnesses, we would have no need for doctors or hospitals or nurses. So their labor would be totally unproductive in that field. But there are many other fields into which those workers could go.
If there is a relative overproduction in one area (such as might be caused by technological improvement), the same fact that creates this overproduction means that there is a relative underproduction in another area. There can be no long-term, permanent absolute overproduction.
There is nothing wrong with workers negotiating higher wages. And there is nothing wrong with unions, as such.
The problem is that unions, as they currently exist, have government-backed monopoly powers enabling them to force employers to “negotiate” with them. This is not a real negotiation; it’s a form of blackmail. Because, for instance, unions have the power to strike and then not be permanently replaced by strikebreakers for doing so if they have demanded a wage that is higher than the market-clearing amount.
This is why employers are so hostile to unions: once you get one “elected” to govern your workplace, you can never get rid of it, and they can make totally arbitrary demands. In the private sector, unions are at least somewhat constrained by the desire not to totally wreck the company and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But when they exist, they still make arbitrary and harmful rules like having promotion strictly based on seniority. And in the public sector, they’re even worse.
You can often improve productivity among the poor by raising wages. It’s why, for instance, they pay waiters at fancy restaurants more than workers at McDonald’s. The fallacy—what you are confusing this for—is that you can raise economy-wide productivity by setting minimum salaries.
It’s not a question of the carrot versus the stick. CEOs get fired all the time. Why do they get paid more and have better severance packages? Because workers qualified to run a Fortune 500 company are in lower supply than workers qualified to staff a cash register.
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I think there’s a good parallel between CEO’s and sports stars.
I’ve trained with Olympic athletes who could run rings around me. They could beat 3 people on my level vs just themselves easily and could usually beat 4.
In a professional sports team their value is high. Lets imagine that they’re paid 200K per year.
That does not mean I am worth 50K to a team. I am worth zero in that arena.
Value vs ability in some arenas is not linear. A football team where each of the players is 10% worse than the league average at the game is one that loses pretty much every match.
A 10% better CEO can be worth 10 times as much because their effect can be very significant.
But, I’d still argue that currently CEO pay has been inflated for reasons other than their ability or contribution and has become more about signalling by the company.
It’s logical for CEO pay to be high but it’s still possible for it to be higher than is justified by their actual ability.
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“What I can’t wrap my head around is the attitude that paying those with lower wages even less is good because it encourages them to work harder”
Who made that argument where?
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I suspect there’s some confusion between “giving poor people higher wages” and “giving poor people more money.” To first order, one makes them work harder, the other makes them work less hard.
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Why would a higher wage make someone work harder, all else equal?
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Speaking for myself, I have found that when I’m not being paid very much, I tend to have the attitude that my employer is not going to have an easy time finding a better replacement for me at that pay, and also that I don’t feel like working very hard for so little money, so I don’t work very hard. I also have gotten the impression that this is what employers expect from their poorly paid workers, further reducing my concerns that slacking off could lead to me losing the job (since slacking is expected).
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I agree with Protagoras. It’s not exactly shocking to me that paying people more could make them work harder.
On the other hand, if paying someone twice as much doesn’t make them work twice as hard, it’s not necessarily cost effective. That is why the fact that Wal-Mart workers would work harder if paid more is not incompatible with the fact that it doesn’t make economic sense to do so.
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I’m not sure the modal Walmart worker working harder would even help Walmart. Greeters, cashiers, general floor help that reshelve things spend a lot of the time standing around waiting for something to happen because that’s basically their job and it wouldn’t necessarily help to invent work when there isn’t any.
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@ Adam:
If every cashier could check people out twice as fast, they would need half the cashiers, even taking time spent waiting around into account.
It probably would be possible to check people out twice as fast (people can do amazing things!), but it would be extremely grueling work, and people able to do it probably wouldn’t be willing to do it, even for twice what Wal-Mart is currently paying. For one thing, the “cushiness” of your job is effectively part of your wage.
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I doubt Walmart would increase revenue by checking people out twice as fast, but who knows, maybe customer throughput is actually a bottleneck for them. I just personally doubt it. Even if it is, though, the biggest factor I’ve ever observed slowing down a line was allowing customers to pay in cash and check, haggle, use coupons, customers thinking they have money in their account but they don’t, etc., not the speed of the cashier or bagger.
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@ Adam:
There’s a certain degree of delay which customers are willing to tolerate. Wal-Mart hires cashiers until they roughly get things down to this level (that’s why they don’t just have one cashier, or else they really would lose customers).
If the cashiers moved their lines twice as fast, they’d need half the amount to reach that level of speed.
You’re right that it may not be realistically possible at all for the cashier to check people out twice as fast because in order to do so (given the fixed delays), they’d have to bag things more than twice as fast. It still may be possible, but it’d be really difficult.
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Wait, when did Kagan become very liberal? Did I miss something in the news?
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In context, when being compared to Justice Scalia. Liberal and conservative are relative indicators not absolute ones. Thinking of them the other way just leads to confusion.
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…I can testify that your last sentence is absolutely correct!
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>“Other people don’t use Twitter the way you do”: one random tweet selected from the website per click.
God damn it, I’m in a College library surrounded by people and I got one that was porn.
>This week in academic intolerance: Christian college kicks out professor who says Christians and Muslims worship the same god. I didn’t even know that was up for debate!
Oh, it’s definitely up for debate. The crux of the issue is Trinitarianism.
The general argument – if someone refers to something that they describe as having different properties to the ones you observe, and they use a different name, but they *say* it’s the thing you’re referring to – are they talking about the same thing as you, or a different thing that they made up?
This is one of those questions that is most usefully dissolved, but it often isn’t because some schools of Christian theology (especially the ones popular in the US) feel that it’s very important that people worship the right god – i.e. more important than whether they’re doing it the right way.
>All you people who say you’re tolerant of everybody whether they’re white or black or purple, now is your time to shine.
They were suspended?! Based on, what, the fact that a poorly-lit photo went viral in the US? That’s appalling.
>A secret government AI called SKYNET is malfunctioning and sending its heavily armed robots to kill innocent people.
Why call it that?
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>The general argument – if someone refers to something that they describe as having different properties to the ones you observe, and they use a different name, but they *say* it’s the thing you’re referring to – are they talking about the same thing as you, or a different thing that they made up?
Exactly. It’s a problem similar to the Ship of Theseus: how much of the original do you have to replace before it becomes something else?
If someone describes everything about me, but gets my eye color wrong, is he still describing me? Sure. What if he also gets my hair color wrong, and my address, and number of siblings? Maybe. How many attributes does he have to get wrong about me before I say he’s actually describing someone else (even a fictional someone else)? It’s a fuzzy line, without a clear answer.
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I think one issue is that the Ship of Theseus problem is simply a demonstration of the fact that “ships” are not intrinsically existing entities. Whether it’s “the same ship” depends on our criteria, i.e. it depends on what we call it. There are some criteria that are too broad and others that is too narrow, but in the middle there’s a fairly wide area of optionality.
There are some theories of personal identity (which are really forms of denying intrinsic personal identity) that say similar things about people, such as its being a matter of convention whether you are the same or not the same if you have your personality “wiped”. I don’t hold to those theories, but that would be the answer under them.
Here I agree with you.
Whether or not personal identity is intrinsic or a matter of socially-imposed criteria, this has no specific bearing on the way you have to use words.
There’s no clear point to tell when you stop referring Francis Bacon and start referring to Roger Bacon or to neither of them.
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Dunno, but the Brits have had their own Skynet program, under that name, for ages. (I believe it’s doing communications, though, not flying drones.)
My guess is that it’s just a fairly obvious portmanteau that sounds pretty good. Not everyone has seen Terminator, or cares enough about it. And some that have might think it’s funny.
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Any room with enough nerds to actually set up such a program, has the collective understanding that “Skynet” means above all else “Malevolent AI that kills people”. The UK’s Skynet dates to 1969 and is grandfathered in as Not Evil; the NSA doesn’t have that excuse.
They may not care. This is a community that can be remarkably tone-deaf and/or deliberately offensive in their symbolism.
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I love that logo.
ETA: Link seems to be broken now, though.
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Presumably this.
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Nah, it was this one, although there was some other content on the linked page that I don’t remember. There’s some entertaining content surrounding some other NRO launches, too.
The eye in the pyramid definitely fits the pattern, though.
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Not sure what happen; fixed it on my end.
And yes, they’ve got a couple of orbiting Eyes of Providence, a Witch, a Dragon, and a couple of possible Demons. No Lidless Eye yet, but give them time…
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But they also have this as a logo, so they can’t be all bad.
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Nornagest, I hope cosplayers know about that link.
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I suspect most of those are essentially inside jokes that eventually got leaked to the public. If nothing else, any group that actually was plotting evil and was competent enough to not have gotten caught yet wouldn’t let their people make those kind of logos.
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I think it is safe to say the NSA is calling it SKYNET specifically for the Terminator reference. The NSA is, after all, full of geeks.
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Geeks with the same sick sense of humor as the ones who called a meal substitute, made out of vaguely sinister and unappetizing chemicals, Soylent.
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Still less unappetising-sounding than
Huel, which, however tasty and nutritious it might be (I haven’t tried it), still sounds like an onomatopoeic representation of the sort of noise you make when you’re trying to throw up.
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If there is anything I am surprised about, its that the alphago news isn’t much much larger.
The approach seems a good deal *smarter* then the chess news, at least that’s how its been advertised.
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I’ve been thinking about going to a therapist for help with persistent anxiety, pessimism, and difficulty connecting with new acquaintances; nothing that rises to a debilitating level, but it’s very distracting and it keeps me up at night. Is there any evidence that talk therapy would be at all effective in helping me resolve these issues, or am I just as well off sticking with my current self-directed plan of trying (to various levels of success) to meditate, exercise, and eat and sleep better?
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Re inter-population differences. I see that they excluded non-White mothers but they don’t mention excluding Ashkenazi Jews. That’s a problem since Ashkenazi Jews have a much higher prevalence of genetic intolerance to alcohol. In particular they have a much higher prevalence of ADH1B*2 which if I’m reading the study right is the exact gene they looked at! See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3812252/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12153842.
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Very interesting. Thanks for pointing this out!
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@Vox Imp
Explain!
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Since he denies any benefit of separate societies, he is incapable of registering any benefits which accrue from them. My folks live in amish country, and I judge the amish by those I know. They do have their own fanatical schismatic streak, like every other religious group. But the people themselves? They are almost perfectly uniformly honest, kind, humble and extraordinarily charitable. I’d go so far as to say they are the perfect neighbors. I have never, in twenty years experience with them, heard or seen one so much as HINT at a malicious thought, even in jest. Quite simply the nicest people you will ever meet.
“Judge ye a tree by its fruits”, the book says!
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Well, I’m not Vox, and I don’t hate the Amish. But while we’re waiting for Vox to wake up…
1. If you are born into an Amish community, your chances of becoming a mathematician or a doctor, or an engineer, or a violinist, or — well, you get the idea — are very low, even if you’re naturally suited to such an occupation and would find it far more fulfilling than Amish life.
This is because the education the children receive is intentionally limited to a very basic level, and those who wish to learn more must be willing to sacrifice everything they have (close ties to family and friends, belonging to their church and community).
2. The Amish are pacifists and prefer to deal with problems inside the community using social pressure (instead of, say, involving the police). This preference is not bad in itself, but has been exploited by abusers who “repent”, are granted forgiveness, and go on to inflict more abuse. Additionally, this vulnerability is made worse by the strong social norms of respecting your elders and “not making a fuss”.
On the basis of these two facts, one might argue that the policies of Amish communities deprive some of their children of safety and/or the opportunity to flourish.
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Yes, basically what you said.
I support the values of modernity. The Amish are a backwards, primitive cult, hardly better than a bunch of savages who want to live in the jungle. I’m not saying they don’t have the right to do so, but I’m also not saying I approve, nor that they have an unlimited right to indoctrinate and to get away with the abuses that come along with subjugating women and having a society dominated by tribal elders.
Long quote, but Timothy Sandefur says it better than I would:
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Sometimes I think “This Vox dude sure seems like too sensitive and feelsy a guy to be an Objectivist”, but then you wite posts like this one.
This is not criticism, by the way.
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Huh? That comment is feelsy enough — after all, it does contain a healthy dose of pathos. (Not criticism, either.)
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“The Amish are a backwards, primitive cult, hardly better than a bunch of savages who want to live in the jungle.”
On the contrary. The Amish are, arguably, the people who are most adapted to modernity.
Different technologies have different effects on social structures. Most of us ignore that issue, since there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it, even if a particular technology has effects we don’t like.
The Amish don’t ignore it. Each congregation decides on rules for its members on what technologies they are or are not permitted to use while still remaining members of that congregation. Some of it is custom, but not all that much—they in fact use quite a lot of modern technology.
Their social structure depends on strong local social bonds, on interacting primarily with other members of their congregation and any affiliated congregations nearby—a congregation being generally twenty-five to forty households. That, among other things, provides a mechanism for producing local public goods.
They believe, plausibly enough, that having a telephone in the house undermines that structure, since it makes interaction with people farther away easy and routine. So the Ordnung generally forbids telephones in the house, while, for many congregations, permitting a telephone outside the house shared by several households for emergency calls and other less frequent uses.
They believe, plausibly enough, that easy access to automobiles undermines that social structure for the same reason. So the Ordnung generally prohibits the ownership of automobiles. It doesn’t prohibit riding in them, and Amish quite commonly use hired automobiles or buses when needed.
I prefer the kind of society I live in. But, judged by revealed preference, theirs seems to work pretty well. Amish are free to observe and interact with the non-Amish world, and do. But they lose only ten to twenty percent at each generation, meaning that most of them prefer the Amish life.
I’m not sure, by the way, where you get the subjugation of women from. Changes in the Ordnung require the unanimous assent of members of the congregation, male and female. And an Amish congregation is the nearest thing in the real world to a society based on social contract, since the Ordnung is only binding on someone after he, as an adult, has chosen to swear to it. The Amish originated as anabaptists, people who didn’t believe that babies could be bound by contracts.
If they are backwards and primitive, how are they so successful?
@Nita:
“This is because the education the children receive is intentionally limited to a very basic level, and those who wish to learn more must be willing to sacrifice everything they have (close ties to family and friends, belonging to their church and community).”
I don’t believe the Ordnung of most congregations has any restriction on learning to play the violin or do mathematics. The education Amish get, mostly in their own schools and at home, seems to be sufficient to produce people who do a good job of running farms and starting small businesses—not to mention being fluent in at least two languages. It’s only if they want to pursue a career that requires formal education that there are likely to be problems.
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I agree with most of your comment, but I’d like note that the Amish are utterly dependent on the American and Canadian governments for physical protection, both because of their pacifism and because of their rejection of advanced industrial technologies. They are thus only well adapted to the extremely specific circumstances of the Pax Americana.
I think the Mormons are a better example of a group that has adapted well to modernity in the general sense. They are economically and militarily competitive, they are good at breeding, and they pull it all off while being dispersed over a wide geographical area. Truly, their social structures are worth studying.
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(source)
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Well, on the other hand, Amish kids are largely unvaccinated, and they get badly burned much more often than other kids (and I’m sure die in motor vehicle accidents much less frequently, but clearly good for kids or not isn’t the only heuristic in play here).
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Well, on the other hand, Amish kids are largely unvaccinated
That appears to not be the case. 68-85% of Amish children appear to have been vaccinated. Lower than the 90-95% national average, but not “largely unvaccinated”.
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The Amish combine modern medicine with traditional birth rates, which is why their populations doubles about every twenty years, despite losing ten or twenty percent of each generation to exit.
Which, incidentally, suggests how fast a phyloprogenitive gene would spread, if one turned up.
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I don’t doubt that the Amish have been ingenious at determining just how to interact with technology in order to preserve their society. The problem is the kind of society they wish to preserve: a society of absolute, Law-of-Jante conformism. Whose whole purpose, moreover, is to “assist” people in achieving an impossible goal founded upon a false cosmological conception.
They choose it on the basis of false information. Not only a false idea of the alternatives open to them (yes, they do “observe” the outside world, but they are encouraged to emphasize its worst, most mindlessly hedonistic and destructive aspects), but also a false idea of the eternal reward toward which their hardships in this life are aimed.
If I thought the only choice were between the Amish lifestyle and some kind of aimless hippie existence, I would be tempted toward the Amish. But those aren’t the only alternatives. A life of individual purpose and achievements is also possible.
Moreover, if I thought the Amish lifestyle were the way to avoid eternal damnation, I would certainly choose it. I would, of course, choose any finite level of hardship in this life if I thought I would gain it back infinitely in the form of otherworldly happiness. The Bible itself is very clear that those who follows its teachings do not maximize their earthly happiness:
It does not follow from the fact that, because the Amish choose that lifestyle, they are doing what’s best for them. They may indeed be maximizing expected utility. But if one’s expectations are seriously off-base, that may not at all be the same thing as maximizing actual utility.
And yes, the Amish accede to the demand of their society voluntarily. But they do so under the influence of the most tremendous social pressure—and social pressure directed toward an evil end, since it is a false end. The most “savage” part of it is precisely that “their whole existence is public”, under the rule of the village.
The traditional type of marriage in which women had no property rights and were effectively under the dictatorship of their husbands could not be conducted without the woman’s consent. That doesn’t mean that women were actually equals, or that they were not subjugated, or that this consent was not produced by the influence of strong and untoward social pressures.
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I’m actually more confused now about what you find evil about the Amish. Above you indicated that you don’t consider freedom a terminal value, so I’m assuming it’s not that the Amish are more socially repressed. This comment makes it sound you mostly object to them being religious. Is there some other metric you think they’re failing on?
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The evil? They disagree with Vox.
“They choose it on the basis of false information. ”
Obviously they don’t think it’s false. They think Vox’s information is false.
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@ Jaskologist:
I don’t consider anything a terminal value except happiness itself.
However I do consider independence, autonomy, the freedom to exercise one’s rational faculty and act according to it, etc. a very important constitutive part of happiness. That is precisely why I don’t endorse the “freedom” to submit oneself to some kind of tyrannical authority (with the extreme case being the slavery contract).
That’s not because I “don’t like freedom”. Rather, it’s because that represents the alienation of one’s freedom.
So yes, the social repression and enforced conformity of the Amish is a major part of my dislike for their culture.
I do, of course, object to their being religious. But I don’t consider being “religious” in the way most Americans are religious a very serious problem. The problem is that the Amish do take it seriously, and they have an effective system of social pressure meant to shape people into a mold of life that is not suited to the needs of the human being as a rational, individual, this-worldly being.
If the Amish conception of human nature and the universe were correct, then they would have a good system and a good culture. But as it is…
@ Mary:
To the extent that they honestly think it’s true, they are not immoral or to blame. To that extent, they are victims of an ideology which has evil consequences.
If it turned out that they were right and I wrong, then my ideology would be evil, but I would not be immoral or to blame because I am (in my estimation) honestly convinced that it is correct. Obviously, no one else can confirm without personal knowledge of me whether I am honest or not.
Therefore, neither do I make disparaging comments about the personal character of individual Amish people. When I say I don’t like the Amish, I mean that I don’t like the Amish way of life. Not that I have ill will toward them as individuals. If I had ill will toward them as individuals, I would approve of their system, since I think it is harmful toward them.
I certainly don’t think it is, in any significant way, harmful toward me. It would be if it became popular, but this is highly unlikely because it is so contrary to human nature.
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So, if studies show that Amish are on average happier than non-Amish Americans, would you concede that they are not evil, and a probably better than us?
(Not a leading question. I don’t have studies in hand, but I know which way I’d bet.)
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“I hate the Amish. I am not joking.”
and
“To the extent that they honestly think it’s true, they are not immoral or to blame. To that extent, they are victims of an ideology which has evil consequences.”
So do you think they are dishonest or hate them because they are victims who are not immoral or to blame?
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@ Jaskologist:
If I were convinced that the Amish lifestyle actually made people happier, yes.
But I don’t know how studies would measure that. It is an extremely difficult thing to measure in general. For instance, suppose you ask them to rate on a scale of 1-10 how satisfied they are with life. How do you answer that question if, for instance, you’re pretty miserable right now, but expect things to all be worth it because you’re going to enjoy an eternal reward in heaven?
And in a larger sense, on the one hand, yes, an expectation of amelioration makes present troubles easier to bear.
On the other hand, maybe your belief in the eternal reward makes you take on more burdens than you otherwise would.
Do you agree that Christianity often tells people to do things that are painful now but which will be rewarded in the life to come? Or do you believe that Christianity counsels a course identical to that pursued by the man who wants only earthly happiness and cares nothing for the supernatural? You can’t have it both ways.
@ Mary:
I spoke imprecisely before. I later clarified this by saying that I hate the Amish way of life, not that I bear ill will towards them as individuals.
I think to some degree they are responsible for their own choices, but to a larger extent (in most cases) victims. And to the extent that they are to blame, it is the same kind of blame that one has for a drug addict or an alcoholic who mainly harms himself. The reaction is contempt and a desire that he shape up so that he can stop wasting his potential.
It’s not the reaction one has toward a murderer, or someone else who harms other people, which is a desire to make him suffer as his victims for what he has done. Though that is my reaction toward e.g. the rapists in the story I linked and the people who covered it up.
***
For that matter, both of you ought to think they are far more evil than I think, since they are heretics who are perverting the Word of God. That’s the part I don’t get.
For instance, they deny infants and even quite old children the rite of baptism, putting the ones who die in serious danger of eternal damnation in hell.
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“If I were convinced that the Amish lifestyle actually made people happier, yes.
But I don’t know how studies would measure that. ”
There is an approach popular with economists. It’s called revealed preference.
Not perfect, since people can make mistakes, but probably better than the guess of a not terribly well informed outside observer.
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“The US is finally starting to win Math Olympiads, and all it had to do was get a couple of bright kids out of the normal school system and into places that could cultivate their talents.”
How does this hypothesis stand up against the alternative that the US has had a lot more kids of ultra high IQ H1B immigrants around since 1990?
I notice all the pictures in the Atlantic article carefully exclude East Asians as well as the standard exclusion of whites, but how about looking at the names of the US winning teams?
E.g. 2015:
Ryan Alweiss
Michael Kural
Allen Liu
Yang Liu
Shyam Narayanan
David Stoner
http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/images/AMC/imo/imo2015.jpg
Before 1990 typically all the names are white, with occasionally one asian name – https://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=USA
The US has benefited a lot from having more Lius about, at this level much out of proportion to their share of the population. Its ultra-smart fraction (140+) might be twice as large as it was in 1990. Something to correct for.
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Interesting point!
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For an extreme example in a different field, consider Eugene Volokh, an immigrant of a different ethnicity, who graduated from UCLA at fifteen–and, a year earlier, was making a good income as a programmer while a student.
Currently Eugene and his brother Sasha run The Volokh Conspiracy, a high profile legal blog with a generally conservative/libertarian orientation.
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I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure how Gene Drives work and I’d like an explanation from anyone who’d be so kind. It doesn’t have to be simple, just accessible. Still, this whole resistant-to-Malaria Mosquitos deal seems like the kind of thing that would fuck up an ecosystem a few years down the line in a way that nobody saw coming. Especially the bit about the red eyes. Thoughts?
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Remember when Richard Dawkins was a renowned evolutionary biologist and not a full-time atheist missionary? The thing he is best known for in his field was pushing the gene-centered view of evolution, or to use the snappier book-title version Selfish Genes, where the unit of selection is the gene rather than the organism. Rather than the old view of whole organisms competing to reproduce, we now see evolution as genes competing to replicate themselves. Which means that you can see intragenomic conflict where a particular gene or genes evolve to ensure that all or most descendants will carry that mutant allele. And this can occur even if the allele imposes a fitness cost on the organism as a whole.
There are a lot of ways that this can happen in nature. Homing endonucleases are the ones I find most interesting because they contain an enzyme which specifically damages the other allele of the same gene, forcing the organism to copy it over onto both chromosomes using homologous recombination. Others involve killing embryos which don’t carry the resistance to a particular maternal toxin, changing the ratio of whether the allele’s chromosome ends up in an egg cell or a non-reproductive polar body, etc. Regardless, these sorts of alleles can sweep through a population extremely quickly because all or virtually all of the offspring will carry it: this can go so far as the allele reaching fixation, that is, where the entire population carries that allele.
The idea of gene drives is to harness that as a tool to “drive” an allele we want through an entire target population. For example, if you found an allele which made female mosquitoes less likely to bite humans you could add a sequence containing a novel homing endonuclease to that allele, use CRISPR to create transgenic mosquitoes with said allele, and release them into the wild. You would rapidly see the number of mosquito bites go down as more and more females avoided feeding on humans. You could also do the same with an allele which made e.g. the mosquito only produce viable male offspring, which would sweep through and eventually collapse the population.
The big problem with gene drives is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s a fire-and-forget system and if there was a problem we would only know about it after it was too late to fix it. Maybe an allele we don’t like hitchhikes along with the one we’re driving. Or maybe the drive agent spreads to other species through horizontal transfer and becomes a gene parasite. Or even just that the allele we choose didn’t have the anticipated effect. That’s why scientists who are serious about gene drives want to test them on isolated islands before actually using them in the wild.
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The current proposals are generally not to simply copy gene drive from nature, but to embed CRISPR in the genome so that a heterozygote edits is own genome to become homozygous. So it is a precise edit, not biasing meiosis and thus there is no danger of an unrelated allele coming along for the ride. And they have demonstrated similar techniques to change things after the fact, setting up another CRISPR to delete the old payload, so it’s not completely irreversible.
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The American election campaigning appears to be going off on some interesting tangents: Trump versus the Pope ?
And of course Trump’s camp made a classy reply:
I did hear some of this on news headlines and my immediate reaction to the “You’re gonna be sorry when ISIS bomb you out of it” was “Displaying your ignorance here, sonny; we’ve long had experience with the likes of this. The name Diocletian ringing any bells? Why do you think the Swiss Guard are in a place of honour as the Papal Guard – “Its first, and most significant, hostile engagement was on 6 May 1527, when 147 of the 189 Guards, including their commander, died fighting the troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the stand of the Swiss Guard during the Sack of Rome in order to allow Clement VII to escape through the Passetto di Borgo, escorted by the other 40 guards”? The Papacy has seen off Napoleon, and Donald, you’re no Napoleon”.
It remains to be seen what influence, if any, this kerfuffle will have on potential voters; I wonder if any of them will have much the same instinctive reaction as I did, that some jumped-up, ignorant modern thinks he is the first secular power in history to threaten/cajole the papacy with “we’ll protect you from the big bad wolves”. Get in line, Donald, you’re nowhere near as impressive as Attila the Hun.
Also, uhhhh – “No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith”? If a religious leader can’t make a judgement on praxis, who can? I mean, in the quote from his camp, he’s questioning the “religion or faith” of Obama (allowing Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened; Obama is Christian, having been baptised as an adult at Trinity United Church of Christ)!
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>It remains to be seen what influence, if any, this kerfuffle will have on potential voters
Seems unlikely to be any. American Catholics are Americans first, and Catholics second, and most, I’m told, already vote Democrat anyway.
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White Catholics in America tend to split almost evenly among D and R.
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My Catholic coworker brought this up. “If the Pope keeps this up, people will dislike him for attacking Trump!”
“But [Name], you’ve been telling me for a year that you don’t like this Pope because of his leftism. It’s not like this is the first thing you’ve disagreed with him on, and it’s not like any leftist Catholics are going to jump to Trump’s defense.”
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The Democrats have managed to lose the Catholic vote.
Ironically enough, the year they pulled that off they were running Kerry, a Catholic.
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Uh, wait. Isn’t rendering such religious judgments precisely what religious leaders are for?
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I think for a religious leader to say ‘building a wall is unchristian’ is clearly what you’d expect. But to say ‘anyone who’s said this isn’t a Christian’… not really sure what this means in this context, my knowledge of Catholicism is too thin. Isn’t a good and consistent Christian? Because that would apply to everyone. Isn’t saved? Because I thought there was an idea that no-one but God could know that for an individual.
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So, Trump is supposedly a Presbyterian, and as such does not see himself as within the Pope’s jurisdiction.
(That is, this is actually the right theological position for Trump, whose religion holds that individuals have direct access to God, instead of having to go through a credentialed gatekeeper. But it’s likely that he guessed and got lucky. This is a guy who got stumped on his favorite Bible verse!)
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It’s a shame, because Trump is normally a pretty good troller, but his religious ignorance gets in the way.
The easy target is the Vatican City wall.
The more advanced move would have been to bring up Nehemiah.
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Thanks for tracking down the full context. It softens it quite a bit over the headlines that read “Pope: Donald Trump Not Christian”.
“[A] person who thinks only of making walls, wherever they might be, and not of building bridge, is not Christian. … It needs to be seen that he has said these things. And for this I give the benefit of the doubt.”
is a lot different, than the soundbite version.
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As GetReligion (which is a site that covers religion journalism, having a lot of former ‘godbeat’ pros with experience as working journalists on its team, and which looks at how religion is covered in the media and where misunderstandings crop up) pointed out, there’s a difference between saying someone is not a Christian and someone’s behaviour is not Christian.
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I think the standard objection to the Pope’s statement is that the Vatican is, indeed, walled.
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Not only is it walled, immigration is restricted.
Fun anecdote: yours truly has been denied immigration into the Vatican.
The wife and I were taking a Roman Holiday, and visiting all the usual sites. Our wanderings naturally brought us to the enormous wall around Vatican City. As we walked around it, we came to a large opening in the wall where a street ran through.
I seized the opportunity, put on my best dopey tourist face, and started meandering up the street.
The Swiss Guard stationed there took one look at me and just shook his head. We turned around and went back to Rome. So much for open borders.
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From official website:
Trump and/or his campaign office are ignorant if they think ISIS is the first (a) military, quasi-military, or terrorist threat (b) Muslim threat the Vatican/the papacy has ever faced, and somehow it has managed to survive without the help of The Donald to rush in and save it.
But indeed, he’s not the first forward-thinking sort to demand that the Church take one side or another in politics and if it won’t, then there should be consequences; H.G. Wells wanted to bomb Rome in retaliation for the Blitz, apparently under the impression that the Vatican was the government of Rome as well.
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(cont.)
Ah, yes: Mussolini, the Pope – what’s the difference?
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“But indeed, he’s not the first forward-thinking sort to demand that the Church take one side or another in politics and if it won’t, then there should be consequences”
This seems a bit unfair, for a couple reasons. First, the Donald was responding to the Pope, not the other way around. The Pope decided to jump into this on his own. Also, you seem to be taking Trump’s statement as a threat, when it really isn’t. Saying “you are misguided, and you’ll be sorry when I’m saying I told you so” is a lot different from “take my side or I will attack you”.
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This episode is extremely frustrating, and serves as a very good example of why soundbites suck.
The answer that the Pope gave was quite effective and nuanced, I think, and should have been taken as an advisement to the anti-Trump listeners (does he *really* say those things? Or is he building walls *and* bridges?) to the Trump camp (take care in your speaking to how people take your words! and the reporter wasn’t born yesterday, sonny, quit trying to rope me into something outside my jurisdiction.
None of the news outlets I’ve heard or read have reported on this accurately, imo.
As for the charge that the Pope is being unwise – there is a wide trend for people to be decried when they give advice on challenges that they themselves do not face – the single celebrate priest to the married couple, the rich person to the poor beggar, the older woman with a career to the young high school senior, the man to the pregnant woman considering an abortion, the young healthy person to the old sickly person.
There is no mass of unwashed clamoring to enter the Vatican and stay there. There is no social pressure on the Vatican to admit such a crowd. The established physical boundaries and property rights of the Vatican are not challenged. Chan Merckle is far better positioned to “lead by example” in this than is the Pope.
That the current walls built around the Vatican were put in place following a sack by Muslims only makes the whole thing more absurd.
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Also note that when the Vatican did take in a family of refugees, those refugees were Melkite Greek Catholics. Source and source.
So not only is the Pope not willing to accept Muslims into his city-state, he also isn’t willing to accept more than one or two refugee families of any religion.
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Anon, how do you know that the pope is “not willing”? Would Muslims naturally think of asking for refuge from a Christian church first? What’s been forgotten is that ancient Christian communities in the Middle East are under attack and have been deliberately targeted for extermination.
The US administration, despite lobbying, has decided not to make any particular exemptions or exceptions for people in fear of their lives, and indeed the system is unintentionally tilted against Christian refugees.
Meanwhile, Christian centres that are older than Islam are being deliberately and intentionally destroyed.
There’s enough sectarianism to go round without looking for bigotry, anon.
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Come on. Obviously, the Pope is not willing to let an unlimited number of Muslim refugees into the Vatican. They don’t ask because they are sure the answer would be “no”.
If he were willing to do such a thing, the obligation would be on him to speak up. Because they have no reason to expect that he would.
Now, I am not saying that the Pope has an obligation to let in an unlimited number (or any number) of refugees into the Vatican. The Vatican is a very different sort of place from a regular country.
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Me: “ISIS are deliberately massacring the native and ancient Christian populations of the Middle East in an act of ethnic cleansing”
You: “The Pope isn’t taking in enough Muslims! Because plainly he’s a sectarian bigot!”
I think the phrase “talking past one another” applies here.
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Media coverage likes to break down religion to politics. Particularly US media, when it’s covering things like “Candidate in election says this, that or the other”. They don’t judge “what is the doctrine of this faith on this matter”, they look at it from the secular angle of “conservative or liberal? Democrat or Republican? progressive or old-fashioned?”
So they like “Conservative right-wing pope X versus liberal left-leaning pope Y”, without remembering that the Church takes positions that annoy both right and left based not on politics but on theology and dogma. If you don’t think the Roman Catholic Church annoys the right-wing, just have a look at any reaction when a pope says making money is not the prime end of human existence – oh noes, attacking capitalism? (which they may not actually be doing, but that’s how it’s read) – this is the most evilest thing in the world! Or being charitable, it’s just that this pope is too stupid to understand economics and doesn’t realise that American free-market capitalism is the bestest and highest human aim ever
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“it’s just that this pope is too stupid to understand economics”
It doesn’t require him to be stupid. Most people don’t understand economics, just as most people don’t understand physics, or evolutionary biology, or game theory.
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So, not actually effective.
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Timothy Sandefur has a pretty good article on Scalia in the Daily Caller: “Conservatives: Don’t Panic About The Supreme Court!”
He explains that Scalia has often upheld the liberties conservatives and libertarians want to protect, but there are other areas where he has shown excessive deference to the state and federal governments, in violation of the Constitution. And thus while a liberal replacement would be undesirable, it would not be the end of the world. There are some areas where a liberal justice would be better and many more areas where they would at least not be worse.
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That’s true of all the justices; the court doesn’t really have anybody resembling a libertarian, and almost certainly won’t once Scalia’s replacement is appointed. It’s be nice to have a judge who thought that Lawrence, Heller, and Citizens United were all decided correctly but that Kelo was not, but those are probably few and far between.
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Three out of four ain’t bad, and I doubt Scalia’s replacement will measure up.
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well those were just the ones that came to mind (I think libertarians could go either way on Obergefell). Doubtless there are lots of Scalia et al. decisions that are not remotely libertarian.
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Sure, but I still expect Scalia’s replacement to be a significant net loss for liberty, barring the Republicans stonewalling until they can name and somehow confirm Mike Lee or some crazy cloudcuckooland scenario where Obama names Ted Cruz to the court in order to set up Trump to win the nomination and lose the general. (And even then, there’s the other elderly justices….).
I also agree with Vox that Clarence Thomas is pretty based, but that still leaves the Supremes at 4-4. Really, Sandefur’s article feels a bit like reflexive contrarianism. Our Side has lost an ally, he’s unlikely to be replaced anytime soon, and it is reasonable to worry about that insofar as it is reasonable to worry about any political development. Even though somebody might mistake you for one of those icky, uncool conservatives if you do.
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@ Psmith:
Well, the same guy says the Republicans should block whoever Obama nominates. It’s just a reminder that the sky is not falling.
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Certainly, it’s true of all the justices.
However, I think Clarence Thomas is consistently better than Scalia in this regard. He gets no respect, of course, but he is not actually just a clone of Scalia. He is much more favorable to the idea of extensive unenumerated individual rights. For instance, see his opinions in McDonald v. Chicago and in Raich, as compared to Scalia’s.
In particular, he supports the original and intended, pro-liberty interpretation of the “privileges or immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects all natural rights, enumerated and unenumerated, against infringement by state governments.
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Well said. For all his vaunted originalism, Scalia pretty studiously ignored the 9th Amendment and the common law tradition it came out of… and the liberal line that Thomas was some kind of unthinking follower of Scalia is unjustified, and arguably tinged with racism (certainly, were the ideologies reversed, a lot of people would call it much more than tinged)
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There are two or three possible Obama appointments I can think of who are arguably in some sense libertarian. Cass Sunstein and Larry Lessig and (less likely for Obama to pick) Richard Posner. None of them is close to being a hard core ideological libertarian, but all of them have more libertarian sympathies than the average judge.
If the Republicans win the election and get to appoint a Justice, Mike McConnell is a serious believing Christian, a leading expert on church/state law, with generally libertarian sympathies. Probably less controversial than any of the others I named, but not someone I can imagine Obama proposing.
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If a Chinese bureaucrat wears Confucian robes, I’d like to see a US politician wearing a three-cornered hat.
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Given the number of people who have called their networks ‘Skynet’ as an hilarious joke, I would posit that the probability that the AI which destroys human civilization is called ‘Skynet’ have massively, massively increased as a result of the Terminator movies.
That’s not really irony or anything, but it makes me feel sort of tingly in my soul.
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“The effect of culture: German families who watched West German as opposed to East German TV had fewer children, maybe because the West German shows promoted a culture of smaller family sizes. I freely admit I would not have predicted this and will have to adjust a lot of my beliefs.”
I recently heard a woman describing the effect of the high percentage of Mormons on the non-Mormons in her area. There are a lot of coffee shops, which are unusually popular among non-Mormons. On the other hand, the non-Mormon birth rate is higher than in the rest of the country, which she attributes to such factors as the way things are set up on the assumption that a couple may be shepherding six children and you have to handle that, and the way little old Mormon ladies will smile on you, compliment your sweet toddlers, talk about how nice it is to have families about, and ask you when you intend to have your next.
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