This is the bi-weekly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. Some corrections and clarifications about Saturday’s links thread: Fort Galt isn’t that cheap (2), some reasons male toddlers might by deadlier, debate on why not more traditional architecture, Desertopa on school discipline, stable inequality is probably just a measurement error, more promising supersonic flight companies, someone listens to the podcast on non-violent private police.
2. Other good comments this week: John Schilling on cost overruns, Wulfrickson quotes DFW, Wency on real estate development.
3. And Emil Kirkegaard crunches some numbers that broadly support the latest discussion on here about non-shared environment.
4. I finally slacked off so badly that the rest of Less Wrong put their yearly survey together without me. Iff you identify as a Less Wronger, you can take it here.
5. You may notice a new ad on the sidebar, advertising online math instructor positions for Art of Problem Solving. Teach kids higher math! Work from home! Incentivize people to put ads up on SSC!
6. Still a little early for this, but might as well get started: I’ll be done with my residency in about a year and will be looking for psychiatry jobs, especially in the Bay Area. If any of you are in psychiatric settings with job openings, I’d like to hear about it. And if any of you are psychiatrists or other doctors with experience in medical job searches, especially regarding outpatient positions or even setting up your own clinics, and you wouldn’t mind talking to me about it, leave a comment here or email me at scott[at]shireroth.org.
I submit that this video may show the most skilled orator in the entire Grey Tribe: https://youtu.be/tDtiTNHPfyo
The author describes the toxoplaymish dynamics of immigration debates (using the UK as an example) and makes an interesting suggestion how to fix them. But more importantly, he presents his points very skillfully, in 17 minutes of uncut, fluent and vivid monologue.
He has tons of other good videos too, but they’re mostly about history, not politics.
I like the interviews about simulated life in the Iron Age. Supports the notion that life feels more complicated now, even though so many things are automated.
Yeah, lindybeige is cool. If you like his weapons stuff you might also want to check out scholagladiatoria.
I’m having trouble understanding question 31 on the survey. The question is:
“With which of these meta-ethical views do you MOST identify?”
The two answers that seem the closest to my views are “Non-cognitivism: Moral statements don’t express propositions and can neither be true nor false.” and “Error theory: Moral statements have a truth-value, but attempt to describe features of the world that don’t exist.”.
I’m having trouble understanding the distinction between these views and figuring out where to put myself. The other three options (Subjectivism, Substantive realism, and Constructivism) are nowhere near my views.
I don’t believe that ethics, morals, or right-and-wrong are fundamental elements of reality. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool materialist who believes that the fundamental description of reality consist of (probably timeless) amplitude distributions over a configuration space. One of the big mysteries of our time is how a bunch of non-conscious matter can give rise to something that experiences consciousness, but I believe that the answer will turn out to be not magical and not mysterious once it’s understood.
I believe that ethics and morals are entirely constructed. They’re a fiction that allow social animals to do better reproductively than they would otherwise be able to, which is why we have these impulses today. I would expect every social animal would evolve something akin to morals for how they treat each other. Eliezer Yudkowski has done a great job in the Sequences of giving a convincing explanation of how morals are beneficial to reproductive fitness. Bits and pieces of his argument are spread around, but a big chunk of the argument is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/v1/ethical_injunctions/ and here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/ . Summarizing his argument, moral injuctions exist because humans do not have sufficient mental capacity to think through all consequences and accurately judge risks for antisocial actions.
So we have morals about how we treat in-group people because these people have power and there are consequences, but most people don’t give two shits how the chickens and cows they eat are treated.
A (so far as I know) novel hypothesis (just a hypothesis) on the issue of “why is everybody so fat all of a sudden?”:
I am in the habit of drinking large amounts of cold water or calorie-free seltzer with most meals. It feels refreshing and is supposed to be good for you. There is also a theory that drinking more water makes you feel full faster.
Recently, I read a theory that it was bad to drink a lot of water during, and especially just before a meal, because it dilutes the stomach acid, interfering with digestion. The Chinese always say that drinking cold liquids with meals is bad for the digestion, and I always kind of scoffed at this, continuing to chug huge tumblers of ice water while they sipped on tiny cups of hot tea.
Recently I tried not drinking water, or at least drinking less water with my meals, and I found something interesting: I seem to get full much faster. Part of it is that, without water, my tendency to eat salty food acts as a limiter on how much I want to eat. But it’s more than that–I literally just feel way fuller, as if it’s a struggle to physically pack away a meal which I know I could easily finish if drinking water per usual.
One thought: perhaps the water sends semi-digested food flowing into the intestines sooner, which is both bad for the digestion and also clears way for more food sooner. Or maybe large amounts of water interfere with the satiety signalling somehow, because your stomach isn’t directly contacting the food as much or something. Of course, improved digestion might mean more calories absorbed from the same food, but if one is eating less overall, it would probably still be better (to say nothing of vitamins, minerals, etc.).
I notice the “hydrate! hydrate! hydrate!” thing has become a big fad in the past few decades. I feel like when I was a kid the rule was “drink water when you’re thirsty.” Now it’s “did you know drinking fewer than 10 glasses of water a day can result in headaches, bloating, blah blah…” and drinking huge amounts of water is praised for its ability to “flush” toxins and fat out of the body.
The big gulp of sugary soda is rightly blamed for contributing to the obesity epidemic, but I wonder if the trend of drinking huge amounts of even water, especially with meals, isn’t screwing with peoples’ satiety mechanisms somehow?
Experiment for anyone who wants to try: try drinking nothing, or at least much less than usual, with and just before meals. You can compensate by drinking more at other times if you feel it necessary, though I think to the extent hydration problems are genuinely common, it’s probably because we eat too many dried, salty foods. I think the water as locked within the cells of say, a melon, is actually much more absorbable than a big bottle of evian you chug, and which kind of runs right through you.
https://backchannel.com/can-a-dress-shirt-be-racist-6b74244446e9#.7s4sjewcb
Race/ethnicity and shirt sizes.
https://8ch.net/rational/
I’ve become more sympathetic to 8chan culture lately, largely due to Scottish(?) discourse norms. Hence, an experiment. Let’s see how it goes.
Anyone got any suggestions for books to teach yourself genetics with? I have very little knowledge of biology, and some knowledge of chemistry.
See if John Maynard Smith’s Evolutionary Genetics is a good fit. Check if it is available at your local library or your other generous library.
Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_, is very readable. Whether it’s what you want depends on what sort of genetics is of interest to you. It’s evolutionary biology, not actual mechanism.
I’m interested in both. Do you have any suggestions for books on the mechanism?
No. Sorry. Not something I know much about.
The Dawkins book is my standard example of a book that teaches serious ideas and is successfully designed to be read for fun. I thought of it as a model when I was trying to do the same thing for economics.
try *molecular biology of the cell*
Depends on the level. Just basic concepts, then “The Cartoon Guide to Genetics” is cheap and readable. At the university level, just buy a used textbook for cheap and plow through it. Alternatively, buy a used biology textbook (e.g., Campbell) and read the section on genetics; as a bonus you get all the other biology stuff too. Finally, check to see if your local library has one of the Teaching Company courses on Biology or Genetics. Those are generally very good.
News today that’s relevant to Scott’s January 5, 2014 magnum opus on marijuana legalization.
A summary in the trade e-pub GenomeWeb (free subscription req’d) on a GWAS from Joel Gelertner’s lab, published in JAMA Psychiatry.
Sherva et al., “Genome-wide Association Study of Cannabis Dependence Severity, Novel Risk Variants, and Shared Genetic Risks”.
The situation with Katie, as far as I can understand from her posts…
1. She’s recently had mental health problems, is isolated from family members and cannot financially support herself.
2. She is living in a group situation with people who all follow a particular ideology. They are paying for her to continue living with them.
3. Her subsistence needs are being met by this ideological group in return for a. her doing a range of tasks related to the group and b. her assurances that not only herself but also her child will conduct themselves and develop in ways that the group most highly approves of.
4. Her long term plans are to contribute to the group’s work and raise her child with members of the group outside of usual contact with the state and wider society (financial systems, mainstream education).
There are many troubling aspects to state involvement in low income families. But one of the benefits is that state financing of such families is that it tends to have a system of checks in place to avoid corrupt practices. Charities also have to be highly regulated to avoid ideological (usually religious) groups from using money and psychological tactics around group support of vulnerable people to manipulate clients.
I worry that Katie’s scenario has cult like elements to it.
Is it a concern if there’s cultlike elements but it’s not a cult?
I think so. Cult like behaviours can be seen in many manipulative situations that are not strictly speaking cults.
I live in the Bay Area, have spent time around Katie and her friends, and know the people responsible for the GoFundMe, and AFAIK this point is completely made up.
It’s not necessarily made up, it could just be a hilariously uncharitable phrasing of “living with a group of people who met by some shared interest, and raising her child to be a moral citizen just like herself and the people she lives with”.
A cult is a kind of community, and the things that you mention seem to largely be markers of a community rather than markers of a cult. There’s no indication that any of her vulnerabilities (lack of support from family, lack of employment, etc.) are exacerbated, purposefully or otherwise, by her involvement with her community. And your entire #3 is speculative at best and false at worst; there’s no indication that she’s doing these things for any reason other than that she wants to do them. Volunteering makes a lot of sense for someone who’s dealing with depression and isn’t employed, especially with a kid: you can find *tons* of content written by moms about how easy it is to go nuts without non-kid-related interests and tasks.
I can see how the situation might look particularly odd from the perspective of someone living elsewhere, but it’s definitely not unusual in the Bay. It’s so expensive to live here that adult roommate situations are super common, and because people are often living on top of each other (living rooms converted to bedrooms, shared rooms, etc.) it makes all the more sense to try to find housing situations where people share interests/culture/norms. I’ve seen houses for new-agey hippies, young coders, aspiring entrepreneurs, and meditators, and there are probably more I’ve encountered that I can’t immediately remember.
Basically: A tight-knit community is sort of just a cult minus all the bad stuff; people in the Bay are incentivized to be in tight-knit communities; some people like living that way and some people don’t, but it’s not a particularly worrisome state of affairs on its own. Also probably a generally good position for a struggling single mom to be in, compared to the other options.
It sounds like a pretty terrible way to live, frankly. I wonder if she’d take me up on an alternative proposal. I have a spare house near Dallas where I live. Come live in it. All you have to do is enough yardwork to maintain the property value and rent out two of the bedrooms to whoever you want to cover my mortgage. The rest is yours. Is that not worth it because you have to leave the bay? You can still write grants or review code or whatever the hell you do for CFAR remotely. Why the hell do people love the bay so much? Why is Scott insistent on moving there and driving up the rents even more when the entire county needs good psychiatrists and plenty of places will pay him just as much or even more for a third the expense on his part? Live in Texas and you can have entire spare houses you don’t know what to do with.
Note this is theoretical and not a real proposal because my wife would never let me do this, but what would be the response? Surely this is a better deal than spare change to cover you for the next two months until you need another handout all over again because you still have no job and the market rent is eight times the national median. Granted, the last time I was in San Francisco was nearly ten years ago, but it wasn’t that different from other cities. Mostly it was just smaller, had more homeless people, and was a lot hillier and windier. And the water is too cold and turbulent to even swim in.
Different preferences. My family has a spare cottage home fairly close to Austin – a beautiful, spacious 1-bedroom surrounded by pasture and woods. It would probably rent for a little less than what I’m paying to split a small apartment in Berkeley. A friend and I stayed there for a few months to start a big project. It had a lot going for it: nature, family nearby, cute animals, privacy, quiet, etc. I can absolutely see why it would be ideal for a lot of people. The isolation really got to me, though; I didn’t want to hang out with my family very often, and I couldn’t really find other people who felt like “my” people. Everything felt far away. There weren’t many places/events in town that were remotely interesting to me. Austin was kind of cool, but still not somewhere that I felt I really fit in. There was a general “meh” vibe to my experience there, and eventually it drifted toward despair.
I could probably make it work there, but it would be difficult and lonely. Most of my socialization would probably be remote (for a long while, at least), and that would leave some important needs unsatisfied. Barring a lack of any other options, it is not something I would consider attempting during or shortly after a depressive episode.
This is just one of those disconnects between me and seemingly everyone else. I’ve never felt like I’ve had ‘my people.’ My best friends in high school were gay goths I went to drag shows with. I started college at a hippie school as an art student and didn’t last long but got along fine with everyone. I’ve lived in hillbilly country in Kentucky and did fine with moonshiners, NorCal with wine-swilling Prius drivers, East Hollywood with Armenian immigrants, and here I am in Dallas and it seems like no one is actually from here anyway, so there are all kinds of people. None of them are more appealing to me than any other. They’re all people. I’ve been bedridden lately with a back injury and among the people who have come to help me are a good-old country girl born and raised in Mesquite whose sole ambition in life was to have kids, which she started doing at 18, then a libertarian Romanian immigrant who burned out on Wall Street who now does IT consulting who wouldn’t touch a kid with a ten-foot pole, and a lily-white upstate New Yorker who is trying to be an artist and hasn’t had a real job in 8 years. My first wife was a Ukrainian liberal do-gooder social worker, second Puerto Rican military officer who was the first female to a command a line battery in the US Army (MLRS – the headlines will give you the first cannon battery commander), and now my third wife a radar engineer from Long Island.
I just don’t get why people insist on insulating themselves in culturally uniform bubbles. There’s a big world out there and a lot of it’s really cool.
“I just don’t get why people insist on insulating themselves in culturally uniform bubbles. There’s a big world out there and a lot of it’s really cool.”
Yep, that’s what I’m saying. You don’t get it because it’s generally hard for people to understand preferences that differ much from their own. I guess it’s your prerogative to determine which is the “better” way to be.
Frankly, I question the relative amount of human behavior attributable to ‘preference’ in the sense of choosing between options you actually have equal information about versus that attributable to sheer inertia and status quo bias.
I mean, I don’t doubt there are some people who would be made significantly more worse off than the money and space and opportunities they lose living in the bay simply because they really do prefer bay area culture that much, but I don’t know. Just of places I’ve been, at bare minimum Portland and Asheville, and probably even Austin, are pretty damn similar at half the price or less, unless it really is the hills, wind, and homeless you love about it.
I’ve lived in or near Seattle, Portland, Austin, and NYC (among other generally less cool places), so at least in my case it’s probably not really an inertia/status quo issue. That said, there’s a big financial/emotional/social cost to moving and setting up shop in a new place, and I’ve basically only done it after coming to the conclusion that where I’m at isn’t working for me.
The insular bubble thing isn’t necessarily about a lack of experience with the larger world, or a lack of interest in it. People have different reasons for preferring a particular esoteric tight-knit community, but mine is that I’m just happier around people who care/think about some of the same things I care/think about and like to hash out differences in a productive way. It’s still interesting to talk to people who are all about Saving the Whales or doing yoga or playing country music or getting their candidate for whatever office elected, but at the end of the day I want to go home and jam about my stuff with people who relate to it and can help me hone it. If that requires living in approximately one half of a shoebox, so be it. It turns out that I’m still happier and more productive that way.
More important to this particular case is that, as a general rule, suggesting that an already-depressed person turn their life upside down and leave their support network in order to have a bigger space or more money is dangerous advice.
I tend to agree with Mason more than Adam here, but I like both of your points. I grew up in an isolated rural section of a Southern city. Isolation from mainstream society has it perks. We have a beautiful forest surrounding our house, virtually no crime in-spite of reputation of the closest neighborhoods, and enough land to build 4 or 5 houses if we wanted to.
But with all that said, I have experienced the general “meh” vibe Mason is talking about. I could never find other people who felt like “my” people, except maybe in my engineering classes. I was unfortunately a commuter student to my local university. You won’t make a lot of friends being 30 minutes away from everything.
Mason is right. If you ever have any depressive episodes, you need to surround yourself with like minded people. Or better stated, you need to put yourself in the best situation to meet people and make friends. I have found when I isolated myself I build much more intense emotional connections with the friends I do have. That’s great, but only when it’s shared. It can be destructive otherwise. If the bay area better fits your emotional needs, you should live there if you can afford it.
I think the community living and volunteering are often usually very positive experiences for single mothers, but usually single mothers in the West have financial autonomy from their community. I think that financial dependency on a community for basic subsistence needs is highly unusual, because Western states usually guarantee families enough money to meet those subsistence needs.
If my neighbour (volunteering single parent who follows a particular ideology and is heavily involved with her local community) was suddenly dependent on those around her for money to house and feed herself and children, that would change the dynamic of the whole community. Her money is from the state.
When I mention cult like behaviour, I don’t mean that the rationalist community or people sharing houses are particularly cult like, I mean that the psychological techniques of cults are likely to come into play when money for subsistence is changing hands in an unusual and unregulated fashion with no immediate signs of how that situation can be alleviated.
Working conditions and pay for employees is regulated, volunteer contracts and expenses are regulated, charitable organisations’ treatment of vulnerable clients is regulated, state payments to benefits claimants are regulated, because if they aren’t people become vulnerable to manipulation and abuse.
A well known example is direct marketing companies like Forever Living. They’re not a community, but they belong to a poorly regulated sector and use the psychological techniques of a cult.
Various people on here are debating whether or not Katie should be given money based on her moral actions around the father, the potential intelligence of her child and her level of involvement in a social group. Those are certainly odd reasons for allocating (or more to the point refusing to allocate) subsistence money to someone, and leaves that person prone to manipulation.
I’m not suggesting the people administering the fund are corrupt; I’m saying that somebody coming on the internet (this thread) and feeling they have to justify their moral decisions while potential donors of the community pontificate over whether they should be given money is going to be prone to manipulation. It’s basically a 21st century version of An Inspector Calls.
I can see there is a high personal cost to leaving a community, but there’s also a high personal cost to losing your financial autonomy.
I think that financial dependency on a community for basic subsistence needs is highly unusual, because Western states usually guarantee families enough money to meet those subsistence needs.
Modern western states are themselves highly unusual, to the extent that the acronym WEIRD was only half-jokingly invented to describe their common culture. Broadly speaking, the usual human response to single motherhood is to make the mother and child financially dependent on a tight local community. Sometimes this works fairly well, sometimes it doesn’t.
Giving single mothers and their children enough money to survive as an autonomous economic unit is a new enough idea that we’re not sure if is really workable in the general case, much less what the best way to go about it is. .
No silent E in my name. It’s not spelled the same as the philosopher. 🙂
Would anyone care to weigh in on the idea that malice is a very strong drive?
Consider the hours some people spend on trolling and bullying, not to mention the more extreme sorts of child abuse which make having grandchildren less likely. What’s going on?
Is it just that abuse is a form of status enforcement, and sometimes it goes out of control?
Altruistic punishment.
Among other things, hurting other people for no particular reason signals the ability and willingness to hurt people.
It’s a strong drive for a very small minority of people, but since it’s annoying, we tend to talk about it a lot.
I am also interested in this but I don’t know how to approach it. It is not like asking about how many psychopaths there are because those people are near the maximum of the curve of sadism level. Instead, I want to know if there is a “fat tail” to this curve.
@Nancy Lebovitz – “Would anyone care to weigh in on the idea that malice is a very strong drive?”
…I feel like the last two years or so have consisted almost entirely of this concept, iterated endlessly day after day. Flippant as he is, suntzuanime seems roughly correct, and I’ve seen the idea expressed by both sides of the political divide.
But is it ever just straight up malice for no reason? What I’ve notice a lot (in politics, on internet forums, in schools) is a strong unspoken norm – don’t be a dick … unless the person(s) deserve it. Either because they have the wrong beliefs, do things the wrong way, are interested in the wrong sorts of things (nerds fall into this category), have too much undeserved status etc.
I’d like to expand on that last one, because it is so alien to the way I see the world. In my country, it is not uncommon for students to bully students who get too good grades, because (and this is hard for me to explain because its such an alien worldview), getting good grades is complicit with authority and that oppresses students who don’t get such good grades. Moreover, it shows that one is “trying too hard” and “thinks that they are better than others” (regardless of what targeted student’s personality is actually like).
I admit this model does not explain lot of child abuse or animal abuse (often performed by children). But I’d like to think harder about that before ascribing it to pure malice. I do think that a lot of child abuse is carried out for a reason something like – “these kids have it too good and they don’t deserve it because they do some things I don’t like so I’m going to beat them down to size to even things out”. If I’m to believe fictional accounts of Victorian era England – children were sometimes seen as morally lacking and deserving of punishment for simply being children, which I feel is slightly different than just malice.
Is your country the United States?
In all seriousness, though, I wonder if what you’re describing really is that different from what we attribute to malice. People do tend to want to rationalize pretty much everything they do, even if it’s not necessarily rational. And in doing so, it only makes sense that people are going to employ the rationales that are common in their communities. If you just don’t like kids who get good grades, but your peers and the moral code you’re socialized into tells you that the true evil in the world is oppression, well, you’re heavily incentivized–by social feedback and by the better angels of our nature, the human desire to do what’s right–to connect getting good grades to being oppressive. It resolves cognitive dissonance and justifies you to your neighbors. Similarly, if your society says all the evil in the world is caused by witches, then in your society those resentful kids burn conspicuously bright students as witches.
Most of what is called “malice” in the internet is either harsh humor or just tribalism.
People are not (usually) mean to be mean. They are mean to be funny, or mean to defend their ingroup and attack the outgroup. For those who do not share the ingroup or the sense of humor, it does seem like malice, but that’s usually (there’s my weasel word!) just a failure of imagination.
This. Actual in-person bullies are probably acting out of malice most of the time, but Internet trolls are just in it for the lulz. It can be taken to callous and arguably psychopathic extremes (like twitch viewers trying to get gamers murdered by SWAT teams because it’s funny), but I’d still say it’s distinct from the motivations of people who beat up other people face-to-face to increase their in-group social status.
Isn’t enjoying hurting other people kind of malice by definition? I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re drawing between in-person bullying and internet bullying, although one factor may be that it is easier for internet bullies to pretend to themselves that they aren’t causing any real harm.
Whether or not they’re causing harm is irrelevant to them. I was under the impression malice is action with the intent of causing harm. Trolling is action with the intent to get a laugh out of it, that may or may not cause harm, but causing harm is not the point.
If you want to call it malice too, fine, it’s malice. We’re just left with two different kinds of malice, then, because I still think this is a useful distinction. Bullies and trolls are not the same type of people.
I think we must be imagining different scenarios, or else there’s a reason why some people find trolling (in the new sense of the word, since that seems to be the one you’re using) funny that I just don’t get. That’s not unlikely; I’m neuroatypical.
So far as I can see, the typical troll thinks causing harm is inherently enjoyable, same as the typical bully.
Apparently there’s a study to correlates online trolling with scoring highly on the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale, which includes 10 items that assess a person’s tendency to enjoy hurting others. That seems to fit the definition of malice being used here. (http://www.livescience.com/48128-internet-trolls-sadistic-personalities.html)
I’m not sure why it is being perceived as “harsh humor” or “for the lolz” by (presumably) non-trolling observers. Maybe it’s hard to tell the difference online and the more charitable interpretation is being favored.
I think perhaps I’ve got the idea, by way of a Harry Potter analogy: “harsh humour” is James hanging Severus up by his ankles; “malice” is Voldemort killing the other children’s pets. @Adam, does that sound about right?
(It seems to me, though, that in-person bullies come at all points along the scale, same as internet bullies. Name-calling in person isn’t much different from name-calling on the internet.)
I think you’re just thinking of a very specific subset of trolling. The classic all-time example of trolling is Ken M of Yahoo! Answers fame. He’s not hurting anyone. He’s just saying outrageously idiotic things and getting people to answer seriously and seeing how far they’ll take it until they realize they’re being f-ed with. That definitely isn’t malice. Some people take it to the point that it actually might hurt people, but that’s just overstepping.
I think the term has just been conflated recently with online bullying, but that isn’t what it is.
Ah, that’s the classic definition of trolling. But I don’t think that was what Nancy was talking about. There’s plenty of far more malicious behaviour out there. (And classic trolling seems to have largely fallen out of fashion.)
Most real-life bullies I’ve seen also did it for the lulz (both their own and their friends’, which increased their in-group social status).
When channers harassed a couple whose 12-year-old son killed himself for more than a year, was that trolling or bullying? They certainly seem to have found it lulz-worthy, and the “an hero” meme is still used by self-identified trolls.
I’m just saying they are distinct things, not that a troll can’t also be a bully. It may even be the case that most are. I have no idea. But trolling is not bullying. Trolling is saying something you don’t actually believe, or pretending to be a person you aren’t, in order to evoke an outsized response that you then laugh at. If what makes you laugh is human suffering, then your particular manifestation of trolling might also be bullying. But bullying is a different thing. It’s just tormenting people because you enjoy tormenting people.
While I might prefer things to be otherwise, that’s not really how the word is used any more. It’s like “hacker” vs. “cracker”, that battle was pretty much lost once the black-hats started calling themselves “hackers”. Similarly, now that even the online bullies call themselves “trolls” (and since they way outnumber the older sort) I don’t think there’s any point in trying to insist on the original definition.
At any rate, definitions aside, I don’t think the original-definition-trolls are relevant here, because they aren’t what anyone else was talking about.
Sastan:
When I first read this, I was very angry and wanted to find some way to swat back– it seemed as though you wanted kindness for yourself and for people whose behavior just makes life worse (in my strongly held opinion). After all, you don’t mean *really* badly. However, all I could imagine was you brushing me off. By that point, I’m not just feeling angry, I’m feeling helplessly angry.
Aren’t you the person with the hyperbole (claimed to not be hyperbole) about my not liking the gender roles in Gene Wolfe’s A Borrowed Man? From my point of view, whoever it was took up my time and also added one of those trivial impediments to a mentioning a mildly feminist point of view.
I concluded that my least bad strategy was to describe how things are at my end while giving up any particular hope of convincing you of anything.
I think that if people chose malicious methods of being funny and of defending their preferred groups, they’re malicious.
I think nastiness is very low information– especially in quantity, it adds noise to good discussion.
Malice is a very strong drive. I’m not sure what you mean by weigh in though. Like, confirm it? Sure.
Bullies in my school replaced a kid’s eyedrops with what they thought was acid. A couple weeks ago I saw someone kick open their passenger door so they could knock someone off a bike as they drove by. A wargamer I know and his spouse spent most of a gaming session taunting their child (really taunting, the sort of hurtful you can only spew if you know someone well) for being dumb because she wanted to quit their ‘family business’ of disability faking and look for a job. Looked to me like the tail end of a harangue that had been going on for hours. The Go club’s boards and stones (literally rocks and sticks, we make em ourselves) have been stolen on multiple occasions. At my work, a janitor stole all of the team’s test iphones. When they tracked her down with the “find my…” feature her house was full of stolen stuff. Hadn’t sold a bit of it. Just stole it to stack up and gloat over. A week ago someone kicked in my car front window and pissed all over my front seats. They stole nothing.
The plural of anecdote is not, of course, data, but my general theory of humans is that if you let them hurt someone without getting hurt they’ll take the opportunity.
holy *shit*.
…I think maybe you should consider not living where you currently live and living somewhere else instead.
lol, I agree that’s pretty extreme.
I do think that you’ve run into more and worse malice than most people, and I recommend moving away if it’s possible.
I just want to say I take this question as being related to the question of whether our relatively egalitarian democratic “nice” Western world is unstable in the long run. If folks are basically mean, maybe illiberalism is more natural and we are living in a weird blip caused by recent high growth levels.
This, exactly. Scott’s “in favor of niceness, community and civilization” and “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup” paint a picture of a world I would vastly prefer, but it’s not the world we seem to be moving toward. Just judging by the comments here over the last year or so, it seems like niceness is pretty difficult to maintain.
That’s an odd way to look at it, IMO. Are behaviors like keeping things sterile for surgery, good software testing practices, or purifying water before drinking it “stable”? Do they arise spontaneously and persist without maintenance? Not really. Should we give up on them? Probably not.
The thing is, we don’t have a consensus on how much niceness is proper — e.g., the discussion about Oliver Cromwell’s comment upthread shows that some people are not on board with Scott’s niceness program. They believe too much niceness is bad, so they push against it. Additionally, most people automatically drop niceness when they feel a need to “punish” bad behavior.
@Nita – “That’s an odd way of looking at it…”
What’s odd about it? your second paragraph is the dynamic I’m talking about. I see Scott arguing that the tribal divide tends to be pernicious, and that we should try to push back against it in favor of niceness even to people of the opposing tribe. And then I see a general push in both tribes to say “naw, we prefer malice/punishing instead.” And yeah, there’s lots of examples of it in these comments.
[OK, this turned into an essay, so I threw in some section numbers a la Scott]
1.
The odd part is the assumption that anything that is not “stable” on its own should be abandoned as hopeless.
Several new commenters have said the discussion here is more civil than in other places they’re familiar with. So I think we’re doing something right — even if we need to keep reminding ourselves to actually keep doing it.
E.g., even my original comment contains less outrage and eye-rolling than its first draft. Sometimes I revise a comment several times, and each iteration turns out nicer. Sometimes I write up a comment made entirely of delicious snark, and end up not posting it.
2.
You say “both tribes”, but I don’t think we have two tribes here. We have a very diverse set of individuals, each with their own life experience and their own understanding of civility.
There are obvious disagreements about what is “true” among us, but also about what is “necessary” and what is “kind”. So, even if each of us observes the rules perfectly, we will have cases where a comment is judged to be a good-faith contribution by some, and a malicious defection by others.
And we don’t have a standard way to handle these. Sometimes tit-for-tat results in a spiral of escalation, but sometimes it actually improves things. Sometimes extra kindness works, but sometimes it’s perceived as condescending (and sometimes it is condescending — it’s very hard to get it right when you’re feeling angry or defensive!).
3.
So, it will always take work. Even completely and precisely defined processes require effort to maintain.
Moreover, our norms are vague and new. It is very likely that things won’t always work out, even if everyone acts in good faith. To paraphrase Jon Postel, we have to be kind in what we say, and forgiving in how we interpret others.
Obviously, that is much easier said than done. But what is the alternative?
OPEN QUESTION…to those that care to scroll down all the way.
I’m looking for new blogs to read on the blogroll. By smart people in general. Not really asking for any specific subject matter or political orientation.
Tried voxday.blogspot.com?
Now that’s just mean.
Well, *I* happen to like it, and as The Nybbler mentions below, it does fit the criteria. If nothing else, it’s a great information source for where VD will strike next, given his habit of calling his attacks.
It doesn’t fit the criteria; it’s not on the blogroll.
I don’t think Vita Fled meant *this* blogroll here. That would be rather indolent of them and pointless – the blog links are already there. I rather think they meant their own blogroll.
Er, what’s up with that blog?
Depends what you mean.
Urstoff and The Nybbler are probably objecting because of the proprietor’s politics and ongoing feuds with, among others, the Science Fiction Writers of America, John Scalzi, George R. R. Martin, Tor Books in general and the Haydens and Irene Gallo in specific.
Vox Day is, well, a very socially conservative libertarian, with persistent claims of protected class status via Hispanic and Native American ancestry. His day job is apparently writing books (fiction and non) and managing a publishing house. He’s also among the Gamergate leadership, inasmuch as they have that, the leader of the Rabid Puppies movement, and author of SJWs Always Lie.
Not boring.
“Not boring.”
Boringness is relative to particular readers, and Vox Day bores me pretty quickly when he’s aggressive, which seems to be most of the time.
I read a bit of the current blog, being made curious by the mention. Not boring seems a fair claim.
I don’t object because of his politics (any more than any other race-obsessed alt-right blogger). He’s just an annoying tool that favors an intentionally antagonistic style over actual substance. The signal to noise ratio is pretty close to zero.
Like a lot of “issues-oriented” blogging, he gets pretty predictable: a lot of what he posts is alt-right outrage porn, and outrage porn is not so much one-note as three-chord. “We are noble and right, but the bad guys are ahead in points, but we can still pull out a late-game win”.
He’s a bit unusual in that he seems outright proud of his “Dread Ilk” or whatever it is he calls the people who will Twittermob his opponents. Usual SOP for people, regardless of politics, is to claim that either this doesn’t happen (and it’s the other team who is running the online harassment campaign, and any harassment by people purporting to be on your side is really a false flag) or to shrug and say “I can’t control what individuals are gonna do”.
Also, his invention of a new, super-cool kind of Alpha Male, way better than ordinary Alpha Males.
That’s cruel. Fits the criteria, but still cruel.
Owl/Sowa
🙂
You could try mine, I reply immodestly:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
It’s about whatever I feel like writing about.
Finally some good news: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/france-s-hollande-drops-p/2649492.html
“France’s Hollande drops post-attack plans to change constitution”
A 6-part series based on Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn is on YouTube and Phil Gyford has some notes about the book. The book talks about thinking about buildings with time and uncertainty in mind, points out a shift in architecture from function to aesthetics–architecture as art, and offers practical advice (e.g. moisture kills buildings and flat roofs leak more often than pitched roofs; use materials that look bad before they act bad; oversize chases; take and save pictures of open walls before the drywall).
I’m looking for other book recommendations on building, architecture, and planning. Right now I’m skimming through The Timeless Way of Building, Learning from Las Vegas, Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Architecture: Form, Space, & Order. Suggestions are appreciated :^)
flat roofs leak more often than pitched roofs
If modern architects have to be told this, then perhaps some elementary geography lessons are in order: there is this thing called “rain” which is made out of “water” which is “wet”. Unfortunately, not every single building you will design is going to be slapped up in the middle of the desert in Qatar, so you will have to take this into account.
Next: “things move down inclines, things stay in place on the flat”, or “why did all those old-timey people put sticking-up roofs on their houses? were they for ritual purposes? no, the shocking secret of getting water off your roof revealed!” 🙂
Frank Lloyd Wright never took this into account, and is revered as one of the greatest architects in history. I mean, who are you going to believe – the thousands of fans of the greatest architect in history, or a few homeowners with the gall to whine about leaky roofs? Or cracked foundations, low ceilings, inadequate ventilation, inadequate storage space…
I regard Wright as a pretty good sculptor who falsely advertised his ornamental artwork as “buildings”, and lament the fact that so many “architects” seem intent on following his lead. But it is perhaps understandable; if you’re in that line of work, more people will look at your buildings than live in them, and you’ve already cashed the checks from the latter.
I will say this, Lloyd Wright’s buildings look absolutely gorgeous. I have no idea what they are like to live in. He really did do “architecture as art”.
His imitators, successors, and successors of his imitators, don’t have the talent to make art out of architecture and don’t have the pragmatism to make architecture. They want big, bold, splashy statements and as for how the damn buildings will work or hold together while being constructed, well, that’s for the civil engineers to work out.
I know I sound like the Prince of Wales and the monstrous carbuncle, and I don’t object to new things merely because they’re new, and a lot of new architecture works very well – but when it’s smooshed on top of existing buildings or in a cityscape of much older design, without regard for its surroundings, and is pretty much a dick-measuring vanity project on the part of the clients about “look how much money we have to blow on the world’s tallest dildo” (though it has since been surpassed in pointlessness by The Shard), then I do tend to harrumph 🙂
Who is “The Carbuncle”?
Peter Ahrends, apparently, though Prince Charles was speaking only of one his architectural proposals rather than the man himself with the “monstrous carbuncle” remark.
If you ever end up in Oklahoma, go to Bartlesville and check out the only Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper.
I absolutely could not work in any of those offices, but they are neat.
I haven’t got a good look at many of Wright’s buildings, but I used to go by one called the Robie House on a daily basis, and it appears to me that in his residential structures at least he mostly got the “roofs have to slope” rule. It’s just that Prairie-Style roofs like his are often very shallow because a lot of emphasis is on the horizontal lines.
Roofs don’t have to be steep; it largely depends on their materials. In the British Isles, of course, thatch used to be very common, but given that it’s basically dead plant material, it really has to slope at least 60 degrees to keep people under it dry. Any shallower and the water will get caught in the straw and rot it and the roof will collapse. But Wright’s roofs–and most modern U.S. roofs–used (I think) asphalt shingles, which don’t last forever, but still usually survive 20 to 50 years. They’re much smoother and more water-resistant than some traditional European materials, which allows roofs to be much shallower.
Meanwhile, while I’m sure your roof isn’t thatch, you correctly noted that mixing architectural styles sometimes has unattractive results, I wouldn’t be surprised if roofs in Ireland–at least outside major cities’ central business districts–were on the whole still pretty steep (even if they don’t have to be). So the form follows the traditional function, even if we can get away with shallow–and even sometimes flat!–roofs now.
“but I used to go by one called the Robie House on a daily basis”
Small world. I spent a good deal of my life within a few blocks of Robie House. Very handsome building–but I have no idea what it was like to live in.
I’ve been in a replica of a Frank Lloyd Wright room– sorry, can’t remember details.
The chairs were great! However, I’m 4’11”.
Places of the Heart looks very interesting– it includes monitoring the bodily effects of being around drab vs. pleasant buildings– but I haven’t read it yet.
Two out of three ain’t bad, so–Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. May be the single best work of nonfiction I’ve read.
I need to get around to reading that someday. As an almost-lifelong New Yorker and a transportation dork I’m well aware of the vast impact Robert Moses had on my city.
I think our current development environment, with endless planning meetings and impact studies and virtually nothing getting built, is something of an overreaction to the Moses era. We wanted to stop the destruction of neighborhoods, so we put in processes that made it almost impossible to build anything at all. And that was fine for a while, since Moses and his ilk overbuilt far ahead of growth…but now we have massive traffic jams, insufficient transit to get people out of their cars, and no reasonable way to build the highways and railroads we need to fix the problem. And restrictive zoning in every place where anyone already lives means there’s nowhere to grow but out – and ever-expanding exurbia will just make the traffic problems in the city worse.
[Content Warning: Self-Promotion]
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a good book! If you’re interested in Jacobs, you might enjoy this podcast episode about her life and work.
PSA: All gravatars are monochrome, a single color and white, so there is no ambiguity to shorten “green and white anonymous” to “green anonymous.”
I attempted to take the survey. Got most of the way through it.
Then I accidentally hit backspace. Big mistake!
After that, there were only error message pages no matter what I did.
Sorry about that.
Regarding Wency on real estate development.
Very interesting comment and I think its admirable of you to accept correction on the matter. What I cannot understand is why you choose to speak with such bombast on topics that you barely know anything about. There’s nothing wrong with writing things that could be incorrect, but why not write them with an appropriate tone of uncertainty? Or were you simply stating what you think is Trump’s view on the matter and not claiming it as your own? (It didn’t read that way to me, but maybe I’m wrong).
I can guarantee that you will have plenty of patients when you move to the Bay. I’ve had lots of friends complain about long waiting periods, etc. My first year in the bay I stopped taking fluoxetine before I should have because I couldn’t find a psychiatrist on my insurance who was accepting new patients. Good luck hunting for jobs.
Many lawyers set up as sole practitioners. How practical is that option for a psychiatrist in general, Scott in particular?
That’s part of what I’m trying to find out. It sounds like it requires a big up-front investment and a lot of knowledge of business administration. I’m wary about the former (especially if it means going into debt with less than 100% chance of making it back) and don’t have the latter.
I’ve set up a couple consulting businesses over the years which should be somewhat similar and I still have ~zero knowledge of business administration. The trick is to find a good accountant.
For investments, I’m not sure what that would entail for a psychiatrist vs consultant? I did my first from a spare room in my house and an outsourced secretary who picked up the phone for a multitude of small businesses, but you probably need office space that patients actually want to visit. Shouldn’t be huge sums in any case?
Perhaps you should sell shares of your future income?
Do people do that in real life? I thought that was going to have to wait for Libertopia?
Be the Libertopia you want to see!
But seriously, I think that’s an idea that work in small doses but faces real problems at scale. I might be happy to buy 5% of Scott’s earnings if he promises not to sell the remaining 95%, but if I expect him to be giving away a large share of his earnings, that’s a kind of voluntary taxation that comes with all the regular deadweight loss effects of regular taxes. That impacts the value that I place on the investment. So I think that dynamic could stand in the way of raising serious money that way.
On the other hand, I’ve certainly heard of similar arrangements in the real world, particularly with poker players. Though the very high variability of income for poker pros probably contributes to that.
Not exactly, but entering a partnership with a “silent partner” is sort of similar. You do all the work, they provide the up-front money and own some percentage of the business. I’m not sure it can be done in the medical field.
On selling shares of your income …
I was talking to someone a week or so ago who is part of an organization that gives programming classes. Their latest project, I think only just getting going, is a two year school, presumably a substitute for at least part of college. Tuition free, but you agree to give them (I think) a quarter of your income for the first four years out of the course.
So it is something that happens in real life, even if not often.
You have the advantage that there are lots of people who would trust you to keep your word, which saves on legal costs.
App academy’s standard fee is 18% of your first year’s income after graduating. App academy has been around for a bit now and does not seem to have run into legal troubles collecting this money. So I think such contracts can be made. At least if they are short term.
It’d have to be structured as a debt (e.g., income-based repayment) – selling an equity interest in yourself looks like a 13th Amendment violation to me.
I thought you came from a rich family. They won’t front you seed capital?
Heard an interesting statement on a podcast recently. To paraphrase:
“The technical challenges facing humans desiring to live on Mars today are no greater than those which faced early humand or proto-humans wanting to live in North European 50,000 years ago (or whenever humans first started living there). We may think Mars is not our native environment and therefore unsuitable for life, but in reality, 95% of the Earth is not our native environment. We are native to part of Eastern Africa near the equator, but unlike other species, we’ve used technology (especially fire, houses, and clothing) to, in effect, “colonize” a much greater part of the Earth.”
I feel like it may be a bit of an exaggeration, but then it may also be hard for me to imagine how difficult it would be for early humans to discover/invent fire, houses, and clothes. So I think this is an interesting point, and part of the speaker’s idea was that we should do it as much for the “motivational” purpose as anything: sure we may not “need” to live on Mars right now, but the technical innovation and hope for the future attempting to so could bring about, as spreading out, seemingly somewhat unnecessarily, across the globe did, would be worth it.
My only question about this is: why not start with all the parts of the Earth currently not considered livable or desirable? High mountains? On the ocean (seasteading?), Under the ocean? Underground? None of these is easy, nor, at this point, strictly necessary, but also a lot easier than Mars? What about the Moon? Why colonize Mars before the Moon?
Sure, having people live on other planets has the advantage of not putting all of humanity’s eggs on one planetary basket and might be a little more inspiring, but of all the things which might render the Earth uninhabitable, I imagine most of them wouldn’t affect people living sustainably on the ocean floor? Except maybe the dreaded paperclip maximizer, but that would probably reach Mars eventually, assuming we can reach Mars. And I still find living under the ocean pretty inspiring.
Easier to get water on Mars than on the Moon. And while the Martian atmosphere doesn’t provide much protection against meteors, I am under the impression that this is an area where a tiny bit, to stop the smallest micrometeors, is still vastly preferable to none at all. And I’m sure there are other advantages to Mars that I’m not thinking of, though there are of course advantages to the Moon besides being closer and having a shallower gravity well. But the important point is that distance is nowhere near being the only issue that matters, and for the moment the expert consensus seems to be that most of the issues besides distance favor Mars over the Moon pretty heavily.
Generally speaking, colonizing a place that is hard to live in but easy to commute to is not going to be economically viable. Which is why, while we exploit the resources of the deep sea, this is done by people who e.g. live in Scotland, take the biweekly helicopter to platforms poking above the North Sea, and very occasionally put on dive gear to support the machinery working below. There’s no way for a habitat on the sea floor to compete with that. And if the motive for colonization is not so much being attracted by what awaits you as repelled by what you are leaving, ask whether whoever you are fleeing can afford a WWII-surplus destroyer and a rack of depth charges.
The Antarctic coast will probably be the last colonizable “frontier” on Earth, when the question of mineral rights is resolved. The Antarctic interior, really doesn’t justify permanent habitation except for the small prestige value of a permanent South Pole Station.
Mars, by comparison, is probably the easiest place off Earth for humans to live (for reasons Protagoras touches on), but well beyond commuting distance with any foreseeable technology. If there’s anything worth doing there, it will mostly have to be done by people who live there. Some of whom may be fleeing Earth with a reasonable expectation of not being followed. And given the “geography” of outer space, things that need to be done generically in outer space or on the surface of some generic asteroid may well wind up being done by people who commute up from the relatively shallow gravity well of Mars.
The Moon is an intermediate case; harder to live on than Mars and easier to reach from Earth, so it’s not actually clear whether it gets settlers or just rotating work crews. I’d bet on settlers eventually, but maybe not before Mars. And probably politically subordinate to Earth, for reasons both material and psychological.
I think that’s a ridiculous exaggeration. The rest of the Earth had a functioning ecosystem full of things humans can eat, that also took their waste and extracted all the nutrients, not to mention keeping up a supply of breathable air. These are big deals. Making a stable self-sufficient system is really hard, and Earth mostly manages by being really big and getting constant energy input from the the Sun. Smaller systems (certainly at any scale we’ll be building in the foreseeable future) are delicate and crash easily, and there go your colonists.
Smaller systems are cheap, simple novelty items that sustain themselves for years without any maintenance or resupply.
That ecologies must be insanely complex networks involving thousands of species each playing a dozen vital roles, is a matter of faith based on one poorly-understood data point. People who try to build simple closed ecologies, whether amateurs, novelty-item salesmen, or professionals like NASA, generally do quite well even in early trials. And understand that the relevant standard is “quite well”, not “perfect”, because a system that includes competent humans on the inside and a planet with air and water just out the door allows for fixing problems as they occur. Also, nobody is really talking about sending one group of astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars with no further contact from Earth; if it turns out that you forgot the seeds of one particular vital plant or you need ten kilos of synthetic micronutrients every year to make the system work, the system will still work.
Mark Watney’s potato farm is a perfectly viable closed ecology, as is the more complex version where he never runs out of ketchup. Build in a bit of margin, and the potatoes go into lamb stew.
Well it did take humans something like 900,000 years to colonize Northern Europe… not that they had a mission to do so driving them on, but if it were not a major technical challenge from their perspective I think it would have happened a lot sooner than that. When we make guesses about when we could colonize Mars they tend to range from what… 50-300 years?
The idea of trying to colonize new environments seems to me a fantasy. My reason for this statement is simple. It’s Ulaanbaatar. It’s one of the coldest and most extreme inhabited places. It was also first colonized thousands of years ago. Modern technology has done essentially nothing in advancing human colonization of new environments. There are places like Antarctic bases but they are not self-sufficient, even economically, let alone in an autarkic way. This should make us humble about threats like global warming.
http://fusion.net/story/209348/no-life-on-mars/
Antarctica hasn’t been colonized because the nations of the Earth have signed a treaty essentially promising that nobody will buy anything an Antarctic colonist might want to sell. Absent that, there would be economically self-sufficient mining communities along some of the coasts. And arguments about who gets to mine which sites, possibly settled violently, hence the treaty. A comparable treaty was proposed for outer space, but ratified only by a handful of minor nations.
On the technology front, probably the most critical technology for colonizing any place is the ability to travel there at a less-than-ruinous cost. We aren’t there yet for Mars, or the Moon, but the cost of space travel is coming down and likely to continue doing so. And, aside from the special case Antarctica, humans have been consistently eager to colonize any vaguely habitable location as soon as shipbuilders and navigators can get them there.
“Scientists have discovered occurrences (small amounts) of several minerals in Antarctica, but there are no known mineral deposits of commercial interest.”
I’m sure there’s some mineral deposits there, but you have to take into account the expense of prospecting.
If you could really make huge profits mining in Antarctica, I doubt the Antarctic Treaty would be stopping people.
I note that the Princeton study says in the second paragraph of its summary that Antarctic oil wouldn’t be profitable unless world oil prices doubled – which actually happened about twenty years after the report was written, with the result that a whole lot of human beings moved to cold, harsh, sparsely-inhabited places to extract oil. Absent the issue with property rights, it seems reasonable to expect that e.g. the Ross Shelf region would have experienced the sort of development that North Dakota and Alberta have. And the same sort of slump in the past few years, but not to the level of total abandonment.
Beyond that, you don’t gauge mineral resources by scientific exploration, “commercial interest” requires prospectors who ask a different set of questions than academic scientists. And yes, Vox, treaties can and do prevent people from exploiting billion-dollar economic opportunities. Trillion-dollar opportunities are another matter, but there may not be any of those in Antarctica. It wouldn’t take trillion-dollar opportunities to drive a modest level of settlement.
Look to the extreme Arctic for the level of activity you’d reasonably expect in an Antarctica with secure property rights. No great cities, but not entirely devoid of human habitation either.
I doubt it. McMurdo is colder than either of those places.
There are places on the Antarctic Peninsula warmer than some places in Alaska. Maybe you could live there in a self-sufficient way, but maybe Eskimos could also have if only they could have gotten there. It’s not very interesting.
McMurdo’s coldest month is August, with an average temperature of -27.4 C. By way of comparison, Baffin Island averages -26.5 C in February, with a profitable iron ore mine and a population of over 10,000. Svalbard only has maybe 2,500 people in spite of a balmy February -16.3C. But Alaska’s North Slope comes in colder than McMurdo with a February average of -27.7 C, and maintains a population of nearly 10,000 to support the oilfields.
I am not clear why you believe marginal differences in temperature place some places entirely beyond viable colonization, but it is clearly not the case that the Antarctic coast is too cold for people to live if there’s something there to live for.
I imagine that the isolation of Antarctica is a bigger factor than the cold, but the cold would still matter. Living seasonally in February does not mean colonization. It is not a question of whether folks “could” colonize a place, but whether any sane person would raise a family there given alternatives. This is about long-term endurance, so it’s the average temperatures that matter. McMurdo is about the same average temperature as Oymyakon, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth. It’s also much more isolated. So I think with at least 90% confidence that given current technology, nobody would colonize McMurdo permanently, even if valuable minerals were found.
Are you similarly 90% confident that nobody would permanently colonize the Alaskan North Slope, Svalbard, or Baffin Island? These places are approximately as cold as McMurdo and approximately as geographically isolated as McMurdo; if they are culturally less isolated it is because daily air service and broadband internet follow, rather than lead, colonists.
I believe your model of human behavior is in need of recalibration here, and I think I have provided you with a reasonable data set for that purpose. Have fun with it.
Why do you think these places are as isolated as McMurdo? They at least lie on an inhabited continent (except Svalbard, which I only now looked at-looks interesting, very northernly location-not quite as isolated as McMurdo, but I will concede my confidence is only 80% now)
@windmill tilter, Svalbard is an island (well, an archipeligo; Spitsbergen is the major island). And you might have guessed that Baffin Island is an island by the name.
@Windmill tilter – what’s the difference between flying to your destination over a thousand miles of mountainous, uninhabited wilderness and a thousand miles of flat, uninhabited ocean?
Baffin is an island but it’s part of North America. Svalbard I admit is more interesting. But McMurdo is still twice as far from, say, New Zealand as Svalbard is from Norway or other European countries. And New Zealand is already pretty remote.
There don’t seem to be any bridges, or even so far as I can tell regular ferries, to Baffin Island, so it isn’t part of North America in any sense that makes it particularly convenient to travel to.
The only reason countries agreed to that treaty is because no one wanted to live in Antarctica in the first place. It’s not like people were lining up to live there before then.
I’m trying to increase the diversity of my opinion sources, which currently means adding more conservative voices. Scott thinking a blogger is worth reading is a fairly strong endorsement of that blogger, but I don’t want to go through the entire set of links in the sidebar for much the same reason that I don’t want to take heroin. I tried to find a comment I remembered in which Scott listed the conservative / right-wing blogs he recommends, but I couldn’t find it despite going through every comment thread back to Dec 1st 2015.
Could someone who remembers where the comment is point me to it, please? Better still, Scott, if you read this, could you respond with a list of conservative opinion sources you think I should look at?
Also, an idea for a post: explain why each blog in your sidebar is worth reading and tell us what else you think we should read that isn’t a linked-to blog (books included). I think there are probably quite a lot of SSC readers who avoid investigating those links because they’re afraid of the tab explosion.
The right-wing blogs are “Those That Belong To The Emperor”, and perhaps “Those That Have Just Broken The Flower Vase”.
Most of the right-wing blogs on the sidebar (the ones belonging to the emperor) are very right-wing, so in my opinion reading more than one isn’t a good way of increasing the diversity of your reading, since you will be reading a large amount from a very small ideology (however much we might forget that on the internet). I can’t suggest any good mainstream conservative bloggers, but I’m sure there are some.
The Federalist is probably the best “Main Stream” conservative blog/news site. Instapudit occasionally linked to by our host is entertaining, but culture-war centric. PJ Media is right-wing Vox, Breitbart(and affiliates there of) is right-wing Gawker. You’ve also got the online versions of old media outlets like National Review, The Washington Post, and WSJ.
Beyond that you start getting into individual writers/blogs, which tend to be a matter of individual taste.
I tend to follow Rod Dreher’s writings on http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ as a Christian traditionalist social conservative viewpoint on events (mostly American events) from someone whose arguments takes it as given that we want people to be well-off and comfortable and happy, and is in and of themselves an advocate of manners and politeness.
I find it at least more interesting than the boring thing some parts of the nationalist/alt right do where they completely ignore those concerns and spend ages in parts of the proposal space that are never going to contain a proposal of interest to anyone sensible.
It never convinced me to agree with any of their ideas, and I think I actually got more convinced that the fundamental nature of their version of religious freedom is not egalitarian and wants traditionalist religious viewpoints to be socially allowed to do things that other political viewpoints are not, but it at least made me more rather than less sympathetic to them as a person.
I’d second JBeshir’s recommendation of Dreher and add the Volokh Conspiracy, currently hosted on the Washington Post (view in incognito mode to get around the paywall)
Is Volokh Conspiracy right-wing?
No, the Volokh conspirators are libertarian law professors.
It’s a mixed bunch. Volokh himself is libertarian, Somin even more so, but Stewart Baker is straight up authoritarian. Kontorovich is obsessed with BDS and doesn’t write about anything else. Orin Kerr isn’t terribly political one way or the other (great 4th amendment scholar). Bernstein and Zywicki tend to be Republican partisans.
re: “Is Volokh Conspiracy right-wing?”
Depending on the contributor, it’s either libertarian or more mainstream conservative (either way, contra Creutzer, I think libertarian counts as right-wing), with Dale Carpenter the Log-Cabin Centrist Republican chiming in occasionally. Very pro Second Amendment, religious freedom/free association (not to imply those are intrinsically right-wing, but the contexts and tones they’re talked about there pretty much are), Citizens-United, etc. Agnostic-to-sympathetic on abortion restrictions. One contributor is very active in FIRE, and one of these days Somin is going to stop trying to kid everyone and come out in favor of restricting the franchise.
Of possible interest to those who like fellow techies. From Wiki on Eugene Volokh:
At the age of 12, he began working as a computer programmer. He attended the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics. At the age of 15, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Math and Computer Science from UCLA. As a junior at UCLA, he earned $480 a week as a programmer for 20th Century Fox.
As a liberal/leftie, Volokh is a guy who I often want to disagree with… but I can only very occasionally find a reasonable way to do so. The dude is a legit genius.
Ethics Alarms is an interesting right-wing blog in that he will call out everyone, but mostly on the left. Right now he seems to be preoccupied with the problems with this election cycle.
Is this the link you’re thinking of? https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/23/ot31-open-water/#comment-249825
I stumbled across this blog in the wake of the Scott Aaronson/Amanda Marcotte/Scott Alexander/Untitled happening at the beginning of 2015. My immediate reaction was “holy shit, Ainsley Hayes has a blog.”
Theodore Dalrymple writes at city-journal, he’s generally a great example of the conservative-as-grumpy-old-man stereotype. I always enjoy his stuff.
I’d like to recommend this post today on the recent refusal to no-platform a person whose name I shall not write:
http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-controversy
It’s very similar to some SSC posts, but notable because it’s attempting to apply the ideals of niceness, community, inclusion, and so on, in the middle of a heated controversy.
“It’s possible we persuade attendees that treating others with respect, dignity, and empathy, and communicating nonviolently (with empathy and honest self-expression) is good for far more than just professional conduct at a tech conference.”
What I find most interesting is that I don’t see any evidence he’s convincing anyone with intellectual argument.
This part is pretty funny: “… [against anyone who wants to] walk up to that whiteboard, look the attendee in the eye, and say, “No, we found out you are an anarcho-capitalist, therefore we are not allowing you to speak about immutable data structures.”“
I love the fact that the comments disagreeing with the decision are all some variant of “I can’t find anything wrong with your reasoning, but it must be wrong because it generates an outcome I don’t like.”
This is a pretty good way to handle things, in general. Argument is vanity, follow the money.
Something that I find more amusing than it probably merits is acronyms that get used for more than one thing. I know “CBT” has been brought up before here (being both a therapy method and a BDSM thing).
I keep seeing “MSM” in the context of “mainstream media” and wondering for a split-second what men who have sex with men has to do with the topic at hand. Or, whenever “GNC” is used to refer to people who are gender non-conforming, there’s a moment where I think “how are supplements involved in this?”
Does anybody else have any good examples of this?
In the same vein, PCP is both the name of a drug and a technical acronym in my field.
I hate that the acronym for borderline personality disorder is the same as the acronym for bipolar disorder (BPD). I can usually tell from the context or by looking at who wrote the sentence which one they meant, but it still automatically causes my brain to have to pause in reading and think about what is meant, which disrupts my reading flow (and I hate having my reading flow disrupted).
Depending on context, AAA might tow your car, shoot down your plane, or institute a price-fixing cartel for farm commodities (respectively: American Automobile Association, Anti-Aircraft Artillery, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act).
In video compression software, SAD stands for Sum of Absolute Differences). In psychology, it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Also in video compression, GOP stands for Group of Pixels. I keep seeing the acronym in source code and wondering what Republicans have to do with it.
MB can be either macroblock or megabyte.
A lot of the time you’ll see DNA length measured in kb or Mb, referring to thousands or millions of base pairs respectively. Naturally those are distinguishable from kilobytes and megabytes only by context.
It’s actually a pet peeve of mine because there’s no need for it. bp, kbp and Mbp is another accepted unit notation which is significantly less confusing.
As a programmer who used to work for a horse breeder, “AI” sometimes does some interesting flips in my head.
As a programmer who used to work for a horse breeder, “AI” sometimes does some interesting flips in my head.
Are MIRI worrying about the wrong existential risk? Or rather, perhaps the risk is that it’s not paperclips such an entity would be interested in maximising 🙂
We’d better hope that it’s friendly…or that it at least warms it’s hands!
When I read Americans online talking about their IRAs or “You need an IRA” 🙂 When they throw in things about “Traditional IRA” I have a moment where I go “Do you mean the Provos before the Continuity and the Real IRA split off, or do you mean Official versus Provisional, or do you mean the Old IRA?”
Then, of course, there’s the fearsome and little-known Roth IRA.
Which sort of IRA do the Baby Boomers favor?
Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA)
MLP as a multilayer perceptron or a well-known cartoon series.
Off topic, but if you concentrate for a little bit on the green part on the right of the 6, you can see a wolf with his teeth showing.
Apropos of nothing, here are some sick burns I saw on a random tv show recently.
Character A: (Seeing B in chef hat): Oh, entering the chili contest eh? You should know that I’ve won it last 5 years.
Character B: Really? Well, we know how to make chili up north as well, don’t ya know.
Character A: Oh yeah, I’ve tried Northern Chili a time or two. We call it SOUP.
Character B: Yeah….I’ve also tried Southern Chili once or twice. I generally think it needs SOME NORTHERN CHILI!
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, we’re looking at both of your chilis and saying “This needs some spaghetti under it.” We’re weird like that.
REGARDING KATIE’S CASE:
———————————–
1. Doesn’t seem like a bad situation, mainly because it’s appealing to effective altruists and it’s nice to help someone close to you rather than deal with scope insensitivity or dealing with philosophical questions of “if we value human life, where should we put our effort in”.
2. The fact that it’s a relatively nice situation does not mean that some people are going to avoid criticism a lot of aspects of it which might relate directly (about Katie specifically) or in general (who’s at fault, what to effing DO, whatever) and it’s an entirely bombastic can of worms. Worms that spend the last few months tripping so hard on LSD that you could see small rainbows crawling along the floor.
Are those people unjustified? I wouldn’t say so, but please don’t be mean to Katie. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to be mean or judgmental towards the other side, either.
(Remember, All Debates are Bravery Debates!)
Last note is that certain things people say are seemingly said in retrospect, such as responsibility or risk. It’s strange how those things are always discussed in retrospect. People should learn about The Proper Use of Humility.
The two main things I saw:
Responsibility is an interesting one and if Katie can explain why she decided to have the child I think.. the distribution won’t change significantly but it might help.
But the risk part is usually some kind of chain defection that it’s literally defect to infinity. Saying things like “man knows there’s a risk by having sex” can be easily countered by “woman should know there’s consequences for non-consensual pregnancy”. There’s such a lack of trust there that I’m really curious what those people are thinking. Not going to judge them for the same reason I’m not judging Katie – I don’t know their reason for that behavior.
This feels incorrect to me, because I see many prospective discussions of risks and responsibilities. (In particular, they certainly had a discussion about what to do when birth control failed!)
I am reminded of a friend’s experience with polyamory: he talked to his girlfriend about it, she agreed, he then started talking to his friends about their decision. His friends mostly responded with “aren’t you worried that she’ll meet someone else who doesn’t want to be poly and leave you for him?”. He responded that he wasn’t. She went on some dates with another guy, that guy wasn’t interested in being poly, and eventually she left my friend to date the other guy instead.
That same thing happens to almost all monogamous relationships, too. You hardly need to let your girlfriend sample other men to determine you’re not the best one she can get. If that’s your worry, be a more appealing lover.
Almost all? I don’t think so.
The rest of your point is sound, though. Leaving you for a better lover is a “threat” in any kind of relationship.
You really don’t think so? I’m not using ‘monogamous relationships’ as a stand-in for marriage. Most marriages don’t end except by death, but most married people had other relationships before they got married and those ended. I’m not saying they end overwhelmingly because the female partner finds a more appealing male while still attached to the other, but ultimately she ends up with someone else.
@ Adam:
That’s what it sounded like you were saying. Sorry if I misinterpreted you.
Okay, sorry that wasn’t clear.
OK – I have a serious, very personal question I’ve wanted to post on one of these open threads for months now. I’ve always chickened out.
This week is no different, so I’ll try again next time. No matter how often I rewrite it, I feel like I’m giving too many details, and I’d hate for those nearest and dearest to me to think I was insulting them or talking out of turn.
So I’ll keep working on it, and instead throw a more lighthearted experiment out to the community: I want to give up reading about politics for 40 days.
I meant to do this for Lent but didn’t. I figure God will forgive the delay. But I’ve recently realized four things:
1. I spend hours and hours every day reading political and social commentary on the internet.
2. The only things it’s led me to do is (a) sign up for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s newsletter (which led to MORE political and social commentary reading) and (b) write comments on message boards criticizing or supporting other posts. In other words, absolutely nothing at all of any consequence.
3. I am not happier as a result. Actually I’m angrier, more prone to be distracted, likely making me a worse husband and father, and definitely worse at my job.
4. I’m bored to shit with it.
It’s too much. If you’re reading five articles a day about how Donald Trump is an asshole, or about protests on college campuses, or whatever else, you’re reading too much about protests and Trump and whatever.
So I want to take a break. But I’m discovering that, not only is it incredibly difficult not to give in (my God, what if I don’t read fivethirtyeight and they write something really important????), which I expected, it’s actually kind of impossible.
Turns out that most everything I read is decidedly political, even if I don’t want it to be. The AVClub may be my source for entertaining discussion about recent TV shows, but there’s no escaping the fact that virtually every recap and review is informed by leftist politics (“this episode of Shameless was great because it normalized abortion!” “The years of fielding sexist complaints about the amount of nude scenes she does in Girls seem to have only emboldened Dunham in this terrific episode!”) These statements tend to inform the entire article, and the discussion that follows in the comments section often focuses on ferreting out the politically unorthodox.
I don’t even want to be confronted by bullshit headlines. So news magazines are out (this week in The Atlantic: “Does Manspreading Work?”), all arts and entertainment reading is out (at least the sites I visit). So is every blog I read, which all seem to boil down to “does feminism/identity politics/Trump suck or not?”, except maybe this one.
So my questions to the group is: what do you read that you like that is not polluted by the current politics? Where things are being written and discussed that aren’t either dubious articles interpreting dubious studies by social scientists or screaming rage at the people who wrote those dubious articles?
I’ll keep checking Longform.org, which has done a decent job of finding actual journalism out there. I just found this Nautilus site that looks pretty interesting. What else do you have? And what do you think of my idea? Intriguing or stupid?
Just to be clear: I don’t want to read pages that bemoan the state of discourse on the internet, so rationality blogs are out. 🙂 I don’t want to see anything that’s about attacking the other team. I don’t want to read the words sexist, bigot, islamaphobe, racist, or any of the other trigger words that all of 2016 cultural discussions revolve around. I’m sick of it and it’s going nowhere. I want interesting writing that pushes in different directions. You know, like pretty much all writing used to be.
And yes, part of the point of this is to seriously cut down on internet browsing. But I’d still like to read SOME stuff.
Thanks! Sorry for the long post.
So, you want to avoid left-wing outrage porn, right-wing outrage porn, and meta-level outrage porn? Tall order. There’s really no way to get current events that isn’t that sort of thing, and I doubt there ever was a golden age when things were better.
Just stick to fiction, apolitical non-fiction (which mostly limits you to technical stuff), non-fiction that while political/about politics is far enough in the past that it doesn’t bug you, and so on.
Yep, that’s pretty much it. I need to work on brevity.
But it shouldn’t be a tall order, should it? And I don’t think it belongs to a mythical Golden Age – the current situation seems to me to be closer to ten years old or so. America has definitely NOT always viewed everything through the current political lenses.
Fiction I’ve got handled offline. I’m not against fiction online, but I’m more interested in finding, say, sites where I can read about and discuss movies or current events or whatever without every review/discussion turning into a critique about whether the director is sexist. That shouldn’t be a tall order. Most people, I think, hate this stuff – how come no communities seem to have formed around preventing it?
Seems like it would be hard to avoid culture war stuff and political disputes in discussions of culture and politics?
As for the nonexistent lost golden age, sure, not the current political lenses, but always political lenses. Now, “liberal” seems increasingly to be a sneer word used by some on the left to refer to those less left than they, whereas ten years ago it was exclusively a sneer word used by the right to refer to those less right than they (note that some on the right haven’t gotten the memo and will refer as “liberals” to those on the left denouncing liberals). I’m not sure if that was better.
The ways in which discourse was awful in the past might be new to you, and so not annoy you as much, but it was probably just as annoying to your equivalent back whenever. There’s probably cuneiform tablets complaining about how politicized everything has become.
Current events online is probably out. Movies you may be able to find a forum with a strict no politics rule in the main discussion area, but I don’t know of one offhand.
But the best answer I think is to just give up on the notion of being on the cutting edge. Just as you don’t really need to consume political or social commentary, you really don’t need to discuss the latest movie in exhaustive detail.
Let me put it this way: say you cut out the web except for amazon, email, wikipedia, recipe sites, and other similar very practical odds and ends. Do you think your life would be impoverished for those 40 days? And if yes, what would you miss the most?
My wife and I were talking while driving to her aunt’s on Easter. I was pointing out that we lived most of our lives without GPS but still managed to get to places on time. I’m 40 and never had anything like GPS or Mapquest until maybe nine years ago? Ten? So we’re talking very recently. But even though I spent the majority of my driving existence without using computers to give me directions, I have only a dim memory of how it worked. Pulling into gas stations when I got lost. That kind of thing.
I’m feeling the same way about this little project. The answer to your question is of COURSE my life wouldn’t be impoverished. It wasn’t impoverished before the internet was ubiquitous – again, not that long ago, and I was a full adult at the time. Yet, for the life of me, I can’t really remember it.
I guess I’d miss the interesting insights from so many sources that I get now. And maybe what I’ll do after my experiment is just give up on everything other than, say, SSC, The Archdruid Report, Ross Douthat, a few other writers that I respect from across the political spectrum. I’ll sadly never visit The Atlantic again, or The American Conservative, or other magazines that I often find insightful but increasingly find tiresome or rage-inducing. You can’t really read Conor Friedersdorf (or whoever) but somehow never click on Olga Khazan.
I don’t see any advantage to online for getting interesting insights. You might as well completely eliminate it. If you have some reason the reading has to be on the computer, you could put e-books on your computer, or, as Limit says, read the New Yorker.
If you think that online has some advantage of diversity, then you should attack diversity head-on in thinking about your offline reading habits.
Lasagna: in the hope that you see this.
I am reminded of an expedition that my college roommate and I once planned (in the pre-cell-phone era) to a destination about four hours’ drive from the place where either of us would start the day (meeting roughly in the middle). We agreed to cross a certain bridge around noon and meet at the first gas station on the right. It turned out that the first gas station on the right was something like thirty miles down the road, but nonetheless we managed to meet there, after a wait of no more than twenty minutes.
Also, we learned to stop at malls (easy to get directions to), find a bookstore, and peruse the detailed map books found there to obtain local information. And, of course, we each bought a fifty-state atlas every year or two. In addition to getting the state highway maps that visitors’ centers usually gave away for free.
Also, people used to join AAA just for the map service. Less flexible than Google, but effective. Nowadays, I tend to use Google for everything outside my hometown, even when I’m familiar with the roads, because I have an Android phone and it routes around accidents, traffic jams, etc. This comes at the cost of becoming much less aware of optimum routing in the absence of the additional information. On a recent trip, Goog steered me down some residential streets. It was plainly apparent who else was relying on the Goog (out of state plates all making the same turns?).
The Ban on Politics is a thing. That said, this a hard coordination problem; people defect because “this is just that important!” or “everything is political!” or “this isn’t politics, this is just being a decent person!” or “the other side is doing it!” and then the mods have to clean up. But the mods defect, too, if only with laxer enforcement of their preferred side. And even people that don’t blatantly defect tend to engage in brinkmanship, seeing how close to political they can get before there are consequences, with both sides escalating as they get a feel for how far they can push it.
Hell, look at what happened on SSC. We used to have a ban on race and gender in open threads, which Scott enforced with his mod powers. Occasionally people skirted the rule, and occasionally people went too far and got their posts deleted, but at some point Scott stopped enforcing the rule (presumably because he could no longer keep up with the sheer number of comments) and people gradually figured it out, and now the rule exists in name only.
You’re going to get a little bit of politics no matter what. You can’t talk about Robocop without talking about what makes a good policeman. You can’t talk about Person of Interest without talking about the surveillance state. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was about as obvious an allegory for drone warfare as you could get in a superhero movie. Our entertainment says a lot about how we view the world.
Personally, I would just find a decent movie discussion forum, and then bail out of the thread as soon as you see politics coming. The first few pages should give you plenty of room to chat about the basic “Is this movie worth 20 bucks and 2 hours of your time?” stuff. Learn to spot incoming drama, and before you reply, ask yourself “Do I really want to pull the pin on this grenade?”
For current events, is a normal, dead-tree newspaper an option? Last time I opened one, it seemed pretty good at keeping the furious outrage contained in the editorial pages. And if you want to start an argument, a letter to the editor takes considerably more work than a forum post.
Definitely an option, and one that I’m doing. I get the NYT and the Economist. Both have become more partisan lately and less interested in straight reporting, but their both still pretty good, in my opinion. That’s the way I’m going for basic news source.
I don’t know why, but someone bringing up drone warfare while discussing Captain America doesn’t bother me, while someone cheering “yay, Feminism!” over Ghostbusters III does. It’s probably that I’m not constantly barraged by discussions of drone warfare, and that discussion can be neatly severed from the “is Captain America a good movie?” question, while the feminism question, to so many people, is the only questions that determines whether G3 is a good movie or no.
I guess, in the end, it’s a question of what is guaranteed to derail the conversation and what is not.
And I’m going to go back and finish watching Person of Interest now. I got distracted and stopped watching around the time Amy Acker became a permanent cast member. Got to go finish it up.
Go really old or really foreign (may as well be the same thing), is the typical LW response. You can divorce yourself from the immediate emotional responses and really dig into stuff. This is more or less why I care about theology at all.
As for journalism, find a couple of people who make good link round ups, and read what seems interesting from them. Any important news or piece will find its way there, and there’s no need to read it as soon as its’ posted unless you have to for social class reasons.
Good calls – old and foreign are up my alley. Any suggestions for that, or for good journalists with good link round-ups? Scott doesn’t count. 🙂
My link roundup suggestion was more a way to keep abreast of current journalism, which is all trash, sorry. It helps you wean yourself off of it, though, and get some distance. Which roundups you prefer are going depend strongly on your tastes in politics, religion, etc.
The New Yorker – the actual print magazine that you can find on the web with a subscription. Lots of meaty, long-form, narrative journalism. It’s not totally free of political bias, or divorced from the issues of the day, but it’s deep, it’s interesting, it’s generally not concerned with scoring zinger points on Twitter.
The columns and blogs on the web are a little different and can sometimes veer into left-wing outrage porn territory, but even still, they’re nowhere near as bad as The Atlantic or Vox (and sometimes they’re actually interesting). But the long-form narrative pieces and essays that run in the print edition are solid.
The Atlantic, at least the online version, seems these days to be occupying a niche of centre-left outrage porn: chronicling both the misdeeds of the right (which are to be expected) but increasingly also training its gaze on left-wing activists, especially on university campuses.
It’s sort of the mouthpiece for middle-aged university-administrator types who, while they know that Republicans are bad, are increasingly nervous about the kids assembling in the quad outside.
I actually think of The Atlantic as publishing more upper-middle-class anxiety porn than anything else, really, but I didn’t feel like distinguishing among the many varieties of bad online writing in my original comment. I do think you are correct that it’s closer to center-left than anything else.
That’s a good way of putting it.
The Atlantic’s audience is upper-middle-class, educated, probably older (but younger for the online – the print version doesn’t have Game of Thrones and Walking Dead rundowns), centre-left by average Western standards (which makes them on the left side of the mainstream left by US standards).
What’s interesting is what they’re anxious about: it’s basically “we (younger audience)/our kids (older audience) won’t be able to have jobs and will have student debt, there’s a populist right-wing uprising, and also those to the left of us are making us nervous.”
Also, something I’ve noticed: the Atlantic’s comments section is really right-wing compared to the content of the articles.
@dndnrsn
Also, something I’ve noticed: the Atlantic’s comments section is really right-wing compared to the content of the articles
I’ve noticed that too. I think that has caused (and is caused by) a lot of the liberal commenters having moved to an adjacent disqus site. It’s still somewhat tethered to the Atlantic, and the users still comment on many of the articles there, but the new group has their own mods and can make their own threads.
Very good idea. We let our subscription lapse, but this is a good time to bring it back. Thanks!
I just check The Browser and aldaily every day and click on things that look interesting. It’s impossible to find writing that’s not informed by worldviews, but there’s plenty of writing that is not overtly political or trying to poke the eye of the other side.
I’ll give those a try – thanks!
Read newspapers from other countries for the politics. Not being local they don’t pick sides so much and only report the interesting parts. I recommend the Economist, the Guardian (but avoid the Comment Is Free section like the plague), and the BBC as obvious examples from the UK.
For other stuff read blogs, but only a narrowly selected few. Which few will be up to you. Scotusblog is cool.
The Guardian Weekly, which is their international edition in print, is really good. Good international coverage, quite sane, left-wing in an old-fashioned way.
The Guardian online is kind of crap. The management seems to have decided that what will get them clicks is American bloggers brought in to write a particular sort of left-wing clickbait. Because, y’know, it’s not as though people who want to read American bloggers can go anywhere other than a British newspaper’s site, right?
I see two solutions.
The first is to go hardcore apolitical. Read Politics is the Mind-Killer, Beware the Man of One Study, Debunked and Well-Refuted, The Toxoplasma of Rage, Meditations on Moloch, Policy Tug-O-War, etc (please reply with further suggestions. I remember one where someone—not necessarily Scott—suggested that pro-lifers and pro-choicers both donated $1M to AMF instead of for advocacy for their preferred abortion policy, the result of which was no change in abortion policy, but $2M to AMF.) Successful conversion to apoliticism should result in inherent avoidance of anything political. It worked for me, at least.
The second option is to physically disconnect yourself from the internet. Unplug the ethernet cable, unplug your router, remove batteries from your smartphone/tablet, etc.
Try reading some interesting primary source material from the past. Casanova’s Memoirs. The Tabletalk of a Mesopotamian Judge. The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades (the same work as _An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades_ but a later and I think more accurate translation). The Icelandic sagas, starting with Egilsaga.
And for fiction, _John Brown’s Body_ (a verse novel about the Civil War) and _Kim_ (Kipling’s one really good novel).
More suggestions available if needed.
Though the statists encroach on ever more turf, there remain many hobbies which are a-political. I did once see a gardening thread nearly take a nasty turn when the discussion turned to sex-changing trees, but it recovered quickly.
Now, all of these forums will have some topics which are highly controversial and prompt flame-wars, but they typically won’t map to right-left.
Honestly, my personal solution is to consume non-text media. Bow out of fandoms. Stick to source material. Don’t bother with reviews. (But on that note, I quite like BirthMoviesDeath, formerly known as BadassDigest.)
Another solution is to jump into the garbage heap. The lowest-brow fandoms that everyone else looks down on, consider way too obviously Wrong to be considered even the outgroup. Things that are unequivocally about the id. Ecchi anime, idols, RPF, etc. On the downside, it’s harder to find quality writings on those subjects, since most of their appeal is “it made me feel good,” but they do exist, and they tend to be more apolitical because the political dimensions are entirely too obvious to be worth addressing.
Finally, specialize, specialize, specialize. Writings devoted to minutia are relatively less political because no one else has the expertise to talk about them. Get into science/technology nitty gritty. Analyze animation techniques, and the specific styles of individual animators. Learn music theory, and work your way up to breaking down the beautiful structures of symphonies. Horror movies might be light on character or plot, and often run afoul of politics, but that’s because they’re fundamentally about using audiovideo language to evoke visceral emotion, through any means, so they’re the best study cases for pure moviemaking. Looking at a sports industry or teams will always get political, because people are involved, but the mechanics of how to throw the best curveball, and the physics of why it does so, are a little harder to find a moral angle on. Basically, depth over breadth, because politics lives in the breadth, in the shallows where the masters of none live.
Understanding Comics is an analysis of what comics are, why people like them, and how sequential story-telling works. There’s even a statistical analysis of the sorts of pictures in Japanese vs. western (American?) comics. I won’t swear there’s no politics, but if there is, there isn’t much.
I sympathize with your desire to get away from it all. When I was getting fried by racefail, I read Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, a woman’s account of knitting an absurdly difficult sweater. Little did I know that there’s a knitting designer with a personality remarkably like Howard Roark.
However, I wanted to read about yarn and knitting and sweaters. I did *not* want to read about feminism, but there was no escape. Fortunately, it was a short part of the book.
Thank you everyone – this is great stuff! I’m working my way through all the suggested material, figuring out what works best for me.
Incidentally, I’m already more relaxed today by intentionally not jumping into the dumpster fire that is unavoidable in political and cultural discussion in 2016. 🙂
project gutenberg: free old books, poems, plays etc. (well written plays can be as good as books I find)
If you find one or two writers they can be used as nodes to find other writers from. This is half of the fun. It’s not a bottomless pool but it could tide you over for a long while if you found it interesting. Just be aware that if you find something amazing there isn’t generally a bottomless pool of the same thing, though I recommend imagining it, and entertaining the thought.
Sometimes a pool, occasionally a wide one, but the structure of the production of this stuff is obviously very different from the kind of stuff you want to avoid. It’s a real shame about that, the resources are in place to produce such an incredible endless stream of good content but imo it’s drowned in rubbish to the point where people are often worse off rather than better.
Some famous writers I like a lot
(you may not like some or all, but can still use them as nodes):
Albert Camus
Charles Dickens
G.K. Chesterton
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Marcus Aurelius
Sophocles
Aristotle or Plato (as much for the historical context of what these two not-random guys, but greek dudes happened to be thinking)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (not just Sherlock, though Sherlock is interesting. I would recommend “the lost world”)
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Rene Descartes
Percy Byshhe Shelley
Webster-Hayne Debates. Also the
great speeches.
(regardless of anything else, everyone should read or listen to the usually quoted end of MLK’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech at least once in their lives, knowing that he was assassinated the next day) (I wouldn’t recommend listening to all of it though, I found it quite disappointing)
Here is a website for specifically American rhetoric, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ (links to similar sites would be appreciated if anyone has them btw)
Taking a completely different angle, many hobbies have an associated endless stream of content. Developing an interest in general fitness for example, or if one already has one, in theories behind it, methodologies etc, opens up a new stream of content if you are running low.
Also, I haven’t really explored this that much, but one can also try to find neutral specialised web forums- the more specialised the forum is, the less likely it is to be sectarian or anarchic, as one can talk about their common interests with many people, but the only place one can talk about an obscure one can easily be on a particular internet forum, so there’s more incentive not to mess up the public commons. Occasionally visiting 7 or 8 such forums and read one or two threads from many, I find the discussion quality to be higher.
There’s also all kinds of cool things on youtube, e.g.(imo) http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/ (links to youtube), but you still have the basic “sturgeon’s law” problem that there’ a lot of rubbish stuff out there, and a lot of the stuff that’s “good” is more good at getting people hooked on it than actually providing value. This is probably a bigger problem in visual mediums, I think.
For the sake of completeness, I feel obligated to point out that one can always try to take the opposite approach of reducing one’s desire for input. Personally I see no reason why one shouldn’t lean on a constant stream of input if it’s available, but if you’re going cold turkey on a significant amount of that; then maybe take up breathing exercises, or relaxing music, walks in nature, or something, in the interim, because establishing a new and better input stream might take some time.
Imo it sounds like kind of a big challenge you’re taking on, but one not distinct from the basic question of establishing an environment one likes, which is one of the most imporant things, so I think you should feel free to take it as seriously as you want, and not get discouraged if it happens to be harder than you anticipate (or indeed worried if it’s easier, either.)
This is an amazing list. You’ve given me a ton to review and think about. Thanks!
And it IS tougher than I thought it’d be. A hundred times a day I’m like “let’s just see what realclearpolitics is linking to.” You’re spot on with the idea of developing an alternative input stream. I just can’t do that at work (actually, I could. WORK at work would be the alternative input stream).
The AskHistorians subreddit is a good source for intelligent responses that are as nonpartisan as it is possible to be. You’re not allowed to insult anyone and everything is 100% backed up by sources, which leads to a much higher standard of discourse.
Consider: take this as an opportunity to *do something else* rather than reading blogs? I did something similar a while back. I realized that I was reading political blogs mostly to kill time when I was too lazy to pay trivial inconvenience startup costs to get into something productive. Taking a break (self-ban from all of my major internet time-wasters) allowed me to develop the habits to begin doing other things, which overcame the trivially inconvenience startup costs that corralled me into the political blog vortex.
> what do you read that you like that is not polluted by the current politics?
I am tempted to say classics but honestly I don’t read many. Here is what is in my Amazon cart at this moment-I will probably only actually buy two of these: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Cave Painters, Sapiens, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Climate Shock. (Any recommendations?) Also, lately I watch a lot of Mad Men.
If you want to read a very interesting non-fiction book not, so far as I can tell, polluted by politics, I recommend _Gypsies the Hidden Americans_ by Anne Sutherland. It is a very detailed account of the Vlax Rom in America, an ethnic group which manages a reasonably successful and, to most of us, very strange life style. I’m currently reading it.
Among other intriguing details, it’s not a problem when the Rom the author is talking with discover that she has gotten information out of them by trickery. They approve of trickery, admire it in others as well as engaging in it themselves. A child who doesn’t realize when his parents are lying to him is seen as stupid.
A Rom has one or more American names. The number is roughly equal to the number of times he got into some conflict with some part of the surrounding system, and so found it useful to change his name.
Typical living pattern: A house the front part of which has been converted into one very large room. All members of the household, typically ten or more, sleep in it. The grandparents get a double bed, some other adults get couches, possibly one other bed, the rest are on the floor.
Simple approach to dealing with attempts by non-Rom to control them, for instance by insisting that they must send their children to school or catching them cheating on the welfare system—move. At least for a while.
One point the author doesn’t discuss but that occurred to me. Gypsies (of which the Vlach Rom are the largest subset) were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, like Jews. Current estimates are that between half a million and a million and a half were killed. I don’t have any exact numbers on how many survived, but it seems clear that there were multiple millions in Europe after the war was over in places that were at some point controlled by the Nazis or their allies.
Which may be due in part to their strategy of staying below the radar of the non-Gypsy authorities, not having births registered, changing names, … .
James C. Scott (author of Seeing Like a State, Two Cheers for Anarchism, etc.) started his academic career by researching government efforts to impose official names on people and to prevent nomadism.
Katie Cohen’s situation seems like a jumping-off point for thinking about what sort of promises people should make, what sort of promises people should ask for, and what sort of promises people should trust.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much to say on the subject, except that I’ve observed that people are pretty likely to break promises I’ve talked them into. Your mileage may vary. I’m willing to bet there are a lot of people who are better talker-into-ers than I am.
Bryan Caplan says it best:
Is it possible to beat Dark Souls without dying, on the first try, without any outside help? Yes, it is.
Is it reasonable to expect it of people? No, it isn’t.
I mean, I agree with Caplan on the general point that we shouldn’t categorically excuse people for breaking promises. But human weakness makes it harder to keep them in some particular cases, and to that extent it is at least a partial excuse. To pretend otherwise is not only not “realistic”; it’s not just.
I think that’s completely wrong. If you promise to beat Dark Souls on the first try without help, and you fail to do so, the failure is entirely on you. It was a foolish promise that you should’ve known better than to make, but now that you’ve made it, you’re stuck with it unless the other person chooses to release you.
Keeping particular promises is unrealistic only if you hold constant what people choose to promise.
And in a world where humans are all actually Laplace’s demons this might be reasonable. Until then Caplan will remain incapable of understanding human behavior and insist on being morally abhorrent.
I’m not talking about promising to beat Dark Souls. Beating that game without dying was just a “relatable” example of something that is difficult to do. But sure, you can argue that it’s easy to recognize that such a feat is difficult to do.
An example of a situation where a promise is difficult to keep is one where the situation can change dramatically in the future, or where very strong temptations might be faced.
Making a promise to say married, not to cheat, etc. is not inherently foolish or ridiculous: over 50% of those who make it keep it. You can reasonably think you’ll be one of those people.
But then what if you, for instance, become famous and are constantly faced with admirers trying to seduce you? It’s not impossible to stay firm and not give in. But it’s not nearly as easy as when you’re not faced with that temptation, either.
Besides, I’m somewhat opposed to this fetishization of keeping promises. Yes, keeping promises is important, but so are a lot of other things and there are many situations where breaking them is justified, not just mitigated on grounds of human weakness. For instance, you marry somebody and promise to stay married your whole life, but then five years later you’ve realized that the two of you just aren’t as compatible as you thought. You shouldn’t break that promise lightly, but there’s no reason you should enslave yourself to it just because it’s “your word”.
Or to take something less morally controversial, say I make a vow to eat Mexican food every day for the rest of my life. But then after a week I realize that this was a really stupid thing to commit to. Why am I obligated to keep doing it?
The point is not that you have to keep the promise, but that no one else is morally responsible for your failure to keep your promise. You are responsible for the consequences of breaking your promise.
@ InferentialDistance:
Where does the idea of other people’s being responsible even enter the picture? Who’s saying that?
All I am saying is that some people seem to have the attitude that you should keep your promises no matter what, while I counter that if they are foolish promises, you are obligated to break them.
Now, in the gold-digger case, it is partially the “seducers'” fault that the one spouse ends up breaking their promises of fidelity. But in that case, I’m not saying breaking the promise is justified. I’m saying it’s partially excused. As in, the action was regrettable, but we can’t put the full blame on you because you faced a stronger temptation than normal.
Promises are informal contracts, and transfer limited partial ownership of yourself to the recipient. Thus, breaking a promise is similar to theft, and wrong for similar reasons. The fact that some transfers of ownership are foolish makes them no less valid. Yes, it’s dumb to promise to eat Mexican food for all your life, but no one forced you to make that promise, and breaking it entails unilaterally taking away something that doesn’t belong to you.
In the marriage case, if your partner is good and cares about you, they’ll release you from your promise. But you aren’t entitled to dissolve it unilaterally, not if you literally promised to stay married your whole life. It’s possible that it’s social boilerplate and understood as not literal, but that changes the content of the promise such that dissolving the marriage isn’t promise-breaking. But if you enter into a literal till-death-do-us-part pact – too bad for you.
To be fair, sometimes breaking a promise is in one’s self-interest. But it’s also in one’s self-interest to live in a society where promise-keeping is strongly enforced.
@ blacktrance:
It’s not in one’s self-interest to live in a society where objectively stupid promises are enforced with absolute strictness. Even when you don’t make any and they’re just enforced on other people.
That’s the point (and it’s a quite legitimate point) of rules against unconscionability.
You pay them the cash value of whatever they lost by relying on you to eat Mexican food every day, then move on.
This is exactly what happens with bankruptcy: people obtain things that don’t belong to them. And yet it’s in one’s self-interest to live in a society where it is possible to discharge debts through bankruptcy vs. one where people get enslaved into workhouses or something.
Everyone ends up better off if you just charge higher interest rates to people at risk of doing such a thing.
Generally, you should not make promises lightly. Given that you make a promise, foolish or not, you should keep it even if it is costly to you unless released from it (which would nullify promises made to yourself).
All that said, you should not lightly rely on another person’s promises, regardless of the other oughts. Especially if they seem foolish.
There may be situations where breaking a promise is justified despite the recipient wishing to hold you to it. I don’t think “really feel like it” should fall into this category.
@ Randy M:
“I don’t really feel like it” is a bad reason.
“Upon careful, rational analysis, I don’t think this keeping this promise serves the life and happiness of myself and the people I care about” is a good reason.
I don’t think whether the other person “releases you from it” is very relevant in itself—unless you think you are never obligated to keep any kind of resolution you make to yourself. If you make a foolish promise to an irrational or evil person who won’t let you out of it, you’re no more obligated to keep it.
You’re ignoring the fact that when people say “Upon careful, rational analysis, I don’t think this keeping this promise serves the life and happiness of myself and the people I care about” they really mean “I don’t feel like it”.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying to make excuses as the negative consequences of being seen to break a promise would have been a factor in the “careful, rational analysis” that they are claiming to have made.
@ hlynkacg:
The fact that people have an incentive to lie and deceive themselves about being morally justified in what they do does not go to show that it is impossible to correctly determine this.
I’m not sure what particular examples you have in mind here.
There are two different concepts here:
– Justification
– Excuse
With a justification, you argue that the decision was objectively correct. For instance: you promise to eat Mexican food every day, then you break it because that was a stupid promise.
With an excuse, you argue that the decision was objectively wrong but subjectively excused. For instance: I regret that I slept with this man, but it’s not my fault because he drugged my drink. Or you have partial excuses: I know I shouldn’t have slept with this woman, but I was under a huge amount of stress and this was the fifth time this week a woman tried to seduce me, so in a moment of weakness I gave in.
Vox Imperatoris:
Bankruptcy and unconscionability are obviously contrary to strict libertarian principles. If you can’t give away your ability to do something, it wasn’t yours to begin with. Part of my self-ownership is the ability to choose what food I eat, and making a promise to only eat Mexican food transfers that to another person. If I can’t do that, then why would I be able to give away something else that belongs to me, like a kidney? There are contexts in which that would be a foolish decision, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be enforced.
Besides, there’s a benefit to unconditionally knowing that if someone makes a promise, they’ll have to keep it or they’ll face strong repercussions.
Promises to oneself are only metaphorical (e.g. you’re going to be as diligent as if you had made a promise to someone else) because you’re not transferring any part of legitimate authority over yourself to anybody, just taking some out of your left pocket and putting it in your right. When you make a promise to someone else, they can release you from it and return the transferred fraction of authority, but if you make a promise to yourself, you already have it.
“It was a stupid thing to say” is not an objective analysis. What you are saying is “I made a bad decision. Do over!” If you can unilaterally declare the do over, your word means nothing.
You are not a robot (yet…?) that someone else can open up and verify the source code of. No one can check your analysis for objectivity or bias ahead of time. If you grant yourself the right to abrogate a promise based on subjective criteria decided at a later date, please avoid saying the words “I will” because they contain very little information content.
I’m really confused where you think these “obligations” come from. I don’t believe you think that there is much force in “I swear to God” so what exactly does obligation mean here?
If I were to honestly try to restate your position, it is something like “It is objectively more likely for more people to have more pleasure if they can rely on each other, therefore [if you care about most people’s pleasure] you would [if you are rational and logically consistent] try to cultivate a habit of keeping your word, except in cases where you later think [but not just feel!] that it’s a bad idea.”
Fair?
@ blacktrance:
“Inalienable rights.”
More later, perhaps.
@ Vox
Besides, I’m somewhat opposed to this fetishization of keeping promises.
Right. There are promises and there are promises. Some are made in documents written by lawyers, notarized, and include penalties and posting a bond. Some are made drowsily in bed. The meaning/s of the word ‘promise’ fall on a spectrum.
@ vox
One can make a cost/benefit analysis that says the price of breaking a promise is lower than the price of keeping it. But that does not absolve one of the promise.
In regards to your first example, whether or not the promise was “stupid” is irrelevant to the conversation. Part of being an adult is learning to deal with the consequences of your own stupidity. Suck it up and try to be less stupid in the future.
Your second example is utterly meaningless, because no promises were exchanged.
@ Randy M:
Why is it not an objective analysis? The fact that it is possible for a judgment to be biased does not mean that it is impossible for it to be correct.
They can’t check the source code, but it’s called a track record of behavior! Come on. That’s why you don’t get married to somebody without forming a judgment as to their character, a judgment founded on information gathered over a decently-sized period of time.
If people had to get married to random freaking strangers, then perhaps this idea that no promise can be broken, no matter how unreasonable, would be more sensible.
It’s the same as how you don’t lend large sums of money to people with no credit history, unless they’re prepared to pay high interest rates. Except that in marriage, you can’t substitute for poor “credit history” by paying money. At least not according to what most people want out of marriage.
Sure, I don’t believe that saying “I swear” is a magic spell that somehow puts “the force of duty” on you. The only obligation you have is to do what is in your interest. A promise made to yourself is often a useful way of concretizing your interest and making it easier for you to stick to it when it is difficult. That’s the point of making them. But if it turns out that the promise was not founded on objective needs, then there is no reason to keep it.
Substitute [if you care about your own happiness] for [if you care about most people’s pleasure], but otherwise, sure.
@ hlynkacg:
What are you interpreting “absolving one of the promise” to mean?
Because I don’t take myself to be arguing that. If you say, “I promise to eat Mexican food every day, or else I’ll pay you $50”, then you should pay the guy $50.
If you say, “I promise to eat Mexican food every day, or else I’ll kill myself”, then I don’t think you’re under any obligation either to keep eating Mexican food every day or to kill yourself. That would be taking the general rule that you should keep your promises out of its proper, life-serving context and fetishizing into some ridiculous thing that is contrary to human life and happiness.
What is my “second example”? The one where I talk about being tempted to cheat and various full or partial excuses? That seems to be a case where promises were exchanged.
The word stupid is ill defined for objective analysis. I realize you are using it for shorthand of “I now think this is not in my interest” but just saying “That was a stupid thing to say” is not objective because different people have different meanings of stupid.
(Also obviously the whole conversation is about promises that are not obviously jest or hyperbole)
You keyed in on the wrong word.
Of course you should check people for trustworthiness before basing your life changing decisions on their promises. But trustworthiness *means* that they keep their promises–things you don’t think they are obligated to do if they have buyers remorse.
So useful = obligatory?
If you promise to do X or you’ll kill yourself, and you fail to do X you should kill yourself. That is unless the person you made that promise to releases you from that bond.
Like I said before, whether or not the promise was “stupid” is irrelevant to the conversation. Part of being an adult is learning to deal with the consequences of your own stupidity. There are no excuses.
Further more I think that you are being staggeringly foolish and naïve to “oppose this fetishization of keeping promises”.
I’m not an objectivist but I do think that Rand was correct about this much…
By the same token promises and contracts are the principal that you will deal with others through mutual agreement rather than at bayonet-point.
It’s both shocking and weirdly comforting to me that you’ve lived a sufficiently sheltered life that you haven’t had to learn this first hand.
@ Randy M:
You demonstrate by this that you know what I’m talking about. Obviously, “stupid” is a vague word. I don’t mean: saying “it’s stupid” suffices for objective analysis.
Rather, “stupid” was my shorthand for “objective analysis indicates that this promise was enormously injudicious and is not worth keeping”
The only way God comes into the picture is insofar as he will smite you or send you to hell or something for not keeping your promises. But God forgives, so he’s a poor choice of guarantor.
God has much lower standards than I do: I say some people are well beyond forgiveness.
Trustworthiness does not mean keeping ill-conceived promises that are not worth keeping. That is, rather, an indicator of stupidity or poor judgment.
Suppose you arrange a date with a woman and she says: “I’ll be there, I promise!” She shows up, but later you find that she walked out as her roommate was bleeding to death in order not to be late. That would not show that she is “trustworthy”. It would show that she is some kind of psychopath with no sense of priorities.
In the situation people are considering upthread, a woman promised to get an abortion if she got pregnant. She didn’t get an abortion. But if abortion is murder, it would be evil to keep that promise.
In the case of marriage, if you’re getting married to someone in a situation where divorce is an option, they are essentially promising: “I promise to stay married unless I rationally conclude that the marriage was a terrible mistake.” Therefore, what you’re interested in knowing is their track record of making good choices and rationally evaluating whether previous choices were good or not. You don’t want to know their track record of irrationally sticking to commitments even though they were terrible mistakes: if the marriage is a terrible mistake, neither do you want to stay married!
Anyway, I’ve gone through this several times with you in the past. Why do you want a reputation for making and keeping foolish promises? That is not beneficial.
You should want a reputation for making reasonable promises and keeping them, while breaking them on the off-chance they turn out to be unreasonable. Of course you have the potential for bias here: that’s why other people have to think for themselves to double-check your judgment—and refuse to deal with you if you are twisting the facts to get out of reasonable promises.
Something may be useful without being obligatory if the goal is realizable in multiple ways. For instance, it may be obligatory to get a job. But if there are multiple viable job paths, it’s not obligatory to get any given one of those jobs.
@ hylnkacg:
That is insanity.
Why in the world ought you to keep such an agreement? By the nature of the case, there is nothing you could get out of it.
The death penalty: that’s the best way to learn yerself.
As for “excuses”: I’m not saying there’s nothing wrong with making foolish promises. There’s just no reason you should keep them. It may harm your reputation somewhat, but better to have a reputation for making and breaking foolish promises than to be dead or stuck doing something really unpleasant.
In any case, you’re certainly twisting Rand’s words quite out of their intended meaning. Rand emphasized the importance of context in moral judgments. You ought to keep promises because it serves a purpose in advancing your life. To the extent that keeping promises becomes divorced from that purpose, it is no longer good.
Vox:
I think the issue is that people wildly differ on which promises are foolish, and can get real, real motivated to declare promises foolish and obviously nonsense when they are rewarded with getting out of them for doing so.
And…I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the majority of our soceity, with things like credit cards and mortgages and other obligations, is reliant, on one level or another, on people keeping their word.
I mean, imagine a world in which there was no societal pressure on people to keep their promises. Imagine if every company you dealt with, every time, kept a little running file on when the optimal moment to cancel your service would be, and if everyone expected this, because keeping an unprofitable customer was stupid. Imagine what politics becomes when people can’t even pretend to believe campaign promises. You think advertising is bad now? Imagine it in a world where companies can say “Yeah, we offered that, but we decided against that, because it was stupid.”
There are massive, massive externalities to the breakdown of trust and personal honor in widespread society. This doesn’t mean that people should always keep their word. But it does mean that there is an inescapable cost of not doing so.
The price of a society in which people can be counted on to not lie too much, too often, in front of too many witnesses, is that any such lies will ding your reputation.
An ideal world, I think, is one with public information, and rumor and reputation become cited and public and verifiable. Ideally, people who don’t want to deal with oathbreakers of any stripe could avoid doing so, while still retaining value in the concept of oaths, and letting people who break some oaths some time still participate in greater soceity.
@ Robert Liguori:
Clearly. I emphasized this several times.
The fact that a judgment call is fallible doesn’t mean that it’s superior to no judgment at all, however.
Certainly. And yet we get by without having one’s word be 100% binding.
If your credit card company sneaks some kind of unreasonable clause into the contract, it won’t be held up in court.
I think the burden of proof of unconscionability should be high, perhaps higher than today. But I don’t think it should be insurmountable.
I am hardly advocating for a world in which there is no social pressure to keep promises. I am advocating for a world in which there is a strong social pressure to keep promises, except when they are unreasonable—which is a high standard one presumes unmet, not a subjective thing to be determined unilaterally by each person judging his own case.
If you break a promise, and someone else suffers economically because they relied on your promise, you should have to compensate them. But it has to be actual concrete damages, not an insistence upon specific performance of personal services. So, for instance, I support the right to divorce—and the obligation to pay alimony to a spouse who quit work to stay at home.
As a side note, companies already always have ways to cancel your service when it is optimal. And when they advertise things, they always reserve ways to take it back and change their minds. For instance, if they run out of stock. So we are living in this very world of chaos.
Reputation is much more important in uncivilized societies that don’t have recourse to legal solutions. For instance, if you’re selling stuff on the darknet black market, reputation is everything. If you’re selling stuff under the rule of law, an established reputation is not nearly as important.
Vox Imperatoris says: That is insanity…
It’s not insane at all. In fact, it might be the purest expression of human sanity that there is.
You want to argue that betting your life on something as trivial as eating Mexican food is stupid? I agree, but people are killed by their own stupidity all the time. The lesson here is don’t bet your life on something trivial.
You ought to keep promises because it serves a purpose in advancing your life.
No.
You ought to keep your promises because living in a society with some level of social trust/cohesion is vastly superior to living as animal. The point that both Rand and Robert Liguori are trying to make is that society is built on promises. And without the expectation that these promises will be kept you don’t have a society.
The doctor’s promise to do no harm?
The Soldier’s promise to support, defend, and obey?
The bank’s promise to hand your money over when asked?
The merchant’s promise to deliver the goods purchased?
The bus driver’s promise to follow an assigned route?
Never mind John Q Public’s promise not to rob you, defraud you, kill you or rape you..
There are times when any one of these promises might not be in the immediate interests of the individuals expected to follow through on them. More often than not it is in those very moments that keeping that promise is the most important.
That is why we “fetishize promise keeping”.
Vox is an objectivist and believes that morality is about rationally maximizing your own self-interest. I assume most people in this thread are not objectivists or egoists* of any variety. And hence there is a huge, massive inferential gap between Vox and many others in the comment thread.
I am not really sure there is a point to arguing if X is “moral” if the participants have radically different conceptions of morality.
*I think blanktrance identifies as an egoist of some variety. Though his definition of “morality” seems to be something like “the set of rules all rational agents would agree to.” Which is different from how Rand presented morality.
@ hlynkacg:
Sure, if you change “inconvenient to keep” to “rationally not worth keeping”, and keep in mind that this includes the social and legal consequences. Which, as I have said repeatedly, should not be zero.
In the course of socially and legally punishing people who break promises, those actors should exercise rational judgment about the reasonability of the promise, whether breaking it was justified or excused, and whether there were any mitigating factors if not.
“No excuses! You said Mexican food or die, so death it is!” is not an optimal policy. It’s not even a halfway decent policy.
We’re not talking about whether you should bet your life on something trivial. Clearly you should not.
The question is whether, having bet it and lost, you should pay up. Clearly you should not.
Vox Imperatoris says: The question is whether, having bet it and lost, you should pay up. Clearly you should not.
And my response is that clearly you should.
@ hlynkacg:
And my response is that such a course of action is obviously insane.
I gave an argument as to why “We should hold people to any arbitrary promises, no matter how irrational they are” is not a good general rule. But even if you think it is a perfectly fine general rule, that is no reason for a given person not to commit suicide in this way if he can avoid it.
As an analogy, the argument that it is a good general rule to punish plagiarists is not the same as an argument that, if you commit plagiary, you ought to turn yourself in. Except the argument that you should turn yourself in for plagiary is decently strong in an environment where incentives are not set up totally perversely.
The fabric of society is not based on holding people to completely irrational promises.
Interestingly, the view that we have a moral duty to honor our legal contracts is by no means an uncontroversial one within the field of contract law. In fact, I would guess that it is a minority view.
Why? Because often breach of contact is economically efficient. Suppose A contracts with B to purchase a service from B for $800, and A values that service at $900. The next day, B meets C, who offers $1000 for the same service (which C values at $1100). If B only has enough time to work for either A or C, is he obligated to work for A?
Consider that if B breaches his contract with A, works for C instead, and compensates A with the $900 of value he lost out on, plus $25 for the inconvenience, all three parties would be better off. (And more value would be created regardless of whether B actually compensated A.)
For this reason (and perhaps other reasons) American contract law usually doesn’t treat breach of contract as a moral wrong that needs to be punished, but rather looks for concrete damages that need to be compensated. We could imagine a system that heavily penalized breaches of contract, and disincentivized them from happening at all, but economists have pretty compellingly argued that we would all be worse off under such a system. So instead we have a system that actually rewards people for breaching contracts when that breach is efficient.
Robert Ligouri argues that the modern economic system is reliant on people keeping their word. But that’s not exactly true; it’s reliant upon people either keeping their word or paying damages if they don’t.
Arguably, the best way of dealing with an efficient breach situation is for B to just approach A and negotiate with him for release of his contractual duty (and sometimes courts will hold parties to the specific terms of a contract merely to force this negotiation will happen). But, equally, sometimes it proves necessary to breach first and make amends later. My point is simply that there’s no presumption in contract law that breach is inherently a bad thing.
Now, it still could be argued that some agreements, like marriage or personal promises, should be treated differently. But there are at least some commonalities. Vox Imperatoris’ example of a date who arrives late because she stopped to help a drowning man is a classic instance of someone creating value by breaching a contract. So, too, would be two married people who realize that they hate each other and would be happier with others.
Would we be better in a culture that held people to all promises, regardless of how ill-advised they might turn out to be? Probably in some cases. But making it a general rule would most likely leave us all worse off.
Mostly @hlynkacg:
Out of curiosity, in your model of the world, what happens if someone makes two promises, which later come into direct conflict with each other? Does it matter at all how reasonable it is to think that they might clash at some point in the future?
Also, what happens if someone makes a promise that they then find out was grounded on false premises?
@ Vox
No, you gave a general argument about how we shouldn’t hold people to promises that they find inconvenient / unprofitable.
I don’t think you appreciate just how irrational inconvenient and unprofitable most of the promises that make up “the fabric of society” really are when viewed at the level of individual agents.
The fabric of society really is based on holding people to irrational promises. In fact, it is often the most irrational promises that are the most critical.
@ Frank McPike
Your premises are incompatible with each other. Without breach of contract being a moral wrong, you have no grounds to seek damages.
@ Anaxagoras asks:
Out of curiosity, in your model of the world, what happens if someone makes two promises, which later come into direct conflict with each other?
You make a choice. You pick one to honor, and you accept the fact that the other might hold you accountable.
Also, what happens if someone makes a promise that they then find out was grounded on false premises?
If the promise was secured on the basis of conditions that are no longer (or never were) true, the promise is void. You might even want to consider seeking revenge against those who attempted to defraud you.
On the other hand If the promise was based on imperfect knowledge, you are still bound.
A concept related to this whole conversation is that of Efficient Breach, which holds that rather than all parties holding to all contracts they make come hell or high water, once a contract costs more to perform than it has value to the person you made it with, the correct thing to do is to breach it on purpose and compensate them for the loss.
Take a fairly realistic scenario in which you promise to provide 10,000 people with a limited run item that only they will ever have, and you manufacture 10,500 of them, but then there’s an accident or a fire, and 700 of them are destroyed, beyond your margin for losses.
It’s plausible you would find that it would be exceedingly expensive to do another production run to get the remaining 200, maybe the manufacturers you’re contracting with require you to make a full 10,000, of which, per terms of your promise, you would have to destroy 9,800.
Efficient breach suggests you should compensate 200 people for the loss of their item, whereas sanctity of contract requires you manufacture the 9800 extra items and immediately destroy them because that’s the only way to meet your contract.
As the name suggests, efficient breach is supposed to be a more efficient philosophy for running an economy, because it means that any time a contract is no longer worth honouring, parties can pay compensation instead. An economy with it is one which does not do wasteful expensive things any time something promised turns out to be wasteful and expensive and so not worth it for anyone.
An alternative approach is to say that every contract or promise can be dissolved willingly by negotiating with the person it’s made with. The problem here is that you’re negotiating with 200 people, all of which have the incentive to try to capture not compensation but the full benefit to you of not manufacturing the 9800 extra items. With coordination problems, or even one person overestimating how much they can get from you, you’d be forced to do the wasteful run. It seems likely that most of the time people would just do the wasteful run.
At any rate, in practice, law runs on efficient breach rather than sanctity of contracts, which suggests that there’s no manner in which it will Destroy The Proper Working Of Society to permit breaking of ‘stupid’ promises, subject to compensation.
An interesting complication here is that the pregnancy itself literally changed her mind before she could stop it.
Perhaps individuals who produce such apparently mind-altering biological material should be expected not to negligently deposit it inside anyone’s body. 🙂
@hlycakg
“The fabric of society really is based on holding people to irrational promises.”
You keep saying that, but it’s just not true. You already live in a society where the rule (at least as concerns legal contracts) is “Don’t hold people to the terms of irrational promises.” Our entire economy, virtually every business dealing, rests on promises made under that rule. And it works fine.
(And even if you don’t think our economy works fine, that’s probably not the reason.)
Are my premises incoherent? Well, they’re not my premises, they’re the premises of modern contract law. But there’s no incoherence. Why would we award damages only to people who have experienced a moral wrong? Damages are compensations for a harm, and they are paid by the party who caused that harm. But that doesn’t mean that it was wrong to cause the harm. Sometimes causing a harm is the right thing to do; for example, when a harmful activity brings benefits that meaningfully outweigh the harm. Efficient breach is such a case.
It’s perfectly coherent to say “There’s no moral wrong in breaching a contract as long other parties end up compensated for the actual harm done by the breach.” It’s even coherent to say “There’s no moral wrong in an efficient breach, regardless of whether the injured party is compensated, but in the interest of long-term stability or fraud prevention it’s important that compensation is actually made in most or all cases.” Once we establish that, the goal of the legal system as concerns contracts becomes to ensure that the compensation is paid, while being relatively indifferent to whether the specific terms of contracts are fulfilled.
@Vox
>The question is whether, having bet it and lost, you should pay up. Clearly you should not.
If morality were just about following our instincts on what’s ethical or not, we wouldn’t have these discussions, we’d just follow our whims. When I feel that producing paperclips is immoral, I don’t want to be convinced that it’s not, I just want people to stop producing paperclips (I enter ethics discussions because I want to enforce my morality on other people regardless of their own ethics systems). So it’s generally about what behavior we as a society should punish or encourage. From the standpoint of the individual killing oneself is clearly insane, and without sufficient indoctrination in our society’s chosen ethical framework he won’t do it. Which is why we fetishize promises and punish oathbreakers who trade communal goodwill for their own benefit. This makes breaking oaths non-rational, because you know you’ll get punished for being unethical, as opposed to just everyone cheering and going “way to screw over that retard who trusted you”. We used to do that as far as punishing family, exactly so that people whose lives are on the line have more than just shame and guilt “motivating” them (wouldn’t be necessary if all people could be bent by shame alone).
Arguing that breaking promises is not immoral means pushing for society to stop slapping oathbreakers, which is clearly a bad idea. At the very least it’s an attempt to remove the guilt you feel when breaking a promise, which is part of said punishment.
@ Anonymous:
I agree that discussing questions of morality is not about simply following our initial whims. There are two questions being answered:
a) The primary question: how should I personally live my life?
b) The secondary and derivative question: what social rules, if put in place, would be most conducive to allowing me to live and flourish in the appropriate way?
The point as relates to this discussion is that an absolute prohibition on “oathbreaking”, one which does not take into account context and justification, is not a good rule for society, nor is it beneficial for any particular person practicing it.
Yeah, I agree that having “never break promises ever” is a bad norm, I do like my employment contracts unenforceable if they say I’m forbidden from ever working again if I quit this company. Just felt like chiming in that the fact that individuals would be irrational to follow through on a promise to kill themselves does not automatically mean that we shouldn’t berate/punish them for defecting in those cases, since it isn’t about what’s rational for the individual at all.
@ Anonymous:
Yes, all we have in such a case is a conflict of interests. It is certainly possible that people can commit certain actions that cause their interests to be misaligned with those of everyone else.
For instance, if you commit murder and are surely facing the death penalty, there is perhaps little reason for you to turn yourself in. (Except maybe to end the stress of being on the run.) That doesn’t mean there’s no reason for other people to try to catch you.
What about the idea of having a public register of people who oathbreak? No penalty otherwise.
@ Anonymous:
There is no reason such a service can’t be provided on the private market like any other service.
Yelp, Ebay reviews, Amazon reviews, there’s even been an app created recently to review people. Honesty is not the only factor covered by such reviews, but neither is it the only factor that people care about in dealing with others.
If there were a government database of “oathbreakers”, it would be gamed and abused. A similar thing has happened with the sex offender registry.
If there were a private database of oathbreakers, it also would be gamed and abused. Largely by extortionists, very likely including the database’s administrators.
@VI
You have a point. But these things seem to be abused/trolled even in private hands. Is there a way to make this actually resilient against abuse/trolling?
@ John Schilling:
Yes, there is that potential. It is mitigated by not having a centralized government database, so that there is competition.
If a rating system is known to be untrustworthy, people will tend to move away from it.
@ Anonymous:
Competition and the profit motive.
Amazon, for instance, has extensive experience in coming up with measures to stop people gaming reviews because they have a commercial interest in providing people honest reviews, for which there is a demand.
Yelp, Uber ratings (“5 for 5”), Amazon reviews, and other private systems indeed *are* exploited and abused and subject to fraud and it isn’t uncommon for there to be bias in reporting mechanisms and similar in the direction of whatever the database administrator’s interests are.
On the other hand they remain useful. They have to remain useful, or go out of business. It’s analogous to Google results; at the end of the day it has to serve something of value to the people using it, and nothing can be allowed to compromise that. If that means limiting abuse, it means limiting abuse; if it means being “unfair” in order to solve a problem it means being unfair.
I would be concerned that a public-run system would not have enough of the same kind of active pressure to remain useful. There’s no theoretical reason why political administrations couldn’t incentivise their managers the same way companies do, it’s the same principal-agent problem, but in practice they aren’t normally nearly as good and you usually take a quality hit.
Maybe because we don’t have governmental equivalents of per-division revenue vs cost effects. If polling was sufficiently fine-grained that problems in a public-run reputation system causing loss of public goodwill to the administration were picked up on and resulted in the person managing that system losing their bonus, maybe a public-run reputation system would work okay. But we don’t.
@ Frank McPike & JBeshir
The thing that you are both failing to grasp is that contract law is predicated on the idea that society will punish breaches and award damages. Using it to argue that we shouldn’t punish breaches of contract or award damages misses the entire point of having contracts in the first place.
As Anon noted above, Arguing that breaking promises is not immoral means pushing for society to stop slapping oathbreakers.
Society really is based on promises that are irrational. Because, when viewed at the level of individual agents, the most rational thing for an agent to do is to defect. This is ESPECIALLY true in cases where you know that those around you feel inclined to cooperate.
Why do people pay damages for breach of contract rather laughing in the other parties face?
Because we “fetishize promise keeping” and have a nasty impulse towards stringing up the defectors form lamp-posts.
I’m not failing to grasp that; I was explicit that efficient breach involved payment of compensation. I never argued compensation shouldn’t be paid. I argued in favour of paying whatever sensible amount of compensation was due rather than following stupid promises to kill yourself because you ate/didn’t eat Mexican food or whatever.
I’m not sure what the confusion here is. I think it might be that you’re assuming that to have compensation you need to declare it Immoral And Always Wrong, with the only alternative being that it’s Always Okay and no one is wronged so no one can have compensation and promises are totally worthless.
This isn’t the case; it is possible to have rules other than simple deontological good/bad classification of actions. In particular, you can have rules for compensation and damages and if you really want even a punitive disincentive component to cover transaction costs or unspecified disruption or whatever else, and then say that breaking a ‘stupid’ promise is a morally okay thing to do, provided you’re willing to pay all of those. And that’s what’s advocated here.
In the case of contract law, it is a particular instance of such rules, and doesn’t rest on any external deontological good/bad classification.
@ hlynkacg:
I don’t know what it takes to drill this into your head, but no one is saying that we should never enforce any contracts or that we should stop awarding damages! Let me repeat that: no one is saying that we should never enforce any contracts or that we should stop awarding damages!
How about a third time? No one is saying that we should never enforce any contracts or that we should stop awarding damages!
Is the message clear, or do three other people have to keep repeating it to you?
What is the argument being made? What is the actual status quo? That unconscionable (i.e. extremely irrational) contracts should not be enforced, and that breaches of contract should be allowed if damages are paid.
Stop arguing against the strawman position that no contracts should ever be enforced. Please.
In such a case, defecting is irrational precisely because you know other people will punish you. No one is saying that you ought to be able to take money for delivery of 500 TVs, fail to deliver the TVs once you have the money, then run away with the cash with no consequences. No one is saying that!
I refer you to the examples given of efficient breach for what people are actually talking about.
If they don’t, they will get sued. In an uncivilized environment where no legal recourse is available, no one will make deals with them again.
This does not represent the keeping of an irrational promise.
If it’s for-profit firefighting (which most, of course, aren’t), then if they don’t save their customers they will lose all their other customers.
This does not represent the keeping of an irrational promise.
Edit: plus everything JBeshir just said.
VI:
Really? I don’t recall, except for one thread about marriage in particular, which hinged on whether marital vows are still understood literally.
Basically I think our disagreement is this: You feel that one’s personal happiness is sufficient to trump moral/ethical considerations, provided that one is well and truly sure of the consequences, and I disagree.
We both think that external circumstances can change, rendering keeping one’s word undesireable, and often there are unstated caveats that are understood and agreed upon (though that can get you into trouble if they aren’t). “I told you I would pick you up from the airport, but a friend was going into labor and I was the only one around to help, I’m sorry for the trouble this caused you, I hope you agree that there was an unstated clause releasing me in life or death situations.” Valid. “Sorry I wasn’t there for you, but on deep and honest reflection, I realize I don’t care enough about you to spend two hours in traffic, have a nice life.” Invalid.
Also, you somehow think you can have obligations to yourself that you cannot release yourself from. I don’t really think this is a standard usage of the term. “You owe it to yourself” is a figure of speech (ironically, one usually deployed to convince one to discharge legitimate obligations).
Also, also I don’t want a reputation for keeping foolish promises; I want a reputation for giving promises carefully but being utterly reliable thereafter, and making plenty of hedged statements of intent for the inbetween cases. I’m probably not nearly as good at this as I intend.
@Vox Imperatoris
zensunni couch-potato seems to pretty clearly believe that because one agent knew a promise could be broken that the other agent is entitled to maximize the harm caused by the broken promise. They’re not the only poster making such intimations.
The “fetishization of keeping promises” is a heuristic used to help people avoid ruining themselves with expensive breaches of contract while also minimizing the overhead on both enforcement methods for compensation and increased unreliability from breaches of contract.
You pick a lot of examples that fail to explain how the other party is being compensated for the broken promises (“I make a vow to eat Mexican food every day for the rest of my life” to who? In exchange for what?). Combined with the occasional flippant descriptions of the pro-keeping-promises side, you come across as a lot more “fuck commitments” than “there are situations where breaking a promise provides enough benefit that, after compensating all involved parties for consequences of the broken promise, everyone is at least as well off as before, and that doing so is justified if and only if all involved parties are sufficiently compensated”.
@ InferentialDistance:
It seems to me that none of those people are saying “we should have no laws, no contracts, no commitments; just chaos and anarchy.” Rather, they are saying that, in the interest of the child, a father ought to be unable to disclaim his responsibility as a parent. I disagree with them, but they are not saying people are, as a general rule, entitled to break promises and “maximize the harm” caused.
Indeed, rather than denying the validity of commitments, they are saying that the agreement on the part of the father to have sex constitutes irrevocable agreement to pay for the upbringing of any resulting children.
And my point is that this heuristic is taken way too far, to the point of foolishness.
It’s equivalent to saying that, since some men are rapists and since accused rapists have a strong incentive to lie, we should convict all accused rapists regardless of the evidence. That’s a heuristic: a very foolish one.
To anyone, for nothing in return, was the original intent of my example.
It was a deliberately ridiculous example. What I expected to hear in return was people saying “No, I agree that such a promise shouldn’t be enforced. There’s a line to be drawn somewhere to rule out unreasonable promises, but we perhaps disagree on where it is.” Instead, I got a certain person zealously defending this ridiculous example, even when I made it more extreme, into “Mexican food or death”.
I don’t know how I can be interpreted as “coming across” that way, since I explicitly said the latter multiple times. But sure, just to be clear: my position is not “fuck commitments”.
I was using examples of absolutely crazy commitments because some people were defending even those. If, on the other hand, we agree that certain promises are insane and shouldn’t be kept, we can have a more useful discussion on where the line ought to be drawn.
@ Randy M:
In the context of the date, what’s the harm being done here?
It seems to me like “actually, I realized that I don’t enjoy your company” is a valid “unstated caveat” to a promise to meet someone for a date. We’re not talking about a prostitute or something; the expectation is that both parties are going to enjoy it.
In that case, the other person is certainly going to break up with you, but that seems to be what one expects to happen from saying something like that.
If the other person has gone ahead and bought tickets to the game/movie/play, the decent thing to do would be to compensate them. And to let them know ahead of time instead of standing them up.
Of course you should try to only agree to go on dates with people you actually like. And if you cancel on people repeatedly, you’re going to be rightly perceived as “flaky” and unlikable. But having agreed to go on a date with someone you don’t like, I don’t think you should compound it by leading them on.
JBeshir says: I was explicit that efficient breach involved payment of compensation…
Yes you were, but giving people the option to freely ignore contractual terms naturally includes the option to ignore terms like “I will pay Y in damages if I fail to X”. “Efficient breach” only works because the contract is being enforced to begin with.
Vox Imperatoris says: my position is not “fuck commitments”.
No your position was explicitly stated as The only obligation you have is to do what is in your interest.
To which I replied that 99 times out of 100 it would be in your (and many others’) interest to say “fuck commitment”
My point this whole time has bee that the only stopping everyone from doing things stopping people is the very threats of retribution and fetishization of promises keeping that you claim to be opposed to.
You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too.
You want the freedom to ignore contracts when it’s in your interests to do so, (which is such a low bar that it might as well be underground) but still enjoy the benefits of living in a society where promise keeping is strictly enforced.
As for the fire fighters; By your own metric it’s better to have a reputation for making and breaking foolish promises than to be dead or stuck doing something really unpleasant. (Like convalescing in a burn ward).
Municipal / public fire fighters don’t even have the threat of loose all their customers to encourage compliance which means that they are even more irrational and insane than the for-profit companies.
What was that you were saying about “The fabric of society is not based on holding people to completely irrational promises” again?
Vox, this is why you shouldn’t use reduction to absurdity online. You’re extremely likely to find someone who disagrees with you about what’s absurd.
The ability to efficient breach doesn’t include the ability to ignore damages resulting from efficient breach, because the owing of compensation is not due to terms in the contract, but due to contract law itself, and directly specified by a court’s instructions.
IANAL but approximately, breaching contract terms gets you a civil case, whereas ignoring a court order probably gets you contempt of court or something and a prison cell until you comply, or bailiffs taking your stuff. Exactly what the law decides to do might depend on the terms (like if they specify process for handling breach) but the structure remains the same; being ordered by a court to do something is not the same as being contracted to do it.
Socially, it being accepted for someone to say “I know I said I’d give you a lift to X, but I’m really busy today, here’s money for a taxi” does not mean that “I know I said I’d take you to X, but I’m really busy today, so meh” has to be equally acceptable. The making-it-right-as-resolution mechanic isn’t something treated as just another promise, but as a norm in itself.
Not everything boils down to contract terms and promises. Not every commitment is equal; contracts and promises are not as binding as overarching norms about how contracts and promises are handled.
Edit: And naturally, the alternative world with no efficient breach, where they can go “No, I demand you give me that ride or else pay me $150 to release you from the promise or else you’re a bad person.”, and be taken seriously, is not the one we live in.
JBeshir says: The ability to efficient breach doesn’t include the ability to ignore damages resulting from efficient breach…
I never said that it did.
What I said was that giving people the ability to ignore contractual obligations at will naturally gives them the ability to ignore things like damages resulting from efficient breach.
You’re taking it as a given that contracts will be enforced when whether or not contracts can or should be enforced is the very matter under debate.
@ hlynkacg:
Good thing no one is arguing for giving people “the ability to ignore contractual obligations at will”. You are clearly not engaging with anything anyone else is actually saying, just with the strawman versions of them in your head.
It doesn’t matter how often and in what detail they explain how you’re misunderstanding them; you keep going back to the same talking points.
Learn to read. Christ!
Vox Imperatoris says: You are clearly not engaging with anything anyone else is actually saying, just with the strawman versions of them in your head….
…Learn to read.
There is so much irony in this accusation that it is practically magnetic
Your position was explicitly stated as “The only obligation you have is to do what is in your interest”.
If I have misread you please say so now.
Once again I respond…
This position clearly precludes any sort of promise or contractual obligation as promises and contracts themselves are the mechanism by which we (as a society) convince people to do things that are not in their individual interest.
My point this whole time, the point that you still don’t seem to grasp is that that “99 times out of 100 it will be in an individual’s interest to say “fuck commitment”. The only reason they don’t is that we as a society have decided to punish defectors and elevate promise keeping. Something that you’ve said that you are opposed to.
You can’t have it both ways.
@ hlynkacg:
You have, totally and repeatedly. I refer you back to my previous comments. For instance, take this one:
You say:
No, our enforcement of contracts and social rules encouraging the keeping of promises is the means by which we cause honoring those contracts and promises to be in those individuals’ self-interest.
No, it will not be. Let’s go back to the firefighter example you keep misusing:
The deal for the firefighters is like this: people pay them in advance so that, if their houses ever catch on fire, the firefighters come and put it out, even take the measures necessary to rescue them.
If the firefighters take the money, then decide it’s “not worth it” to rescue some of their customers, then all their other customers will cancel the service. Why pay for firefighters who can’t be relied upon to come and do their jobs? Not to mention that, if they fail to honor their commitment, they will be on the hook for any resulting damages, whether that is loss of property or loss of life.
As for non-profit firefighters, similar considerations apply. They will get fired, or people will stop donating to them. If they actually have no incentive to go and fight fires, then they shouldn’t—but then the system is set up very poorly, and the problem is with the system.
If they are indeed throwing their lives away for no reason, that would be irrational. But the provision of firefighting in no way depends upon such altruistic motives.
For Christ’s sake, I have not said that I am opposed to promise keeping or the honoring of contracts. I said it three goddamn times in a row; how many more times is it necessary to say it?
The problem is that, as JBeshir has pointed out, you seem to have the idea that contracts/promises must either be Always Enforced No Matter How Insane or else Mere Words With No Effect At All.
Here is what I have actually been saying:
a) You should make promises and contracts with the intention of keeping them.
b) But sometimes, people make unconscionable promises/contracts that were never reasonable, or the situation changes such that keeping the promise/contract is no longer reasonable.
c) Social pressure should condemn people who break reasonable promises/contracts but not people who break unreasonable ones.
d) You should never be able to break a contract without paying the damages caused to the other party by breaking it.
I am not trying to assert contradictory things.
I am not “opposed to promise-keeping”. I am in favor of the keeping of reasonable promises and opposed to the keeping of unreasonable promises.
If someone promises to deliver 500 TVs, then takes the money and runs away, I think that person ought to be punished. That is fraud. Civilization indeed does depend on such reasonable promises’ being kept and enforced.
If someone promises to eat Mexican food every day or be put to death then skips a day, I do not think that person ought to be put to death. That is an unconscionable agreement. Enforcing it would be irrational. The fabric of society in no way depends on enforcing such agreements.
There is no contradiction between these two positions. I am saying it’s a matter of judgment, not “Promises—Always Keep ‘Em or Always Break ‘Em?” That is what I meant by the “fetishization of promise-keeping”: taking the principle of keeping promises out of context, out of the sphere of rational judgment, and turning it into a deontological rule that they must always be kept at any cost no matter what.
Is my position now clear to you? If you were reading me honestly and came to the conclusions you did, I apologize. But you really seem to be in the habit of jumping to negative conclusions.
@Vox
You may not have explicitly said that youought to be able to take money for delivery of 500 TVs, fail to deliver the TVs once you have the money but that is the world that your assertion that “The only obligation you have is to do what is in your interest” coupled with your opposition to society’s enforcement mechanisms naturally leads to.
That is why I keep telling you that you can’t have it both ways.
Something has to give. You either accept that there are obligations beyond one’s own interest, or you have to take a hard line stance on promise keeping and contract enforcement (even the unreasonable ones). Otherwise the only rational choice is to defect.
As for the Firefighters…
Agreed, and yet according to you that is insanity.
Objectively there is very little difference between promising to die in a fire and promising to die if you don’t to eat Mexican food. (granted, qualitatively is a different story) In either case, sticking to the contract means accepting the very real chance that you might die as a result. In the end, either both contracts are enforceable or neither are, because as you yourself said. it’s better to have a reputation for making and breaking foolish promises than to be dead or stuck doing something really unpleasant. (like convalescing in a burn-ward)
That is what I meant when I said that the fabric of society really is based on holding people to irrational promises. and that It’s often the most irrational promises that are the most critical.
What “opposition to society’s enforcement mechanisms”? Unless you live in a society radically different to mine, the comment you linked to doesn’t say anything of the sort. (In other words: whatcha talkin bout Willis?)
Where I live, at least, neither are. The most you can do to a firefighter who refuses to risk his life is dismiss him, and perhaps some kind of financial penalty. You can’t force him into a burning building at gunpoint. Do you think you should be able to?
@hlynkacg
Simply because someone rejects the statement “Breaking a promise is immoral in all cases” (which is your position, I take it) does not mean that they therefore must adopt the position “Breaking a promise is immoral in no cases.”
There are possible middle grounds, such as “Breaking a promise is immoral in most cases but isn’t immoral in some cases.” As far as I can tell, everyone in this conversation who has disagreed with you occupies precisely that middle ground position.
By analogy, it’s possible to take the position that “Killing humans is immoral in all cases.” Many people do adopt such a position. But it would be utterly misguided for them to assume that anyone who disagreed with them thought that “Killing humans is immoral in no cases.” There are good arguments for complete pacifism but “If you reject pacifism you must therefore believe killing is always justified” is not one of them. Nor is asserting that the adoption of complete pacifism is the only way to prevent constant killing.
And that’s what I find most perplexing about your arguments. The position endorsed by JBeshir, Vox Imperatoris, and myself (namely, “Breaking a promise is immoral in most cases but isn’t immoral in some cases”) is, as has been previously pointed out, already the position of American law. And horrific consequences have failed to result, even though an effective loss of the ability to meaningfully promise at all would probably have made itself known by now.
But it’s not only the majority position in American law, it’s also the view of most of society not only now, but at every point in American history. No amount of time travel would lead you back to a simpler, more honest era where people would solemnly nod along with you if you insisted that someone kill himself for failing to eat a burrito a day, no matter how confidently that person had pledged to do one or the other.
Underlying your arguments seems to be some kind of assumption that the position being espoused here leads to some kind of inevitable institutional decay, or a slippery slope into complete societal collapse. But even a cursory knowledge of how promising worked in the past would disabuse you of that notion.
Most of our knowledge about how older systems of promises worked come from legal systems, and there you see a lot of variation. Roman law allowed for many different types of promise, some more binding that others (even the strictest allowed fraud as a defense; others were more like a rough commitment to a particular course of action backed by a stronger guarantee of good faith; most required some kind of set ritual to become binding at all). Early canon law was more or less a reconstruction of the Roman system, and included some kind of requirement of “just price” in order to be meaningful at all; contracts that went too far astray from market price or common sense were questionable (this was in part motivated by fear of fraud, and in part motivated by a general belief that profit was bad, and that too much profit was itself morally questionable).
Then you get to Aquinas, who genuinely did believe that all promises were absolutely binding. Two notes, though: First, that really wasn’t a majority view until Aquinas. Second, even after Aquinas, the canon law did not fully reflect his views, and meaningful debates over the enforceability of contracts continued. (Presently, the canon law acknowledges many circumstances in which promises are not binding: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P4E.HTM)
As to (secular) civil law, the Aquinas-style hard line on promise-breaking was rarely (if ever) adopted. English common law, of course, introduced the doctrine of unconscionability. In Spain, Las Siete Partidas went further, allowing anyone under twenty-five to void a contract that turned out not to advance his interests. Grotius and Pufendorf, in their treatises on natural law, each allow at least some circumstances where parties are not bound to perform promises (and Pufendorf draws a distinction between ordinary promises and more-binding oaths). The Napoleonic Code allows contracts to be voided if there is a mistake as to a central matter (so does the English common law).
Non-inviolable promises are the majority tradition in the Western world. This did not at any point lead to the collapse of society. Some of those limitations on enforcement were undoubtedly ill-advised, though evidently not ruinously so. Others are, as I have argued before, in the interests of society as a whole (not just selfish individuals who want to escape their own errors). The hypothesis that society will be torn asunder if we don’t all accept your principles has been put to the test many times over, and been consistently disproved.
(Of course, I have omitted probably the most crucial limitation on contract enforceability under some of those laws, namely coverture, which effectively prevented married women from contracting. That is clearly a situation where many people genuinely were denied the ability to make meaningful contracts because they could not held to them at all. That is, I suspect, the doomsday scenario hlyncacg fears, and rightly so. But note, ending up there required a near-absolute limitation on enforcement. That’s extremely different from anything being proposed here.)
@ Harry Johnston:
I don’t think you understand what “enforcement” means. If it is immoral to demand that fire fighter put their lives on the line, it is equally immoral to sack a fire fighter for failing to do so.
IOW If you can punish a fire fighter for failing to get burnt, you can punish our fan of Mexican food for failing to kill themselves as promised.
@ Frank McPike
Please read the previous comments.
My issue is not that Vox “rejects the statement ‘Breaking a promise is immoral in all cases’” so much as the fact that she seats the bar for “Breaking a promise is a moral” so low that it might as well be underground.
The middle ground in question isn’t a middle ground at all. It’s the difference between “every day” and “days ending in Y”.
If you went before an American court and tried to argue that “I should be allowed to ignore contractual obligations when it is in my interests to do so.” the judge would bench-slap you so hard that your lawyer’s grandkids ears would feel it, and yet that is precisely the position that Vox has taken.
@ hlynkacg
You might have been misled by Vox’s unorthodox use of the terms “morality” and “self-interest”. If I understand correctly, the typical firefighter in Voxworld would think:
1. Hmm, fire is dangerous. Walking into it might not be in my self-interest.
2. But if I don’t try to help people, their surviving relatives will try to punish me, acting in their own self-interest. And my employer or a judge will cooperate with them, acting in their self-interest in turn.
3. Therefore, walking into the fire is in my self-interest after all.
It’s like the free-market capitalism of morality: “don’t try to optimize the system, just let every agent optimize for their own interests, and things will work out in the end”.
@hlynkacg
As far as I can tell, you’re seriously misunderstanding Vox Imperatoris’ position. There’s a very big difference between “I should not keep a promise unless it’s in my self-interest” and “Promises should never be enforced through any mechanism.” It’s perfectly self-consistent to believe the former and not the latter. No one here has proposed that there should be no enforcement mechanism for promises (only that there are at least some promises not worth enforcing). Vox Imperatoris, as far as I can tell, has not taken the position “All promises that are not already in my self-interest should not be enforced.” And yet that is the position you seem to be ascribing to them.
I think your key misunderstanding is “If it is immoral to demand that fire fighter put their lives on the line, it is equally immoral to sack a fire fighter for failing to do so.” That may be true in some moral systems (though I’ll note that American courts would treat the two quite differently).
But it certainly can’t be true in a moral system founded on self-interest. Assume that any act in one’s self-interest is moral. If it’s genuinely in the interest of the firefighter not to enter the burning building (even after taking into account the consequences he will face), then refusing to do so is moral. Granted. But if it’s in the interest of that firefighter’s employer to fire him (and I imagine it would be) then obviously that action would be moral too. Clearly it wouldn’t be in the firefighter’s self-interest to be fired. But he’s not the one doing the firing.
But let’s get to the real concern. Is self-interest truly incompatible with promise-keeping? Plenty of corporations have no motive other than self-interest for keeping their promises. And yet they are so reliable in keeping promises that our economic system works. You’ve probably contracted with entities that don’t care about you beyond whether they get your money, and I doubt you’ve been consistently burned. “Do self-interested agents keep their promises within our current system?” isn’t something we need to guess about. There’s a clear answer and that answer is “generally, yes.”
@hlynkacg: I think you need to define your terms, I’m finding it hard to tell what you’re trying to say.
Depends what you mean by “demand”. “Do your job or we’ll fire you” is fine IMO, “do your job or I’ll shoot you” is not.
Depends what you mean by “punish”. Firing someone for failing to do their job isn’t a punishment by my definition of the word, and if you expand the definition enough to cover it, then that comes under the civil enforcement category that Frank has covered so thoroughly and which Vox has repeatedly asserted to be OK.
It seems to me that a lot of the clash and confusion in this thread comes from two different parts of Vox’s position:
1. He has no objection to legal rules that impose costs on people for breaking contracts–indeed approves of such.
2. He believes, if I correctly understand him, that all morality comes down to self-interest.
I think people are taking the second point, not unreasonably, as implying that if he can break a contract without having costs imposed on him, whether because the legal system doesn’t have rules against such or because the rule won’t be enforced in his case, then he should do so if it is in his interest–and there is no obvious reason why it wouldn’t often be in his interest.
This is the same problem sometimes referred to, in the context of arguments with Objectivists, as the prudent predator problem. Having rights respected benefits you. Respecting rights often benefits you. If you are in a situation where violating rights benefits you, should you feel free to do so?
@ Frank McPike:
Thank your for your excellent, historically-informed posts.
What you’re saying is exactly what I’ve been trying to say.
I just want to emphasize that I am not advocating any kind of radical change in our practices of holding people to contracts and promises. It is hlynkacg who’s doing that. I am defending what is more or less the status quo. This whole discussion started when I merely remarked in passing that some people place an outsized emphasis on keeping promises—this was not a suggestion that we should stop keeping them.
@ David Friedman:
Yes, and my answer to that is that such situations are uncommon.
But I don’t believe that they are metaphysically impossible, unless you define rights such that they only apply in situations where there are no conflicts among them. For example, I think killing innocent civilians in war is an example of a possible situation where violating rights may be in one’s self-interest. You can avoid that by saying rights don’t apply to enemy civilians in war—but that’s tendentious.
However, my general opinion is summed up in the passage I always quote from James Fitzjames Stephen:
Of course I don’t agree with the part about God—and I agree that this does weaken the case against committing murder—but it doesn’t weaken it enough to make committing murder good.
Frank, I think you’re missing that contracts do not cover all agreements and all scenarios, and trying to extend them into doing so would make real life prohibitive. In your scenario, the optimal behavior for a company in the supply line of a competitor should tactically breach their contract at a time when they can do the most damage to that company. And the first company would need to write their contracts not knowing the future, or would need to be constantly regeneotiating them.
Do you game? Because you can see this model if you’ve ever played Diplomacy or Munchkin; as you approach the endgame, everyone scrabbles to win, alliances dissolve, the game becomes a Hobbsean war of all-against-all, for perfectly logical game-theoric reasons. We see this because in the toy model of the game, it’s expected that you will tactically default on agreements.
Again, this does not lead to a strong and stable soceity. Imagine, if you would, if every economic agent you interacted with paid out with the reluctance of cut-rate insurers. Imagine if it becomes expected that companies will identify situations in which efficient breach will kill people they owe money to, and stand a good chance of removing those debts.
We have models of how people behave when honor is not expected nor extended nor reciprocated. They are not particularly good worlds.
“In your scenario, the optimal behavior for a company in the supply line of a competitor should tactically breach their contract at a time when they can do the most damage to that company. ”
Not if they will be forced to pay that company the damages that result from their breach. If that requirement is imposed (and it is) then they will breach (if they want to breach) at the time when they do the least damage to the other company.
I agree that it would be unwise to release people who commit an efficient breach from the obligation of paying damages. But if they must pay actual damages, the problem you raise is solved, while still creating incentives for efficient breach.
If firm A’s breach is capable of driving firm B out of business (killing them, I suppose), then there is a risk of real inefficiency, since B is unlikely to be able to sue A afterward. But note that this is a problem under any system of contract, even one that tolerated no breach (say, by dissolving any firm that ever breached a contract). If A can drive B out of business entirely, then A will never face consequences, no matter how severe they are. But that’s unrelated to the question of whether we should tolerate or encourage efficient breaches.
(In any event, I’m not really making a policy proposal. I’m describing how the American contract system already works and pointing out that catastrophic consequences haven’t followed.)
Re: the consequences for tactical breach:
That’s why the social consequences are important. Because the victim of the tactical breach often can’t retaliate, we distribute the negative consequences.
And, as you say, our current system takes place under the assumption that people quickly stop doing business with known bad actors when given a choice. Again, what we have right now is a good system; contracts which represent a certain level of seriousness (a meeting of the minds, etc.) are enforced legally, and can be breached at penalty to both finance and reputation, but people who work at good-faith efforts to limit the harm from their breaches suffer little reputational damage, while people who revel in broken promises and use them tactically suffer great harm.
However, this state of affairs does depend on people valuing their word and their reputation, because they know that soceity (and not just their bargaining partners) will shun them if they behave dishonorably.
If there were a private database of oathbreakers
Ashley Madison. Which demonstrated, to what should have been nobody’s surprise, that the owners and CEO of the site were not interested in “let us help you to have a little harmless fun on the side”, they were interested in milking the maximum amount of cash from the suckers out there.
With many more men than women signing up, fake accounts for fake female users created to address this, and the whole business model of pay for chat, pay for gifts, etc., it was a great cash cow – until the inevitable happened, but even if it hadn’t been attacked in such a manner, I imagine there were a lot of users who signed up for the promise of being matched with married/partnered women looking for no-strings affairs, and who forked over a lot of cash under the marketing wiles of the business model and ended up with little to show for it.
The point is not that, under a free market, there will be absolutely no scams. The point is that you aren’t forced to pay into them.
Social Security is a scam, but that doesn’t give me the option to opt out of it.
That reminds me that the Social Security Administration used to have a FAQ about Ponzi Schemes, to explain how Social Security totes wasn’t one, for real you guys.
It doesn’t look like it’s on the website anymore, which is a shame; it was always good for a laugh. Looks like the wayback machine has it, if you go all the way back to 2005.
You guys should listen to what @stargirlprincesss said. This argument is like a social conservative and a feminist arguing over the ethics of abortion without asking whether the fetus is a person. From the perspective of the conservative, abortion is murder. If you argue against that by pointing out how an unwanted child could harm a women then you aren’t really addressing the root of the problem. If they both hold radically different values, then neither one of them is going to be convinced by the other unless you deal with the larger issue.
Vox, the people you are responding to probably don’t believe morality should just be used to help oneself. So if you believe that, then of course breaking an unreasonable promise makes sense. But they probably feel like they have a sense of duty to fulfill their promises that is more important than their own desires. Suggesting that it’s against their self-interest is missing the point.
Sure, that’s why I have consistently argued both that such a policy is neither in anyone’s self-interest nor in the general interest.
If someone wants to argue that it’s good by some deontological standard totally divorced from any kind of benefit to individuals or society, fine. But by any standard connected to human life and happiness, I think it’s a bad idea.
@Vox I am sorry if I mis-represented you. The reason I felt you were speaking primarily from an objectivist perspective is you said things like this: “Why in the world ought you to keep such an agreement? By the nature of the case, there is nothing you could get out of it.”
The above statement really only makes sense to say if you are assuming egoism.
@ stargirlprincess:
Sure, that’s fair. That particular statement does only make sense in that context.
But I tried to emphasize as best I could that the wider sentiment is applicable in many contexts. Thus the comments about the “fabric of society”, etc.
A phrase I’m fond of is “humans respond to incentives”, and that seems to be basically the standpoint being pushed by Caplan here. But another concept that I think is also missed a lot and I don’t have a brief summary for is that there’s already lots of incentives, rewards, and penalties in life, and before endorsing making incentives worse or better, or piling on yourself, you should assess what the current state of incentives is.
The concern here about giving charity removing important incentive would be reasonable if they had not faced any other downside to going back on the promise than their current problems. But from the sound of it, they’ve had a really damned bad time already- including the loss of a partner- and there’s no call for people to pile on more disincentive.
The structure of the situation is *already*, from other factors, such that anyone responding to incentives right will quietly try to avoid taking this course. No one needs to refrain from being kind to reinforce it further.
I put some money in, and I’d encourage other people who want to help to not be deterred from doing it themselves.
What’s so unique about her situation that we need to discuss it? It’s nothing unheard of and it’s not new either.
If you’re asking about promises, it’s depends on the consequences.
Formal system: When people make promises, they enter a non-formal, mutually consensual social contract(c).
That contract has two other variables, which are people(p) and situation(s).
Axiom: the weight (value) of c varies between different contracts.
Axiom: p and s might have some correlation, but it’s not clear how consistent this is.
Can anyone improve on this? I’m tired.
I was thinking recently about complaints that engineers do not spend enough time in the humanities/social sciences in college, and that such courses are needed to make us well-rounded. On a whim, I checked my alma matter’s catalog. It’s primarily an engineering school, but even so, an English major needs only 12 hours of math/sciences, while the theoretical requirement for an aerospace engineer is 24 hours of humanities/social sciences. This seems unfair, particularly as there don’t seem to be many restrictions on what kind of math/science classes they can count (which could thus include Math for Dummies), but I had to do literature and ethics.
Thus, in the spirit in which they say we should have to take humanities/social science classes to be ‘well-rounded’, I have a proposal. I will stop complaining about my HSS requirements if they have to spend as much time doing STEM classes as I had to do on HSS. Oh, and they have to have Calc 1.
Thoughts?
Edit:
Just to be clear, I’m not actually advocating for more STEM for people doing BAs, or defending HSS requirements for BSs. I’m pointing out the double standard.
As a (partly) HSS person, I support the idea that HSS could use a little more STEM in their diet too.
I am not a HSS person; please correct any incorrect guesses I’m making about them.
I could stand HSS to be more mathematically literate. However, as things currently stand, there’s this standard ladder of math courses that starts with arithmetic and goes up to calculus and I want everyone who’s not a STEM type out after about arithmetic. I’m guessing that things like {solving equations, trigonometry, graphing conics, differentiation} provide them approximately zero value, but the fact many (most in many instances) of the students taking these courses aren’t STEM types means that the hard stuff, which takes work, gets removed. If the standard high school sequence were taught at the AoPS level, if calculus were taught at Apostol’s level, I’m guessing that HSS students would just fail really hard. So, it gets dumbed down and, really, everyone loses. HSS types spend a bunch of time memorizing a bunch of apparently meaningless rules (eg cos -> -sin, sin -> cos, tan -> sec^2, etc) and I get a 5 on the AP calculus exam without knowing the fundamental theorem of calculus, much less why it’s true.
I don’t think this situation is unrescuable. My current best solution: draw a big red line in between “here’s some useful heuristics that fall out of mathematics, but be under no illusions that you’re mathematically literate” and “math for people who actually should know math”. The former can probably stop around arithmetic or so, and then learn about Bayes’ Rule with pictures of red and blue waterfalls and odds ratios and the latter group can get something like Jaynes’s treatment, which proves that probability theory is a unique consequence of about three desiderata.
What kind of non-HSS person are you? I think you might be either underestimating how much maths is needed in engineering, or overestimating how good engineers are at maths.
My primary background is in mathematics, but I take an interest in most of STEM.
As someone who did understand what the fundamental theorem of calculus was, and still got a 2 on my first try on the BC test (Taylor series made no sense, and I learned them and got a 5 on my second pass), it’s not quite that easy. I think this gets solved in a lot of places with Honors/Advanced math classes.
Agree most HSS people don’t have much maths skills. To be fair, I think calculus and related areas are near useless for most subjects on the HSS side of campus, and not really useful life skills either. Statistics, on the other hand, is actually quite useful/important in many HSS areas, and useful for making sensible judgments in many areas of life, but seems to be very under-taught (really wasn’t any different from high school stats where it was). I actually also think logic/fallacies/bias should be compulsory even outside philosophy too, because like calc in engineering its vital but not exactly the fun part and no-one wants to do it. Hence there is more nonsense coming out of the HSS side than there needs to be. Probably a little general science and maybe even a few weeks of programming wouldn’t hurt too. Maybe I’m getting carried away.
While I think of it, having done a little philosophy, I will say I sometimes find the philosophical end of maths and QT to be pretty suspect, so I’d be keen to see a focus on practical techniques if possible. I realise this may be hypocritical considering I like the idea of STEM having a brief intro to the main philosophical ideas in HSS.
I do agree HSS has a lot of SJ stuff that belongs in politics and not everywhere else. To be clear, I’m probably the only centre/centre-left person that still thinks this. *sigh*
I’m a far-leftist who thinks that also.
I assumed the far-left generally actively pushed the SJ stuff, so that’s a surprise to hear. Do you disagree with the SJ paradigm or just think politics should be mainly kept in politics class?
There was a far left long before SJ took hold.
I know a communist who thinks SJ focuses way too much on emotions and too little on changes in material conditions.
I tend to think of the left as a coalition between the Social Justice Left (centrally things like women’s lib, earlier civil rights movements, etc, with the modern Internet Social Justice thing an outgrowing of it) and the Welfare Left (which kinda further subdivides into Communists and Social Democrats).
With overlap and resonance between each other, in the same way the right’s Social Conservative and Small Government Conservative subgroups have overlap and resonance.
Someone being extreme in one of these groups doesn’t make them extreme in others, and in fact someone extreme in one probably thinks people in the others are missing where the *real* focus of the struggle ought to be.
If I recall correctly, in the 70s feminism was for a while considered a bourgeoisie distraction from the real problems of class and economics by a significant amount of communist thought, for example. And even nowadays, the communist-leaning people I know are happy to view campus social justice stuff as silly and misdirected. Meanwhile a lot of SJ people probably think communism is dumb, or at the very least not focusing nearly enough on social justice issues.
Not to understate the solidarity; Welfare Left and Social Justice Left are pretty intertwined. But the more extreme a thing is in one, the more likely people who principally think in terms of the other are at best going to be tolerating it and at worst may view it quite negatively, even at extremes.
@Citizensearth
To answer your question, I have far-left ideals that match fairly closely with what SJWs tend to believe, with respect to how people should be treated and what the demographic makeup of society should look like. My ideals related to economic/political systems are also very far left, though I fall short of advocating communism. This is why I identify as a far leftist.
However, I believe achieving these goals should be done in an honest and fact-based manner. And that’s why my perception is that that HSS has too many SJ stuff that belong in politics, not academia. I believe “having an accurate model of the world” is a goal that trumps “changing the world to match my ideals.” I perceive HSS as producing a lot of research that seem optimized for advocacy rather than more accurately modeling reality.
I think it comes down to reasonable self-doubt. I have far-left ideals, and I believe, with as much confidence one can reasonably have, that I am right to have those ideals. Which is to say that I’m very very unsure, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my belief that my ideals are right is exactly as justified as Hitler’s belief that his ideals were right.
Thus I want HSS to help me by giving me more information about the world. I don’t want HSS to feed me things that just make me feel good and righteous for believing what I believe – if I’m right, I want HSS to show me that I’m right, and if I’m wrong, I want HSS to show me that I’m wrong. Thus even though I strongly believe in SJ ideals, I also strongly object to HSS academia having SJ stuff that belong in politics.
This is the reason I come to the comments section of SSC. There’s a good number of people, from the left, right and centre, that have one thing in common – the truth comes before pushing an agenda. It’s not everyone here, but there’s quite a few. Gives me hope. 🙂
@Citizensearth:
Your comment reminds me of a pattern I have seen several times recently elsewhere online:
Someone makes a factual claim designed to support a general conclusion.
I point out that the factual claim is false.
He neither concedes that it is false nor defends it, but instead makes a different factual claim designed to support the same conclusion.
After a few more exchanges, it becomes clear that he has concluded both that I disagree with the conclusion and that I am a member of a group ideologically opposed to the conclusion.
(One such exchange was on Islam. The original poster concluded that I was a liberal committed to defending Islam due to my contradicting two false factual claims he made on the subject.)
The obvious implication is that he sees the conclusion as what matters, isn’t interested in whether the claimed fact is true, and assumes that the only reason I would contradict him is that I disagree with the conclusion. It pretty clearly did not occur to him that I might object to false claims.
@David
I feel the same way and find that frustrating too. It’s behavior that seems almost default amongst red and blue tribes, though with a fair number of exceptions. Come to think of it, I think grey tribe is like that too, but only for a much more limited number of sacred cows. I suppose its sort of natural instinct, but some people thankfully get infected with a truthiness meme that lifts them out of blind support for tribal doctrine (I hope I’m at least partly one of these people). Or maybe that just what the grey tribe doctrine wants us to think… 😛
I always breezed math classes but I kind of agree with you.
There’s some kind of popular idea that forcing people to learn things of zero value to them is right and good. The idea that those people could spend the same time getting better at things that are either actually useful or actually interesting to them…. never seems to cross their mind.
There’s big chunks even of the highschool math curriculum where I grew up which are obviously useless to 99% of the class but get included almost out of some kind of tradition. There’s chunks of the course which are obviously meant to teach one thing but have been corrupted, for example there was a section on sin/cos/tan proofs which were turned into “memorize these 30 proofs exactly” that was pretty obviously originally written to try to introduce people to the idea of proofs that they could reason through themselves but then they started teaching to the test.
It’s genuinely cruel to force people through some of that crap who would make perfectly good linguists or musicians for the sake of the perverse worship of “roundedness”.
Of course I also have similar feelings about being forced to rote-memorize foreign language poetry for years that I could have spent getting better at something actually worth doing.
My impression is that most people who have taken, and passed, a calculus course could not give the simple geometric proof of the fundamental theorem, which means they haven’t actually learned to understand the subject, only memorized formulas.
In what educational system are students required to memorize poetry in a foreign language? My impression is that most people today have not memorized any in their own language.
My wife and I were on an airplane recently, and my wife recited a bit of a Milne poem (“James, James, Morrison Morrison …”) to entertain a small child. The adults present seemed very impressed that she could do so.
@ David Friedman:
I was required to memorize Russian poetry in the course of studying Russian. Not a lot of it, just short snippets. But I only took it through the intermediate level.
More commonly, I was required to write an memorize monologues and dialogues (with partners). These were major components of exams. It was done in the Russian-style “billet” system: there are 5-10 possible dialogue topics, you prepare something for each one, and then you randomly draw one of the topics, which are cut up on little strips of paper. Of course, they’re not grading you based on your fidelity to the version you wrote in order to memorize, but you will do poorly and get a bad grade if you’re trying to make it up off the top of your head.
Eastern Europe here: Between 1st and 7th grade I was required to memorize a fair bit of poetry in my mother tongue for literature class. And yeah, Russian as a foreign language also included a couple. As did German. I think only English didn’t include poetry memorization, which is weird because I had the most classes in that one, more than ten years.
Later, a tiny university course for Chinese (in Germany) also had it, although those were only 8-10 lines so could mostly be learned in 10 minutes, and the teach couldn’t punish us for not doing it anyway since it was a more casual/optional class. We only once had to do a real poem there, I think because our level was too low for there to be many suitable ones; the rest was dialogues that we would recite in pairs.
So yeah, memorizing poetry or sometimes just random things for foreign language learning is super common in my experience.
Oh, and in high school Latin class, extra credit was given for memorizing and writing down the first few lines of the Aeneid. Not a lot, just the first stanza or two. Of course, the whole class was basically memorization: you have all these vocabulary quizzes where you have to give the four principle parts of verbs and write down the declination chart of hic, haec, hoc and so on.
And there’s a lot of similar memorization in other subjects. In biology, you had to memorize the Krebs cycle and the parts of the cell and that sort of thing. I always found that type of thing pretty easy because it’s not purely random memorization (there is some order to it), and you certainly don’t have to “think outside the box”.
There was even a competition (in middle school) to memorize digits of pi, but that was just for fun.
It sounds as though all of the memorization of verse in a foreign language was a device for language learning, which makes a certain amount of sense, poetry being designed to be easy to remember. I at one point thought of memorizing a good deal of Dante’s Inferno to improve my Italian, but I didn’t get very far with the project.
Anonymous’ comment about memorizing poetry in his own language is more interesting. I have a vague impression of having been assigned to do a tiny bit of that at some point in K-12, but I don’t think there is much such assigned in U.S. schooling.
Do people in his society learn poetry for the fun of it very often? Remember what they had to learn in school and recite it for fun? It seems to be a dead art in modern day America, aside from songs.
I had to memorize several pieces of verse for my English high school classes, including Poe’s “Eldorado”, Juliet’s balcony soliloquy, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, and the prologue of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. I don’t remember Hamlet, but I remember the other three. Granted, my high school English classes were half Honors and half AP; I have no idea if the Regular kids had to do this.
I’ve been memorizing “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” as a personal project, but its hard without the motivation of a grade and a deadline.
I also accidentally memorized Chatoyance’s “A Verb Called Self” from Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens, but I doubt any of my English teachers would have given me credit for that.
@ jaimeastorga2000:
Huh. I’ve memorized Poe’s The Raven years ago, which is twice as long, obviously without any extrinsic motivation. I get mad at myself if I occasionally happen to forget a verse. Come on, it ain’t that hard.
@David:
I wasn’t required to memorize anything in high school, but I do memorize poetry and oration for fun.
I know a good chunk of the Shakespearean canon (especially his sonnets), much of Kipling, a bit of Robert Burns, and a decent selection of great speeches from American history (I have a particular fondness for Lincoln).
Just yesterday I finished memorizing “Casey at the Bat,” feeling I needed to add a comic poem to my repertoire.
Chevalier, any useful resources, or does it just come naturally?
I can’t say that I use many explicit memorization techniques, apart from the method loci (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorization#Techniques, the art of memory article is also useful), although I’m familiar with most since sometimes the administration in its wisdom tasks me with teaching psychology. I’m afraid that I can’t offer many useful suggestions, though, since I’m not quite sure how I memorize things myself. I’ll talk through my process in the hopes that it may be helpful, though.
Mostly I think it’s just practice. The first verse I ever memorized was when I was 13, when for a course in mythology I learned 14 lines or so of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Since then it’s mostly just been a matter of taking the time to practice a piece.
The poems, for example, are easy, since poetry is designed to be easy to memorize. Rhyme helps one associate one line with the next, knowing the story helps keep the lines in order, and solid meter clues you in when you forget a word (and often suggests the word that you’ve forgotten). I think that’s also why Lincoln’s orations, in particular, are a joy to memorize – he makes use of a lot of poetical devices such as parallelism and repetition, and writes with a certain meter of his own, all of which aid recall. Without the clear organization of either metered poetry (I don’t know any free verse poems, that I recall) or classical rhetoric, I don’t think I could manage.
Other than paying attention to those cues, I just use brute force. I read Casey at the Bat through two or three times, then began to recite it myself. Inevitably a few key rhymes and verses stuck in my head, and I began building up the poem around those. “Okay, so ‘They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain, they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again’ must precede ‘The sneer is gone from Casey’s lips, his teeth are clenched with hate…”
Working from those, and consulting the text, I gradually fill in the weak bits. The hardest part then is distinguishing between similar metaphors or images that repeat – is this the line with the stricken crowd, or the sullen crowd? Is it the beating of storm waves on a stern and DISTANT shore, or stern and COLD shore? (that’s where meter comes in!).
Finally, once I can run through the whole thing once or twice with only minor errors, I may listen to a recital of the poem and follow along myself, as one last crunch. All told, I’d say it took maybe 2 hours of concentration spread out over two days. Then I just recite it once a day or so, with decreasing frequency, until it’s encoded long term.
For Jaime’s sake, I’ll learn Gods of the Copybook Headings by next open thread.
On the subject of memorization, which used to be very easy for me–read a poem I liked a few times and I remembered most of it…
It is considerably harder at seventy than at thirty or even fifty. As I discovered when I decided a while back that I wanted to learn “Akbar’s Bridge.”
But I did.
So learn things while you are young.
I’m considering “The Last Rhyme of True Thomas.”
Psmith – “any useful resources, or does it just come naturally?”
…I have a strong tolerance for repitition; I can listen to new songs I discover and really enjoy for a day or two straight*, for example. I came across a really good reading of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwHCsTq3IU
…and listened to it for a day or two. Combined with a copy of the text, that did most of the process more or less automatically.
*provided I don’t actually put them on repeat, but manually restart them over and over again. For some reason, actually putting them on repeat kills the magic almost instantly.
Thanks dudes. I accidentally memorized quite a bit of “Kublai Khan” in middle school, but haven’t tried much since then. Would sort of like to get “Horatius at the Bridge”, like Churchill supposedly did. Brb…
The main thing I think is that you gotta like it. Memorizing something you don’t love is a waste of time.
I memorize things that I want to carry around in my head, so I can enjoy them at any time. With that in mind, go for it!
On that note, here’s a lovely piece by Boris Johnson of all people on this very subject: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/5004215/Heres-a-really-Right-wing-idea-learn-poetry.html
Re Boris Johnson:
I once had to memorize a poem as an assignment in school, probably elementary school. I have almost no memory of what it was about, no longer remember a word of it.
But I know hours of poetry that I learned on my own initiative because I liked it.
So although I agree with Boris Johnson about the value of having poems in your head, I have doubts about his proposal to make kids learn it.
I had enough of the indoctrination shit in highschool and in 11th grade was eagerly awaiting university where I would only study useful and necessary stuff. Very glad my country doesn’t have mandatory humanities stuff in university, although I still had to pick a couple classes outside my major.
Obligatory Well-roundedness = Blue-Tribeness
I have met a lot of people who made a lot of money in software / engineering / technology and they are very often of the right to own guns / lower taxes / religious traditionalist.
No, it doesn’t.
I’ve seen more push for strong core requirements from conservative traditionalists of the no-one-should-graduate-without-reading-Aristotle type than from leftists.
Yep, I’ve argued that.
On the other hand I’m pretty sure my school’s requirement for a “race and ethnicity” course did not come from the Red Tribe.
I think there are two things going on – conservative traditionalists push for the importance of the Western canon, “classical education”, which did consider “well-roundedness” key.
“Blue Tribe” activists are more likely to push “The humanities are still relevant! Because everyone needs to take X Studies classes!”
Both groups might agree on the idea that STEM types ought to take more humanities (though I suspect they’d also push more math for social science students). But they’d probably differ on the content of the newly required courses. The “Blue Tribe” group is more dominant among actual faculties at the moment.
There is a pretty good guide to colleges put out by ISI, which used to be a libertarian organization called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists but at some point became a conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It approves of schools with extensive required curricula. My kids used that as a negative signal, since they disapproved of them.
The guide not uncommonly says positive things about the educational quality of schools whose politics the authors obviously dislike, which I thought creditable (and useful).
College departments sell themselves by teaching general education courses to everyone: so math people have to teach intro math to math students, but they also have to teach it to physicists and engineers and computer scientists. These classes would be completely different if they could be taught as math in the math tradtion, math in the physics tradition, etc. So ideally, everyone would wall themselves off into little communities and teach their tradition perfectly.
But this is an obvious trap, because people need a base of common knowledge to work with. So you have to dumb your classes down and remove most of the philosophy and history behind it to focus on skills that will be universal across as many disciplines as possible, to sell the fact that you can teach a useful generalist class. That these classes are going to be garbage is kinda inevitable.
IMO, as someone who teaches introductory math courses at university, there should be less STEM requirements. If you’re going to be utilitarian, classes on public speaking and writing are very needed for STEM people, communication skills are lacking and people are way, way too afraid of being publically embrassed.
Do communication skills classes actually teach much relevant material? Most advice winds up being either needlessly obtuse, or completely obvious. I knew a guy attending teachers college complain about the in applicability of the material.
They make you practice over and over again, ideally. General education classes should be focusing on skills, not theory, and I have no idea about the usefulness of communication theory.
I think some STEM people need more training in communication (written and verbal), but colleges currently do a horrible job of teaching it, so I wouldn’t want them to be forced to take more currently-useless classes in it.
As it is now, communication is usually a poor-quality, extremely easy program full of junk classes for people who can’t pass college classes in any other subject (these people are often athletes). It’d be nice if colleges created some genuinely useful communication classes for people going into STEM professions who aren’t great at communicating their findings/work.
I recall my required science writing class, which was okay but could have been better. What I would have done is something like “here’s the body of a real scientific paper. Your homework is to write the abstract without looking up the original abstract.”
Then you have the submissions somewhere public, you stitch together an abstract together as a class, you compare to the actual abstract and have a discussion. Repeat until people feel confident in their ability to write good abstracts.
Oh, I’m not being utilitarian, or even particularly serious. I’m pointing out that the demands for well-roundedness seem to be rather one-sided. I had a list of specific class types I had to have, some of which had no bearing at all on anything I could conceivably need to do professionally, while an English major has half the required hours and can take literally any STEM class the school offers.
I figured, but this is a personal favorite issue to talk about for me, so I used your comment as a springboard. I do think STEM lack of well roundedness is worse than humanities, but then I would think that, being exposed to more examples of it.
I actually think that’s part of the problem. There’s a diminishing amount of personal contact between the general populations of STEM people and non-STEM intellectual (NSI) people after high school. During middle/high school years, STEM people (geeks) tend to focus on STEM stuff and related fields (Sci-fi, for instance) which don’t count as ‘well-rounded’ in NSI minds. Then, during later years, the geeks start to branch out, but the NSIs don’t see that because they don’t have much to do with geeks any more. And then they pontificate on how geeks need to be more well-rounded, even though most geeks tend to round themselves to some extent. And frankly, we’d be more likely to do so if we weren’t looked down on and dragged into those classes. I enjoyed my literature class (SF) a bit, although it was dampened because nobody else understood most of the science involved or anything about how militaries work. Ethics was a blast, but I had a good professor and enjoy philosophy.
Of course, this is the non-cynical explanation for those classes. The cynical one involves rent-seeking.
My impression, possibly long out of date, was that people who were in the sciences tended to also be interested in music, often reading, sometimes even poetry and history.
My impression, possibly long out of date, was that people who were in the sciences tended to also be interested in music, often reading, sometimes even poetry and history.
And I would agree with you. But I’d also guess that most of them got that way, or more that way, after the last time they had much contact with the sort of people who go into journalism and the humanities.
My undergraduate school had three intro to physics tracks: 1) for people thinking of majoring in physics, 2) for people in the engineering school, and 3) for pre-meds / other. I thought that worked well.
The math department didn’t follow that model. There were also three tracks, but it was very muddled as to what the purpose or aim of each one was. One was a lab oriented track, one with no special designation, and one honors. I took the honors track and it ended up being more geared towards proofs and less towards practice sets, which I liked, but it was pretty much dumb luck that I ended up in it.
The computer science department didn’t have any separate tracks at all, just different starting points: 001 “I don’t know how to turn on a computer”, 006 “I’ve never programmed before”, and 100 “I’ve been programming since I was 9”. The 001 and 006 classes were well received by and large but didn’t prepare students for the 100 class. There were several people I tutored that got an A in 006 and but then had to drop 100 the next semester and give up on computer science.
You can’t forget one important factor behind core requirements: they “create jobs”, allowing for a bigger department.
When I was graduating, I went to a breakfast hosted by the philosophy department (I was a philosophy / government double-major). One of the professors explicitly brought up the fact that, since my college requires everyone to take two philosophy classes, this allows the philosophy department to be far bigger and better-funded than it would be on its own and produce more “real” graduate work.
I imagine the situation was quite similar for the theology department.
Definitely, it’s all about selling yourself to the adminstration and to the media, so they can hopefully swing some rent-seeking your direction.
College departments sell themselves by teaching general education courses to everyone
Some do, some don’t. I have never seen an engineering department teach “intro to engineering” to anybody but new engineers. Often it doesn’t even count as a general-education elective for a non-engineer who wants to take it, which is sort of a pet peeve of mine if we are going to have this sort of “well-roundedness” requirement.
I don’t think I’ve seen law schools teaching introductory law courses, though that would be massively useful to anyone wanting to live in a modern civilized society. Not much from the medical schools either. Others?
Possibly the general rule is that if you are teaching a lucrative profession, you focus on the wannabe professionals. If you are teaching something where the professional prospects outside of academia are dim, you necessarily have to get outsiders to sign up for some of your courses – ideally by making them mandatory, or at least arranging for them to satisfy a mandatory general-education requirement. I like the idea of requiring a well-rounded education for a traditional university degree, but it may create perverse incentives within academia.
Law and medicene also don’t try place themselves as undergraduate degrees, and engineering also segregates into its’ own ghetto in my experience. But then enginnering also has better PR than other departments, they don’t have to convince people they are worthwhile. Similarly for IT and business programs, which also don’t have mandatory general classes everyone has to take, at leaast usually.
Law schools in particular are pretty well off financially and don’t have to look elsewhere for funds.
Law schools are graduate schools, so the only people in them are law students. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern of a law school also teaching some undergraduate courses, although perhaps there should be.
On the other hand, our business school decided to offer a law and economics class with multiple professors. I taught three sessions of it last quarter, am teaching four this quarter–and I’m in the law school.
“Law schools in particular are pretty well off financially”
Would that it were so.
Law schools have been hurting badly for the past several years due to a sharp decline applications. Some have merged, I think some have gone out of business.
I think that’s a lot of it. I have no problem with a well-roundedness requirement, but I do find it a bit odd that an engineer is required to take twice as much humanities as a humanities major is required to take STEM, and at much higher levels. A typical college might require 2-4 STEM classes for a BA, which a reasonably bright student could easily do with AP credit. I took every AP class I could, and still had to do 3 humanities and a social science.
If we’re really trying for well-roundedness, then every department should be required to have a specific class or two tailored to non-majors. I have a feeling that ‘Literature for Engineers’ is usually called ‘Sci-Fi Lit’, but professional departments generally don’t have any options there.
I feel an idea brewing, but it will take a little while.
I’m going to take the STEM-elitist view here:
Literature for engineers is called “Literature”, Shakespeare for engineers is called “Shakespeare”, History for engineers is called “History”. The “X for non-X majors” are peculiar to math and science courses because your typical STEM student is both smarter AND more well-rounded than your typical humanities student. Engineering students can handle introductory humanities classes “undiluted”, but not vice-versa.
Note that this applies only to the bottom of the ladder, however.
(also, amusingly, my alma mater had three different introductory physics classes: One for non-majors, requiring no calculus. One on the physics major track, which did require calculus. And one for engineering students. I took the course for physics majors, and one of my roommates took the engineering one. As far as I could tell the main difference between the two was in the problem sets for the engineering one, the results were less likely to be round numbers.)
@The Nybbler:
The impression I – as a former humanities student – got was that the humanities are easier at low levels.
However, I took a course that was intended both to be a “science for non-STEM” and a “non-STEM for STEM” course. It was basically about the history and philosophy of science. So, there definitely are diluted humanities/social sciences courses for STEM types.
I remember two things: one, basically memorizing a bunch of science I subsequently forgot, and two, half of the STEM kids dropped out of the tutorial I was in when the first paper was due. It was 4 pages.
I remember being dismayed, because here I was thinking the people who would be doing science and building bridges were smarter than us morons in the humanities and social sciences, with our bullshitting on exams while hung over and so forth.
@The Nybbler
I don’t think you have it right. The difference is that there is no strict sequence of courses. Those 100 level English courses are for anyone, those intending to major in STEM or non-STEM, that wants an amuse bouche in the area. They aren’t the ‘introduction to serious study of literature for majors but STEM people can also take them because they are so brilliant’. If you come in freshman year all fired up to go into literature in a serious way you can go talk to someone in the department and skip straight to a 200 level course.
The Nybbler:
Literature for engineers is called “Literature”, Shakespeare for engineers is called “Shakespeare”, History for engineers is called “History”.
Interesting perspective. To some extent, I agree. We are cooler than they are. But at the same time, I’d guess that any Sci-Fi lit class at a school with a STEM program will be massively enhanced relative to the average literature class in STEM people. And everybody benefits from it. The literature department can probably get more of whatever they’re trying to teach across to the students when the students are not being turned off by the subject matter. And the students get a more enjoyable class, and probably better grades because they’re spending less mental energy forcing themselves to care about the topic, and have more to spend on actually doing the work.
Also, as others point out, introductory classes are not the same as what they do at higher levels.
I will admit that I wasn’t hugely impressed with the rigor of any of my upper-level HSS courses.
SF lit was OK, but not that challenging. On the other hand, it was populated by engineers.
Military History was dead easy, but that’s a subject I’ve been studying since I was in about 3rd grade. Also, it had lots of engineers.
I dropped International Relations because the professor was incoherent, and the textbook wasn’t much better.
And Engineering Ethics was great fun, but it was full of engineers who didn’t share my glee at philosophy.
I think this is somewhat biased towards “Humanities courses that Engineers actually choose to take”
X for Engineers is called X, but only for values of X where either:
* I really, really like the topic
* (Note: You should start reading this normally, but be reading this in an increasingly frantic, possibly a touch manic tone of voice as this continues) There are no term papers whatsoever, and preferably I knew something about the topic prior with bonus “I actually like this topic”. (Frantic starts here) Because I have 12-16 credits of upper-level CS courses to do, and I have no time, and 50/50 I even bother showing up because you’re on a different campus at the far end of a 20-minute bus ride, and I don’t have time to show up to my engineering classes because these 3 projects are due in 3 days and I haven’t slept in 2 and *Would be curling up into a ball right now, except he doesn’t have LITERAL TIME to have the panic attack*
Yeah…
So my humanities courses that AP things in HS didn’t cover (US, World, Euro + 8 credits of Spanish on the placement test + Lang xor Lit, I forget which) were:
* Philosophy 303: Introduction to Symbolic Logic. AKA: A semester-long rework of the first 2 weeks of the discrete math course I took the same semester. (Which I actually enjoyed a lot though, and it did actually dig into some corners that the discrete math course glossed over).
* CLCIV 385 – Introduction to Greek Mythology. AKA that class where I dug out some books my Grandma gave me when I was 4, and never bothered to show up for anything other than the first day, midterm, and final. Because I was busy, busy, busy, pass-failing, and probably scraped a B.
I probably COULD have walked into an Intro to History course and done well-ish, but I just didn’t have the time, and it would’ve been more challenging than I had energy to spare for.
So I didn’t.
If our objective is to make sure our people are ‘well-rounded’, we have two logically-consistent ways of doing so. We can either define exactly what well-rounded means and herd people into those classes that will make them ‘well-rounded’ or we can set it up so that people are encouraged to look for interesting classes outside of their current areas of interest and encouraged to take them. The first model seems to prevail. Looking more closely at my school’s STEM requirements for a BA, they want 12 hours (4 classes) with at least one class in each of physics/chemistry/geology, biology, and math/stats/CS. This does not seem a very high bar to clear, but even then, you’re herded into specific classes. On the engineering side, it’s pretty much the same. I got one HSS class where I had a substantial choice of what to take. Everything else was either a specific course or a choice from maybe half a dozen options.
The alternative would be to move electives/gen ed courses away from 3-hour courses and into 1-hour courses, with an increase in flexibility and actual breadth of education. Some of the 1-hour intros would be required or picked from a short menu, while others would be ‘anything that’s not obviously from your major or nearby areas’. Maybe require a 3-hour or two somewhere in there.
I’m not quite satisfied with this, but it seems a good start. If we’re going to push ‘well-roundedness’, we should do so in a way which exposes people to lots of fields and then lets them pursue the ones they find interesting, instead of just making job opportunities for philosophy and english majors.
Everyone at your school is required to take a computer science class? What are introductory CS classes like?
No, they’re required to take class from math or statistics or CS.
I was required to take an introductory CS class, and it was a complete joke. I did most of the assignments in about 5 minutes, and learned absolutely nothing. The only thing I remember from any of the lectures is a bit of optimization math I did for a game. It was literally the most useless class I took in all of college. Even fireworks at least gave me some information I can use in the future. (Yes, my school had a fireworks class.) At least they let us take C++. Apparently, some of the aero professors want fortran to be required.
(All of my knowledge of programming comes from doing things on my own. And it’s mostly MATLAB. Which is brilliant and wonderful in every way. At least to an engineer.)
Oh, and the above is why I don’t hold required gen-ed math in very high esteem.
I prefer the English model — college bound students get a well rounded liberal arts education by the end of high school and then undergraduate is for depth in a particular subject.
That said, in high school I don’t see why any reasonably bright child regardless of area of intellectual interest can’t or shouldn’t take calc I (i.e. an informal introduction to differential calculus in one variable) as part of a “well rounded liberal arts education “.
Because most high school students will never have any use for calculus. The same is true of trigonometry. And lots of other classes. Different people are interested in different things and find different things useful.
The list of classes that it would be neat for someone to take in order to be properly educated would fill up K-12 several times over.
First, they may not know whether or not they will need it. Second, I don’t think calculus or trigonometry is most important for knowing how to do calculus or trigonometry, rather it is the mathematical style of problem solving that is most important in a broad liberal arts education.
I agree things seem pretty tight and one could make the case for many subjects that don’t often make the cut, but unless we all move to your unschooling idea we have to settle on something. Math of one kind or another seems to be high on many people’s list. If you are going to be taking four years of math in high school, I don’t see any reason why that can’t include one year of calc I for at least a 1/3 of the class.
My basic point in that paragraph was that calc I has a reputation as being much more difficult than high school trigonometry, but that reputation doesn’t ring true to me.
No. just really. No.
You don’t know for certain that you’ll never need to know how to clean a tortoises shell. You really can’t be totally certain. That is not an even vaguely coherent reason to require all highschool students to spend 3 hours a week practicing the polishing of dummy tortoises shells.
Some people are natural linguists, some people have a very clear career track ahead of them and most of the time it has slightly less chance of requiring knowledge of calculus than the chance that at some future point someone will run into their dance studio shouting “who knows how to scrub a Testudines!?!? QUICKLY! THERE’S NO TIME!”
There’s some bits of math which are useful to almost everyone: arithmetic, very basic algebra, very basic probability but the hours of their lives are finite.
Every time someone stands up and screams that their special hobby should be included as a requirement the lives of hundreds of thousands of students are made slightly worse because hours they could be spending on something worthwhile end up spent on someone elses gigantic vanity-project.
It’s not hard to think of things which would be of more value in later life to 99% of the class, hell simply sending the kids running for the time they would be doing calculus is almost certain to have more positive life outcomes for them than spending that same time on calculus.
This is coming from someone who loved math class. I just try to avoid deluding myself about the utility of many things included in math classes to most people.
I can see a case for including a gut-level understanding of interest in everyone’s education, but it still might not work because you can’t force minds.
It’s kind of ridiculous to call it out as a “double standard”. The fact is that what is classified as “STEM” is a narrow area of knowledge, while “humanities” covers everything else.
For instance, here were the core requirements of my college (which I believe are fairly typical, except for the theology and perhaps philosophy requirements):
Now, you say it’s “not fair” because someone majoring in math or science has to take ten courses in “humanities” (if this is used to mean non-STEM), but someone majoring in “humanities” only has to take two math or science courses.
But what you’re ignoring is that someone majoring in history has to take ten non-history courses, someone majoring in French has to take ten non-French courses, etc.
But what you’re ignoring is that someone majoring in history has to take ten non-history courses, someone majoring in French has to take ten non-French courses, etc.
That’s not a particularly relevant comparison, for two reasons:
1. Your typical engineering student (or any STEM student outside of math and maybe CS) spends an awful lot of time taking non-major STEM classes. I’d say that my STEM classes were probably about 60/40 non-Aerospace/Aerospace. Some of those were directly relevant, some of them weren’t.
2. Let’s assume that all people in college have one of two brain types, S (STEM) and H (Humanities). This is an obvious oversimplification, but bear with me. Classes of the appropriate type are relatively much easier than classes of the other type. The H-brain has 2 type S classes, and the S-brain has 10 type H classes. One of these people is doing a lot more work in fields he’s bad at than the other is.
I would also disagree with your position that because STEM is ‘narrower’, it should get less emphasis. (And that Humanities covers everything else. Business, for instance, is not humanities.) Leaving aside if that has any meaning (and the fact that social sciences have to fit somewhere in there), I would argue that having some real grounding in STEM is just as important to being a Good Citizen today as having a grounding in the humanities. Technology plays a massive role in our lives, but somehow ‘The Classics’ are more important to understand than the basics of science.
You grant that this is an “oversimplification”, but my exact point is that thinking in terms of “STEM / non-STEM” is not a good way of bifurcating the entire intellectual world. It’s like thinking of religion in terms of Mormonism and non-Mormonism.
I don’t dispute the possibility that requiring more math or natural science courses may be a good idea. (I never took any because I placed out of them with APs). One problem is that most biology or physics courses are either “non-major”, in which they’re crap, or “major”, in which case there’s a fairly rigid progression building from one class to the next. They’re taught like foreign languages, where you have to start from the bottom level and do them one at a time.
If there were more natural science classes that taught worthwhile information without a mathematical focus and large amount of prerequisites, then I think it might be worthwhile to require a lot more of them.
In any case, you can see the distribution of core requirements at one college. Currently, they require two math/science courses. How many would you like to require? Four, six, eight? And what would you cut out to make room?
You grant that this is an “oversimplification”, but my exact point is that thinking in terms of “STEM / non-STEM” is not a good way of bifurcating the entire intellectual world.
How would you bifurcate it? And why should we dole out time based on how much of the intellectual world subjects occupy? How would we measure that, anyway? I find it difficult to believe that we can sweep the entirety of math and all of the sciences into the same size of category as ‘philosophy’ or ‘history’ or ‘social sciences’. (Using theology here would be unfair, I grant.)
The point is that STEM is an important sector of human knowledge, but a typical BA’s requirements for it are ‘any two or three STEM-like classes in the entire school’. So if you’re interested in biology, you can do a couple biology classes and a math class that doesn’t even touch calculus and you’re good. On the other hand, I have twice as many required classes and no choice over what area all but one are going to be in.
If there were more natural science classes that taught worthwhile information without a mathematical focus and large amount of prerequisites, then I think it might be worthwhile to require a lot more of them.
I’m in favor of more classes in all subjects which cover lots of territory at a high level. But I’m not sure that we can entirely drop the math without crossing the line from ‘learning science’ to ‘learning about science’. I’m not saying that they all need to be at the rigor of a major-type class, but physics without basic math is pretty much useless.
In any case, you can see the distribution of core requirements at one college. Currently, they require two math/science courses. How many would you like to require? Four, six, eight? And what would you cut out to make room?
To some extent, I posted to highlight the absurdity of calls for more gen eds for STEM students. Two is definitely too low, particularly if they can be filled by ‘botany’ and ‘introduction to ecology’ (to pick on the squishiest of sciences). I’d say four, including at least one math-based science.
>a math class that doesn’t even touch calculus
As a CS student, I find it odd that there can even be a university-level math class that doesn’t touch calculus. What can they teach you without calculus, group theory? Rehashes of highschool material?
Statistics, matrices, graph theory, and number theory. I had a couple university-level math classes on those, and I easily could’ve taken more.
Rehashes of high school math, I think.
(I went straight into Calc 3, so I have no actual clue.)
The latter. A lot of people satisfy their math requirements with courses like College Algebra and Trigonometry.
Also, there are plenty of course offerings in humanities for people with “non-humanities brains,” but not nearly as many STEM courses for people with “non-STEM brains.”
Aerospace engineering is narrow. STEM is certainly not narrow. Mathematics, all of engineering, and all of the sciences. That’s pretty wide.
It’s narrow in the context of comparing it to everything else.
How do we define ‘width’? I don’t have a problem saying that ‘STEM’ is narrower than ‘everything else’, but how much narrower is it? And what happens we we go field-by-field? I would place words like ‘math’ ‘physics’ ‘chemistry’ and ‘engineering’ on the same broad plane as ‘history’ ‘English’ and ‘philosophy’.
Aerospace PhD checking in. These days, it’s far less narrow than you think. It’s become more of a systems degree in a lot of places, and you basically have to know a little bit about everything that goes into a complicated vehicle – a little mechanical, a little electrical, a little mechanics, a little control theory, a little CS, and so on and so forth. It’s not the 60s anymore, and honestly, some departments are having trouble positioning themselves and selling their graduates. A lot of aerospace bachelors get hired for positions that aren’t really aerospace engineers.
When you go to grad school and specialize, there’s a bit of a bifurcation. Some specializations are really quite narrow and really only apply to one thing (e.g., astrodynamics). Some specialization apply to basically everything in the world (e.g., control theory).
So far, every subthread on this blog about education has made me feel better about the one we use. This one’s no exception.
I’m glad my country lets you study only one subject at university. I think I would do well with a broader curriculum, but I know many people who wouldn’t, and it seems pointless to force them to study subjects they aren’t at all interested in. Also, what is Calc 1, and who is expected to do it? Is this Calc 1? If so, I’m very glad I won’t go to an American university, that looks like a very easy (and hence dull) course from my perspective.
If you take Advanced Placement classes in high school and pass the associated tests, you can place out of basic classes like that Calculus one you linked. For instance, I took AP Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, U.S. History, English Language & Literature, U.S. Government, and Comparative Government. Consequently, I was able to skip a fair number of requirements (even though a couple of those weren’t counted by my college).
MIT combines what most universities call Calc I and Calc II into one Single Variable Calculus class. Calc I introduces derivatives and integrals, while Calc II covers sequences and series, as well as some advanced techniques for integration. Calc III is multivariate calculus.
Everyone who is doing an engineering, science (except bio), or math degree is usually expected to complete the three-course calculus sequence, and Diffy Q’s (differential equations) as well. You can take AP Calc AB and AP Calc BC in high school to skip out of Calc I and Calc II, respectively, assuming you pass the AP Exams at the end of the year to a level that the university considers satisfactory (most schools take anything above a 3, but elite schools like MIT might only take 5’s).
Is Calc I taken by everyone; everyone who is better than ambivalent towards maths; all STEM + economics students; mathematical STEM + economics students (excluding biology etc); or only maths and physics majors?
All STEM students are usually required to get credit for at least Calc 1, including bio students. Economics majors normally have to take calculus as well, but they can sometimes get away with taking Calculus for Business instead of regular Calculus I, which is easier.
There are plenty of students who never take calculus. As I said in another comment, usually they satisfy their math requirements with rehashes of high-school material like algebra and trigonometry.
You went to the wrong engineering school apparently. My wife graduated from RPI dual EE/CE and took photoshop and video game design as her humanities electives.
Personally, I just love learning. I have degrees in philosophy, applied math, biology, public policy, finance, and computer science. I ended up ultimately writing algorithmic trading software because it gives the most immediate reward, but I had plenty of other jobs too and enjoyed all of them, from managing a nonprofit to managing a sports bar to commanding tanks to working on the defense budget. There’s a lot out there to do in life. Thankfully, Coursera exists now, so I don’t need to waste all my money on more degrees.
… How old are you and how many years of your life have you spent in schooling?
Also, LOL @ game graphics courses being considered humanities. Just because it’s for funsies and relatively easy, doesn’t mean it’s not a technical topic.
I’m 35. Bio/phil was a dual BA that took 3 years, public policy a resident master’s program that took 2 years while I was in ROTC, the Army paid me to do the finance master’s, which I did part-time over 3 years. I did the applied math BS and CS MS online through SUNY Empire State and Georgia Tech in about 3.5 years total (the math one I already had all of the lower-division courses out of the way and didn’t need electives since it was a second baccalaureate). So really, much of this was accomplished while working. It’s not like I just stayed in school forever. I just like learning new things and I like changing careers periodically. Shit gets boring once it gets easy.
Theoretically, I actually originally planned to be a biologist, but I discovered I really love the theory but really hate lab science.
Entirely tangential, but is the BA/BS distinction meaningful or useful at all? I got my math degree along with computer science and economics and they were all BAs. I was given a choice to get either a BS or a BA in CS and I chose a BA because it would mean I could get in the same college (within the uni) as math, thus avoiding a little extra paperwork. The coursework and requirements were 100% identical
I don’t know about CS, but in engineering and the physical sciences a BA tends to be interpreted as “qualified to write about…” where the BS means “qualified to practice…”, with the more technically rigorous class and lab work in the BS program. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a BA on a resume submitted for an actual engineering job, though it’s possible I’d have overlooked someone who went on from a BA to get an MS.
It seems to vary a lot by university. Which is unfortunate in some ways because a lot of people are just going to assume that however it was at their undergraduate must be how everywhere does it.
At my undergraduate school currently the only difference between BA/BS in physics is a little more flexibility in the BA but the same overall composition on 100/200/300 level requirements. In the math department the only difference is that a BS requires a year of physics.
Well, I know my school just started offering a BS in Philosophy alongside the previous BA. Yes, I know that sounds absurd, but it apparently made it much easier for someone doing a BS to double-major.
I’m not sure that a BA in engineering would mean anything. If it’s not ABET-accredited, then it’s not really an engineering degree, and I doubt ABET accredits BA programs.
(Actually, the BS in Philosophy is the second most confusing degree I’ve ever seen. The weirdest was from a liberal arts school that partnered with an engineering school in 2+3 arrangement. The liberal arts school gave out BAs in Liberal Arts Engineering, to go along with the BS from the engineering school.)
I did my bio undergrad as a BA instead of a BS because it made it easier to double-major. If I recall correctly, the BS required an additional 12 credit hours of upper-division bio classes, so it was a meaningful difference. Not that you can do jack with a bio undergrad anyway. The ones I know who actually try to work with that are barely-paid lab rats doing work you could probably train a baboon to do. I’m glad I did something else.
Of course, there are universities that only award one of the two. All Cambridge undergraduate degrees are BAs (later “upgraded” to MAs for arcane historical reasons) whereas IIRC all MIT undergraduate degrees are BSs.
Although physical-science and engineering degrees at Cambridge tend to award a Master’s (MSci or MEng) as well as the BA. If someone under the age of 65 has *just* a BA in Engineering from Cambridge, they dropped out early.
Can anyone suggest any reason I (we?) shouldn’t consider ALL the big political ideologies as somewhat Molochian in their pure forms? Applied without regard to pragmatic human consequences they all seem to have pretty strong tendencies to become ends in themselves, driving their followers to ignore evidence and nuance in favor of trench warfare. I also observe countries with mixes of ideologies tend to perform quite well and commit few atrocities (eg. modern Germany, Australia, Scandinavia). That’s not to say we should be without ideological understandings of the world (I deeply mistrust that too), but shouldn’t we be suspicious and wary of all ideologies including our own, in the sense that they are fundamentally untrustworthy entities that are metaphorically looking for a way to become an end-unto-themselves and turn upon humanity at the first opportunity? I include everything from left to right in this, and am not really interested in whether one is worse than the others (I already know that).
Less ‘in their pure forms’ and more a tendency to elevate The Cause above what it is supposed to accomplish. It is an inevitable feature of popular movements since most individuals don’t actually have in-depth understanding of the actual ideology (séances to find the spirit of Marxist-Leninism is my personal favorite).
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” – Emerson M. Pugh
Is there some sort of proof/disproof for this admittedly catchy quote? If it is true, should we expect this to have consequences for AI research, or the practically achievable limits of performance of AI?
I’m leaning towards “No, it is not true”, because there are computer-aided designs that no human would ever come up with, but that can nevertheless be investigate and explained after the fact, for example:
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
I would still like to hear counterpoints or better explanations.
I always thought perfect self knowledge implied infinite Godelian recursion, but I may be not even wrong….
It’s too vague to either prove or disprove (which is not necessarily a bad thing for a pithy saying). Who’s “we”? What exactly does “understanding” something involve?
Let’s take a less mysterious example. Can we understand the entire system of metabolic pathways in the human body, or are we too simple? I think various research groups can map out the relevant details of this system and develop models and abstractions that enable individual humans to think and talk about it, as well as tools to predict and manipulate it. I don’t think an individual person can hold the entire thing in their mind without abstracting away the details.
Lots of things are complex but tractable. There’s no rule that a single human has to understand every part. There’s hundreds of cell types in the brain, individuals and teams can investigate one each. There’s many distinct modules or sections of the brain. Individuals and teams can investigate how each module behaves. There’s many distinct ways that cells can influence each other. Individuals and teams can investigate them in turn.
And those people can build build simplified abstractions to help people understand the higher level behavior.
It’s pretty much how humans approach any painfully complex problem.
The halting problem?
I can’t fit every line of code in a browser, the OS networking stack, the OS kernel, the device drivers, the microcode for the processor, and every aspect of the design of the processor in my head, not by a huge margin, but we can still build and iterate on all of it. We just don’t keep the information in our head, and we specialise.
Humans are hominids with the lifestyle of ants; that we’re individually limited on our own with no access to records doesn’t prevent us from doing all kinds of things collectively and with access to records.
Simply: A complete real-time understanding of every component of your brain would exceed the storage and computational capacity of your brain, which also has to run you simultaneously.
That’s irrelevant, though.
A completely accurate map of England would have to be the size of England. That doesn’t mean we can’t simplify it enough to hang on a wall without making it useless.
Brains/minds may be complex, but they’re not magic.
The only ingredients an algorithm needs in order to qualify for Turing Completeness are GOTO’s and memory. Given it’s possible to reduce “All The Algorithms We’ll Ever Need” to two primitives, I don’t see any metaphysical hurdles to reverse-engineering the brain.
If you’re worried about Halting Problem: the Halting Problem is essentially equivalent to “This sentence is false”, “A -> ~A”, Russel’s Paradox, etc. I.e. the statement is self-contradictory to begin with. A self-contradictory algorithm isn’t possible to implement in the real world, so there’s no need to worry about it (except in the lovecraftian scenario where Bleem Is An Integer and Everything We Know Is Wrong (except maybe Feminism)). If it were possible to implement self-contradictory algorithms, constructing a Universal Halt-Decider wouldn’t pose such a problem.
The Computer-Aided Design projects are just using a genetic algorithm to quickly search a large design-space. Given enough time, humans could do the same thing (albeit at a slower pace). [Obligatory xkcd]
A while ago I was reading an archive of translated WWII-era German propaganda, and came across a review by the SS of a Superman comic in which Supes fights some Nazis. One of the criticisms they have is that a Luftwaffe pilot speaks bad German: “No German would say what the pilot says”. I don’t speak German so I can’t tell you whether that’s true of my own knowledge, but it certainly seems plausible, and they should know if anyone does. But what struck me about this is that it means the article was written by a literal grammar Nazi. (related)
<3
i need to spoil this: the criticism is not, that the pilot is using improper grammar, but rather that he is speaking yiddish
(or something close to yiddish, "diss" was unknown to google translate and the next best yiddish translater i found, but it is an easily derivable article variation found in many German Dialects)
And that would of course no proper nazi pilot do.
since we are only talking about three words here, they could also be interpreted as some dialect close to Baden, but then that whole "look how badly made this is" thing wouldnt work.
That article makes no sense on that point. As a German, I can translate that the pilot says “Heavens. What is this?” in a regional dialect, not yiddish.
The other point is that the reading convention in western comics is left to right and top to bottom, so there is no way that Superman responded to the pilot’s exclamation. Superman responds to himself in the previous panel, where he rhetorically asked “Looking for trouble, eh?”.
oh you are right, himmel is definitely not yiddish. i missed that.
i am curious though, what dialect do you think this is? definitely something southern, maybe Badisch, but i cannot pinpoint it.
Of course there is the possibility, that the authors are indeed imprecise about the German phrase =)
I missed the part of the context that it was a translation from an SS newspaper. I’m not really good at the fine nuances of dialects. It does sound like southern Germany, maybe Baden as you already said, but ultimately it probably doesn’t matter. Your typical Nazi back then just hates everything jewish, and everything he hates he describes as jewish, and everything jewish he happens to like he appropriates as German. That’s the core message.
I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be Bavarian. They don’t actually have “diss”, but “des” with a very closed “e” that someone might have misperceived as “i” or rendered like that by way of exaggeration. Everything else fits and the phrase would indeed be a natural thing to exclaim in Bavarian. (It immediately brings to mind the character Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes, who is exactly the person you’d picture saying that.)
Has there been any response to Brett Hall’s critique of Bostrom’s Superintelligence? What do y’all think? http://www.bretthall.org/superintelligence.html
Or Goertzel’s critique of Superintelligence? http://jetpress.org/v25.2/goertzel.htm
Crossposted from LW: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nf7/open_thread_march_21_march_27_2016/d6wz?context=1#d6wz
Everything about Hall’s critique is wrong.
Part I is a false analogy that goes nowhere. It is wholly irrelevant, if not actually deceptive and misleading.
Part II criticizes Bostrom’s writing style, but makes no other points. (He’s apparently upset that Bostom hedges his language when making predictions. The stupidity and pointlessness of Hall’s argument should be readily apparent.)
Part III contains nothing worth responding to.
Part IV’s core argument is that computers are incapable of creative thought. Not only does this betray mystical thinking about the human mind, it is also false. Artificial intelligences have been designing circuits and other such things for many years — and often quite creatively (if bizarrely). Neural networks are built to “learn” and, based upon what they have learned, produce creative output. It is fairly simple to model the creative process.
Hall says: “Creativity might very well be tied intimately with consciousness. For to solve a problem you must be aware of a problem. And therein lies the problem: to observe, consciously be aware – of that which you do not know – requires an ingredient we simply cannot express mathematically or in any programming language. Yet.”
Creativity has nothing to do with consciousness. Furthermore, he seems to be implying that the human brain is a magical device. Consciousness seems to be nothing more than a function of neural complexity, and our silicon is getting there.
Part V tries to poke holes in the “paperclipper” concept, unsuccessfully. Hall’s argument is that no AGI would single-mindedly latch onto one motivation or goal at the expense of absolutely everything else. He is right about one thing: Paperclips are ridiculous. But replace “paperclips” with “computronium” — assume that this AGI is obsessed with increasing its own capabilities and that it needs enormous amounts of computronium to solve the hidden mysteries of the universe — and it’s rather easy to see how a godlike AI could fixate upon the attainment of computronium, to the exclusion of every other non-vital function.
Part V’s bottom line: “An AGI is a person. Not a human person – but a person nonetheless. And that means: an intelligence not fixated on a single problem for all time. Instead a person critically reflects. And creates – creates new problems, and solves them.”
But if the “problem” involves making Planck-scale attacks upon the substrate of our universe, our AGI is likely going to require resources on a cosmic scale, and eons of time.
…The goals that the AI creates for itself are unlikely to be compatible with human goals.
Part VI begins with another criticism of Bostrom’s writing style — to wit, that he likes to invent new terminology. It is not worth discussing this criticism further.
Part VI then makes a couple of inane arguments:
1. Bostrom is too pessimistic.
“To see this just switch the topic to non AGI. i.e: a human. Imagine someone said of a baby at birth: do not trust them. They will grow up to be manipulative. The potential of that baby is vast and one day it will learn better than any of us. We must be cautious. We should put it in a Faraday cage…just in case.”
This is among the worst arguments I’ve ever seen anybody make. A sufficiently advanced AGI and a human baby couldn’t possibly be more different. Human babies are known quantities — they develop and learn at predictable rates, and their capabilities are obvious to everybody. A sufficiently advanced AGI is a wholly alien intelligence.
2. Ultility functions are irrational. Instead, AGIs will use: “[…] a creative process to make decisions. That involves coming up with new theories and using persuasion (of themselves and others) to find the most rational course forward. So why is there not such a program? Because no one knows how to model – mathematically – algorithmically – in code – the creative process.”
This is nonsense which indirectly supports all of Bostrom’s arguments.
i agree. his main argument (i have only made it to part 4 so far) seems to be that since we do not know how general intelligence works, we cannot produce it. What to him seems to be reassuring is exactly the point of AI risk. since we do not know how AGI will work we better watch out that we dont accidentally make a computronium maximizer.
I have not read Bostrom, but judging from what i have read here about AI risk, Hall’s whole essay is about punching a strawman so ridiculous weak, that he starts throwing arguments,
that in fact support any serious account of AI risk.
This is among the worst arguments I’ve ever seen anybody make. A sufficiently advanced AGI and a human baby couldn’t possibly be more different. Human babies are known quantities — they develop and learn at predictable rates, and their capabilities are obvious to everybody. A sufficiently advanced AGI is a wholly alien intelligence.
That depends on your assumptions.
Yudkowsky, and following him, Bostrom, tend to take an AIXI like approach to AGI, believing that what is necessary is One Weird Trick, a magic formula that will give you full generality all at once. Shortly followed by a leap to superintelligence.
The alien ness of AGI follows from that , it is not unconditional.
Hanson and other critics tend to assume that the development of AGI will be the result of combining special purpose technologies, and will be highly incremental. Given that assumption, AGI will not be alien, because each increment will resemble the previous ones.
I replied to both over there (Brett Hall, Goertzel).
Edit: this is my bit. if you want a longer and in any way better discussion, follow vaniver’s link above
Goertzel makes an excelent critique of AI risk thinking. He takes AI risk seriously , although he comes to a more positive conclusion. His criticism of Bostrom and Yudkowsky focuses mainly on two of their hypothesis.
1. the orthoganility thesis, that is the assumption that any level of intelligence might in principle be coupled with any set of goals.
2. The conception of intelligence as maximizer of a utility function.
He argues, that intelligence is better understood in terms of Self-Organizing Complex Adaptive Systems, that supercede the conception of goals and maximizing outcomes. He especially criticizes yudkowsky’s ignorance of complex systems and emergence. In the end he does not try to disprove ai risk, though pointing out some serious issues with Yudkowsky and Bostrom, but generates different ideas about what stand to take on AI development from a broader point of view than “we must avoid the paperclip maximizer”
I considered it an excellent contribution to the debate. If there is something to respond to, it is not the formal points, on which he is right, but in how far can from his criticism really follow a less cautious approach to the possibility of unfriendly AI.
Though, as for super-intelligence. We already have a risk-minimizing method through guided breeding. If we were to be extreme in this method when it comes to selecting males, its plausible that everyone born by the *end* of this century would be multiple standard deviations above levels now, and certainly by the end of the next. Before the possibility of *soulless* artificial intelligence with only thought but no verified emotion, that idea could be considered evil. Now though, is it?
This experiment has undoubtedly been done before with animals, at least when it comes to bell-curve traits with massive amounts of interactions. Finding the closest analogy of what’s been done can be a chore, though.
The next *safest* method is through genetic engineering. Hard to say when this will be perfected, or the largest extent of how its been in animals and humans.
What are you trying to get at? The doomsday argument?
A pathway to superintelligence that nicely avoids the AI doomsday possibilities, while keeping other doomsday scenarios, such as climate change, comets, and nukes.
Wait, you totally changed the content of your post since I responded to it.
When I wrote that, it said something like “Isn’t it suspicious that we’re living here now, just as AI is beginning to surpass human intelligence in some areas?”
In any case, the problem with selective breeding / genetic engineering as a pathway to Friendly superintelligence is that we already know humans with a lot of power tend to get corrupted.
That’s a natural human tendency, yes. But remember, for any one corrupt hyper-intelligence, its competing with hyper-intelligences on the spectrum of morality.
And I slightly suspect that an somewhat edited variant of “Evolutionarry novel” hypothesis is true, that heightened intelligence tends to move people away from natural brutal methods. A slight example in the modern farming method is vegetarinism, and while women vegetarianism have highter IQ scores then typical eaters, as certain types of brutality amongst men is perhaps called more *natural*, the difference is even higher in men.
He isn’t the best author, but a few good posts.
“that heightened intelligence tends to move people away from natural brutal methods.”
That sadly isn’t true. The Nazis are of course the go to counter example.
Could some one explain to me why the left (is the the right name?) has taken to criticizing female characters that are very sexual?
Classically isn’t this considered conservative/patriarchy thing? But I am consistently seeing such critiques from feminists/the left.
Why is this?
Everyone polices gender norms.
There are a lot of prudes. Some of them are feminists, and try to use their feminism to justify their prudishness. In addition, an argument that appeals to prudery will find a receptive audience even among non-feminists, so those who want to reach a significant audience will be helped by appealing to that demographic. Because such arguments are popular with a wide audience, they are encountered more frequently than the more sophisticated feminist arguments which have more limited audience appeal.
This is my best guess as well, which brings the consensus up to two random internet people at least.
Though I should warn that these are Outside View explanations, so to speak.
I might describe the cluster of people you refer to as “Social Justice Warriors”.
Disclaimer: I am not a feminist.
Well on the ideological side, you’ve got two obvious sources. The first is so-called sex negative feminists, mostly holdouts from the second wave, who see heterosexual sex either as inherently degrading or at least as problematic as long as patriarchy exists. The second is sex positive feminists who nonetheless worry that sexualized female characters are serving more as stroke material for guys than as developed characters.
Plus there’s always just ordinary jealousy. Right or wrong, most of the time it’s other women shaming female promiscuity. There’s no reason that attitude can’t apply to a fictional character just as much as a flesh-and-blood person.
@ Dr Dealgood
The first is so-called sex negative feminists, mostly holdouts from the second wave
Wrong wave. Or, say ‘het sex’.
I thought the standard view was that Third Wave was (generally) “sex positive”, although third wave is also more fragmented in ideology.
Second Wave has some fairly archetypical sex negative examples, doesn’t it?
Ok, didn’t realize there was a practical difference there. Thanks for the clarification.
So how would you slice it up?
I think there’s a couple different concerns (at least, this is how I’ve seen people talk about it).
First, I think there’s the concern that it can come at the expense of character development – that the fact that “sexy cheesecake” is one of the assigned roles for female characters in fiction can limit the range of action and identity that women have in fiction. Especially if it’s done in a way that’s pander-y – that a writer who’s having women behave in particularly sexual ways is not doing so because of anything rooted in character development, but because they happen to like it.
Second, there’s a concern that portrayals of sex, sexuality, and sexual agency are not symmetrical across the genders. That women are portrayed in sexual ways much more than male characters, that women often have much less agency or are judged differently by media for similar sexual choices compared to male characters, etc. Sexualization of things that would not be sexual for male characters. Criticisms of the prevalence of female nudity versus male nudity, that kind of thing. And so the argument here ends up being that the sexualization isn’t wrong, as such, but that the gender gap makes it problematic.
But, again, that’s just the sense that I’ve gotten.
Those are the rationalizations. Not that those points don’t ever have any merit, but it’s very common for criticisms of sexy female characters to be made with absolutely no attention paid to the nuance, and even in cases where these points seem rather obviously not to apply.
I couldn’t tell you what lies in anyone’s secret heart. I’m just trying to explain the claims that are being made.
I would say that doing things like missing the point and deploying arguments you don’t really understand are not uncommon at the best of times, and there are plenty of people who seem to pay little attention to nuance. So, I mean, that doesn’t seem wholly unexpected to me, I guess.
When the nuance isn’t the source of the argument something else has got to be. I’d take the fact that someone can come up with multiple justifications for the same behavior as a strike against those explanations rather than for. If being a vegetarian is something done to protect animals AND save the environment AND being economically more feasible than I generally round up the argument to “it’s popular among people I like”
(disclaimer: I’m 3 years and going vegetarian)
@ii:
Well, I’m not sure. It certainly seems possible to me that – to take the vegetarian example – there are people out there who are pro-vegetarianism whose reasoning does, in fact, boil down to “it’s popular among people I like”. While at the same time, the existence of those people does not in itself invalidate any actual good arguments for vegetarianism as a position. It’s ancillary.
In much the same way, I certainly agree that there are probably plenty of people who are advancing arguments on female character sexuality just for social reasons. I don’t think that speaks to the validity of those arguments in a vacuum. And I think it is more interesting to try to understand those arguments in their strongest form than it is to point out that some people are very silly and make bad arguments because of it, or that some people are motivated by social concerns.
I just don’t see why it’s important – and particularly important in this instance – to point out the basically banal fact that some people make arguments they don’t really understand, or to treat this as a meaningful criticism of the arguments when they’re made by people who do understand them. I don’t see why we should be particularly surprised that people make bad arguments on this topic. I don’t see why people making bad arguments in this instance points to some deeper truth. I don’t see it.
@ reytes
It doesn’t really but then the question was “why does this phenomenon seemingly break political ranks” to which the answer is a rather banal “because enough people started doing it so now it doesn’t”
just like the popularity of most books and movies is 10% “found its audience” and 90% “other people were already talking about it”
I agree that the minor reason is more interesting to discuss but not that it’s the more important one.
Because there are way too fucking many completely over sexualized female characters in every kind of media. Its inescapable.
Also there’s ‘sexy’ vs ‘sexual’. Women are most often portrayed as ‘sexy’, and the very definition of that word is pretty much “sexually pleasing for (usually) men to look at.” That is not the same thing has being ‘sexual’, which is just a term to describe something as having to do with sex. I rarely ever see a woman portrayed just as a sexual being in a way that doesn’t directly appeal to male viewers.
Basically what’s happened with feminism’s stance on this is that society as a whole was very prudish, so there was basically no sexual aspect to media whatsoever. Feminists saw this as undesirable because of a whole ton of reasons that I can’t all explain in this post, but basically that when sex=dirty, bad, wrong + gender roles = women who are in any way sexual (or god forbid enjoy sex) are dirty and worthless.
So feminists had an interest in making sex less taboo, but since that cultural change has happened now sex is everywhere, but women still get the short end of the stick. Women still don’t get to be truly sexual (just look at those orgasm rates + mountains of other stuff I can’t dig up right now) but can now be marketed as Sexy!! without a good portion of society seeing it as indecent.
So now sexy women are everywhere and used to market everything and the idea of sexiness has infiltrated every young girls head at an early age, but now instead of just “women + sexuality = bad” its “women + sexuality + performing said sexuality in any number of societally deemed incorrect ways = dirty slut”
Side note: sexuality/sex for all people is never easy and accepted completely, everyone is looked down at for something, but this comment is specifically about sexualized women.
Also: The comments that answered the above post are among the worst quality I have yet seen on SSC. Everyone is up for thoughtful and careful discussion until we mention feminism, and then the comments have a totally different (judgmental and contemptuous) tone. This is really disappointing to me. I’m not asking everyone to be “””PC””” or call themselves a feminist (or even use the word feminism!), I just would like to see some better responses of topics that are just as worthy of discussion as anything else here–of which there are many things the majority of people would not consider worthy of discussion at all.
Interesting that you claim they’re the worst comments you’ve seen, considering they seem to be saying the same thing as your post. That doesn’t reflect well on you.
then I’m not sure we’re reading the same comments, because while the general gist of my comment was similar to a few others, the tone of others were extremely dismissive and prejudicial, which is not the norm for these threads. The comments were positively tame for average discussions of feminism on the internet, but lower quality than comments here discussing any other topic. To me most comments came across as: “ugh feminism why are we bringing this up? its so insignificant, but those sjws are always so offended. this is what feminists “”””think”””” is happening but they’re stupid and wrong because they always are.”
I think you’ve sort of got a point, but there’s something about feminism/gender issues that seems to bring out the bad in people, at least on the Internet. SSC is honestly one of the few places I’ve seen where one can have a discussion/debate around feminism or feminism-related topics that isn’t *totally horrible*, even if it’s still somewhat below the normal level of discourse around here. It’s kinda sad, but I think you need to grade this on a curve.
The discussion with regard to feminism or feminism-related topics is really bad here. Maybe it’s worse on 4chan or something, but that’s not saying much.
And I do feel like the standards of discussion, generally, have gotten somewhat worse here over time.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Most discussion of feminism on the net is on the level of
“SJW freak!”
“Misogynist pig!”
GENDER-BASED SLUR
BLOCKED
REPORTED
SUED
PROSECUTED
so it doesn’t take much to be better.
Where is the quality of discussion about feminism good?
The FeMRADebates subreddit seems to be decent. The quality here at SSC is not great because there aren’t many committed to arguing against the general opinion.
I would like to be clear that my own comments came not from a place of “ugh feminism” but from a place of “ugh this topic.” I normally like discussions of feminism, but far too many cases of feminists criticizing allegedly “over-sexualized” or “objectified” female characters strike me as little more than slut-shaming under cover of a pretense of feminism.
The problem with media representations of women is that there aren’t enough of them (it’s still around 1/3 of characters across movies and TV, rather than the 1/2 it should be, right?) and as a result they are insufficiently diverse. Having more of them will pretty much inevitably make them more diverse (needs of storytelling; you can’t have multiple smurfettes, once you have multiple women some of them have to be playing other roles besides just being “the girl” because redundancy is bad storytelling). Making them less sexy, or less sexualized, on the other hand, is completely beside the point and will do nothing to help produce more fully realized female characters. Indeed, it will tend to have the opposite effect, because sex is an important part of human experience, and just trying to remove it produces less human characters (I know, you only want to remove it when it’s done wrong, but that never works; there’s never enough agreement about how it’s supposed to be done).
Feminism-related discussions seem to go better at a socially adjacent blog, Ozymandias’ Thing of Things. But breaking the occasional circlejerk here on SSC is still worthwhile. Welcome to the fray, 57d.
Edit: Protagoras, your earlier comments would have seemed less hostile if they had contained less name-calling and accusations of bad faith. I agree that simply having more female characters would help in most cases, but I don’t agree that it’s sufficient. E.g., the Gor series manages to portray multiple women who seem to be basically the same.
“The problem with media representations of women is that there aren’t enough of them (it’s still around 1/3 of characters across movies and TV, rather than the 1/2 it should be, right?)”
Why should it be? Fiction isn’t supposed to be a realistic picture of the world. I would think the ratio would depend on what works for storytelling purposes. No particular reason why it should be the same as the ratio in the real world.
At a considerable tangent … . My first novel contains a female military order. Most of the institutions and technology in the novel were based on things that really existed, but that was not—I know of no historical example of anything very close.
But it worked very well as a plot device, for a variety of reasons, which is why I did it.
David, didn’t Qaddafi have a unit of female guards?
@Nita, As to my tone, slut-shaming really annoys me. WRT Gor, my point was that a greater number of female characters plus the needs of good storytelling will produce more diverse female characters. Gor is of course a fringe case, and I haven’t read enough of it to really know exactly how many female characters there are or how diverse they are anyway, but I had not been particularly under the impression that it was widely considered an example of *good* storytelling in any event.
“didn’t Qaddafi have a unit of female guards?”
I don’t know. I have seen references to an African ruler in the past with such. But that isn’t very close to the Order in _Harald_, which is more like the Templars–an independent power mostly located within a kingdom. Part of the plot involves the attempt by a new king to convert his father’s allies, including the Order, into subjects.
>So now sexy women are everywhere and used to market everything and the idea of sexiness has infiltrated every young girls head at an early age, but now instead of just “women + sexuality = bad” its “women + sexuality + performing said sexuality in any number of societally deemed incorrect ways = dirty slut”
Can you explain why you think this particular case of “X is corrupting our children” is special? And how the “normalization” of female sexuality in media leads to the “performing said sexuality in any number of societally deemed incorrect ways = dirty slut” bit?
“Women still don’t get to be truly sexual (just look at those orgasm rates + mountains of other stuff I can’t dig up right now)”
What does orgasm rate have to do with this?
I think the idea is that women don’t tend to insist on getting off during sex, because vaginal orgasms are very difficult to achieve relative to clitoral orgasms but are also much more socially acceptable.
There’s some truth to that. From what I’ve seen, a surprising number of women don’t even seem to be able to bring themselves to climax reliably and don’t expect to climax with a partner at all. It’s a trivial problem to solve in theory, since even if you’re too lazy to learn how to do it manually vibrators have existed forever, but in practice it gets tied up by women’s nervousness in asking. Maybe marriage manuals should make a comeback.
Is it a problem? Or rather is a perfidious minority pressuring women to act in ways they don’t want to, specifically to act more like men, in order to satisfy some gender-ideological crusade? What is more dangerous; a world in which not 50% of the orgasms belong to women, or a world in which the equality is enforced as an end in itself, with absolutely no pause to even consider the possibility that there might be costs involved?
This question posed with no irony for your consideration.
(Sidebar: Kudos for bucking the trend and being an anon with a recognizable gravitar. Thanks.)
I’m not really in favor of the modern idea of family and romance to begin with, so I agree with you on the broad philosophical point.
That said, the specific question here doesn’t seem like dogmatism so much as simple pragmatism. Women lose interest in sex over the course of a relationship faster than men already, see ‘lesbian bed death’ for an extreme case, and long-term relationships like marriage depend on sexual intimacy to survive. Keeping both the man and woman sexually satisfied within the relationship is important.
It’s not like their nervousness is completely baseless:
‘he says he doesn’t think it’s “natural” or “fair.”‘
‘I just don’t want you to develop a crutch in which you always need the vibrator to cum’
‘He says he wants sex to be just between us, not “some plastic piece of shit” (in his words). He basically went on and on and on about how I’m finding a substitute for him and how disgusting it is, and how I got it because I’m not satisfied with him.’
If there is a conceivable biological explanation consistent with what we see, why the need for discussions of structural oppression? Except to assign blame?
The Patriarchy cannot be overthrown until women break through the cum ceiling!
I don’t think I understand your distinction between “sexy” and “sexualized.”
Portraying women as sexy, meaning sexually attractive to men, seems like an obvious thing to do in a novel or movie, since sexual desires are a major human motivator. A sexy woman will get more attention from at least the male audience, and her sexiness provides obvious plot opportunities. One wouldn’t want all female characters portrayed that way, any more than you would want all male characters portrayed as tough, aggressive he men, although that too provides plot opportunities. But portraying a fair number that way makes sense.
Although I have to confess that my fiction is seriously deficient in both categories.
But then what does “sexualized” mean? Described “Just as a sexual being?” Does that mean a character interested in nothing but sex? I wouldn’t expect many fictional characters to fit that pattern. And, if anything, I would expect it more of male characters than female.
Or does “sexualized woman” mean “woman portrayed as of interest to the male characters only as someone to try to go to bed with?” I can see that, given how large a role that motivation plays in male behavior, but I would think if anyone is being insulted by that portrayal it would be the men.
I think one illustrative example might be, say, Power Girl, who is sexy and dresses provocatively, but as far as I know, has never been portrayed as seeking or desiring sex more than the average woman.
Power Girl might not fit, but I’m sure there are thousands of female comic book characters who do.
Feminists thought that prudishness was suppressing women, but it was also protecting them from seeing what men really wanted to see.
But why construct it that way? you used a roundabout way of saying that things men “really wanted to see” might not be so great. You seem to be implying that women don’t like the things “men want [them to do/act like]”, why does that not matter? Why is it ok that men “really wanted to see” things that many women don’t like, don’t want, and even consider harmful and degrading? Why not question whether those things are really good things to want in the first place, rather than putting the blame on the people (women) who are required to perform those things?
Because as a general principle, “someone thinks X isn’t good” shouldn’t matter. Plenty of people think homosexuality isn’t good. Plenty of people think drawing pictures of Mohammed isn’t good.
How would you construct it?
Which is basically the argument of every prude in history (except the more direct ones who just wanted to burn whores)
Some people want to see girls wrestle in oil. Some girls want to wrestle in oil.
And a big crowd of prudes from both the religious and feminist camps take the position that it “might not be so great” and so should be banned either to [pick one or more]:
1: protect the children
2: avoid offending god.
3: protect women
4: “protect” women from objectification no matter their own opinions on the matter because we know best.
Should “many” people get to dictate what people who aren’t part of that many do with their bodies or show of their bodies?
Once you’ve decided that you have the right to dictate what’s good for other people to do with their bodies you’re squarely in the same camp as the nuns and preachers no matter if you delude yourself that you have totally different reasons to sing from the same hymnbook.
Yes, it is uncharitable but nothing you’ve said has been anything but superficially different from what I’ve heard from nuns in the past.
Um, wait. I thought we were discussing characters — fictional entities created by their authors. They don’t want to wrestle in oil. They don’t want anything. They’re imaginary.
Of course, there is also plenty of fiction optimized for heterosexual women’s enjoyment at the expense of psychological realism. But some creators of mainstream media seem to want it (and sometimes have it) both ways — to sex-up their work with juicy fanservice and to be taken seriously.
@nita
I thought we were discussing protrayal of women in media , “things[many] men want to see” and implicitly things some women want to be seen doing.
the “sexy women are everywhere and used to market everything” thing.
The “sexy women” in that phrase are characters (including e.g., the ephemeral characters in ads and posters), not people. Hence the distinction between “women portrayed as sexual beings” and “sexy women”.
For instance, is this a portrayal of a woman as a sexual being, which feminists dislike because they’re totalitarian prudes?
This seems to be a common failure mode of a lot of (I don’t want to call it progressive so…) “un-conservative” policies. IE x is suppressing both y and z, we remove x because we like y but act shocked when z shows up to the party.
This reminds me a bit of the whole “women should be allowed to breastfeed/go topless in public,” thing, which I think of as a feminist issue. Like most feminist issues, it feels, to me at least, as if it’s aimed primarily at men: “hey men, stop hypocritically suppressing us: if you can go topless, we should be able to as well.”
But I also think it’s probably mostly women who actually mind seeing other women’s breasts in public. Most straight men would be quite happy to see bare breasts in public, I think, even if that meant sometimes seeing some one might rather not see. So the real message is “hey women, stop shaming other women for not being super protective of their bodies as you are.”
I feel like feminist criticism of prostitution also has a lot of this character. The ostensible message is “hey men, stop degrading women by patronizing prostitutes”; the covert message is “hey women, stop lowering the value of vaginae by selling them too cheaply.”
Oh SSC comments.
That’s what you get for hanging out in a space that’s a bit more literate than your average internet forum.
I think this is right. I’m a woman, and though I would never say so in public for fear of people verbally dogpiling me, I don’t like seeing women breastfeeding in public, especially if their breasts are clearly visible. Breastfeeding with some sort of covering over the breasts is better (though I’d still rather not see it).
I would never tell a breastfeeding woman to stop, but I don’t like seeing it and I wish women would do this in private, at least whenever possible.
Part of my objection to it is that the whole concept of drinking from a human nipple viscerally disgusts me for some reason. I don’t know why, but it does. (I was never breastfed as a baby, so that might have had some effect.)
I’m not saying it’s objectively wrong to breastfeed or anything. I’ve seen the statistics on it and agree that it’s probably a little bit better than formula feeding. I just don’t want to see it. I wouldn’t support a law banning women from breastfeeding in public, but I would like it to be generally socially unacceptable except when there is no other possible choice.
Absolutely. Most women aren’t consciously aware of the whole “female cartel with a monopoly over men’s access to heterosexual sex” thing, but they do seem to get it unconsciously, and they do socially punish women who break the cartel’s monopoly by reducing the price (i.e. marriage or some other form of commitment) of sex. Women who really want men to be forced to commit before they can get sex have basically lost already though, because both prostitution and women willing to have casual unpaid sex with men have completely eroded the cartel’s ability to maintain high prices. This causes those women to be especially vicious towards the women who ruined it for them.
Leon Kass, is that you?
Seriously, though, I feel the same way. It’s gross.
Do you think that is a common reaction to breastfeeding? I don’t, but neither do I understand why you’d share your idiosyncratic reaction.
I do think that it is pretty common for people to find injections disgusting and not want to see them. Assuming that premise, what do you think of a norm that diabetics should not inject insulin in public places, particularly dining areas?
@ Douglas Knight:
Yeah, they should do it in the bathroom.
Edit: with Anon‘s obvious caveats about emergencies.
@Douglas Knight
I’m fine with diabetics injecting insulin in public (even in dining areas) if they have to, but I also think it’d be fine if it was generally socially unacceptable to do so in non-emergencies. I have a pretty big divide in my opinion of what should be acceptable during an emergency and what should be acceptable in non-emergencies.
Breastfeeding and insulin injection are both fine in public if you need to do it. But I’d like it if people at least tried to avoid getting into a situation where they need to do it in public.
Like, if you’re (generic you) a mother and you are going out for the day in public with your baby, you should know that you will need to breastfeed him at some point, so you should try to plan to go somewhere at least semi-private at regular intervals to do so (your car would be fine for this, or a breastfeeding room if a location you’re attending has one). If no semi-private place can be found, at least bring a blanket or covering to cover yourself while breastfeeding in public.
Likewise for diabetics. If you’re a diabetic and you know you’ll have to inject insulin after eating (or before eating, I’m not sure which one they have to do), you should try to do so in a private or semi-private place rather than right in front of all the diners at the restaurant you went to. Obviously if you’re about to die if you don’t inject it right now in public, go ahead. But you should be trying to plan ahead for known issues like this.
I don’t think it’s a rare reaction, though it may not be exactly common. It does seem to be common for people to be grossed out by witnessing a child breastfeeding. That’s why it’s still socially unacceptable in many parts of the U.S., and that’s why some mothers and various types of feminists are trying to make it more acceptable.
I shared my idiosyncratic reaction because it is relevant information in explaining why I hate seeing women breastfeeding, and because the SSC comments section is unusually open and accepting towards idiosyncratic reactions people have to various stimuli.
I appear to not be the only one who feels this way, as Vox Imperatoris agrees with my feeling.
Edit: Stuff like this and this is what I’m mainly reacting to here. This (to me) demonstrates an egregious disregard for the comfort of the people around you, and I think it’s a good thing for this kind of behavior to be socially unacceptable.
I put the odds at 95% that disgust reactions are not the cause of the taboo.
@Douglas Knight
Why? And what do you believe the cause is? Most of the times I’ve seen people express a preference that mothers not breastfeed in public, it’s been accompanied by something along the lines of “it’s gross”.
I don’t think it’s possible to assert a social norm of only breastfeeding in private without it acting to discourage breastfeeding altogether. Personally, it seems to me that the public health consequences of that outweigh any idiosyncratic discomfort a very few people might feel.
(Plus if we can make public breastfeeding sufficiently common, negative reactions to it should become even rarer, at least among new generations.)
@ Harry Johnston:
Public health is a potential concern, I suppose.
I just don’t trust these things saying that bottle-feeding lowers IQ by 5 points or something. But maybe.
I guess I’m biased because I was bottle-fed.
@Anon, I can’t speak for Douglas, but my own guess is that prudishness accounts for a lot of it.
Although I’m starting to wonder whether sheer unfamiliarity is also a factor, perhaps for some of the same reasons that the idea of eating dog meat or bugs grosses us out, even though they are both normal parts of the human diet elsewhere in the world.
@Vox, 5 points seems improbable to me. But I gather the shorter-term immunological benefits are on more solid ground.
I dunno. I’m fairly prudish, eg I skip past the sex scenes when watching Game of Thrones, and I have no problems whatsoever with public breastfeeding.
@ Blue and white Anon:
Someone I knew had a clever version of the story of how it happened.
Women generally want to end up with men two or three years older than them. When the women of the baby boom hit the marriage market they were looking for men born in 1944 or 1945 and there weren’t many of them, so some of them ended up settling for lovers instead of husbands–and the immemorial sexual cartel was broken.
A bit too tidy, but I still like it.
@ Harry Johnston:
Well, I think there’s some kind of…maybe it’s not fair to call it a fallacy, but a belief common in “rationalist” circles that no standard of behavior can promulgated in society unless you can show that it’s universally obligatory everywhere.
“Why can’t I wear a t-shirt and shorts to this formal event? Couldn’t there be a society in which t-shirts and shorts were formal clothing?” Yes, there could be such a society. That does not change the fact that, in our society, they are not appropriate formal clothing.
For the same sort of reason, I think it’s okay to be against people being naked in public, or eating bugs, or having sex in the street. You shouldn’t have sex in the street because it’s offensive to everyone else. But you can’t even express the idea that “it offends my sensibilities” without sounding like a parody.
On the other hand, I think these norms of behavior can certainly be overridden if they have significantly bad consequences. For instance, people’s disgust toward homosexual behavior: it’s a very harmful norm.
In the same way, I think “smoking is acceptable even cool” is harmful norm that is better replaced with “smoking is disgusting and low-class.”
Maybe the discouragement of public breastfeeding is a harmful norm, I don’t know. But if not, there’s nothing wrong with it.
In any case, I don’t think such norms should be enforced by law. I think it’s much better to rely upon social pressure.
@Harry Johnston
If this is true, then I guess it might be better to just make it socially acceptable to breastfeed in public, depending on how beneficial breastfeeding really is. But I’m not sure it is true. There’s plenty of things that are socially unacceptable to do in public, but are acceptable and very normal to do in private, such as having sex, showering, using the toilet, changing clothing, etc.
If making sex unacceptable to do in public didn’t stop people from doing it in private, I don’t see why making breastfeeding unacceptable to do in public would stop women from doing it privately either. Both are natural bodily functions that people experience an evolved urge to engage in.
I would also be okay with the compromise position of “women should be able to breastfeed in public, but only if they cover themselves while doing it so other people don’t need to see”. Since a towel or small blanket can easily be put into a diaper bag (which mothers of infants already carry around with them anyway), it shouldn’t impose any additional burden on the mothers. Women who refuse to do this are behaving in a way that ought to be socially unacceptable.
That might be a factor for some people, I agree. It’s not a big factor for me, and I’ve never heard anyone express this opinion, but I suppose people who hold this view might be too afraid of being dogpiled on to express it.
Still, I’m inclined to believe the “ew gross” factor is a larger reason for the taboo than prudishness.
@Nathan
Huh, it’s the exact opposite for me. I watch all the sex scenes in GoT, but I don’t like seeing breastfeeding. Mostly because breastfeeding grosses me out, while sex does not (though I also watch GoT alone; if I was watching it with other people I might want to skip the sex scenes due to awkwardness).
Of course, I still wouldn’t want to see people having sex out in public places, and I’m very glad it’s socially unacceptable to do so.
Edit: Missed a part I wanted to respond to.
Unfamiliarity probably is a factor. I doubt very many people living in, say, rural African villages where women don’t even wear shirts and where mothers with babies always breastfeed in public are disgusted by it.
But that’s not our society. In our society, it’s unfamiliar and many people find it disgusting, and I’m not so sure we should make it familiar because I don’t think socially allowing women to breastfeed in public when they could fairly easily avoid doing so (including by simply covering themselves momentarily) brings us much of a benefit.
If someone can think of a strong societal benefit for making public breastfeeding socially acceptable, I could support it despite my personal dislike of the practice. But the health benefits of breastfeeding are tiny (though real), and mothers can still give those benefits to their babies simply by privately breastfeeding, or by pumping and then bottle-feeding the child breast milk.
Also, I do want to reiterate that, like Vox, I don’t want public breastfeeding to be illegal.
@Vox, it makes a difference though. If the reason it makes some people uncomfortable is just unfamiliarity, then it will stop being a problem once it is familiar, so the harm is entirely one-sided, at least in the long run. If there are other reasons why breastfeeding makes people uncomfortable, it isn’t that easy.
I would argue that discouraging breastfeeding is a harmful norm and encouraging it a helpful one. But if there are a significant number of people who would still be upset by it, even once it became the norm, it might be necessary to reconsider.
I think there is a mixture of disgust, prudishness, and discomfort at viewing something very intimate (which I guess is a sort of prudishness, though it feels distinct to me? Like, seeing a couple look longingly into one another’s eyes for a long time on the subway could make a me a little uncomfortable, even if they aren’t actually doing any PDA).
1. You’re seeing a boob, which many people think of a sexual 2. You’re seeing a human body excrete something, which many people think of as private/gross 3. You’re seeing something non-romantic, but very intimate. In other words, breasts in general have a complex and potentially confusing set of associations in many minds: sometimes sexual, sometimes nurturing, or even both. None of these feelings are feelings most people expect to feel riding on the subway.
I think number 3 is probably my biggest problem with it, though I don’t really mind that much. It feels sort of like you’re witnessing something that, while not inherently “gross,” nevertheless should be private. I think at least draping a blanket or something over yourself is a reasonable compromise.
This relates somewhat to something which has always bothered me: why is it okay on American TV and movies to show someone’s head exploding, but not sex, nor even a bare breast, assuming we’re not dealing with at least a PG13? This always seemed a really f-ed up priority to me.
The ostensible reason is maybe people are more worried about children trying to imitate sex than violence, but I have a friend who theorizes that people feel subtly empowered/adrenaline rushy when viewing violence, and that is an emotion most people are okay feeling in public/in front of others; viewing sex and naked bodies makes people feel turned on and/or vulnerable, and those aren’t emotions most are comfortable experiencing in public.
@Anon, to nitpick, it isn’t socially unacceptable to shower in public, only in mixed public. And most of your other examples are things that we’re more strongly motivated to do (for one reason or another) so I think that’s an apples-and-oranges comparison.
Empirically speaking, breastfeeding was in fact quite uncommon at one point. So I think there’s good reason to be concerned that any social pressure against it would be risky.
@Harry Johnston
This is true, and you are right that sex and using the toilet are more powerfully hardwired into our evolved behavioral matrix, but I think this only happened because it became trendy not to breastfeed.
I don’t want it to be trendy not to breastfeed. I want women to want to breastfeed, so their children can receive those small but real benefits of it. I just want them to do it in private, or at least in semi-private (like with a blanket over them, or in their car, or something). Even just having mothers face away from other people while doing it would be better than this.
Is it really unreasonable to want mothers to not blatantly display their breasts to the unconsenting public when there are many, many ways they could avoid doing so while still feeding their baby?
Now, maybe it’s impossible to discourage public breastfeeding while not making non-breastfeeding trendy and thus very popular, but if it is possible, that’s what I’d like.
Women of my generation (I am 22) seem very reluctant to shower in front of each other. It’s getting pretty socially unacceptable to do this even when only one sex is present. From what I’ve heard, young men are starting to feel the same way.
When I was in high school, no one showered after gym class because the showers were not private. The fact that boys and girls had separate locker rooms didn’t seem to matter much. Girls didn’t even want to change into or out of their gym clothes in front of each other, and would go to great lengths to conceal themselves from each other while changing.
@ Anon:
As a young man of around the same age (23), the sentiment was the same at my high school. We actually had private shower stalls (though people didn’t use them just after gym class), and in any case no one stripped down naked in public. I have never been naked in public in my life.
Mothers need to leave the house sometimes, and babies need to eat frequently and on no convenient schedule. Expecting all breast-feeding to take place at home is not practical; norms against breast-feeding in public round off to anti-natalism.
Bottles are both less nutritious and less convenient. They are yet another thing to carry around, and babies need to be trained not to reject them. Plus, mommy still needs to be milked regularly, or things become quite uncomfortable for her.
On the other hand, expecting a blanket or some other form of cover is entirely reasonable, and women whining about that need to get off their high horse.
Are you sure there is no prudishness involved here?
I don’t see any other reason to object to someone displaying their breasts if they are comfortable with doing so, particularly given that they have a practical reason.
As it happens, I have a personal foible that makes me unwilling to shower or change in public, so I can sympathize. But I don’t think this is a positive thing for society as a whole, and it worries me.
@Jaskologist
I’m not expecting mothers to only breastfeed at home. I just don’t want them doing it in public in full view of people. Breastfeeding in a specially designated breastfeeding room, or in the bathroom, or in their car, or in any other private space they can find is fine with me.
Less convenient, absolutely. But I don’t think they’re less nutritious, if we’re talking about breast milk that has been pumped and then placed into a bottle. It’s literally exactly the same milk as the milk babies get when they drink it right from the breast.
Is there something about the process of putting it into a bottle that makes it less nutritious?
The training factor for the babies is a good point, as is the point that women who do this have to pump regularly. That’s why I don’t think pumping and then bottle-feeding the pumped milk is the perfect solution, though women who want to should certainly do so. I think it’s a much better idea to just encourage breastfeeding women to breastfeed privately, or semi-privately, or at least not in blatant full view of the public.
Yes, I agree! This isn’t my ideal solution, but I’d be fine with this being the social norm. It’s way better than women breastfeeding uncovered, at least.
Sometimes I wonder if some women actively enjoy showing the public their breasts while breastfeeding, but simply won’t admit it. It would explain why some women are so resistant to the idea of covering themselves with a towel or blanket while publicly breastfeeding, despite the fact that this compromise solution gives them everything they say they want (namely, the ability to breastfeed anywhere, even places without breastfeeding rooms).
@Harry Johnston
I don’t think so. The point of the sentence you quoted was that the public was unconsenting. They didn’t choose to view the breastfeeding mother’s breasts. She imposed it upon them, even though she could have gone to a more private location, or covered herself with a blanket while breastfeeding.
I like seeing breasts when I’m consenting to view them (such as in, say, GoT sex scenes like we were talking about upthread). That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy seeing random women’s breasts at any time whenever those women choose to expose them, even if it is for a good purpose.
Many straight women enjoy seeing men’s penises in certain contexts (like when it’s her husband/boyfriend’s penis and they’re going to have sex). That doesn’t mean they have to enjoy seeing random men’s penises whenever a man on the street chooses to show his to the public.
Also, recall that I find breastfeeding itself to be disgusting, not breasts. So seeing a woman breastfeeding bothers me more than if a woman just came up to me and showed me her breasts (though I don’t want that to happen either).
I think it’s a neutral-to-mildly positive development. I don’t really know what society gains from having nudity (even among single-sex groups) be socially acceptable. Society probably doesn’t gain much from it being unacceptable either, which is why I think the effect is probably neutral. But if there is an effect, I’d guess it’d be in the positive direction, since people seem to genuinely like not having to be nude in public (even when around only the same sex).
Some of the women who object to covering up in public also object to men looking at them (even incidentally) when they breastfeed or reacting at all at seeing it. This is annoying and not because of prudishness.
Other women see no problem being in a conversation with a mixed-sex group while breastfeeding, which I find rather embarrassing. I guess that would be prudishness.
Speaking as a male, I don’t want to try to claim that I understand why some women don’t like the idea of covering up the baby while breastfeeding, but I can imagine several possibilities.
The most obvious is simply that agreeing that you should cover up might seem like a concession that you’re doing something shameful. Another is that it might upset the baby, or simply be uncomfortable for the mother; breastfeeding can be difficult enough as it is.
They didn’t choose to view her elbows, either, but that’s unlikely to generate complaints.
I suppose treating visible breasts as something inherently sexual isn’t exactly prudishness, but I’m struggling to find a better word for it.
Interesting question. I think my opinion is that any widespread irrational phobia is inherently unhealthy for a society, regardless of the specific details.
PS – I seem to recall that bottled breast milk does have health implications, but I may be mistaken. I would assume it isn’t the process of putting it in the bottle, but simply the delay.
@The Nybbler
This is a really strange reaction. It kind of reminds me of the sealioning thing, where people want to be able to say/do something in public but don’t want anyone else commenting on it/looking at them doing it.
I don’t think I’m a prude (though maybe I’m wrong about that), but I would leave a conversation and location if a woman started breastfeeding her baby right in front of me without covering up with a blanket. I wouldn’t tell her to stop, or say anything to her about it, but I would make any excuse I could to leave, or just walk away without an excuse.
If she really feels she must breastfeed in public right at that moment, fine, but unless she’s really doing it for an exhibitionist thrill, I do not need to be present for it. And if she is doing it for an exhibitionist thrill, she ought to hire people to watch her do it, not try to make people give her the thrill for free.
@Harry Johnston
I can see how some people might view it as a concession to the idea that breastfeeding is shameful, but I don’t think it really is. There’s a lot of things people do in private (and not in public) that are in no way shameful.
For example, showering is becoming increasingly a private affair, and yet it is not shameful to tell people that you shower. In fact, it’s shameful not to shower.
I don’t see why breastfeeding couldn’t be a thing that is good or even admirable to do in private (or in as close to “private” as you can get), but which is not acceptable to do in public except in extreme circumstances.
Edit: Forgot to respond to the other part.
Yes, using a blanket might be uncomfortable for the baby or mother. But is it necessarily so? I think a baby that was accustomed to it would not be bothered, and I think trying to get babies accustomed to something they initially don’t like (a blanket over their heads) is more morally acceptable than trying to get adults accustomed to something they don’t like (seeing breastfeeding).
My intuition says that it makes a difference that the baby’s objection is rational (!) while the adult’s objection isn’t. But I’m starting to feel that I’m getting out of my depth here, so don’t take that too seriously.
@Harry Johnston
I think breasts are inherently sexual, because a very large proportion of humanity (straight men, bisexual men, lesbian women, and bisexual women) finds them sexually attractive, while only a tiny proportion of humanity finds elbows or knees attractive.
Whether something is sexual (to me) depends on whether it is a common and normal thing to be sexually attracted to. And since about half of the world’s population finds breasts sexually attractive, that makes them sexual.
(If it was common and normal to be attracted to elbows, I’d say people should cover their elbows whenever possible too.)
Now, yes, breasts also have a non-sexual purpose (breastfeeding). But that doesn’t invalidate their sexual purpose (to look nice and attract men for the purposes of reproductive copulation).
Ah, I don’t, so that’s why we disagree on this. I think it’s fine for society to have irrational phobias, as long as those phobias don’t cause serious harm. And I don’t think a societal phobia against public nudity causes harm.
Edit:
Yeah, I’m not super sure if my point there is right. It just feels more wrong to try to change an adult’s preferences than to change a baby’s preferences, especially since having a blanket over your head doesn’t hurt or anything.
Also, the baby only needs a blanket over its head when its mother is breastfeeding in public and can’t find a more private place to do it. It’s not necessary during every breastfeeding session, some of which will take place at home. And they don’t need it at all anymore after they’ve been weaned, whereas if breastfeeding in public was socially acceptable, adults like me would never be able to have an end to our negative experience without becoming hermits.
Time-limited bad experiences are generally less bad then indefinite ones.
I dunno. Elbows and knees are indeed … I guess we would say specialized interests … but I think most heterosexual men find women’s legs and faces to be sexually attractive.
(Oh, and the nudity phobia is certainly causing at least some harm; unless I’ve misunderstood, your own experience confirms that, in that you refrained from showering when you would otherwise have preferred to do so.)
@Harry Johnston
Hmm…this is true (I am a bisexual woman and I also sometimes enjoy seeing the faces and legs of particularly attractive women). But I don’t think the intensity of the “wow that’s hot” response is nearly strong enough for me to support having women cover those body parts in public. If faces or legs caused instant, massive sexual arousal for men, I probably would want those body parts covered, but I don’t think it’s that strong of a response. Of course, not being a man, it’s hard to be sure.
It never occurred to me to look at it as a harm, but I supposed it could be viewed that way. Still, I’d rather they just put up stalls* around the showers so people could shower privately rather than trying to dismantle the preference not to shower publicly.
That way, we could satisfy both the preference to shower after gym class and the preference not to shower or be naked in public.
*And when I say stalls, I don’t mean the kind of stalls they have in American public bathrooms, where you can see under them and through the cracks. I mean real stalls that are difficult if not impossible to view through from the outside.
I’m not crazy about seeing breast feeding, though my reaction isn’t nearly as strong as some of the people posting here.
Still, I’m going to make a case for not opposing breast feeding in public. Having a negative reaction to it can’t be a baseline human norm. Women have been breast feeding babies in the sight of other people through the vast majority of human evolution.
Taking care of children is work, and some of the benefit of that work goes to society in general. I don’t think raising children should be made harder than necessary.
We do get the question of freaking the mundanes– if you think people are having an irrational reaction to something you think is harmless, is it bad to expose them in the hope of eventually desensitizing them? I could argue either side of that.
@Anon, I think that’s kind of a circular argument, since if we made women cover up their legs and faces, exposing them would produce the same sort of response, because it’s the very fact that they’re kept covered that makes the exposure so titillating.
(In most of western Europe, I’m reliably informed, public nudity is commonplace and causes no more arousal than, say, women wearing bikinis at the beach do in the US.)
As for shower stalls, that’s still a little bit harmful, because it means an additional and otherwise unnecessary expense. But granted the main problem is when the infrastructure hasn’t caught up with changes in public mores, or when different sections of the public have disparate views.
Nudity being accepted and normal, at least in some contexts, is positive in a few ways. It makes for less embarrassment when one accidentally shows body parts one wasn’t intending to show, it helps reduce body image issues when you see a wide variety of other people’s bodies without photoshop and special lighting, and it weakens the link between nudity and sex; more non-sexual nudity means that when you do see it, it’s less distracting.
Not advocating for everyone walking around naked all the time. It would be good if we were at least at the point where almost nobody cared about being nude in places like locker rooms, private-access swimming pools, etc.
Breastfeeding is not trivial. It has to happen every 3 hours or so, the baby has to cooperate, and if anything fails to go smoothly, we get a screaming infant. So, I’m OK with mothers doing whatever they need to help it go smoothly. Baby doesn’t like having a blanket over its face? Don’t cover up. Baby fails to latch on if you’re nervously huddling face-first into a corner? Do it in the open.
Also, most places provide no private corners except for toilets. And toilets are for shit and piss, not for eating. (Not to mention that the other patrons might need to use them.)
Some people feel disgust when they see fat people, for example. And many women feel that men’s bared forearms are sexy. But that doesn’t mean that we should institute a social norm against fat people appearing in public, or shame men for rolling up their sleeves.
I hate to say this kind of thing, but somehow Europeans seem to have figured out how to breastfeed their children without displaying a lot of naked breast to everybody and without making a fuss over it…
“and it weakens the link between nudity and sex”
Is that clearly a benefit rather than a cost? It eliminates, or at least weakens, one way of getting sexually aroused.
Suppose we eliminated the link between all visual experiences and sex. There goes the video porn industry. More frustrated men. Possibly more rapes–there is some evidence that online porn is a substitute not a complement. Maybe more men jumping into unwise marriages because they are desperate for sex.
You have to look at the downside as well as the upside of hypothetical social change.
@ Creutzer
The rate of breastfeeding is very heterogeneous in Europe, and way below the rate in the countries where public breastfeeding is completely accepted.
I’ve only seen a woman breastfeeding in public once here (on a bus). Luckily, no one said anything. It seems that the acrimony around this issue in the United States is due to some people harassing mothers while they’re breastfeeding, and other people pushing back against that with “nurse-ins” and defiant photos.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Yeah, I agree that disliking seeing breastfeeding can’t be a human social norm (though I think the disgust reaction people have when they see bodily fluids in general is an evolved trait, which is probably being misapplied to breast milk by accident because evolution isn’t perfect).
I’m fine with the idea of making having children harder than necessary. There’s a lot of things we legally require parents to do that aren’t strictly necessary for the child’s survival, and there are even more things that parents are socially expected to do or not do that are harder than necessary.
I agree that having public breastfeeding be socially unacceptable makes the lives of mothers harder than necessary, but I’ve also mentioned a lot of compromises that would make it fairly easy for them to keep going out in public and be able to feed their baby (covering up with a blanket, breastfeeding in the car, or even just turning away from the people you’re with/near while breastfeeding so they can avoid seeing it). That last one is especially easy, as it literally takes like 2 seconds to turn around before unbuttoning your shirt, so I’m not so inclined to feel like this is an unreasonably large burden on mothers (neither is the “use a blanket” solution, to me, but some people feel differently).
@Harry Johnston
Is it really the fact that genitalia are covered up that makes them so titillating for straight men? I didn’t think it was. I thought it was an evolved trait, and I figured that that’s why the massive free availability of more internet porn featuring vaginas than any man could ever watch hadn’t reduced men’s general desire to see vaginas.
That’s interesting about Western Europe, but I find it kind of hard to believe that men there don’t get aroused when they see completely naked women at the beach. Is this really true? I could see them getting less aroused, but it’s hard to believe that such a strong evolutionary response (getting an erection upon viewing a woman who appears to be sexually available and is willing to be naked near you) would disappear just because they see it all the time.
And yeah, putting stalls around the showers does cost a bit more, but if we’re going to be funding public schools out of tax dollars anyway (including all the massively frivolous stuff schools do and buy), then we may as well shuffle a bit of that money towards modernizing locker rooms to meet today’s mores. It’s a lot less wasteful than half the stuff we currently fund.
Private schools should also do it, simply because it’s what kids want, and if the kids are unhappy with the locker room facilities, they might convince their parents to send them somewhere else (meaning the school loses those tuition dollars). In fact, I’d guess private schools are more likely to have already done it, due to this factor, but I’ve never been to any private schools, so idk.
@Cadie
I agree that public nudity being acceptable does make it less embarrassing if you accidentally show a body part unintentionally.
The body image issue I don’t really agree with though, simply because I think the fact that many people have body image issues is because they’re objectively unattractive, and being objectively unattractive takes a harsh toll on a person’s happiness and self-image. The huge rise in obesity rates in the modern day is probably the #1 cause of poor self-image (and lest you think I am merely being cruel, I myself am fat and have poor self-image; I just don’t think it’s irrational or unnatural, and in fact believe it’s entirely normal to have poor body image when you actually look really bad).
I think the best cure for poor body image would be for the pharmaceutical industry to invent a weight loss pill that actually works.
As for weakening the link between nudity and sex, I (like David Friedman) am not certain that’s a good thing. I kind of enjoy nudity being sexual. I like that it’s an easy arousal trigger. In this day and age of massive porn availability causing erectile dysfunction in young men, I don’t think getting rid of an arousal trigger that actually usually works (seeing a real life naked woman in front of you) is a good thing.
@Nita
I totally agree that if the baby needs to eat and simply won’t do it with a blanket on its head, the mother should remove it. But I don’t think babies can even tell if their mother is facing away from her companions towards a wall. As long as she isn’t getting a heightened emotional response from doing so (which the baby can pick up on), I don’t see any reason the baby would be aware of it. I never said the woman needed to “huddle” in a corner. I just think it would be polite to face away from the people you’re near if you need to breastfeed and can’t use a blanket for whatever reason.
I honestly can’t understand why anyone would object to this, except for people who enjoy having other people watching them breastfeed.
You say “most places provide no private corners except for toilets”, but…they do? When I say “face the corner/wall,” I’m not expecting the woman to go into another room. Literally any room that has 4 walls will have 4 corners, and even if there’s stuff in the corners in her way, there’s still 4 walls, and presumably at least 1 wall won’t have people between her and it (so facing that wall does a fairly good job of avoiding having other people seeing it).
And about toilets, yes, they’re for defecating and peeing in. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently disgusting to breastfeed in there, unless you’re planning on rubbing your nipples on the toilet seat before putting them in your baby’s mouth. And yes, other people might come in to the bathroom, but I think it would be wrong for them to object to a mother breastfeeding in there, since she’s obviously trying to do it as privately as she can (I’m imagining her doing it not inside a stall, which someone else might need if all the other stalls are taken. Just standing by the sink out of the way or something).
I change clothes in public restrooms all the time for reasons. The fact that people poop in there doesn’t mean my new clothes are just like…inherently fouled, unless someone rubs poop on them or something. And for the same reason, the fact that the milk is leaving a woman’s breast in the restroom doesn’t make it dirty, which means it’s fine for the baby to drink.
About fat people: I agree, but only because it’s incredibly hard to lose weight. If losing weight were as easy as pushing a button or swallowing a pill one time, I would want a social norm against appearing in public while fat, and I think one would organically appear by itself in such a world.
About men’s forearms: That’s a niche sexual interest. Yes, there’s a reddit about it. There’s a reddit about many niche sexual interests. I’m sure there’s one about My Little Pony (I’m not going to go check); that doesn’t mean we need a social norm where all horses need to be clothed.
Breasts, vaginas, penises, and butts are in a whole other category. They’re, well, core sexual interests. Almost everyone is interested in at least one, and all 4 have billions of admirers around the world. I think saying that these four should be covered, while forearms and elbows are optional is reasonable.
Also @Nita
In your second post, you mentioned something about people harassing breastfeeding mothers and then mothers doing feed-ins and stuff. I just wanted to say that despite my personal dislike of the practice, I don’t harass breastfeeding women and I think it’s wrong to do so. The only thing I’d do that might make a breastfeeder uncomfortable is leave abruptly if one started breastfeeding in front of me, but I wouldn’t say anything rude or tell her she should stop.
You are a prude. The modern focus of prudery has just shifted slightly. It used to be targeted at sex, but now it is targeted at reproduction. We would speak ill of a woman getting it from the whole Theta Chi house, but having six children? That’s just low-class.
“and it weakens the link between nudity and sex”
Is that clearly a benefit rather than a cost?
Thank you. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. I’m not even allowed to enjoy good wholesome nudity now? I may need to take back what I said about prudery being redirected.
I will weigh in on the side of “more acceptable venues for semi-public, non-sexual nudity would be a good thing.”
I think being obsessive about hiding one’s naked body encourages an attitude of shame and promotes bad body image. If what you and nobody else sees when you strip down in front of the mirror doesn’t match the fashion models and the porn stars then you may think there’s something wrong, given that you rarely if ever see average human bodies of all ages.
Japan also has a concept called “nude interactions,” which means, basically, “honest interactions with no pretense.” That is, you can trust what people say to you at the bath house. This is, in part, because Japan is so repressed/non-confrontational that people have to be either drunk or naked to express their real feelings, but I can say from personal experience that going to a bath house with same-sex friends is a nice homosocial bonding experience. One simply can’t have as many pretensions and barriers and so on when everyone involved is nude.
And I don’t think it desexualises nudity. Half of Japanese porn is set at a bathhouse (usually where a women somehow accidentally enters the men’s side or whatever). And, of course, locker rooms, etc. are common settings for gay porn, both here and in Japan. I don’t think one could ever entirely “desexualise” nudity. I think what happens instead is that mild titillation becomes not so wildly unacceptable. Certainly I don’t think nudists stop being turned on by the naked bodies of their partners; they are probably just better able to compartmentalize nudity in different contexts and/or more okay with getting slightly turned on in a situation where sex itself is not called for (I think maybe the real function of prudishness as, to some extent, of marriage itself, is to banish sexuality and sexual tensions from occupying such a prominent and non-productive place in peoples’ daily interactions).
Now we’re weirdly okay with everyone wearing super revealing clothing in public but we can’t be naked in front of our same-sex buddies even in the steam room. This seems to me to be a bit messed up. I’m not sure what the better attitude is toward truly public dress, as in, what you’re wearing while out on the street (though I do find it disappointing how few people bother to look nice anymore: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/122108.html), and maybe it would be too distracting and/or ruin the anticipation if everyone were running around nude in mixed sex, public contexts, but I do think the disappearance of same-sex and/or semi-private spaces like bathhouses where nudity is accepted or even expected, is a shame.
To Vox and others who are phobic about showing their naked bodies even in places like locker rooms and among same-sex friends: why? I mean, what about the idea bothers you?
To add a bit of facts here:
(1) Insulin is not an medication one would take in an emergency. Insulin lowers blood sugar. The effects of high blood sugar, while harmful, are gradual. Even when my BS is high enough to cause me discomfort; I am still healthy enough to walk to a bathroom or corner. If my blood sugar and ketones were high enough to incapacitate me, I’d need a hospital, not just insulin. LOW blood sugar can be an emergency, but that isn’t what insulin is for.
(2) As someone who used to go to bathrooms to inject, it is a real nuisance, and, with modern insulin pens (let alone pumps) injection can be very discrete. I think non-diabetics should learn to deal.
@ Anon:
When we’re talking about bottle-feeding, I’m definitely thinking of baby formula. And I think most other people are, too. Not pumps.
I was fed baby formula, I think because my mother had trouble breastfeeding. And it was definitely in vogue for several decades to use formula over breastmilk because it’s more “civilized”. Not to mention more convenient for mothers. For instance, I was able to mix up / heat up formula and feed my little brother if necessary.
So that’s what the health dispute is about.
@ Jaskologist:
So she’s a “prude”, so what?
Is it that terrible to have social standards of behavior?
Turning away from the people you’ve talking with isn’t going to work in a lot of restaurant seating.
Also, turning away is a social cost for the mother (not being part of the conversation to the same extent), though having a hard time seeing breast feeding is a social cost for you if she doesn’t turn away.
” I think the disgust reaction people have when they see bodily fluids in general is an evolved trait”
Sweat? Semen? Blood? (people shouldn’t be inhibited from helping someone on their side who’s wounded)– I want to see some information about reactions to body fluids in different cultures.
So far as I know, all human cultures have at least a little something in the way of clothing, but sometimes it’s very little indeed. I assume there might be some slight background arousal, but I don’t think people can afford to get thoroughly aroused at routine nudity, and I’ve heard of Americans getting used to nude beaches.
“The huge rise in obesity rates in the modern day is probably the #1 cause of poor self-image (and lest you think I am merely being cruel, I myself am fat and have poor self-image; I just don’t think it’s irrational or unnatural, and in fact believe it’s entirely normal to have poor body image when you actually look really bad).”
Venus of Willendorf! I don’t think that statuette was made with the pathetic hand tools of the era because people thought she looked bad.
“I honestly can’t understand why anyone would object to this, except for people who enjoy having other people watching them breastfeed.”
Or because they like pushing other people around, demonstrating that they can do things that make others uncomfortable, hence establishing their superior status. I may be mistaken, but I see that motive in a fair amount of behavior along lines of this sort.
My fairly informed opinion (not that anyone asked, but giving opinions to strangers has apparently become a hobby of mine):
It is perfectly normal for straight men to be aroused by women’s most prominent secondary sexual characteristic, and also for them not to want to be aroused randomly in public (although that ship has long left port thanks to the advertising industry), so women should generally try to take other’s feelings on the matter into consideration.
But, a quick flash of nipple or whatever is vastly preferable to a screaming infant, a sound I suspect evolution designed to be particularly grating.
And, anyone asking a woman to cover up with a blanket or go to the restroom should try having a picnic in a burka or in the public restroom and see if it is enjoyable.
Debatable whether it is more convenient. It is more convenient for mothers who need sitters, and less so for mothers who are tending the child themselves, barring physiolgical or psychological difficulties. For instance, no mix up/ heat up necessary.
@David (re desexualization of nudity): I don’t think that’s likely to be a problem. My guess is that softcore pornography would only be slightly affected, and hardcore pornography would be almost completely unaffected. But it might be interesting to see whether nations with a relaxed nudity taboo consume less porn. (I do have the impression that they’re mostly in the same parts of the world that have the lowest birth rates, but I think that’s just a coincidence!)
@Anon: I think it’s contextual. A woman who is willing to be naked with you in particular is different from a woman who just happens to be naked and couldn’t care less whether you’re around or not. There’s also good reason to think that full nudity is different to toplessness, since almost all cultures seem to expect most people to cover their genitals most of the time, whereas there seem to be very few pre-monotheistic cultures in warm climates have a corresponding taboo against visible breasts.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that the problem for men in nudist colonies isn’t so much that they get aroused more often than normal as that they have a harder time hiding it. 🙂
Personally, I’ve seen pictures of nudist beaches and don’t find them particularly arousing. On the other hand, some people certainly do, and while I suspect that’s a relatively rare fetish I could be mistaken. I’ve also visited a clothing-optional beach once when I was around your age, and while I don’t recall there being any naked women, some were topless. To the best of my recollection, the only aspect of the visit that aroused me was the vague hope that the girl I was visiting the beach with would follow their example. 🙂
@onyomi: for my part, there’s no reason I’m aware of for my dislike of being naked in front of other men, any more than there’s any reason for my fear of spiders (mostly under control) or of heights (not so much). I assume it’s just an aspect of my GAD.
@David (re motive): it perhaps wouldn’t be too inappropriate to compare public breastfeeding (as an act of protest) to gay pride parades? There might or might not be mixed motives in any given case, but they did work!
It just feels more wrong to try to change an adult’s preferences than to change a baby’s preferences, especially since having a blanket over your head doesn’t hurt or anything.
Then I suggest that the few affected adults wear blankets over their own heads at all times. Lest they catch an unwanted glimpse for the split second it takes to look elsewhere.
I’m really liking all of these suggestions that we require women to carry around a sheet to cover themselves up, in case someone catches them breastfeeding. We could call it a “birth canvas” since it is a piece of canvas being used to cover up a newly born human. Then, since that’s kind of an awkward phrase, we could make some kind of cute portmanteau out of it. Something like “BirKa,” or “BurCa,” or something along those lines. It’ll be great! :op
As the husband of a woman who has breastfed our two children, occasionally in public, I believe I can offer some small insight based on my wife’s experience.
My first observation is that people without children tend to overestimate how easy it is to do anything with children. Just popping out to the car to breastfeed is an ordeal, especially after you’ve already presumably loaded and unloaded the car once just to get inside the mall (or where ever).
My second observation is that most people tend to be unaware of the social pressure that mothers with young children are subject to when they go anywhere in public. When I (a father) take my toddlers somewhere and they behave like hooligans, I tend to get knowing and sympathetic looks, like “oh, dad’s just doing his best.” Women tend to get what could best be described as “icy stares.” Admittedly, this is super anecdotal, but I think a lot of young mothers are self-conscious to the point of anxiety already whenever they’re in public and adding on the anxiety of breastfeeding in public is not helpful. Keep in mind that a screaming baby has precipitated the public feeding.
My third observation is that my wife at least is peeved by the fact that Victoria’s Secret has boobs plastered all over their storefronts, and that’s about how much boob you see from uncovered breastfeeding and it feels hypocritical that utterly superfluous lingerie boob is totally fine, but modest food boob is somehow unacceptable. I get the sense from my wife that this complaint is more about venting than justice…
My fourth observation is that, at least in my experience, exposure to breastfeeding really made me a lot more comfortable with it, to the point that it hardly even registers when I see it in public.
This is something I never thought about before I became a dad, and my takeaway is that I think it is a worthwhile goal of society to make mothers feel totally comfortable mothering in public, especially because so many women may be struggling with postpartum depression or other issues that make them not want to go out in the first place. It’s pretty easy (dare I say, trivially so?) for everyone else to deal with and it makes a huge difference for moms.
> My third observation is that my wife at least is peeved by the fact that Victoria’s Secret has boobs plastered all over their storefronts, and that’s about how much boob you see from uncovered breastfeeding and it feels hypocritical that utterly superfluous lingerie boob is totally fine, but modest food boob is somehow unacceptable.
Well, two points here. One, a real woman (even a real lingerie model) walking around in lingerie would probably not be considered acceptable in front of most Victoria’s Secret stores despite being plastered on the store display. Two, with uncovered breastfeeding a woman will expose the whole boob (or at least nipple) when the baby decides to unexpectedly let go. And by Murphy’s law, some guy will happen to look that direction right when it happens.
@ ksdale
+
Keep in mind that a screaming baby has precipitated the public feeding.
And even if the mother has pre-emptively begun feeding ahead of any “I’m getting hungry” screaming — as Nita pointed out, anything that disturbs the feeding can cause “Hey, something went wrong” screaming.
So here’s a rough utilitarian calculus. Delaying/complicating the feeding causes scream-worthy discomfort for the baby, distress for the mother, emotional pain for everyone within earshot, disturbs whatever the other patrons are there for.
That’s very strong dis-utility for the baby and mother, and strong dis-utility for everyone in earshot (which they can’t turn their ears away from).
Bystanders who see the feeding are fewer, can look away. Even if they can’t look away quick enough, it is hard to imagine their momentary psychological pain being strong enough to outweigh the physical, and longer lasting, pains (stomach ache, noise) of the many others.
It seems to me that the non-negotiable urgency of feeding a child is not significantly greater than that of changing a diaper, or for that matter using the bathroom as an adult. And it does not seem to pose an insurmountable logistic or social burden that we require these things be done in private.
The problem, I think, is that we’ve spent centuries establishing a social consensus that those things need to be done in private, that there is no shame in excusing yourself to privately attend to them, and gone and built millions of private “rest rooms” to meet the need. Whereas with breast-feeding we’ve spent most of those centuries with the understanding that recently-pregnant women were expected to be barefoot and in the privacy of their own kitchen, rendering the issue moot, and are now playing catch-up.
If we want to establish a social consensus in favor of public motherhood but against public breast-feeding, that’s not unreasonable or impractical – but we aren’t there yet, and we certainly haven’t built the necessary infrastructure. Neither have we established the opposite consensus.
In the meantime, it would be really neat if both sides could find some of this “tolerance” and “courtesy” stuff I’ve heard talk of.
@ John Schilling
It seems to me that the non-negotiable urgency of feeding a child is not significantly greater than that of changing a diaper, or for that matter using the bathroom as an adult.
One of those things is not like the others. For hard sanitation reasons, there is no alternative to a bathroom. For a hungry baby, there is the alternative of feeding where is as is.
Just to throw in my two cents on this, as a new father whose wife is breastfeeding:
I absolutely get where everyone is coming from when they don’t want women to breastfeed in public. Frankly I don’t understand how someone could NOT understand that. And my wife – who is a very modest person – would never do it. Too embarrassing, too risky (and too risque).
But! As someone who is now routinely watching breastfeeding close-up, I think I can confidently tell all of you who are uncomfortable with it in public: you would very, very quickly stop being so if it were a general thing. It’s pretty amazing how what is virtually always a sexual stimulus – a naked female breast – can stop seeming sexual when the context is changed.
I’m not advocating for acceptance of public breastfeeding or anything. Doesn’t matter to me. But I’m comfortable saying that it would very quickly stop seeming like a big deal if, for instance, you saw it even a couple times a week for a few months.
I think this is supported by a couple studies that indicate that men are roughly neutral on average towards women dressed less conservatively, while women are on average quite critical. The upshot being that slut-shaming by individuals is driven largely by women.
Iirc, an explanation tentatively posited was pretty much what you’re saying: in terms of the sexual “marketplace”, a promiscuous woman is neutral to positive for men and negative for women.
Take this with a grain of salt though, since I don’t remember the studies in enough detail to comment on their validity or generalizability.
Personally I done a little of this policing, basically whenever I succumb to the instinct to voice opinions on the internet, but I think my reasons are different from others.
My angle is not that female sexuality is bad and should be hidden, although that’s what most rebuttal assumes I mean. I just think that sexualizing characters in fiction (and games – is this about the Overwatch thing?) is terrible art, almost every single time it’s done, and it’s so terrible it’s embarrassing to see, and I want to make it go away. It’s the same cringe instinct that makes bad acting so unbearable. I feel this especially when the sexualizing portrayal is in (what feels like) a very dated manner like a stripper pose (maybe its that it feels low-class, maybe I should feel bad about being averse to this). It seems like the aesthetic senses of some artists go out the window when it comes to expressing sexuality, and they can only think of one way to do it, and that way is really stupid, like kid-stuff or trashy-stuff.
If we’re talking about games, all I can say is that I abandoned a female character build because as I got items that were higher armour class, she ended up wearing less.
Now, you could argue that this merely demonstrated the superlative qualities of the better armour (it was so good that, um, it could protect even areas of the body that it wasn’t covering!) but the equivalent male character of the same class did not shed clothing to show off his toned and amply proportioned anatomy in the same manner.
So that is why I mainly play male characters because (as yet) I don’t have to cope with watching them run round battlefields in battle lingerie and high heels.
I think there has been progress made on this front. It seems to me that most developers by now know to avoid this trope.
Ex:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Human_female_heavy_armor
There are a couple skimpy pieces (and the male sets show similar skin), but they are far outnumbered by the ones covered in armor.
WoW looks similar.
http://www.wowhead.com/guides=10
But I am not an expert on MMOs.
I totally get why this bothers a lot of women, but it doesn’t bother me at all. I kind of enjoy it when my female characters get to run around in sexy armor/outfits. This may be because I am bisexual and enjoy seeing attractive women in sexy outfits; heterosexual women wouldn’t get this same benefit from it.
I do think there should be the option of having your character fully and properly armored, though, at any level. This would resolve the conflict between people who like having scantily-clad female characters and those who do not.
Male characters should also have the option to be scantily-clad.
I just think it’s pandering and distasteful.
But I’m just a prude!
Obviously all items should come with customization (like they have with colors now), with one of the axes being something like “revealing,” so you can both have bare-chested or bikini-clad warriors and tin cans.
As I recall, WoW had a feature where you could have one item display cosmetically and another item apply stats, because people would find something they really liked the look of but its stats would only be appropriate for a few levels.
I was very flummoxed by it; I earned new gear with better stats, equipped it, and on the character screen my character had less coverage. I switched back and forth between the old and the new gear for a bit because frankly I couldn’t believe my eyes, then pulled up my alternate male character and did some gear-switching between higher and lower for him, and nope, he remained fully-clothed at all levels.
At which point I went “bugger this” and played the rest of it with my male character because as you say, if I wanted to gawp at boobs, I could look down my own top 🙂
A lot of it is when I play, I do tend to identify with my character, so I’m thinking as Busty Bombshell is running around in her high-heeled battle boots “I’m going to break my damn neck”, not “Woo, sexy!” Male characters get the option of practicality. Some of it is a very restricted notion of what is sexy: it does seem to take the one-size-fits-all approach of tits’n’ass appeal to all guys unilaterally, which I don’t think can be so. And finally, though this is more a comics complaint than games (excepting game art), as a female I do go “But breasts/spines/hip joints/legs don’t work like that” or “You realise nipples don’t sit on the breasts like that”.
Male characters should also have the option to be scantily-clad.
Speaking of comics characters, from a now-defunct livejournal I hung round, we all pitched in to do a male version of the Witch Blade character (called Witch Cup because of the Grail connotations as source of his power, you see?) complete with obligatory tragic backstory, based on the then-design of the comic character (this was back in 2007).
Very tasteful, completely empowering and liberating, putting a male character into a position of claiming and owning his sexuality, we all agreed 🙂
@Deiseach:
As someone else mentioned, WoW now has the option of giving one piece of gear the appearance of another. I am generally unhappy with the fact that most weapons and armor look like something out of fantasy fiction art rather than something real. If I am willing to go to a little trouble, I can considerably improve that. I have at least made sure that any swords my characters carry look like believable swords.
This. Most sexy character art in games and comics just comes across as profoundly manipulative and annoying to me. If I am playing a shooter, I am there to manage the intersection of bullets and heads. If I wanted to be staring at boobs, there is an ocean of porn I would be looking at instead.
On the other hand, the solution is more art, not shaming campaigns.
The goal of all totalitarian ideologies is to outlaw everything, so they, as the enforcers, get to choose who to punish. Universal guilt, original sin, “male privilege”, call it what you will. Incidentally, also the goal of all law enforcement bureaucracies. This is merely an outgrowth of that tendency in most people.
Because whereas the right attempts to solve gender conflicts by policing what it regards as potentially toxic elements of both genders’ sexuality, the left attempts to solve gender conflicts by policing what it regards as potentially toxic elements of men’s sexuality.
So as it pertains to the policing of men’s sexuality, the gender conservatives and feminists are often in agreement. This can extend to some… very bizarre places. I’ve encountered feminists arguing against abortion because abortion relieves men of responsibility.
Lots of female characters are essentially male sexual fantasies so they tend to mark certain video games/ movies as male-only spaces. Ironically, the rise of internet porn has tended to de-sexualize other cultural products. Those that haven’t gotten de-sexualized tend to look a little off and creepy.
Oh, female movie/vidya characters?
I don’t see those much in the most mainstream articles, like time and the New York Times. This is a “dick” statement, but IMO its jealousy along with a cultural norm of not pointing that out in general to the …erm cough…*insert negative physical attribute descriptor* girl.
This is considered “Steve Sailers Law of Female Journalism”
I don’t see it on mainstream sites though, barring a general critique of the shallowness of general people. Mostly on the pandering portions of slate and salon.
Males do the same thing to, but it never gets the same coverage. Guys instantly get called out by other guys for that.
Its jealousy.
I suspect part of it is what Bryan Caplan calls anti-market bias. If you don’t believe that businesses have to provide what customers want in order to make money, the natural explanation for lots of sexy women in media is “sexism” rather than “50% of the audience likes it and the other 50% does not have any strong feelings on it one way or the other”.
I think it’s a fallacy to say that because businesses are providing something, customers must want it. Businesses can provide the thing for any number of other reasons, sexism among them.
(Now, if I said that businesses could simply stop providing something that customers want, with no consequences, THAT would be an example of anti-market bias.)
What do you mean by ‘because of sexism’? One interpretation could be that business owners choose to inject sexism into the movies they produce in violation of what their audiences want, forgoing some amount of profit, but gaining though spreading their views or getting to enjoy a high budget movie catering to their unpopular tastes. Perhaps the occasional business owner might do this, but the idea that this is pervasive enough to explain why there are sexy women in movies does not seem credible.
Another interpretation would be that it’s because of irrationality. Movies contain sexy women not because business owners are consciously sexist but because they’re unconsciously sexist, too dumb to see that their belief that audiences want movies with sexy women is mistaken and is losing them money. This too seems implausible. Do feminist movies, or movies that refrain from making their female characters sexy, tend to make higher profits than movies containing sexy women? I don’t have any data on this but I’m enormously doubtful. Apart from anything else, I’ve never heard anyone claim this, which I expect I would have if it was even arguably maybe true.
Uh, people can want things for any number of reasons, sexism among them. That’s one factor.
Another factor is “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment”. Most people who provide capital for expensive projects don’t want to you to take big risks with their money. Do what everyone’s always done, make what the sponsor believes the consumer wants.
Similarly, can all people be divided into those who want only white guys in lead roles, and those don’t care about the question at all? Not really. And yet:
As someone on the left but who doesn’t like that kind of criticism, my belief is that such criticism comes from a belief that exposure to female characters who are sexual (in a way that is typical in most fiction) would change the way people behave towards women in real life, and that change would be in a direction that would be negative towards those women.
This is the best reasoning I could come up with, because, after all, there is no reason to be against any media whatsoever unless that media also affects what people do in real life. In some cases, people are hurt in the process of creating a work. But those are peculiar cases, and the general criticism against the way anything is depicted in media is the way people could be hurt due to the consumption.
To be more specific for this question, I think the key belief is that if media is overloaded with females who are sexual, males and females will come to view real females as sex objects who are unworthy or incapable of non-sexual endeavors. Most certainly not ALL – or even likely most – males or females, and most certainly not an extreme flip in opinion from hardcore feminist to hardcore misogynist, but on the margins, we’ll see some people’s behaviors swayed in a less egalitarian direction.
The reason I don’t like this kind of criticism is that it seems to place an unwarranted amount of faith in the causal connection between exposure to media and behavior. Of course, it’s obvious that exposure to media will cause change in behavior. This is a trivial fact. What’s not obvious – and what needs to be true in order for the above argument to actually work – is that a population being exposed to media that is overloaded with females that are sexual causes a net change in behavior within that population so that behavior that objectifies real females is more common.
If that connection or a similar one were established, it would reasonably follow that someone who wants less objectification of females in real life would criticize depictions of female characters who are sexual in media. In fact, I’d probably push for actual legislation if we knew such a causal effect with very high confidence.
I don’t find the argument that it has to do with jealousy or protecting the cartel to be very convincing. Maybe subconsciously it does, I don’t know. But I think the left’s criticism of female characters who are sexual in media comes from a place of reason (along with EXTREMELY faulty premises), not of pure emotion or selfishness.
>In fact, I’d probably push for actual legislation if we knew such a causal effect with very high confidence.
The purest spirit of puritanism, alive and well in the left of all places. Marshaling the government to censor the arts in the name of morality! And on what basis? It is left unmentioned, of course. An exercise for the reader perhaps. At least in the past this nonsense was based on some sort of system, at least they had an argument of sorts in God. We did away with God but his zealots stayed around, that’s just great.
The part you quoted pretty clearly outlines the system in play: knowing with high confidence that exposure to certain types of media create – at the margins – a change in behavior in a certain way. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with morality. It has to do with knowing the social consequences of consumption of certain products and designing laws in order to engineer a desirable outcome.
For instance, we know with a high degree of confidence that cigarettes are addictive, and regularly smoking cigarettes increases the risk of lung cancer by a lot. We as a population decided that we want a society where we minimize the number of people who get addicted to drugs and/or get lung cancer, but we also want a society where people are free to do what they want with their bodies. So we, through our legislature, have constructed laws banning sale of cigarettes for minors.
In the case of depictions of females in media, IF we knew with a high level of confidence that media that depicted females in a certain way caused net behavior changes in the population such that sexist/misogynistic/bigoted actions became more common, it would make sense to construct laws against such media, in order that we engineer society to reduce the number of bigoted actions IRL. Whether that would be outright ban or an age restriction like in the case of tobacco, I don’t know, but it would most certainly manifest in some sort of legislative censorship.
Of course, this is a very very very very big if. Given the current state of scientific knowledge in this field, we most certainly do NOT know with high confidence that such media would cause such outcomes in the population. I believe the major failure of SJWs and other leftists who criticize certain female characters in certain media is that they have unshakable faith in this causation – that is, they believe that we DO know with a high degree of confidence that such media would cause such outcomes IRL. In that sense, I think their motivations are in the right place, and even their reasoning is mostly sound. It’s just that they believe – perhaps to such a strong extent that they identify with that belief and their whole worldview would be shattered w/o that belief – something that is false. This naturally leads to a conclusion that cannot be considered with any confidence to be true.
The analogy to smoking doesn’t work very well, since a smoker is injuring himself and you are worrying about media causing people to injure other people.
But there is a more fundamental problem. Following out the logic of your argument, it ought to apply to books and web pages and articles and not be limited to issues of sexualization.
Ideas kill. In my view, shared by many but not all others, the idea of communism killed many millions of people. Following out your argument, it would be proper to suppress any publication that made those ideas more popular. If you happen to be on the other side politically, apply the same argument to books that successfully argue for free market views—Ayn Rand’s, for instance.
Do you really want to go there? The usual legal rule is that individuals are responsible for their own actions, people who spread ideas that make actions more likely are not legally responsible for the consequences. Giving the government the power to suppress ideas it disapproves of is, in my view, a very bad idea.
My God! *sniff* Pure Ideology! *shirt tug*
Tell me, what do you imagine is the difference between you, who want to ban media that causes “sexism”, and, say, the people who banned Ulysses because it “lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts”? The structure of the argument is literally identical, the only thing that has (only sightly) changed are the specifics of what ought to be banned. To say that “This has absolutely NOTHING to do with morality” is simply ridiculous.
@David Friedman
>Ideas kill. In my view, shared by many but not all others, the idea of communism killed many millions of people. Following out your argument, it would be proper to suppress any publication that made those ideas more popular. If you happen to be on the other side politically, apply the same argument to books that successfully argue for free market views—Ayn Rand’s, for instance.
>Do you really want to go there?
As uncomfortable as I find it, yes, I do want to go there. If we can know with some high degree of confidence that the spread of some ideas causes people to be significantly harmed, I believe it is in our interest that we have laws that regulate the spread of such ideas to some extent.
I mean, we already regulate speech that cause harm to people, such as slander or true threats. This is because we know with a sufficiently high degree of confidence that slander and true threats cause significant harm to people. If we knew with an equally high degree of confidence that, say, books that are pro-Communism causes harm to people, then I would want regulation on books that are pro-Communism. Or Objectivism or whatever.
It seems very reasonable to suspect that this would be a very easily abused tool for the government to suppress speech it doesn’t like. It’s a very real concern, definitely. That’s why I believe a very high degree of confidence is required. Like, we should be just as confident in such a causal link as we are of, say, evolution or germ theory or the general oblate spheroid shape of the Earth. Like, it should at least be a consensus among everyone in the field regardless of ideology and have withstood persistent attempts to disprove it for a long period of time. That’s a high bar for any hypothesis to clear, and only once it’s been cleared, would I feel comfortable with legal regulations on such speech. But I would definitely feel comfortable under that wild hypothetical scenario.
@Anon.
>Tell me, what do you imagine is the difference between you, who want to ban media that causes “sexism”, and, say, the people who banned Ulysses because it “lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts”? The structure of the argument is literally identical, the only thing that has (only sightly) changed are the specifics of what ought to be banned.
The difference is that I do NOT want to ban media. Right now, given what we know, I believe that we have absolutely zero interest in – or right to – banning any media for its depictions of women. And I believe that banning – or even criticizing in a way meant to cause shame or harm – media that depicts women in negative ways would be a terrible thing.
What you don’t seem to get is that I would only want banning media that “causes” sexist actions if we actually knew that that media “caused” sexist actions. Right now, there is no media that we actually know to “cause” sexist actions. Maybe one could reasonably argue that PUA instructional books qualify, but even for those, I would argue, no, we don’t have sufficient evidence that those books cause sexist actions. If the causality was as well established as, say, the causality between pulling the trigger of a (loaded, safety off, etc) gun and the bullet flying out really fast, then I would want such media to be regulated. If it were any less established, then I would vehemently fight against any such ban or regulation.
In the case of Ulysses, there’s the additional kink that “sexually impure and lustful thoughts” are meaningfully different from “sexist actions.” The former doesn’t harm anyone. The latter (usually) does. I am against banning or regulating any media for any thoughts it might cause in someone. But if some media were to be proven to cause actions that cause harm, then I would want that media regulated.
That’s a high bar of proof. In fact, I’m not sure how it could be met or even IF it could be met. Still, I would want at least that bar met before bannings or other regulation took place.
>To say that “This has absolutely NOTHING to do with morality” is simply ridiculous.
Please explain how it’s ridiculous. Where does morality enter into it? I mean, I guess one could argue that the government wanting to minimize sexist actions is related to morality, but I’d argue that it’s merely a manifestation of the government fulfilling its presumed function of serving the populace.
@David Friedman – “Do you really want to go there?”
The more deterministic human interaction becomes, the more subject to regulation it becomes. What we understand, we wish to control.
>I’d argue that it’s merely a manifestation of the government fulfilling its presumed function of serving the populace.
So would the people who believed Ulysses caused sexually impure thoughts. Sexually impure thoughts are harmful. Ergo banning Ulysses is a manifestation of the government fulfilling its presumed function of serving the populace. In fact I can personally confirm the correlation exists!
Luckily some dudes 250 years ago presumed otherwise, so I can stroll into any bookshop and buy this terrible, corrupting book written by a known fart fetishist!
Here’s evidence on the power of media to corrupt, p<0.01. Is p<0.01 enough or should we put the bar lower? Should we require a replication study first or can we go ahead and start shutting down internet pornography? Of course it would require a modest expansion of government powers and the banning of encryption and such, but what is a little freedom when there is Harm to be defeated!
You also need to consider how this works out in a democracy. While you people are (thankfully) a minority, there are majority ideologies that have equally insane yet completely different conceptions of harm. Most people in the USA are Christians. Going to hell is clearly harmful. Atheistic literature would be right out.
There is nothing special about your conception of harm.
Indeed the argument followed through to its conclusion ends in the banning not only of actively “harmful” art, but neutral art as well, as it takes up time that could have been spent on art that promotes welfare. Anything that does not support the revolution is counter-revolutionary, comrade! This is how you end up with Kazimir Malevich wasting his genius painting Socialist Realism garbage.
@Ivlln:
It seems to me that you have answered your argument in your own post.
“It seems very reasonable to suspect that this would be a very easily abused tool for the government to suppress speech it doesn’t like. It’s a very real concern, definitely. That’s why I believe a very high degree of confidence is required.”
The fundamental problem is that “if we know” assumes matters of objective fact and a “we” that can be trusted to make decisions in the general interest.
We have no mechanism to make governments act in the general interest, unfortunately. So the question should never be “is there a situation in which a wise and benevolent philosopher king could improve things by doing X.” The question should always be “If the government has the power to do X how will it use that power and will the results be good and bad.”
And for the case of freedom of speech and the press, the answer is that dropping the principle can be expected to have bad results.
The legal status of threats and slander doesn’t involve the same principle you want to introduce–suppression of dangerous ideas.
You might want to consider that most people who have thought about the question believe there are ideas which are much more dangerous than you are suggesting the portrayal of sexual women is, although they disagree about which ideas those are. Communism, after all, killed something in the tens of millions of people and kept something over a billion poor for decades.
@lvlln
Another problem besides what everyone else has mentioned is enforcement. Governments worldwide would need to agree or it would be easily circumvented. Germany has various laws related to media featuring the Swaztika as well as Holocaust denial, yet a German can go on the internet and access American sites featuring Nazi propaganda. Unless governments worldwide agree, then this will be true for anything you care to make illegal.
Even with a world government enforcement would still be a problem, because unlike banning something like child pornography, you’d be banning highly contagious ideas which can be carried via codewords (see racism). There’s no in built disgust mechanism for mere ideologies to help people self-police either. If you banned PUA (for example) because some high council proved that it made people more misogynist, then you’d likely fall foul of people’s mistrust of authority, and get more people seeking those ideas out (nowadays this is happening with racist material).
If you could click a magic button and delete PUA material (for example) from the internet, then your scheme would obviously have maximum effectiveness. In practice, the act of declaring something illegal but then being unable to enforce it is likely to activate people’s “Fuck the pigs!” impulses and be counter-productive even if you did find an association between PUA material and sexism (for example).
The laws on intellectual property seem to get more and more severe every year, and to be included in more and more expansive “free trade” deals as we go forwards, and yet, they have very little effect on piracy because the enforcement end of things is so poor. Occasionally, they’ll charge some guy preposterous amounts in supposed lost profits, but at the same time, millions of people get away scot free. If something is popular, good luck doing anything about it short of putting Skynet in charge of everything (and then you have other problems). One gender wanting to bitch about the other is popular enough and sexism a concept vague enough that enforcement would be arbitrary.
@Anon.
>So would the people who believed Ulysses caused sexually impure thoughts. Sexually impure thoughts are harmful.
No, they are not. They are not provably harmful in the same way that, say, regularly smoking cigarettes is provably harmful to someone. You’re conflating “I personally don’t like this” with “we’ve confirmed that this causes harm to enough of a degree that it’s consensus within the relevant scientific field.” The latter case is the only one that’s relevant here.
>Here’s evidence on the power of media to corrupt, p<0.01. Is pYou also need to consider how this works out in a democracy. While you people are (thankfully) a minority, there are majority ideologies that have equally insane yet completely different conceptions of harm. Most people in the USA are Christians. Going to hell is clearly harmful. Atheistic literature would be right out.
The existence of hell or the harm that hell would provide to someone hasn’t been proven to the same extent that, say, smoking has been proven to increase the risk of lung cancer and other diseases. Thus your analogy has no bearing in this discussion. We’re talking about a hypothetical world in which scientific studies have made us as confident of a causal relationship between certain types of media with certain types of behaviors as of a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
>Indeed the argument followed through to its conclusion ends in the banning not only of actively “harmful” art, but neutral art as well, as it takes up time that could have been spent on art that promotes welfare. Anything that does not support the revolution is counter-revolutionary, comrade! This is how you end up with Kazimir Malevich wasting his genius painting Socialist Realism garbage.
Now that’s just a weird leap to make. But going with the example, if it were scientifically proven (to the extent that science can prove anything) that the opportunity cost of not producing art that promotes welfare harmed people – that this causation was so well established that every time some art that didn’t promote welfare was produced, everyone agreed that some orphan would go hungry for a day who would have been fed had that art not been produced, why wouldn’t it make sense to legally regulate art? We legally regulate automobiles because we know that they can be used in ways to cause great harm. If we knew with just as much confidence that art could cause harm – something which we don’t know and which we can’t possibly find out without at least decades of research – I don’t see why regulating it would be so unthinkable.
Especially since we ALREADY regulate media that are proven to cause harm. Child porn (the real kind) provably causes harm – not by consumption in this case, but by production, which necessarily involves the abuse of a minor. And that’s why it’s regulated. If other types of media were just as proven to cause harm, I’d want the government regulating them too.
I just don’t believe we live in a world where such a thing has been proven. I personally don’t believe that such a causality exists – that is, I don’t believe that exposure to media depicting women in a certain way causes people to behave in a more misogynistic way or whatnot. Under that belief, I believe very strongly that the government has no business regulating media for sexist content. But that’s an evidence-less belief, just an intuition I have. If it turned out that such a causal relationship did exist, I would change my mind.
@David Friedman
>The fundamental problem is that “if we know” assumes matters of objective fact and a “we” that can be trusted to make decisions in the general interest.
Yes, I’m assuming an objective fact. That is, I’m positing a hypothetical world in which a causal relationship between certain types of media and certain types of behavior were objectively true. At least, the same “objectively true” as the causal relationship between, say, smoking and lung cancer. We don’t live in that hypothetical world.
>And for the case of freedom of speech and the press, the answer is that dropping the principle can be expected to have bad results.
If you’re considering this dropping the (legal) freedom of speech and the press, then we’ve ALREADY dropped freedom of speech and the press. The government ALREADY regulates speech and media based on the harm it’s been proven to cause. Child porn (involving real minors) is one example. It is regulated because we know with a very high degree of confidence that the production of that media necessarily causes harm. In the hypothetical world in which, say, pro-Communist media were proven to cause harm to the populace, to the same extent that child porn were proven to cause harm to minors involved in their production, I’d want my government to regulate pro-Communist media in some way.
>The legal status of threats and slander doesn’t involve the same principle you want to introduce–suppression of dangerous ideas.
No, it involves the exact same principle: regulating something that is proven to cause harm. The only way in which your characterization of my principle is accurate is if you’re using “dangerous ideas” as shorthand for “media which has been proven to cause harm through broad consensus reached by rigorous scientific research.” But in that case, “dangerous ideas” sounds misleading, because that usually means “ideas I think causes harm,” which is nowhere near the same.
>You might want to consider that most people who have thought about the question believe there are ideas which are much more dangerous than you are suggesting the portrayal of sexual women is, although they disagree about which ideas those are. Communism, after all, killed something in the tens of millions of people and kept something over a billion poor for decades.
I actually don’t believe portrayal of sexual women is harmful or dangerous at all and thus don’t believe it should be regulated, either legally or socially. But I also know that this belief of mine is just an intuition. If I were wrong – and if I were proven wrong to a rigorous degree – then I’d change my mind.
But regardless, how dangerous I or anyone thinks any given idea or media or whatever is is irrelevant. Just like it’s irrelevant whether or not I think smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. So what if some people think misogynistic or pro-Communist media is dangerous? Have they proven that such media causes harm? To the extent that it’s a broad consensus among all the scientists in the relevant field? From my observation, the answer is No. And as long as that answer is No, regardless of how dangerous anyone thinks any media is, that media should be free from government regulation directed at it. But if that answer ever changed to an honest Yes, I would want government regulation.
@TD
You’re talking about a specific regulation – that is, outright banning. Indeed, in today’s world, a ban would likely backfire.
But a ban’s not the only type of regulation possible. It could just as easily be an age restriction. Or maybe just a warning. I don’t know, I haven’t thought too hard about what sort of regulation would make sense and how it would be enforced. I’m just pointing out that it seems to make sense to want the government to regulate something if that something is scientifically established (as much as anything can be scientifically established, anyway) to cause harm.
Though, in the hypothetical scenario I’m positing, perhaps social enforcement would be in effect. After all, there’s some social enforcement against child porn today, because almost everyone agrees that child porn causes harm. In a hypothetical world in which almost everyone also agreed that media of a certain type caused harm, I imagine there would be social enforcement against that type of media. Perhaps less so than for CP since CP also has lots of psychological issues specifically tied up with it.
But I hate the concept of social enforcement, so I’d rather leave that out of the scenario.
>No, they are not. They are not provably harmful in the same way that, say, regularly smoking cigarettes is provably harmful to someone. You’re conflating “I personally don’t like this” with “we’ve confirmed that this causes harm to enough of a degree that it’s consensus within the relevant scientific field.” The latter case is the only one that’s relevant here.
I see. Since this has nothing to do with morality or ideology, but is purely an evidence-based and scientific matter, I’m sure your opinion would change to follow scientific knowledge, yes?
For example, if gender equality was found to decrease women’s life satisfaction and happiness, you would be against gender equality because of the harm it produces? (Here’s another paper, and another one — there’s plenty more on google scholar).
Perhaps you would need a couple more studies before we achieve that magical “Consensus”, but that is beside the point.
So, Mr. Objective Science Man, I’m sure you have dutifully updated your priors and are now not only a sexist, but would also back a ban on pro-gender-equality literature! It is unfortunate that you have been supporting things that Objectively™ and Scientifically™ cause harm to women, but at least now that you know better you can turn things around.
@Anon.
>I see. Since this has nothing to do with morality or ideology, but is purely an evidence-based and scientific matter, I’m sure your opinion would change to follow scientific knowledge, yes?
>For example, if gender equality was found to decrease women’s life satisfaction and happiness, you would be against gender equality because of the harm it produces? (Here’s another paper, and another one — there’s plenty more on google scholar).
Yes, absolutely. If we were to know with high confidence that gender equality caused harm (and wasn’t off-set by happiness gained), then there is close to no questiontin my mind that I would be against gender equality. Or at least would want any pro-gender equality actions to be moderated in a way to decrease that harm caused.
>Perhaps you would need a couple more studies before we achieve that magical “Consensus”, but that is besides the point.
No, that consensus IS the point. I wouldn’t need a “couple more studies,” I’d need a couple dozen more studies attacking the question from many different angles, performed by a wide variety of researchers of different ideological leanings. If they all reached the same conclusion that achieving gender equality would cause net harm that wasn’t off-set by the positives, I would be against achieving gender equality.
Now, the idea that such a thing would – or even could – be proven scientifically seems unlikely to me. I’m not sure how one could properly weigh the benefits of gender equality as experienced by individuals against the harms that result in the population level, but in a hypothetical universe in which that were possible, and in which the scientific consensus was that achieving gender equality was harmful to women even when taking into account the great positives to individuals who are gratnted more freedom and comfort, then it’d make perfect sense to be against gender equality, or at least desire ways to moderate/regulate it in such a way to minimize the harm.
>So, Mr. Objective Science Man, I’m sure you have dutifully updated your priors and are now not only a sexist, but would also back a ban on pro-gender-equality literature! It is unfortunate that you have been supporting things that Objectively™ and Scientifically™ cause harm to women, but at least now that you know better you can turn things around.
Well, your handful of links and your comment here doesn’t come anywhere near even 1% of the way to establishing that gender equality is harmful to women, but, again, if you had established it to such an extent that “achieving gender equality harms women” were as uncontroversial a statement to make as “smoking cigarettes regularly increases significantly one’s risk for lung cancer,” then I would be against achieving gender equality.
The tone of your comment seems to imply that you believe that I would find dissonance in this, that I would have a problem concluding that gender equality was a bad or undesirable thing if it were scientifically established as so. I find such a belief to be curious and kind of weird.
So, lvlln (?), a few questions about your position:
Is the level of harm a factor when it comes to these bans? It is presumed that most people do or consume things because they enjoy them, how do you weight harm done vs enjoyment obtained from whatever you’re deliberating whether to ban?
How do you even go around banning these things? Drugs are hard to ban as they are, and they’re phyisical objects that you have to consume and produce regularly, books nowadays are just strings of words, it would prove very difficult. What degree of enforcement would exist for these bans? Fines, Prison, or do you go Full Singapore (which seems like the most effective method, to date)?
Whoa there, hoss.
Oh damn, I accidentally posted this in the links thread rather than the open thread. Reposting here.
I’m a CS PhD student who just got a summer internship in Santa Clara. After reading about all these rationalist/SSC people off in the Bay Area, I’m hoping to use this as an opportunity to actually find out about that group and get to know people. Are there meetups or social events? Are there secret passwords that are needed or are they pretty open?
Also, any general tips about the area and getting situated would be awesome. Never been to that area before, and have been stuck in a relatively small college town for a while so not sure what to keep in mind re: housing/transportation/etc. Recommendations on car vs public transport? Areas to look at or avoid for living? Things you wish you had known before arriving?
Secret passwords can be found in HPMOR, chapter 33.
There’s a website for such things, though I don’t know how up-to-date it is. You’re a little far south of most of the community; if you’re an EA type, you might be interested in Stanford EA’s meetings on Sunday afternoons and game nights on Thursday evenings.
If the opportunity arises, apparently going to a CFAR workshop or weekend is a good way to meet people.
Public transit’s not great, but Caltrain + BART will get you within a short bus ride or Uber of where you need to go… eventually, usually. Outside of the city (i.e. SF) and Berkeley, it usually makes sense to have a car. Try to avoid driving during rush hour, especially going toward the city in the morning or away from it in the evening (though I don’t know if this remains true in Santa Clara).
At a slight tangent, how much interest would there be in an occasional meetup at my house in San Jose?
I imagine a good deal. I would certainly be interested.
1) You will need a car (or car-ish levels of Uber expenses coupled with an extra couple hundred a month in rent so you can walk to the grocery store) unless you work in SF proper AND elect to live in SF proper. With that said, decent odds you take transit to work.
2) SF public transit is terrible, but… when you only need to go 5 miles, a 7MPH bus/MUNI works well enough. But anything beyond that…
BART exists and works and doesn’t connect anything with actual density unless you’re in SF.
PEAK Caltrain is fine (Not great), off-peak Caltrain is once an hour at 37MPH.
3) Re traffic:
* It’s disgustingly terrible.
* You will unfortunately need to travel distances of 20-30 miles on a semi-routine basis, especially if you’re taking advantage of everything the Bay and CA have to offer.
* DO NOT plan a commute that involves driving across a bridge. DO NOT! I’ve got coworkers who commute 90 minutes from downtown Union City to University and 101 over the Dumbarton.
* The magic places are Palo Alto and SF, and to a lesser extent, Cisco down in Milpitas.
Heading towards Palo Alto and SF is nigh impossible in the morning, and away from them nigh impossible in the afternoon (This should be read as: “I am debating whether I should eat an $80 Uber after a concert in San Jose, or leave from work at 5:30 for a 7:30 concert 20 miles down the road in San Jose”).
Just generally, most of the problems the area has are tied to having low density of housing coupled with high density job clusters. Pull up a traffic/transit map about 8/9AM Pacific and 5/6 PM Pacific, figure out where your job is, and then start looking for places to live based on that traffic map.
Edit: Edited out advice about where to live when I saw where you were working in your post (Thanks, @David Friedman)
New Version:
Santa Clara is both affordable (ish) and low-ish traffic. You can totally live in/near Santa Clara, though you still might *need* a car as opposed to merely wanting it depending on exact details of where you work/end up living.
Or as I put it when explaining to my boss why I wanted to transfer over to Seattle “When I only need to go 2 miles, I don’t care that the bus only goes 8MPH. When I need to go 25, I do. And in the Bay Area, I do”.
4) It’s gotten way worse very fast.
My job has been in Palo Alto this entire time.
In January 2013, I was paying $870 for a 20 minute commute to work.
In February 2016, I am paying $2100 for a 70-100 minute commute from work in an apartment with mold problems and a broken toilet.
/Also, @David Friedman, very interested, but Weekends mostly for the aforementioned traffic problems.
Rush hour from Santa Clara to SF is pretty bad in the morning, and similarly the other way in the afternoon. But if he is living in Santa Clara and interning in Santa Clara, he may well be able to find an apartment within walking distance of where he will be working, and rush hour within the Santa Clara/San Jose area is not as much of a problem. Also, there are parts of Santa Clara where he could be within walking distance of restaurants and grocery stores.
I might be able to give more precise information if I knew about where he would be working. I live in San Jose close to the San Jose/Santa Clara border, teach in Santa Clara (SCU).
Thanks for all the helpful info! (also the other commenters too, replying here once for everyone).
My internship will be at NVIDIA Research, if that helps.
Pull up a traffic map right now, and that’s pretty realistic.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Nvidia/@37.348256,-122.0055004,12.38z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x76527847b95e08c9!5m1!1e1
TLDR: The highways are useless, but anything to your southeast has a tolerable commute.
You will be working about five miles due north of where I live. The airport is about a mile east of you, so in looking at housing you may want to check on airport noise.
SCU, where I teach, is a little less than two miles south and east of you, so if you like the university environment for people to socialize with and the like you might want to live in that direction–I’m not sure how much the university students push up rents.
You are about a mile and a half north of El Camino Real, a street which has quite a lot ethnic restaurants, ethnic groceries, and the like along it, in particular Indian and Korean.
If you have a car and want to get into SF, 101 is just north of you, 280 a bit farther south. 101 is a little shorter, 280 a good deal pleasanter. Also, just the other side of SCU is a train station where you can catch a train to SF. I haven’t used it so can’t tell you more than that but I expect you can find schedules online.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
I’ll be having a meetup in San Jose very soon, which I’ll announce on here. That should be a good opportunity to get in touch with people.
Is it just me, or has the comment section been getting more hostile lately?
The world has been getting more hostile lately. SSC has been remarkably well insulated IMO.
Has the world become more hostile? Maybe compared to five years ago.
Aside from the whole anon@gmail.com giving people free reign to be jerks, I’m not sure I’ve noticed a major difference. In fact, my impression is that things are a little less hostile.
I liked the idea of anon@gmail.com, but a lot of posts under it have been pretty jerk-y 🙁 Please stop, fellow anons!
It’s only a few anons that do this, you can’t judge all of us for it! We are a collective of peace.
More seriously, though, there was an initial spike, but I don’t think changing anons from multicolor to monocolor changed their jerkishness significantly.
If people feel differently, I suggested a faster track for b&w anon bans, maybe that’ll make us behave.
If you want to be judged on your own merits, come up with a unique moniker.
That’s the opposite of what at least some of the anons want – they want neither being lumped with everyone sharing their gravatar, nor to have their posts read in the context of their life’s work.
That’s what a unique pseudonym is for.
I just IP-banned eight anons who deserved it. I’ll see if that works before blocking anon@gmail.com directly.
Some of us use a different email address when wanting to comment anonymously.
Thank you!
Yeah, I’m pretty much fine with the idea of multiple people posting as the same Anon (using the same anon@gmail.com account to generate their gravatars) so that they can maintain an extra level of anonymity, but I don’t want bad behavior from them to spill over into the reputation of anonymous posters who are using unique emails (like me).
You know, the whole point of anon is that you’re not building a reputation. If you’re trying to build reputation for your combo of anon+unique gravatar, you’re not any more anon than suntzu or s3 are, the only difference is that you couldn’t be arsed to pick a nickname for this particular site (or you did pick a nickname, namely “Anon”, maybe because it is kinda trendy nowadays).
Not saying it’s bad, but worrying about reputation spill or whatever misses the point of the real Anon Way (that can only be found in scotland).
Well, I’m not trying to build a positive reputation, I’m just trying to avoid building a negative one. But maybe you’re right and I should just pick a name.
The issue reminds me of the voat vs. reddit dynamic touched on in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/
Basically, when you don the black-and-white anonymous, you are not wiping out all aspects of your identity, you’re identifying as someone who wants to wipe out all aspects of their identity. I think if you want to be *truly* anonymous you should cycle to a new nonce email every time you post. (They’re not verified or anything, are they?)
Nah, they’re not checked. I used to write a long garbage string in the email field and delete a character after every couple posts, but this is better because otherwise people assume it’s a unique person for each unique gravatar and I can’t be arsed to save what string I was using for which subthread.
If you shout “I am Spartacus”, you get crucified even if you didn’t lead a revolution.
What if it’s just standing out because anon@gmail is a lot more active? You don’t notice gargl being mean because he is only mean twice a month, but if twenty people use anon@gmail and three of them are gargls, then anon is three times as toxic as gargl.
Eh, plenty of the best sites I know of are anonymous, however they are well moderated.
There are sites that are basically the final form of Remove 80% of 4chan posts until the culture develops until 10% need to be removed.
eh, peak hostility was jim/multi this has been a calm period
Multi is still around and still yelling at people. I gather they took a hiatus at some point, which may account for a perception of increased hostility if they came back recently?
Coming from a dude who has deliberately misgendered a person (me) just to insult them, and moreover wished a very bad real-life thing upon me, in the context of wanting me to not “contaminate” a country…
Coming from a dude who started it by seconding the anon who wished a very bad real-life thing upon me, in the context of not wanting people with my “dark triad traits” in a country…
What are you two talking about?
shh give them some privacy
http://multiheaded1793.tumblr.com/post/141850242671/fascists-gonna-fash-that-was-about-immigration
lol
While I don’t think very highly of multiheaded’s communist tumblr circlejerk, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to hound it for crossposts.
“Hounding it for crossposts”, that’s a lot of motivation your implying on my part. I’m amused cause she gets the dynamics of these things so well in a gender/sexuality frame and then apparently totally forgets about them in a politics frame.
I will readily admit a lot of jumping to assumptions on my part. Is the image (blocked in my workspace) not of a comment from here?
Yes. She recognizes these dynamics in a gender context, what this sort of thing inevitably feedbacks into. But she’s casting “summon greater fascism” anyways. They’re supposed to be better than this, is all.
Praise from the likes of you surely means I’m doing something wrong.
<3
Random personal celebration/brag post.
A few years ago I was among a fairly large gathering, and ended up spending a lot of time arguing about economics with another person there (on several subjects, but especially free trade vs protectionism, him taking the latter position). Amongst this group of people was a woman I had not met before who didn’t say too much, but later became a political candidate and ultimately a parliamentarian. I did send her an email of congratulations on the occasion of her election (which she did not respond to – I’m sure it was one of many), but otherwise have not had any contact with her since.
A little while ago, she emailed me out of the blue, asking me to come and work as her economic advisor. This is basically my dream job so having it land in my lap out of nowhere was pretty exciting.
I start in two weeks. I’m pretty happy about this. 😀
Congratulations.
nice, i envy you =)
Wow!
Thanks guys. 🙂
What country are you in? “Parliamentarian” suggests not the U.S.
I’m Australian.
Aussie too. I’ll look for you on the TV, no doubt standing and nodding behind a newish female member of parliament! (no guarantees on vote tho, lol)
Great news!
Who knew arguing economics in public was such good networking.
Congrats!
Hey SSC. I have a vacancy at my apartment in Piedmont/Oakland, California and I’m looking for a roommate to fill it. Place is fairly nice, and on the higher end of price, and so the ideal candidate is either a single professional or a couple with stable income between the two of them. If anyone is looking for a place, email me at rz+roommate at eqdw dot net.
I just wanted to say that I’m so glad I found this blog! I had never heard of LW or the ‘rationalist community before stumbling upon a post here (that was linked in a weekly best of email from the Pocket app), but I am enjoying the mode of discussion and investigation here so much more than the angry nonsensical responses that populate most of the internet!
Welcome.
Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has recently put up a draft of a new paper on p-values and how they can greatly vary between repeated experiments: http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pvalues
Commentary on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153707240958375
Does anybody with more math/stats knowledge than I have any remarks on the paper and its soundness? What are the implications of this for discussions of replicability of experiments in fields like psychology and medicine?
Ah, this result has been known for many many decades, I believe during the lower half of last century. Economists have been redoing and redoing what mathematacians have been doing for a century 😛
There’s really no *new* implication of this result, but its useful to know.
Does anyone here fly drones/quadcopters/UAVs? I’m curious how you land them.
Landing is easy. Landing and being able to use the quad again is a little bit of a trick. For the completely manual controlled ones you just reduce the throttle and let them settle to the ground; it’s pretty easy. For the really tiny ones you can cut the throttle and catch them. I fly mostly helicopters, which are harder because of the tail rotor.
I believe the ones with autopilot will land themselves.
Do you carry any kind of payload (cameras, sensors, etc.)? If so, how do you protect it from damage?
No payload. I’m thinking of building or buying a small camera quad. Usually the camera mounts below the center of the quad, and there’s landing legs that extend below it. Also you typically use a reasonably tough camera.
That seems like it would protect the camera so long as you’re landing on a flat even surface and the legs are guaranteed not to break. Also if your camera is always below a certain size. Are all those things usually true?
Also, is it fairly typical for people to build their own drones, or modify them?
You usually fit your camera to your drone or vice-versa. The people like me who got interested from the model aircraft side tend to build the drones; people who are more interested in the pictures they can take tend to buy, though that’s not a hard and fast rule. A lot of photographers interested in the images more than the flying got into it before you could just put money on the table and get a package, so they tend to build.
I do, but i’m not sure I understand the question.
In a general sense, the trick is the same as it is in a real aircraft. You want your vertical velocity to hit 0 a moment before your altitude does rather than the other way around.
More specific instructions will depend on the sort of drone you want to land. For light weight hobbiest drones I find the easiest way is to simply catch it. Fly it low / slow and then simply reach out and grab it. My home built quad has a lanyard hanging off the bottom for exactly this purpose.
Interesting (re. the lanyard). Is that a design you’ve seen a lot of other drone operators using? How well does it work in high wind or other conditions that might make the lanyard hard to grab? Does this mean you need to be able to (at least temporarily) operate the controller one-handed?
I wouldn’t say “a lot of other drone operators use it” but I know I’m not the only one. I find that it can actually make it easier to land in wind or unstable conditions (like flying it from the back of my buddies boat) as I can compensate for a good amount of the “slop” in the approach with my own movement.
As for the mechanics of actually catching it…
I use a dual stick RC Helicopter controller that hangs from a strap around my neck. I can generally hold her steady enough using one hand on the cyclic to reach out and grab it with the other.
Can you get it to land on your wrist like a trained falcon? Cause that wound be incredible.
I’ve actually been tinkering with drone autopilots in my spare time. The main feature I want to implement is automated follow/return. IE have the drone follow along behind you at a set distance without user input. and return on command “Heel, Come, Sit, Stay, Who’s a good little robot helicopter?” I think there’d be a serious market for automated chase-cams and the like.
The problem with LessWrong is that they spend too much time mapping, or rather just thinking about cartographic principles, instead of actually exploring the territory.
I heard from a friend who went to a CFAR workshop that most of it was about encouraging the nerds to move from optimizing theory to the nth degree to actually practicing it.
For someone who says we’re too meta, that’s sure an abstract and example-free complaint.
Considering the current political controversies, which libertarian arguments are strongest? Libertarians and non-libertarians feel free to discuss. I would say that the libertarian solution to the housing problem is pretty solid. Housing could be so much cheaper if there weren’t so many barriers to “substandard housing.”
The War on Drugs is both a practical disaster and a very easy thing to argue against on libertarian grounds.
It really depends on what you mean by “war on drugs.” Legalizing weed is easy to justify. Meth and heroin not so much. I’ve noticed that libertarians generally seem to ignore the costs to having meth and heroin sold at your neighborhood drug store.
Legalized heroin would probably be a net social good (compared to the real case of black-market heroin, not the fantasy of zero heroin), but that argument will be easier to make after a decade or tow of legal marijuana.
Legalized meth is called “Adderall”.
Portugal decriminalized everything, including opiates, and has good outcomes.
This isn’t a strictly libertarian policy since drug users get a lot of government help.
Kleiman, Caulkins, and Hawken really said it best – Portugal’s drug policy is a Rorschach test.
I think the argument I’ve seen used the most, not sure if entirely libertarian or what, is that the criminalization of drugs has not worked that well at getting people not to use drugs, and it has probably worked even worse on getting people to not sell drugs.
Anyways, legalizing weed makes sense because it is just as, if not less, harmful than the already legal cigarettes and alcohol. As far as drugs such as meth and heroin more people–not always libertarians–are pushing decriminalization, not legalization. Decriminalization means that you won’t get in legal trouble for using these dangerous drugs, but the hope is that they would be more likely to be placed in a well run rehab program and be able to stop using meth or heroin. Because after a point no one enjoys using heroin, they just can’t stop because the withdrawal feels so terrible that they need heroin just to feel normal.
Side note: I’m currently in a high school health class and in the last two classes we’ve had two outside speakers, one about how to identify signs of a heroin overdose and how to administer Narcan, and one today about how he became addicted to heroin and how he recovered. These events happened because the rich white school district I live in is now facing the reality of heroin addiction with their own perfect children, rather than just those crazy poor homeless druggies they see while driving into the ghetto.
I seem to recall from an earlier SSC post that there are drugs that effectively treat heroin addiction.
Scott, could you confirm? I’m wondering what the effect would be of making them available over the counter.
Methadone is effective at treating heroin addiction but does come with its own downsides.
I mean, less serious ones than being addicted to heroin, but still.
Methadone treatment is standard in Australia and I know a couple of people who are ex heroin users and currently on it.
Decriminilization is not the libertarian answer to the war on drugs. Full on legalization is. And legalization is going to increase the consumption of those drugs. If anyone denies that, I’m not going to take them seriously.
@Error –
Naltrexone seems to be a good treatment for a variety of addictions, including heroin. If you take it before you plan to use your drug, it blocks your high – repeat consistently enough, and your brain gradually learns that taking your drug is just not that fun anymore and your cravings fade away.
I know an alcoholic who effectively bought it over-the-counter by ordering it online from India, and he’s been quite pleased with the results. It apparently has relatively few and minor side effects as prescription drugs go, and I think making access to it easier would be a good thing even if we *don’t* legalize heroin.
@Wrong Species
I said in my comment that I wasn’t necessarily speaking to the libertarian point of view, just one that I’ve heard argued.
@Error
Yes! Suboxone! and similar drugs. Yeah I read most of the article that was linked in that SSC post several months ago, it was super long, but very good and very depressing. basically these drugs not widely used because shoddy treatment centers and people with power think its just “switching one drug for another”. Nevermind the fact that you can OD on heroin super easily and they have even engineered Suboxone products in ways to prevent abuse and ODs. But no! DRUGS! OPIATES! BAD!!!!
I pretty much agree. Decriminalizing possession of small amounts for all drugs seems like a no-brainer from a justice perspective and it’s been done to good results in some countries. Legalizing other drugs less dangerous than alcohol is probably also a good idea. Legalizing everything would obviously have some benefits, but it’s too untested for me to strongly believe there wouldn’t be a spike in usage that outweighs them. (And again from a justice perspective, making it illegal to sell things that are really dangerous is not unprecedented.)
Not a libertarian argument, but this would be a good opportunity to link to After the War On Drugs – Blueprint For Regulation by the UK-based legalisation advocacy group Transform Drug Policy Foundation (link is to a page where you can download the whole book as a pdf but you can find the executive summary here), which sets out their recommendations for how different drugs might be legally regulated to minimise harms.
They do not advocate a libertarian approach – their position is that it is precisely because drugs are riskier than average consumer goods that they need to be tightly regulated, but that the prohibition approach causes far greater overall harm than a cautiously-phased-in, evidence-based and explicitly public-health-focussed regulatory regime overseeing the legal production, sale and consumption of currently-illegal drugs.
They would not advocate having meth and heroin available to all comers at your local drug store (though note that prohibition tends to incentivise the more potent, and more dangerous, forms of drugs, and a legal regulatory regime would be much better placed to incentivise, say, opium over heroin, milder stimulants over meth etc), but if they are right then even with substantial nanny-statism, you could still expect to see an uptick in state respect for adults making their own choices and a reduction in aggregate drug-harms and drug-policy-harms, because the current system is so terrible.
They specifically do not recommend decriminalisation (in the ‘you don’t get in trouble for using it but it’s still illegal to produce or sell’ sense) because that is likely to incentivise a larger number of users while still leaving the market in the control of criminals who have no public health mandate.
I remember hearing that economists (Friedman?) predicted that the current regime of “we won’t arrest you for using, but will ruin your life for selling” would pretty much guarantee the proliferation of vicious gangs since there would be a huge amount of buyers which bids up the price leading to people eventually overcoming their fear of the risks (and being very violent to potential snitches or informants).
What do you mean by “strong”? Anything that agrees with the current neoliberal consensus has the highest possiblity of becoming policy, anything that strongly disagrees with the current neoliberal consensus will also probably have strong leftist, conservative, and assorted arguments in favor of it, making it easier to communicate with a wider group of the politically motivated.
I mean most convincing to a nonlibertarian.
In that case I’d say the argument for localism in politics or general antifragility, and against top down solutions imposed from afar. I say this because it’s both obviously libertarian and has clear sympathies in major leftist and conservative movements. It can also convince imperialists and neoliberals, point to the success of management that can react cleverly to local conditions while incentivised not to go native.
Unfortunately, while localism is an attractive idea, there’s Jim Crow as a huge counterexample– local governments were abusive to their citizens (it might be reasonable to call black people under Jim Crow residents rather than citizens) and the big centralized government came in and made the local governments behave somewhat better.
I see what you mean, but I don’t think this is necessarily as big a problem as it seems, coming philosophically more from a Booker T Washington and Malcolm X point of view. This issue gets complicated fast though, and my thoughts are to jumbled for a proper response. Maybe in another thread.
@Nancy:
It’s worth noting that the central government, more precisely the Supreme Court, had failed to prevent the local governments from blocking efforts to help their black residents find better places and go to them. There was a lively business in putting black workers in states that treated them badly together with employers, generally also in the South, but in more desirable places. The states pretty much regulated it out of existence, the case got to the Supreme Court which, on the Lochner principle, should have found such regulation unconstitutional, and didn’t.
Part of what makes localism workable is easy migration, hence competition among localities.
I’m not arguing that the federal government was harmless in the matter of Jim Crow, but getting rid of Jim Crow was the better than trying to ameliorate its effects by getting some people out of its reach, and it was the federal government which did it.
I feel liked this can be chalked up to another case of “the federal government fixes a problem the federal government caused, yay federal government”. But your point about this being non-obvious still stands.
Foreign policy, hands down.
A lot of libertarian solutions can be summarized by saying “knock that off, it won’t get better if you keep picking at it!” in an exasperated tone. It’s often good advice but at the same time can be infuriating when you’re trying to lance domestic boils. Sometimes you need to bleed before you can heal.
But American foreign policy is the perfect counterpoint to that. Democrat or Republican, it has been pointless and self-destructive for decades. We would have done well to listen to George Washington’s warning about foreign entanglements. It’s not possible to return to an isolationist foreign policy immediately but we can at least take the first steps towards weening the West.
The trouble is that we rely heavily on foreign trade and foreign energy sources. Self-sufficiency in energy is probably attainable (for the US at least), but it requires in the short term aggressive development of our domestic fossil fuel reserves and nuclear power, which is opposed by environmentalists.
Going economically isolationist would be much more difficult and painful. And unfortunately the two issues are mingled, because even if the US isn’t dependent on Mideast oil, other countries will still be, making Mideast conflict a drag on the global economy whether America is involved or not.
The other problem with American isolationism is that there are serious opponents (from the US perspective) who are not isolationist. Giving them free rein to act everywhere but on the North American continent probably has bad implications. We need to maintain the big stick or else bear the costs of the rest of the world being directed in ways opposed to our interests (which is not to say that we couldn’t be more judicious in our wielding of the stick).
Short version – isolationism only works if everyone else agrees to be isolationist too.
What does economic isolationism have to do with non-interventionist foreign policy? Libertarians not only don’t argue for the former they generally argue for complete free trade, which is the opposite position–less economically isolationist than the current policy of almost every country.
Libertarians often do argue for a non-interventionist foreign policy. The fact that you are not bombing people does not mean you can’t trade with them.
Yeah, the libertarian position on trade is almost always “unilateral free trade, starting yesterday”.
The idea that it has to be bilateral is quite odd: I’ll stop impoverishing my own people if you stop impoverishing yours.
You’re right. Isolationism was a poor choice of words on my part. The concept I was really thinking about was economic independence – if we unilaterally give up our ability to project power, my concern is that other states could move into our current sphere of influence and force unfavorable trade deals on us (it takes two to “free trade”). If we’re capable of economic independence, we can at least say “no way, we’re going to take our ball and go home” to keep them honest.
Overall though I do think we should intervene less, but also intervene more decisively when we do (and make sure there’s a rock solid case for the world being more favorable post intervention).
The sanctions against Cuba should have been a scandal to libertarians, but so far as I know the sanctions weren’t high on the list of things libertarians wanted changed. Instead (so far as I know) the sanctions were lifted as a result of people who have personal and/or commercial reasons for wanting free trade and travel with Cuba.
@Nancy,
Trading with Cuba while the communist government is still in power means, quite literally, that you’re fencing stolen property produced by slave labor. It’s no less wrong when the nominal government does it than when it’s done by private actors, if anything moreso.
That said, if Cuba sans Castro ends up going the way of China sans Mao, it’s appropriate to encourage that. The timing of this seems to indicate that the State Department agrees.
” if we unilaterally give up our ability to project power, my concern is that other states could move into our current sphere of influence and force unfavorable trade deals on us”
Switzerland has very little ability to project power, does pretty well in the world market. Ditto Taiwan, Japan, Germany, … .
There is really no connection. The reason for trade is mutual advantage, not threats.
Taiwan, Japan, and Germany specifically entered into alliances with the United States in which they promised to be nice and peaceful and non-interventionist and we promised to project power on their behalf if need be. Switzerland made essentially that deal with the Old World Order, and when that collapsed found itself entirely surrounded by nations which had made the peace-for-protection deal with the United States.
This is, demonstrably, a winning strategy for nations which are not the United States of America. I see a potential flaw in having the United States adopt it, and recommend carefully thinking this through before jumping on the bandwagon.
@John – exactly. And it’s a winning strategy for those countries that depends on the United States existing as a friendly (to them) superpower. If that goes away, it may stop being a winning strategy.
@David – a protection racket operates on the principle of mutual benefit. So does blackmail and extortion. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to voluntarily make yourself vulnerable to becoming the victim of one.
Until everyone is operating on the principle of truly free trade, which doesn’t seem likely anytime soon, there’s going to be jockeying for national position and bargaining power, often with military force. Call these threats if you like, but they are real, and there’s a real cost to not being in a powerful bargaining position.
@ Gbdub:
The point of unilateral free trade is that we benefit from it even if it is not reciprocated.
Whatever harm protectionism on the part of other countries causes to us, it causes greater harm to them. And the harm it causes to us is only magnified by imposing our own protectionist schemes.
Yeah have to agree with Dave.
I think we could stand to get a bit more energy independent and am skeptical enough of globalism that I can’t honestly call myself a libertarian, but even that’s a far cry from autarky. We’re not talking about haijin here, all the ports can stay open.
Hell I’d even be fine with sending the Marines to “the shores of Tripoli” every so often if I felt we had the self-restraint to actually make punitive strikes without it turning into a decade long occupation. If we promise to protect someone, whether our own nationals or allies, then we are obligated to: that’s why such promises need to be rare and well thought-out.
Here’s the part I don’t get, as a libertarian somewhat more inclined towards interventionism: it seems like our “entangling alliances” have worked out pretty darn well.
Where we get in trouble is when we intervene without having made a clear prior commitment.
I don’t see what we get out of abolishing NATO or something. Maybe we can spend less on it, but maintaining liberal capitalism around the world is in our self-interest. I certainly don’t think, for instance, letting the Soviet Union invade Western Europe would have been in our self-interest.
If anything, we could move toward total military integration in return for more equitable sharing of costs.
Hands down in what sense? Doing the most good, or persuading people that you should be allowed to try?
Libertarian foreign policy has an unfortunate, potentially fatal weak spot when it comes to dealing with the enemies and the commitments the United States has already made. As an aspirational policy, yes, there are steps we can make now that in twenty or thirty years might make us the Switzerland of North America. As a way to make policy or win elections today, “Ignore ISIS; they’ll get bored and stop trying to kill us in twenty or thirty years” is not going to be persuasive. Neither, for that matter, is “Let Japan deal with North Korea; it’s their problem not ours”.
Also, you don’t win in politics by advocating policies so at odds with the other major parties that everything you try to do will be undone the next time they are in power. It is exceedingly rare for any political party to hold the White House for twenty years in US history. And the American people have a demonstrable taste for foreign interventionism in a good cause, which can be satiated or suppressed but isn’t likely to go away. So, every ten to twenty years, the reins of foreign policy will be held by people with a perceived mandate to go set right what went so visibly wrong in the world while the isolationist Libertarians were in charge. Which will get us a whole new set of enemies and commitments that don’t go away when in ten or twenty years the Libertarians take power again.
If you’re looking for a winning argument today, that doesn’t take thirty years you won’t get to show results, I’m inclined to agree that housing and the war on drugs are good places to start.
I agree we can’t and shouldn’t leave allies holding the bag when they’re attacked. A lot of countries are literally demilitarized because they’ve come to depend on American troops to protect them, and suddenly withdrawing would destroy them.
That said, I don’t see that withdrawing can’t be a piecemeal process. Make South Korea the model of a US ally: if we have bases in your country, we expect you to pull your weight and supply a fully equipped modern army of your own to match or exceed our troop presence. Then once other nations get the hang of securing their own borders we can start drawing down the forces we have abroad and handing bases over to our allies to manage.
As for immediate results, I’d say the savings in blood and treasure should count for something. If we took a four year hiatus from buying weapons for our enemies and starting new invasions the difference would be tens of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. If you can’t sell that to the public then you deserve to lose your reelection campaign.
The last time the US invaded anyone was in 2003. Clearly we are living in a Libertarian utopia, with budgets balanced on the basis of zeroed-out defense spending and American war deaths a distant memory…
It will take decades for most of our allies to build armies comparable to South Korea’s, and if we try to make it happen any faster I’m pretty sure you won’t like the results. It will take decades for people to lay off attacking us and our allies, whether because we are all so nice to them or because our allies are sufficiently mighty in their own right. And for that matter, our own domestic military expenses are necessarily budgeted on a similar timescale.
The only real flexibility on a four-year timescale is humanitarian interventions like Libya and Syria – which maybe we shouldn’t be doing but they aren’t costing thousands of American lives and the American people do seem to favor kicking ISIS ass, so I don’t see this as a big winning issue for the Libertarians.
Hmm, my immediate reaction is “the libertarians think the market is a free lunch, again”. It also plays very poorly against the stereotype of libertarians not caring about other people.
I agree with the point on housing, but then I agree with libertarianism generally, so it’s probably better to start where libertarians are the weakest. The three areas where libertarianism falls down badly are big business, welfare, and borders.
Big business: Libertarian solutions are weaker in markets with just a few dominant firms who have tremendous price setting power, and are protected from competition by non-governmental barriers to entry (oligopolies), and strongest in markets with lots of different buyers and sellers with low barriers to entry (usually called “monopolistic competition” but the name doesn’t mean what you think it means). Banks need more regulation than corner shops, and even if they didn’t, the perception that they do is politically important. Libertarians, being a political minority, should stop fighting liberals/progressives on the regulation of things like banks and megacorps. I would go as far to say that libertarians should “agree” with them, and split the difference, by gathering credibility to then focus on getting regulations out of the way of small business, and attacking credentialism.
Welfare: Some sort of basic income guarantee may become necessary later in the Century due to automation, as has been discussed extensively in past open threads. Even if this is not so, the existence of the welfare state is almost a given. The best libertarians can do (political minority; permanently if you take Haidt seriously) is to find the most libertarian compatible version of a welfare state. Libertarian objections to the welfare state are the libertarian weakspot, because it’s trivial then to portray them as heartless shills for business and haters of the poor, whether it is true or not. The best way to get communism in a modern state would be to produce the political conditions for it. Instead, focus on repealing burdensome regulations, not on attacking welfare and taxation.
Borders: An increasingly necessary welfare state needs to remain financially viable, so there is the twin trap where you need young taxpayers, but you also risk opening the floodgates to welfare tourists who can’t be integrated. The second concern becomes dominant if we assume middle of the Century mass technological unemployment. Libertarians can’t easily address this, but in fairness, no political movement seems to be able to do so satisfactorily. The best thing is to follow the crowd on this one (political minority again) in order to stay relevant at all. At the current juncture, stronger border control is soon on the ascendancy across the spectrum.
Basically, sucker up to leftists on big business and welfare so you can defy them on everything else (P O L I T I C A L C A P I T A L). This might seem counter intuitive, but the main way in which libertarianism is attacked effectively is by shouting THE POOR THE POOR THE POOR THE POOR THE POOR and then that’s that. Ideological minority movements always have to go down on one knee… perhaps with a knife in your boot, but all the same.
There’s hardly a knockdown argument that libertarians will achieve most success by compromising on the advocacy of libertarian principles. If libertarians don’t speak up for them, who will?
The point is to be a consistent, principled voice driving the Overton Window towards libertarianism. Not to jump on some political bandwagon. Places like the Cato Institute have had considerable success in doing this, not to mention the legal victories of places like the Institute for Justice.
Anyway, it’s not an incredibly detailed response, but Jason Kuznicki makes this sort of argument in response to Will Wilkinson, a libertarian who does exactly what you want them to do.
In the interests of disclosure: I agree with libertarians generally, but I’m still talking about them in third person, because I’m not strictly speaking a libertarian to begin with, and I don’t start from libertarian first principles. I’m an ex-libertarian, but I still want to live in a libertarian society. What that means is that I think about the whole thing in entirely materialist terms, of how to get from A to B. I think libertarianism needs to be contained within a package that isn’t challenging to the most baseline moral foundations of the general populace.
You talk about moving the Overton Window, but at this stage, I’m skeptical that you can budge people’s morality that much. Libertarians have remained a weird little minority forever, and there has to be some reason why. People spend a lot of effort trying to deny left and right, but they seem to remain relatively fixed. Sure, the overlying expressions might change, but the emotional core remains to shape and confine the boundaries of those changes. Leftists are always angry at the rich, and rightists always fear the alien.
I’ve always cared about autonomy, not only mine, but other people’s. I want to live in a society that can preserve that. I could look back and say that I changed, but I really think the core foundation level of what I care about has always remained the same. I started out as a liberal (US terminology) supporting Obama and other figures, but when I think about it, I didn’t know much about politics, and I thought that liberals were the ones who cared about autonomy. They wanted to stop the evil warmongers after all.
I gradually found out that the left actually cared most about equality, and not equality of a specific thing, or in a specific realm, but equality in a more abstract and expansive way that slips through the fingers like sand. For example; equality before the law means freedom for all, but I could never understand why we needed more female CEOs, or why we needed a maximum income. Why are you so angry at the rich? I gradually moved away from leftism.
Then I found libertarianism. Suddenly it clicked! This was it! Here was a complete system that articulated and justified what I felt inside. Now, if we could just get everyone to convert to it, all of our problems would be solved…
Some years later, I began to read into mainstream textbook economics, and I learned that Austrianism was fringe not because elites, but because there were some good arguments against it. Keynesian arguments about the paradox of thrift seemed very compelling, but no one could really agree on any of this stuff, because there was such a lack of evidence underlying any of it, and there were no controls in history. This was an idea already present in Austrian economics, and yet it still required you to buy into a priori statements about human nature. In reality, economics is within certain bounds, a very open field, in which you’d be hard pressed to gather enough evidence to blow it wide open. Two economists with completely opposite views can both win the Noble Prize in Economics.
How then could I convince people that libertarian economics worked and would make things better? By evidence? Fat chance, especially if even I’m not convinced. The purest libertarians have a poor record of conversion anyway. There was the “libertarian moment” of Ron Paul, but at best what happened afterwards is that the term “libertarian” began to apply to more mainstream conservative views. The left and right difference always seems to win. It really does seem like tribes, the blue and the red as you say here. Leftists will always care about abstract equality, and rightists will always care about some specific conception of purity.
If you take the Jonathan Haidt view of politics seriously, then libertarians are a cognitive minority who have NO hope of having their complete package of ideas become dominant. It seems to me that in lieu of that, the best, libertarians or people who care about autonomy, can do, is try to eke out some “radical center” ground and try not to alienate the left and right too much. Won’t work in the US or any first past the post electoral system, but it’s a strategy that should work in any European country with proportional representation. The other best thing is for technological changes to make libertarianism an easier pill to swallow for people inherently primed against it. Or maybe make secession easier (seasteads, etc).
So, when I look at this:
“A more modest political strategy might concede that we don’t actually know the consequences of a prominent, welfare-skeptical political faction, like libertarians, collectively changing their minds about welfare policy. It’s not entirely unreasonable to think that it will lead to a larger (but neither juster nor more efficient) welfare state. And that it won’t do anything else at all.”
I can agree with that on its face, but I really don’t see many other options that aren’t just trying the same failed strategy again and again until the end of time. It could make the welfare state larger, but I feel pretty confident in trends that will make that happen anyway. I don’t think libertarians should be singing the praises of the welfare state from the rooftops, but I do think it should be treat more as a given reality. If robots do everything 70 years from now, the welfare state won’t even be a problem from a “taxation is theft” perspective, because you won’t need taxes to pay a wageless workforce.
Just to point out that libertarian economics need not mean Austrian economics.
That’s true. Back when I was a libertarian I was most familiar with Austrian economic arguments, that’s all.
I think the Rise of Trump shows there’s a large demand for essentially the opposite of libertarianism. And that a lot of Ron Paul supporters weren’t so much principled libertarians as they were people looking for a specific flavor of anti-establishment-ism.
I agree on points two and three being the weakest but I don’t know about point one. If you’re talking about weakest as far as public perception is concerned, sure. But I think libertarians can get a decent amount of mileage pointing out that banks are already heavily regulated and that might itself be the problem. Besides natural monopolies, I think the argument against potential monopolies is a lot weaker than is assumed.
“Banks need more regulation than corner shops, and even if they didn’t, the perception that they do is politically important. Libertarians, being a political minority, should stop fighting liberals/progressives on the regulation of things like banks and megacorps. I would go as far to say that libertarians should “agree” with them, and split the difference, by gathering credibility to then focus on getting regulations out of the way of small business, and attacking credentialism.”
And then you run up against the problem that, for some libertarians, that’s the most important part. Libertarian arguments about markets become a lot more tenable when the economy isn’t falling apart every decade or so, when you aren’t dealing with growth along all metrics that leaves millions of ‘losers’ who are disappointed and jaded about their life outcomes. If you think that over-regulation or mis-regulation of banks (and this is one of the areas where libertarians have the better of the public debate on the matter — pro-regulationists who insist we have a free market in banking are either wholly ignorant of modern banking regulation or are using a really idiosyncratic definition of ‘free market’) is the cause of a lot of modern economic instability (and historic instability, for that matter), then arguments over banking regulations are really freaking important.
But monetary policy/banking regulations are actually really boring and so the people who can say the simplest, most digestible thing tend to carry the day, because the majority of the voting populace just wants to move the hell on to something more exciting and culture war centric.
The real problem with libertarianism as a political movement hoping to achieve actual change is that they’ve spent so long in the desert they’ve forgotten what life is like in the village. They’ve spent so long tolerating and even celebrating kooks and charlatans that they’ve forgotten how to actually play the game. The kooks and charlatans need to be thrown under the bus and a sober, professional movement needs to be built from the ground up. You can either grade on ideological purity and get nowhere or start admitting that pragmatism is important and take a shower, put on some clothes that fit, and figure out why people don’t like you. If you do that, you might start being able to change in a way that will bring success in the future.
Maybe figuring out how to convey the message on something ‘important’ like banking regulation in a way other than, “Well, the magic of the market…!”, would be a good place to start.
Libertarians never knew how to play the game.
The problem with a pragmatic approach is you lose the actual libertarianism. By the time you’ve compromised enough to get into power, you’re indistinguishable from those there now.
“The problem with a pragmatic approach is you lose the actual libertarianism. By the time you’ve compromised enough to get into power, you’re indistinguishable from those there now.”
Not if you strategically “compromise” on things that don’t actually matter that much to libertarianism in the long run, such as the welfare state (which will libertarianize just through technological progress) and borders (public property being used to remove a lot of choice about who you will live around that you would have in a more privatized system). Strategic compromise to the left and right on key issues means you could get to be a coalitional spoiler party (in non 2 party systems, so forget the US), and get free market stuff passed.
Vox doesn’t think it’s possible, but I don’t think purist deontological approaches to libertarianism will ever be successful. You’re never going to see 50% of the voting population become true blue libertarians, because libertarians are cognitively weird.
If this is true, then libertarians have to engage in minority group politics, with the added disadvantage that they don’t have sympathetic majorities helping them. You might not want to do this, but you don’t have a choice if you want to remain relevant.
This is why secessionist approaches and institution-building are better than electoral politicking IMO.
@TD:
When you talk about “libertarianism” do you mean the Libertarian Party? An intellectual movement does not work the way you are describing. It’s a spontaneous order not an organization.
I am a libertarian. What are you suggesting I should do? Stop mentioning the less politically popular parts of my position when I write books or articles or argue online? Say something hostile about the “kooks” whenever I have the opportunity? I’m not running for office, so don’t have to have a campaign platform.
@ David Friedman:
Exactly.
And what about all the “mainstream” libertarian organizations? The Cato Institute? Reason Magazine? The Institute for Justice?
They’re not “kooks”, they take a principled position but they’re not intolerant dogmatists, they work pragmatically with people on the left and the right, etc. The invite everyone from the NAACP and the ACLU to the NRA and conservative religious groups to work with them on specific issues.
And they have achieved success that is…obviously not total, but far in excess of the relative size of the libertarian movement.
Are the people criticizing just unfamiliar with them, or do they really think the Cato Institute or whatever are crazy radicals nobody listens to?
@David Friedman
“When you talk about “libertarianism” do you mean the Libertarian Party? An intellectual movement does not work the way you are describing. It’s a spontaneous order not an organization.”
I’m principally talking about parties and how to win in politics, but I think it would help if libertarian think tanks started to adopt triangulation tactics into their ideology.
Sure, it’s a spontaneous order, but I’m just adding my little bit of influence to that spontaneous order. I’m not claiming anything else.
“I am a libertarian. What are you suggesting I should do? Stop mentioning the less politically popular parts of my position when I write books or articles or argue online?”
That’s up to you. I think the libertarian movement would have more success if the major philosophers abandoned elements that are simply unsustainable. Anti-welfare positions I don’t believe are sustainable, but then I believe that because I believe that technological unemployment is in the pipeline, and if you don’t believe that, then there’s no reason to become pro-welfare.
I honestly think though that by the end of this Century, it’s either a market economy with a universal welfare state grafted on, or communist revolution. I don’t think you get a choice outside of welfare capitalism that retains property rights Vs various capital S socialisms that take them away.
The thing is, libertarianism, broadly speaking is comprised of three claims:
1.That a society that places the autonomy of person and property highest is more ethical. (Libertarian ethics)
2.Various claims about reality and economics to support the above position. (Libertarian economics)
3.We can convince people that BOTH the above are true (Libertarian politics).
I still believe in 1, but I have moved away from 2. For example, I believe that the Keynesian multiplier effect works, among other things. This means that while I generally side with the market, I’m more likely to trust mainstream economic interpretations over more fringe libertarian ones. When trying to achieve a society based on 1, I have to consider whether 1 can be achieved right now, and if it can’t, what must change about society to make a libertarian society possible (I think the answer is mostly technological, but I’m not going into that right now). I also have to consider 3, why most people do not want a libertarian society, and how to ease libertarianism into the mainstream in a modified package that doesn’t set off alarm bells. You need to get past those emotional alarm systems. Appease liberals on the poverty question and you’ve basically defanged them, because whatever else you say after that is really hard to connect in people’s minds to a group of people who are okay with granny starving under a bridge. Conservatives are the same on borders. This is why I support a framework that goes free market(except for banks and megacorps) + welfare(later basic income) + borders(later property rights based).
Rent control is probably the strongest libertarian argument.
The strongest antilibertarian argument is of course anything dealing with the tobacco industry.
Not sure if rent control is the strongest libertarian argument *everywhere*
Its a textbook example of inefficencies in new york, new york, that horribly crowded place.
How do things like section 8 housing factor into those arguments?
I personally think that what is happening right now with medicine and education are the best very-visible current examples of anti-libertarian arguments. Its why Sanders is doing so well.
New York is the most infamous, not the only location with rent control. Section 8 isn’t rent control, but voucher housing; unrelated.
Do you think a decline in standards won’t happen, or will happen but be accpetable?
I think the practical arguments for libertarianism are best. Eg., Penn Jillette’s I don’t know, so I’m an atheist libertarian: government is hard and intimately tied up with violence, so let’s be really careful what we trust them with.
Related to that, it’s weird to me that government doesn’t seem to be held accountable for things in the ways that businesses or individuals are. It wastes, misplaces or gives to dictators billions of dollars a year. It burns or crushes thousands of foreign children to death (and then calls them “collateral damage”), it spies on its citizens, it locks people in cages for bad reasons. Nothing seems to happen when contracts for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars produce nothing of value. The USA spends $1 Trillion every year (that’s a million millionaire’s entire fortunes, every year!) on education that gets politicized by Texas-approved textbooks and ivory tower liberal arts professors alike.
Just in the past 24 hours of my news feed, here’s a Detroit school bribery scandal and a worldwide bribery scandal. People will get fired and go to jail, but we never seem to say “our current government is hopelessly corrupt/incompetent at doing this thing, so even if it ideologically makes sense, practically it’d be a disaster, so we’re not going to trust them with it.”
People get down on Nestle and Walmart and Planned Parenthood and Halliburton for good reasons, but those companies aren’t even a blip on the radar compared to the atrocities of the behemoths that we simultaneously trust to regulate them, provide our health care, lock people in cages, educate our kids, drop bombs on people, protect the environment, train and employ assassins, and provide our electricity and water.
It’s not that governments shouldn’t do any of those things. It’s just odd to me how easily we assume that if “feed the poor” is in the public interest, that we can simply direct the government to do it and that it’ll somehow do it efficiently and without horrible mismanagement and corruption, especially given how easily we can all name so many ways that government is screwed up.
If we’re recommending original fiction, Mother of Learning is fun. A groundhog day plot, still ongoing, someone else recc’ed it in a /tg/ Less Wrong thread.
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/1/Mother-of-Learning
Second the rec. It’s not rationalist, per se, but I don’t recall any characters acting immersion-breakingly stupidly. It has fairly well-built universe and a load of reasonably developed secondary characters.
I found it good enough that I offered to beta it. My time is valuable, so I don’t do that unless I think something’s good enough to justify spending my time on it.
I was more interested in the guy who mentioned an Unsong tabletop adaptation in the works
Also recommend. It definitely has a main character who sets about solving problems in an intelligent way (not just relying on high INT stat to seem smart). People react to surprising information in reasonable ways.
Hey, MugaSofer, you still recruiting for that Harry Potter RPG?
I appreciate the reference to the Easter Rising in this centenary year, Scott 🙂
I just realized the kabbalistic implications of the term “Easter Rising” and I am delighted.
This is a particularly infelicitous use of “kabbalistic.”
I can see it as a pun, but what’s the kabbalah?
An appropriate image
Jewish mysticism
See our host’s other blog…
Scott seems to be using “kabbalistic” to mean something like “symbolic” or “metaphorical.”
Nice image. 🙂
I see the media is (almost) entirely silent on the fact that the captured Paris suspect very likely had detailed knowledge of the suspects and potentially the plans of the Brussel’s attackers. The fact they executed the attack within 4 days of the capture supports an argument the attackers were concerned they were about to be exposed (because the captured suspect had this knowledge).
The Belgian’s “interrogation” of this suspect apparently involved never even asking him if he knew of any future attack plans. The fine print says he stopped talking, so they stopped asking questions. It is one thing to start chopping off fingers, it’s another thing to not even try and act like this guy is a jaywalker.
This is a concrete example of where tough interrogation may have had demonstrable and verifiable positive benefits, and my point is that nobody even discussing this seems to be a case of willful denial to avoid a messy debate.
I submit that if the media wanted to “flood the zone” to support this issue we would be subjected to the victim’s families telling us in no uncertain terms that they find the white gloved treatment of the Paris suspect to be appalling, instead we get crickets.
Better a thousand innocents should die in a fireball than one terrorist be asked an impertinent question! Didn’t you read your Greenwald and Thoreau?
In reality, this is just an outgrowth of tribalism. The media, half the political spectrum and almost all the governing bureaucracies are on the side of the people killing their citizens. Of course it’s horrible and all, but not horrible enough to do what is necessary to stop it.
Besides, didn’t those Belgians ask for it, what with all the colonializm and razixms and wasn’t there a Crusade or two we can lob at them as well? Personally, I blame the Belgian’s inability to assimilate their muslim population. If only they’d given them more jobs and better welfare, they wouldn’t be getting blown up. Everyone knows how xenophobic and warmongering those Belgians are. I mean, Belgian is practically a byword for Ghengis Khan-like levels of violence, right?
This is not only not the sort of comment that leads me to come here, I think it’s the opposite of the ideal SSC comment in nearly every way.
Would you prefer I were seriously advancing either narrative?
A little while ago, in a little town in Germany, a bunch of women were robbed, sexually assaulted, and even raped.
The police, politicians, and media agencies all tried to cover this up; they had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to address the issue. I mean, figuratively speaking, of course; it’s not like the people of Cologne physically dragged them anywhere, however much one might wish they did (preferably, to waiting gibbets).
Shortly thereafter, the people staged protests against the refusal to protect the citizens, the initial attempts to cover up the crimes, and the response that blamed the victims for what happened to them. The government’s response was to go full Bull Connor. That’s not figuratively speaking; I literally mean they turned the fucking water cannons on their own people, while police on foot used truncheons to beat individual protesters to a bloody fucking pulp. But then, I’m told that Pegida was involved, and I’m also told they’re racists, so everyone participating in the protests were guilty of racism by association, and deserved what was coming to them. So I’m told.
This is not isolated; this has been going on all throughout the continent. Do you remember Rotherham? Well, for starters, while in the public imagination Rotherham was a one-off, in reality it was only one of at least eight cities in jolly olde England where the rapes were occurring. In all cases, local governments suppressed any attempts to stop the crimes from occurring, and even when perps were brought to justice, magistrates still saw fit to minimize their crimes, blaming the parents (who, in some cases by attempting to rescue their children, were arrested for committing hate crimes), and referred to acts like stuffing an escaping girl into the trunk of a car as “grooming”
Sastan wasn’t engaging in some fallacious reasoning; across the West, the State has declared war upon the Nation. Where once it was believed that governments existed to serve the needs of the people, our enlightened betters understand that the people exist to serve the whims of the State, or, more accurately, those who control it. And they are more than happy to sacrifice their own citizens, for status or profit, so long as the right sort of people are the victims.
Can’t upset the _others_, unlike the natives, those people might actually kill you.
Reported for being unkind, untrue and unnecessary (as well as very racist).
Rotherham was not the only instance of a group of adults having sex which was statutory rape with underage teenagers from a deprived background, and where extensive coercion emerged in exactly the way one would expect from that situation.
It was the only place where the local authority and police force totally declined to bother following up on reports of statutory rape and underage drinking/drug use out of attitudes like these*, then as evidence emerged that it had become a large problem and people had realised they could do whatever they liked, actively covered that up until it was no longer possible to.
The other cases were just examples of crime, which happened to be committed by a minority. Rotherham was a governmental failure to enforce the law on a grand scale, 2-3 orders of magnitude worse.
It is true that the minority has elevated rates of committing that crime overall, but it’s a smaller gap than between various long-standing minorities in the US and than between men and women. Any elevated rate is sad, but it’s not an existential threat and not presently one of the biggest problems to worry about.
I’m not familiar with the whole brutal crackdown on protesters in Germany thing. I had heard of protests involving, e.g. feminist groups calling for something to be done to prevent a re-occurrence, which I thought was promising, because they’re the kind of people who won’t go off the deep end in what they want and will also be listened to. It doesn’t surprise me too much that some protests there turned violent, lots of latent anger, but I’d need to know more before concluding the government was insane.
I do know at the very least that the hate crime charge in the UK was not for trying to “rescue their child” but for abusive behaviour while waiting for the police to retrieve the child, who had ran off to spend time with them, not been kidnapped. And it was just enough of a charge to pull them away rather than leave them there after the police left to get violent, rather than one with a severe penalty. That’s just the government declining to grant a free pass for retaliation.
No government has declared war on The Nation. The Nation voted it in and is liable to vote it in again. It’s just the rest of the Nation doesn’t share your value system and preferred policies.
There’s legitimate bad things, but the incentive for those who want to justify extreme measures is to maximise everything as far as possible to convince people to sign up to their political project, so you can’t take the general tone of the more, agitating things, as balanced representation.
* Which are a lot more acceptable to many people when you’re talking about rich footballers than when you’re talking about lower class minority members. Their error was in resolving this in the direction of “it’s always okay” rather than in the direction of “it’s never okay”.
“It is true that the minority has elevated rates of committing that crime overall, but it’s a smaller gap than between various long-standing minorities in the US”
Is “Pakistanis commit rape slightly less often than blacks” really an argument you want to make here?
The relative crime rate gaps I know about to compare relate to violent crime; if you want rape rate gaps, in particular to compare to, though, consider men vs women. My point is that the statistical difference isn’t a terrifying crisis justifying terrible things, because while any crime is bad, crime rates are still pretty good by international standards.
This does involve acknowledging that statistical differences in crime rates between groups exist, without making any claims as to causes, and I’m prepared to do that because it seems to be true, and we should acknowledge things that are true, and also because it is necessary to acknowledge what seems to be true in order to make a compelling argument as to why the rest is false.
And it’s necessary to engage and make such arguments, because otherwise people who are scared about things will feel ignored and become unpleasant. Being unpleasant should be socially shameful, to disincentivise selfishness and stop non-scared people from doing it, but we should still be able to offer truthful explanations as to why they’re wrong and how their needs can be provided for without unpleasantness, so they can stop feeling scared and ignored and stop feeling the need to resort to being unpleasant. I think that makes sense, anyway.
I don’t want to load any groups with negative affect- which is the point of putting it into formal language and not naming the groups involved. I don’t agree with anything much of the typical worldview of the people who want to do that.
@JBeshir – That is a marvelous reply. Bravo, sir.
This isn’t about a statistical difference in crime rates, it’s about organized systematic attacks against the native population.
Terrorist bombings make up a minority of murders and pedophile gangs make up a minority of rapes but that isn’t the headline. The headline is that the governments of Europe routinely cover them up or minimize them when they happen, and use their police power to punish the victims while protecting the perpetrators.
You’re engaging in the same kind of apologia. Why do we care so much about a group of Pakistani men pouring gasoline on their English victim and threatening to light her on fire if she tells anyone? After all, football players sometimes have sex with willing girls under the age of consent! Must be all those innumerate racists…
@Dr Dealgood
Yes, Adam Johnson is a poor point of comparison. But horrific crimes against children aren’t only perpetrated by Pakistanis. I broadly agree with you in that there was clearly a big problem where the police failed to act because of fears about appearing racist (a rare genuine case of “political correctness gone mad”), but you can’t blame a large group for the actions of a very small minority.
The Adam Johnson thing is, roughly, why they didn’t act on the cases they could see, before they turned into worse cases they couldn’t see.
They didn’t outright ignore people getting physically coerced in front of them. They failed to follow up on pretty good signs that statutory rape was going on, out of attitudes like that that statutory rape was not in and of itself a big deal in the absence of clear signs of coercion, and that was what opened up the opportunity for the targeted children to become socially isolated and then physical coercion to be conducted in private. This is the end of the process generally referred to as “grooming”.
It is not “organised systemic attacks against the native population”, in the sense of being conducted by outsiders; they *are* the native population, mostly, being citizens, usually children of naturalised immigrants. They are criminal gangs, but it seems implausible to attribute any ideology to it other than amorality and a knowledge that the people around them are also amoral.
There’s no grand strategy to it, no leadership, no large population supporting said leadership that can be persuaded to stop supporting said leadership to make it stop, and the war mindset that acts as if there is recommends heinous acts.
Okay, then it’s organized systemic attacks against the ethnic group that makes up most of the native population.
In the sense that any criminal gang is, yes. In the sense of the war-like mentality the phrase evokes, see the rest of the comment.
So we replace war with good ole fashioned ethnic cleansing
that sounds much better.
The real problem in Britain is the fact that a wide range of crimes are not investigated and do not have any meaningful penalties associated with them. In this sense there isn’t anything particularly strange about the grooming gangs – after all, how many times would you have to rob a house before (a) the police would start an investigation (b) you would be given an actual punishment once caught?
Having said that – this idea that we’re all the same group won’t survive contact with attacks from groups of people who look/identify differently to us. One of the ‘arguments’ (when we were deemed worthy of one) provided for mass immigration was that “we are all migrants”. I suppose that might be a good counter to certain types of blood and soil racism that no-one believes in, but as an attempt to build a shared identity it is pretty pathetic. If you want to tell people they are all the same, you’re going to have to create a convincing universal identity – at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be working.
@hlynkacg
As of 2009, 2.2% of those in Rotherham were of Pakistani origin. Pretty poor ethnic cleansing if you ask me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen more jaw-droppingly brazen mendacity than what JBeshir posted. Prior to now, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a “can’t even” mindset.
He completely rewrites history, even when the facts – that the police refused to investigate due to fears of being labeled racist, that people who investigated the matter were disciplined for pointing out the truth, that this fact pattern was true of every city where such activities occurred – are matters of public record. He lies through his teeth by claiming the parents who were arrested for racial crimes (for the sin of trying to rescue their daughters after the police refused to intervene) were in fact arrested for “abusive behavior towards police.” He claims that dousing girls in gasoline and threatening to light them on fire to keep them silent, forcing them to witness brutal rapes to give them an example of what will happen if they talk, threatening to (and in some cases actually) assaulting younger family members, is in fact just “statutory rape.”
He completely fabricates the incidents of German protests – even after admitting he wasn’t following them – to paint a picture of violent protesters being responsible for police brutality, as opposed to what really happened, a government forcibly quashing dissent.
To say nothing of the sheer inanity in arguing “No government has declared war on The Nation. The Nation voted it in and is liable to vote it in again.” You mean like voting in Angela Merkel on a far-right platform of restricting immigration? How’d that work out for the Germans? How’d voting in immigration restrictionists work out for the Tea Party in America? Entire tomes have been written about how democratic systems are essentially rigged to ignore the popular will in favor of the rich and connected.
In reality, this is just an outgrowth of tribalism. The media, half the political spectrum and almost all the governing bureaucracies are on the side of the people killing their citizens. Of course it’s horrible and all, but not horrible enough to do what is necessary to stop it.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. These Muslims wouldn’t be able to kill us without the cooperation of the media and half the political spectrum.
Oh, that’s always been *the* most commonly brought up example for legalizing torture. Ever seen the show “24”
Its commonly brought up, with many bush era neo-conservative leaders proposing examples such as that.
I’ve never really cared to tackle the torture argument, so apologies if some of you find this obvious, but what’s the problem with torture for terrorists? “Someone under torture will say anything to get out” is a real issue when trying to establish guilt, but it’s not a knockdown problem if you’re trying to get information since you can corroborate or otherwise verify whatever info you get. Is it really just political pressure to be gentle that has achieved so much, or are there also practical issues?
Obviously there would be errors. That guy they just released after verifying he is not the bomber with the hat is probably very glad that torture wasnt an option.
wether or not you think torture for terrorists can be useful and justified, its practicality hinges on the classification of terrorists and the need to formulate it in general terms to make it law. You will probably end up with a police force torturing a lot of muslim criminals per racial profiling etc.
Second we have a problem with rule of law, how do we treat evidence coerced by torture while not incentivizing police to torture not just for prevention but also (under pretense) for prosecution?
Third, there is a foreseeable dynamic to politics and public opinion where the next argument is about torturing kidnappers, then organized crime, then copyright infringers or whatever the evil of the week seems to be. And that is assuming your government will not turn evil. (I know a certain newcomer to politics who will be THE BEST!!11!eleven at torturing)
Just not torturing seems a pretty good Schelling point for preventing all these risky dynamics especially when you put the opportunity costs of not torturing terrorists into perspective. Even assuming we could avoid any future loss of life through terrorists, thats not that many. Now that i think about it, torturing is probably even costly enough (bureaucracy-wise), that Malaria nets would be a better way to spend the money.
You can provide a lot of pressure on someone without attaching a car battery to their testicles. Moving a prisoner from holding to the general population is a common tactic. The other tactic is to threaten their families (hello, Trump). Obviously you cannot straight up lock up mamma , but you can force her to testify, and you can threaten to prosecute her for anything she might have done wrong or been aware of. A famous Canadian sex killer signed a confession because he was explicitly threatened the house he and his wife built would be torn down in front of her to look for any evidence.
Police are absolutely positively allowed to, and frequently do, lie during interrogations. “Your cohort has already confessed” is very popular.
It it torture to tell a suspect that his family is going to be “disappeared” if he doesn’t answer verifiable questions truthfully when you have no real intention of disappearing anyone?
I am pretty sure it would invalidate any further testimony at the very least.
Confessions after policing lying to the suspect are admissible. I don’t know if there are limits to this.
FYI – I supposed threats to disappear a family would be considered threats and coercion, ha ha. Another common tactic is the “we have you on video”.
What tactics can the police use when questioning a suspect?
The police are prohibited from using physical or psychological coercion when conducting police interrogations. A confession or evidence that results from coercive tactics is inadmissible at trial. The police, for example, may not use torture techniques, threats, drugging, or inhumane treatment during an interrogation. The police, however, can use lying, trickery, and other types of non-coercive methods to obtain a confession from a suspect.
– See more at: http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-rights/faqs-police-interrogations.html#sthash.V89HqYAa.dpuf
Yeah I wanted to stay away from the justice system because I acknowledge that torture invalidates testimony. The question was entirely about information gathering – if you tell a guy his family will get disappeared and he tells you where a bomb is, well, you either go find a bomb or you’ve closed an airport for naught, not a huge issue considering the potential lives saved unless you’re going through many fake uninformed terrorists with comrades you can use for corroboration. If you pressure him into telling you what he did yesterday instead, well, tough luck verifying that one.
After chaosbunt’s comment I’m pretty sure I’m for torture practiced by the military when on deployment somewhere far away, but against it being in the hands of anyone else, for risk of slippery slopes like the intelligence services capturing a guy at home and declaring him terrorist.
I’ve seen an idea in Torture and Democracy (a long geeky book about the evolution of no-marks torture, people here might like it) that torture is so easy that police who use torture are less likely to use normal investigative methods.
There exists some substantial area between “torture” and “let the guy get nice and comfy-cozy before asking any tough questions, and if he doesn’t want to answer, oh well”. The Belgian interrogations seems to be much closer to the latter than the former, and I don’t think you need to justify torture to nevertheless think a little bit of stress imposed on the guy might have been okay, given the probably urgency.
It doesn’t seem like a very concrete example with all those “very likelys” in there. I am willing to grant you three of the four suppositions, but not the claim that the Belgian interrogation “apparently” didn’t ask him about attack plans. I would expect them to ask, so I would need some kind of a source to support that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/brussels-attacks-were-a-terrorist-interrogation-failure/2016/03/28/a5949ed8-f4e5-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html
As I said in the original post, I believe the real story is he stopped talking, so they stopped asking questions.
One hypothesis is that the government wants, for self-interested (or maybe ideological) reasons, a policy which is soft on terrorism. Gaining information that shows that future attack plans is actually counterproductive–getting that information may commit the government to a course of action that forces it to attack the Middle East, spy on Muslims, or otherwise do something against its preferred policy.
you do realize the US Government is performing more attacks to kill potential terrorists than any other country or us government before them, right? everything points in the opposite direction. Fighting terrorists is a great way to show you are strong, a winner, and at the same time makes you popular with a lot of influential people sometimes referred to as the military industrial complex. Also i do not see how knowing about an attack plan would force anyone to do anything. So yes, that is a hypothesis, but not a good one.
Edit: oh, you probably were not talking about the US. Well France already declared war on ISIS, there is not much escalation potential left and belgium…also cannot escalate anything so my argument stands.
On the rationality of security i recommend “the Gatekeepers”, interviews with former heads of shin bet.
https://books.google.co.th/books?id=vTaGCgAAQBAJ&
There is plenty of escalation left beyond harsh sounding speeches, Europe can commit ground troops to the fight against ISIS. Europe can refuse any more immigration. The rules of engagement can be loosened. A blockade around ISIS territory can be setup. All water and power can be cut off, all important infrastructure can be destroyed, etc.
They say generals always fight the last war, and to a certain extent you are also currently fighting the next war. Mommy punished you for stealing cookies to stop you from doing it again, not to get her cookies back.
One needs to ask why does ISIS think terrorist action in Europe is a net benefit to them? Part of their calculation is that they believe there will be no additional retribution, no increased price to pay for this action. And they are right. Oh they will be shamed by the infidels, but I think they will overcome this.
When you get to second level arguments it is clear that ISIS strategically uses our moral convictions against us. They use the west’s sanctity for the value of innocent life as a tool to meet their objectives. People don’t throw rocks at people with guns unless they are convinced they won’t shoot back.
A 9/11 level event will trigger a ground war. If that occurred the 20/20 hindsight will be that we should have acted earlier. The calculations of escalation to prevent further atrocities is nebulous because we can never really know what we prevented. If the US failed to act and Saddam nuked Israel 10 years later that would have been a strategic error.
We are waiting for ISIS’s warped ideology to burn itself out before they gain enough strength to do real damage. Perhaps this is correct, but there is risk and no one should pretend there isn’t.
ISIS may come or go, only the future will tell. But what is a 100% certainty is that if it goes, it will be replaced with something even worse. This is the evil little secret of the middle east. The population wants, desires, demands this sort of behavior.
Sure only a small percentage actually engage in the slaughter, but only a small percentage of any culture do the killing. Less than half a percent of Americans serve in the military. But they carry the moral weight and physical support of hundreds of millions. So too with ISIS, the Taliban, Lakshar e Taiba, so on and so forth.
ISIS is only the latest incarnation of nihilistic muslim rage at the fact that their society is a cultural backwater and the promised dominance of Dar-al-Islam has regressed. They are not the first. Hell, they aren’t in the first six hundred groups to take up the call of the caliphate. Nor will they be the last.
We in the west have a tendency to think that these are discrete problems, that once you round up or kill all of Al Qaeda, they’re gone. But they aren’t. The Romans lost a lot of legions at Cannae, but had replaced them all within a year. That is what we are dealing with. A society bent on our destruction, without the current means to do so. But they will keep trying, until they succeed, or until we re-barbarize and do unto others before they do unto us.
I agree. I think it is a mistake to think that just because we can’t fix it long term means we shouldn’t engage. The Israelis call their wars with their neighbors “mowing the grass”. The purpose isn’t a long lasting solution, but keeping it under control.
I think today’s threat of terrorism is overwrought in the grand scheme pretty much the way Obama does, but I think the grass needs to be mowed to keep it that way.
I think today’s threat of terrorism is overwrought in the grand scheme pretty much the way Obama does, but I think the grass needs to be mowed to keep it that way.
Pretty much
In the short term, I agree with you, Tom.
I think we need to provide time and space for muslim society to reform itself. Without this, there will be no living with them.
However, as weapons technology spreads, the day quickly approaches when this will no longer be an option. Think if every terrorist bombing were a nuclear strike. We would very quickly be in a situation where we would be forced to be the perpetrators of a genocide (or at least massive ethnic cleansing) just to avoid being the victims of one.
That is the question for the medium-to-long term. Can muslim society change sufficiently before it comes to existential questions?
Isn’t it more of an arab problem? There is Muslim misdeeds and atrocities in the rest of the world, but it doesn’t seem substantially different than other religions in the area (Africa has crazy jihadis and countries banning Islam and mosque bombings).
ISIS may come or go, only the future will tell. But what is a 100% certainty is that if it goes, it will be replaced with something even worse.
Are you sure about that? It seems to me that if ISIS were wiped out, the thing that would replace it would most likely be the Assad government, which we’ve already established as “bad, but not as bad as ISIS.”
Don’t get me wrong. The lesson we definitely SHOULD have learned from our adventures in the Middle East is that toppling an effective, established government, even if that government is unabashedly evil, will create a power vacuum that will do more harm than good, at least in an unstable environment like the Middle East. However, ISIS has only been “established” for a little over a year now, and the territory they have firm control over is fairly small, in the grand scheme of things. Any power vacuum we create by toppling them, at least as a government which actually controls territory, as opposed to a guerrilla movement which shares the same name, which they would doubtlessly evolve into after we topple them, would be so small as to be virtually indistinguishable from the power vacuum that already exists all around them.
“Don’t get me wrong. The lesson we definitely SHOULD have learned from our adventures in the Middle East is that toppling an effective, established government, even if that government is unabashedly evil, will create a power vacuum that will do more harm than good, at least in an unstable environment like the Middle East.”
If you’re judging by results then the lesson we should have learned is that the USG and the EU governments are more evil than Middle Eastern dictatorships.
USG rules Iraq and it turns into a monstrous abattoir. EU governments take in a few Arabs and they commit widespread mass murder. UK imports Pakistanis and they form rape gangs.
Certainly looks like evil Middle Eastern dictatorships have a better track record.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I don’t think middle eastern government claims about how safe and uncorrupt they are, are reliable.
@anonymous
Brilliant observation! Obviously, what we should have done was make Saddam the Supreme Dictator of the United States rather than letting the Iraqis execute him, and the EU and UK should have let the people responsible for turning the places their rape gangs came from into the sort of hellholes that produce rape gangs be in charge, too. I sincerely thank you for providing the solution to all the world’s problems. We never could have done it without you!
What kind of tough interrogation are you thinking of? Not chopping off fingers, but, waterboarding? Drugging? There wasn’t really time for any of the deprivation/long-term psychological stress based tactics the US favoured.
Asking in an increasingly angry voice seems unlikely to accomplish much, and I’m not sure what else “tough interrogation” is a euphemism for here.
Point of note: A couple of Scott’s Posts made their way onto the Cracked Podcast.
http://www.earwolf.com/episode/americas-secret-caste-system/
Calling out rational and utilitarian ethicists on… non-utilitarian ethics.
Currently there’s some buzz about speciesism around my campus, which concerns animal ethics, which is something I have some kind of utilitarian perspective on. However, the popular philosophy around it contains much less rationality and much more… something else I can’t wrap my mind around. And some douchebaggery (some honourable animal rights defender literally asked me if I was unloved as a child; but then again, that guy had always been a huge asshole). I don’t like having things around me I’m totally clueless on, so now I’m trying to learn some of the philosophy around it.
Which brings me to the question, how should I begin exploring this region? This is a completely new territory for me so I’d love getting some kind of guidance from people whose thought processes are similar to mine.
Are you asking “what are ethical views / beliefs held by Regular People™”, or are you asking “what are some non-utilitarian ethical views that are ‘rational’ and make sense by the standards of this community”?
Those will have very different answers. I can give some answers to the latter (I’ll let others field the former, if they like), but you should in any case get clear on which you’re after.
Can’t help with that (they’ll be here soon, don’t worry), but I would suggest accepting that morality can only be argued on the grounds of consequences once some initial premise is accepted. If you don’t share the initial evaluation of animal life as being that high relative to human life, then there is absolutely no way to provide an objective answer as to what is right morally.
However, the popular philosophy around it contains much less rationality and much more… something else I can’t wrap my mind around.
That sound of hollow laughter you hear wafting on the breeze is coming from me.
I have, as I may perhaps have mentioned once or twice, a vegan and animal rights brother. Oh boy, do I have a vegan and animal rights brother.
That means my Facebook gets all the stuff about veganism and animal rights he wants to share with the world at large.
Rationality has bugger-all to do with it. Speciesism is a huge part of it, and I think that “something else (you) can’t wrap (your) mind around” is the Animal Rights version of the Noble Savage – animals are just so much better than us, so much purer and more unconditionally loving and caring and not hurting others and you know, perfect unfallen Disney anthropomorphs frolicking through the flowering meads in the paradisal pre-Adamic world of total natural unity and peace, until we horrible humans with our big brains started killing, torturing, raping and abusing them for fun and profit.
It’s religion even if not recognised as such; a bit of animism, a bit of panpsychism, a whole heap of Gaia-worship and a lot of Western People Problems (worrying about circus animals is a luxury).
I’m not saying that concern about animal welfare is wrong, but I don’t think animals are the moral equivalent of humans, and that you can be concerned about cruelty and ethics without attributing “that cow is weeping tears because she is so sad because her maternal love is thwarted by the cruel farmer taking her calf away!” when cows don’t have brains that think and feel as we do* in the same way and to the same degree and a cow wouldn’t know what “maternal love” is if it encountered it in the feed trough.
*Do cows have instincts? Yes. Does a cow think of its calf, complete with name and character and memory, as a human mother thinks of her baby? No.
I’m an proud human “speciesist” and I think the argument for vegetarian is pretty convincing. In modern society, it’s not that hard to find alternatives to meat. In fact, meat is usually pretty expensive. So I have to ask myself if my tastes buds are so important that it’s worth the killing and suffering of millions of animals. It doesn’t take a hippie to see some kind of problem with that.
In more formal terms:
P1: It’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering
P2: Eating meat is unnecessary(under the present circumstances)
P3: Demand for meat causes suffering in animals
C1: Therefore, it’s wrong to eat meat(under the present circumstances)
Does anyone disagree with the premises? I’m sure someone could quibble on the distinction between “eating meat” and “demand for meat” so that someone could eat leftover meat without causing more animal suffering. However, most people who eat meat are going to directly(whether through hunting) or indirectly(buying meat or getting someone else to buy it for them) cause animal suffering most of the time.
If you’re a “speciesist” (as I am), why is it wrong to cause “unnecessary” animal suffering? In any case, while there may be something virtue-ethically wrong with causing totally wanton and pointless animal suffering, that’s a far cry from saying it’s wrong to cause it in order to produce anything more than the bare minimum nutrients necessary for survival.
My argument against:
P1: “Speciesism”: for humans, only humans are moral ends; everything else is a means.
P2: Meat tastes really good, providing a large psychological benefit to humans.
P3: The suffering of farm animals imposes only a small psychological cost (if any) on humans who consume meat.
C: Eating meat is moral.
If you can argue that it’s against human interests to eat meat (such as very strong health reasons or something), then I will concede the case. But I don’t think that can be shown.
I may be a speciesist but I don’t assign zero moral worth to animals. If you think it is morally wrong to torture animals for fun(and most people do), then I don’t think meat eating can be justified.
@ Wrong Species:
Well, as I alluded to with “virtue-ethical”, torturing animals can be more plausibly argued to turn you into a crueler, meaner person. The sort of reasons that Immanuel Kant argued made torturing animals immoral.
It is very implausible that eating meat makes you significantly crueler or meaner.
In any case, I don’t see anything wrong with killing animals for sport in the proper context, such as bullfighting or hunting. Yes, there are people who hunt for the food, but it’s not the main draw for most.
The obvious non-speciest utilitarian response is that those animals would not exist if they were not being raised as food and that living and eventually being killed produces more utility than not living at all.
It doesn’t prove very much, since we could produce more utility for them by spending more money to raise them in better conditions and not slaughter them.
The idea that maximizing human welfare and maximizing human plus animal welfare call for exactly the same actions is tremendously implausible.
Vox, while technically it’s possible, it’s probably not something we will actually do before post-scarcity. A better option, but not a realistic one yet. In any case the question was about the moral difference between eating meat and vegetarianism and the possibility of doing better than both doesn’t change the answer.
@Vox
I don’t think there is a single person alive who actually acts in a way that maximises aggregate utility. All utilitarians, even the really serious ones, fall incredibly short of what they view as their moral obligations. So I don’t think it’s particularly reasonable to single out meat eating for being non-utility-maximising beyond, say, literally anything else that isn’t buying bednets.
Not only that, but if you accept David’s reasoning, then their proposed remedy, veganism, will not increase aggregate utility but reduce it.
The logic of the larder wasn’t very good to begin with and has not aged well. No one here would prefer a thoughtless, speechless time in confinement with live mutilations and a high risk of painful death over a time of no experience.
That said, P3 can be wrong because of indirect effects, most notably displacement of non-domesticated animals.
Of course, all of this has been discussed many times before.
@ vox
The idea that maximizing human welfare and maximizing human plus animal welfare call for exactly the same actions is tremendously implausible.
Only politically. Phasing out factory-farmable animals would be healthier for most humans (ie vegan diet) and result in less dis-utility for animals (even if the land freed were not used directly for better purposes (such as wildlife habitat).
@ David Friedman
living and eventually being killed produces more utility than not living at all
Such assertions are often made, taking for granted what might be called the Sundial Inscription (“I count only sunny hours”), and ignoring any ‘net-positive/negative’ approach.
@Hedonic Treader, I think perhaps that argument is targeted at factory farming only? Most conventionally-farmed animals live in conditions that are perfectly natural to them (or perhaps a bit better) so I don’t see any obvious reason to suppose that their lives aren’t (on net) worth living.
@ Harry Johnston
Most conventionally-farmed animals live in conditions that are perfectly natural to them
Paging Ernestine….
Sorry, that went right over my head. Ernie’s baby cousin?
I’ll disagree with the premise that killing animals causes unnecessary suffering:
Prey animals, if not regularly culled, will naturally tend to overpopulate, overgraze the local plant life, and then when all the food is gone lots of them starve to death, which is surely worse suffering than a quick bullet to the brain. Plus the local plant life is then damaged. If we were willing to allow a sufficient predator population, they’d do the job, but large herbivores like deer frequently live much closer to humans than we’re willing to allow large carnivores like wolves to live. Accordingly, human hunters should pick up the slack and hunt deer.
(Someone’s going to object here that it’s more “humane” to shoot the deer with contraceptive darts instead. This, however, is pure expense with no material benefit to any humans.)
How big a proportion does deer or other wild game make up in the average American diet? Not much.
…I don’t see how you don’t see that this refutes your argument.
If the standard of necessity is what people normally mean by “necessity” (something like: you’ll die if you don’t do it), then killing the deer and eating them is not necessary.
Human beings kill and eat the deer because it saves a lot of money over trying to neuter them, and they get the tasty meat. Well…it’s deer, not incredibly tasty, but still. Necessity doesn’t have anything to do with it.
@ loquat
+ with a couple of nitpicks
1. Contraceptives aren’t even side-effect-free for humans yet, and nobody is going to spend much trying to perfect them for deer. So imo they’d be preferable only to setting out poison, or other measures harsher than natural/human predation.
2. Venison is delicious (if cooked medium rare or less, of course).
How big a proportion does deer or other wild game make up in the average American diet?
Hey Guys, I found the city-slicker.
In all seriousness though. The answer is “Way more than you’d think” especially if you expand the definition from “deer” to “any meat you kill yourself”. You’d be hard pressed to find a rural family that doesn’t have a meat freezer.
> “any meat you kill yourself”.
I think any meat shot by someone in your social circle is a better expansion. A lot of people do not have the time/land/temperament to hunt themselves, but you’ve got to be a downright asshole for nobody to be giving it to you as part of a social exchange of some sort.
@Who wouldn’t want to be anonymous:
Fair point. I know I’ve given a lot of meat away over years and I’ve got close to 10 lbs of fish in my freezer right now that a friend gave me in trade.
The word “unnecessary” is doing a lot of work here. Eating meat is unnecessary in the sense of being able to live without it, but only in the same way that, for instance, air conditioning is: you can live without it, but your quality of life is reduced.
Using air conditioning contributes a non-zero amount towards global warming from generating the electricity used for it, and therefore causes a non-zero level of harm; but we don’t stop using air conditioning merely because it causes some non-zero level of harm and is unnecessary.
That’s a good point. I do think that the gain people get from air conditioning is greater than the gain from eating meat. I’m sure many would disagree but I don’t think life would be unbearable if everyone was a vegetarian. It would for many people if there was no air conditioning. And the losses due to global warming are much more speculative than the pain felt to animals. Still though, you are right. I simply took “unnecessary suffering is bad” as a principle for granted. It seems more complicated than that.
I’m not in full agreement with P2. Eating meat is totally unnecessary for some people, necessary for others, and for still others it isn’t necessary for survival but prevents some of the human’s suffering. It depends on where they live, how much different foods cost there, how much money they can afford to spend on it, their specific dietary needs, etc. Some people really do need to hunt or fish in order to get enough to eat. Some have medical reasons that a heavily plant-based diet doesn’t work well for them. Some can’t afford enough specialty foods to get all their nutrients from vegan or even vegetarian sources (vegetarian is much easier, but still not always possible) so eating meat is the option that doesn’t result in nutritional deficiencies. Etc.
It’s true that the amount of meat eaten in most first-world societies is well beyond what is needed, and could be reduced. But not everyone has the resources and ability to avoid meat entirely.
That’s all true but I was mainly talking about the majority of first world people. I don’t see anything wrong with eating meat if it’s truly needed to survive. And while I’m skeptical about the need for some people to have meat in their diet, I would make an allowance for that. The problem is that for millions(possibly billions) of people, it’s not necessary.
Anti-specism is (the version I’ve been to at least) simply the belief that humanity is an animal like any other (which makes sense if you’re neither religious not dualist imho). Therefore we ought to treat animals ideally as well as human, in reality without being too much cruel.
The main consequence is pretty much “don’t make animals suffer / don’t eat them if you can help it” , the counter point being that it’s mostly OK eat insects or any animal that can’t feel pain. (I saw the same argument made with consciousness instead of capacity to feel pain in the rationalist community).
If you agree with the premises (animal are mostly like humains => human suffering is bad => animal suffering is bad) then the position is mostly consistent in an utilitarian perspective, you want to minimise all suffering, including animal suffering. It can even get weird depending how you weight animals vs human suffering since the number of animals involved tend to be much higher (look at what Scott Alexander is saying on animals ethics, it’s related and very interesting)
The problem I’ve always had with that logic is that animals eat meat, and kill for sport, and apparently feel zero qualms about it.
So either:
A) Humans are just animals. In which case holding us to a higher moral standard than other animals when it comes to obtaining our food is itself speciesist. We have just as much right to kill for food as any other animal.
B) Humans are somehow morally superior to (or fundamentally different from) animals, who are amoral. Therefore humans can be held to the standard of “avoid causing suffering”. But again, this argument relies on a speciesist view. If we’re already saying that we’re on a “higher plane”, as it were, why is inherently wrong to view the pleasure of a human as more important than the pain of a non-moral animal?
I don’t think these arguments preclude moral veganism, necessarily, but to me at least they reject the notion that veganism is objectively more moral than omnivorism.
…? We do not generally find that it is morally permissible to do harm to people who appear to lack morality. Why would this not extend to animals?
I don’t put much stock in this particular argument, but the way it is set up is like this:
You say it’s immoral for human beings to eat meat but not for lions to eat meat. You seem, therefore, to be holding humans to a stricter standard. But if humans are being held to a stricter standard, whatever distinction you are making that allows them to be held to a stricter standard may also serve to mark them out as having a special moral status.
So either you say humans and lions are the same, in which case it’s moral for both to eat meat.
Or you say they are different, in which case why should humans and animals be treated as equal for the purpose of consumption? So it is still moral to eat meat.
There are many ways to poke at this argument.
It doesn’t follow that us having a higher moral status than animals (which I believe we do) makes it ok to eat them. There is ample space between ‘equal to human’ and ‘no moral weight at all’.
I personally think that the reason that it’s moral for a lion to eat meat and dubious at best for humans to do so is that humans have the capacity to do differently. As a living being gains more and more awareness of itself, its life circumstances and that of others, its moral duties increase.
Vigor, I don’t agree with your conclusion (that human meat eating is morally dubious) but I’m fine with the logic – yours is a defensible position.
My main point however is that your position still relies on speciesism to work. Therefore, the argument “veganism is moral because I reject speciesism! Humans are just another animal!”, which is what started this sub thread, is fatally flawed.
@ Gbdub:
People who reject “speciesism” don’t say that there are no differences between humans and other animals that might justify different standards of behavior for each. It’s about whether they count equally as moral ends.
For instance, one can say that people with an IQ of 30 shouldn’t have the right to vote or to drive cars, etc. But simultaneously hold that their welfare ought to be weighed in equally with everyone else’s.
Gbdub, I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that vegans think it is moral for lions to eat meat, except insofar as we do not hold people morally responsible for doing things they could not reasonably have realized were bad, especially when there’s not a viable alternative yet. (Although factory farmed meat almost certainly causes significantly more suffering per unit meat than does predator-hunted meat.)
The vegans I know talk about wild animal suffering as being a major source of unnecessary pain in the world. It’s just that we are a minimum of centuries away from having the wisdom and knowledge to do anything about it.
As Anon alluded to, there are people who would argue that it is bad when lions kill prey- so after The Singularity or in the far future, when we are capable and can survive without it, we should destroy nature.
Again to be clear, I’m not claiming that I have an ironclad case against moral veganism. Only against the “humans are animals too” line of reasoning as justification for moral veganism.
Anon, of course you don’t think lions eating meat is “moral” because fundamentally lions are amoral. You might say “humans are animals / animals are people too”, but ultimately you believe that humans are moral agents and other animals are not. There are no moral lions, and never will be barring massive evolutionary change.
Your last paragraph loses me – is your position that the utopian endgame for moral veganism is a world where predators are not allowed to predate but are managed somehow and fed a meat substitute? Because frankly that’s rather terrifying (but might make some great speculative fiction!)
@Vox, isn’t using 30 IQ humans just an example of the non central fallacy? Ultimately I’m arguing that everyone, even moral vegans, are accepting the dichotomy “humans are/should be moral, other animals are not and cannot”. Both sides are speciesist. The fact that noncentral examples of amoral humans exist, and we still treat them as humans, is not really relevant.
Fun/speculative question – can you imagine a pure predator (say a lion or dolphin) achieving sufficient intelligence to be considered morally responsible for their actions? What does that look like? It’s fairly easy for humans, naturally omnivores, to survive on a vegan diet, but would conceivably be a lot harder for an animal evolved from a pure carnivore to do so. For the sake of argument let’s say it’s impossible for this speculative super dolphin – they need animal based food to survive. What is the equivalent of moral veganism for a moral agent that nevertheless must be a carnivore?
@ Gbdub:
It’s not the noncentral fallacy. That’s something else entirely.
You say it’s not relevant that there exist examples of humans incapable of moral responsibility. Well, the advocates of animal rights say it is relevant. It is the “marginal humans argument” which I linked below to an argument against. The point is supposed to be, in an analogy with racism, that humans are drawing the line in a bigoted way, focusing on the mere species and not the actual capabilities of the beings in question.
For instance, suppose Asians were, on average, three or four times smarter than everybody else. Would it be racist, then, for a college to say, “Asians Only”? Yes, it would. Because there would still be mentally retarded Asians who were unqualified, and outlier geniuses of other races who were more qualified than most Asians.
The fair-minded thing to do would be to have some objective, race-neutral standards and let people of any race in if they can qualify. Not to create a blanket rule centered around race. It doesn’t matter whether unintelligent Asians or intelligent non-Asians are “noncentral”.
And to take things back to animal rights, the anti-speciesists say that dolphins or gorillas or whatever are more intelligent than human babies or mentally retarded people. Therefore, they ought to have at least the same rights. The relative typicality of each is not relevant.
gbdub: What Vox said. Nothing about this argument implies speciesism. Moral agents should be moral, but moral agency is not a requirement to be a moral patient, and humans are not inherently superior to animals. Don’t torture babies. Don’t torture animals.
> is your position that the utopian endgame for moral veganism is a world where predators are not allowed to predate but are managed somehow and fed a meat substitute
No. I simply observe that it is bad that wild animals suffer. This is in no way a proposal of something which would be better.
Vox, your “Asians in college” example works because there exist both low IQ Asians and high IQ non-Asians. There are also ambiguous members on both axes (say people with one Asian grandparent, and people with above average but not genius IQ). So racism is bad.
But then again, I doubt you’d get much objection if the college posted “only humans may apply”. Because while there is a continuum of intelligence, clearly there are precisely zero non-human animals on Earth that can complete a college curriculum. So the things that make racism harmful don’t really apply to speciesism in this case.
Likewise, while there exist amoral humans, there are zero non-human animals we consider morally responsible for killing for food.
So you’re still making a bright-line distinction, and the line is at human: animals may kill to eat, humans must not (Presumably, in vegan utopia, you wouldn’t punish an amoral human for eating a fish, but you’d still stop him from doing it, while you wouldn’t stop an eagle from the same). There is one and only one species to which you apply “don’t kill to eat” as an imperative.
Having established that at least some applications of the bright-line-at-species are acceptable, you can’t outright deny the validity of someone who uses that bright line to say “okay to kill and eat cows, not okay to kill and eat humans”.
You can (and do) make an argument against suffering, and that moral agents have a duty to minimize it. You’ll wind up in some sticky situations of judging suffering (how advanced must an organism be before it can suffer? Is the suffering of a thousand chickens worse than one cow?) but it’s a totally valid framework on which to build a moral veganism.
But at that point you are no longer arguing against speciesism per se – you are arguing against a negative consequence of one particular form of speciesism. And that’s been my point all along.
Anyway I’m still curious about what, if anything “moral carnivorism” (for an evolved moral, intelligent species that must eat meat) would look like to you.
@ gbdub:
You’ll find that the principled vegans who know what they’re talking about don’t make any such “bright-line” distinction. It may so happen to be the case that only humans happen to be capable of moral agency. But they say both humans and animals fall on the other side—thus we shouldn’t draw a species-based line.
They say if it’s necessary for eagles to eat fish, then we shouldn’t stop them from eating fish. And if it’s necessary for humans to eat fish, then we shouldn’t stop them from eating fish. I have never heard of a vegan who says that primitive tribes, etc. are immoral for eating meat.
They say that modern, civilized people who have reasonable alternatives are immoral for eating meat. If we could feed eagles vegetarian food, they would say we should.
Uh, first of all, you recognize that I personally am in favor of eating meat, right? I have argued for it in this very thread. I am just responding to your strawman arguments against veganism.
In any case, the regular sort of vegan arguments don’t say anything against “moral carnivorism”. If you have to eat meat, you have to eat meat. Vegans argue that humans do not in fact have to eat meat.
The question for an “obligate carnivore” is whether your survival has more worth than that of the creatures you eat. Maybe you are morally obligated to kill yourself; maybe you are justified in killing those creatures. The case could be argued either way.
I suppose by some criteria I’m not a “speciesist”. I think there ought to be a line between human and non-human—but for justifiable reasons that aren’t centered around a cognitive bias in favor of the familiar.
gbdub, “So you’re still making a bright-line distinction, and the line is at human: animals may kill to eat, humans must not”
We make no such bright-line distinction. In vegan utopia, omnivorous animals ought not be permitted to kill to eat. Even for carnivores we’d like to find a way for them to eat with a minimum of suffering; it’s just a much harder problem than the problem of omnivores like humans eating with a minimum of suffering.
It’s bad when things suffer. Some instances of suffering are more avoidable than others, and some behaviors are easier to change. There’s no further distinction being made.
@Vox – I know you are not vegan. But I’m also talking to Anon, who seems to be. So I’m using a general “you”. And really I’m arguing against “anti-speciesism” as a principle. If you are not a proponent of that position, please don’t take my critique of it personally.
Also, my “moral carnivore” aside was not meant as a strawman attack on veganism. I was generally curious, as a thought experiment, what a vegan moral outlook on animal suffering would look like applied to obligate carnivores.
@Anon – earlier you implied that “vegan utopia” did not necessarily include eliminating predation among wild animals. Now you are saying that it probably would – certainly for anime thing that can be vegan and optimally an effort would be made to eliminate suffering even to feed obligate carnivores.
In this case I concede – you have constructed a consistent, non-speciesist position.
Of course, Vox has stated “no one says it’s immoral for animals that must eat meat to do so”. But you seem to do so here (it’s not “immoral” for amoral animals, but it’s bad, and you’d prefer to eliminate it as soon as a viable alternative exists. Presumably if animals became moral and an alternative to meat existed, you’d start calling it immoral). And I think your position (namely that animal suffering caused by other amoral animals is still bad) is required to really be “anti-speciesist”.
gbdub, I didn’t mean to imply that vegan utopia either would or would not include predation. My first statement on the matter was denying that I was actively proposing anything at all. My second was observing that suffering is bad regardless of whether it’s caused by humans or animals. Both were careful to note that wild animal suffering is a hard problem. Sorry if that was not clear.
I don’t know if this is common among vegetarians in general, who span an incredibly broad range of beliefs, but it’s the common one around here, I think.
> Of course, Vox has stated “no one says it’s immoral for animals that must eat meat to do so”. But you seem to do so here (it’s not “immoral” for amoral animals […])
I’m pretty sure these are consistent. Vox’s statement is a contingent one, which only holds since in fact animals (like some humans) are not moral agents and there in fact no viable alternatives.
“The problem I’ve always had with that logic is that animals eat meat, and kill for sport, and apparently feel zero qualms about it.”
Yes… If we gave animals human rights, wouldn’t they also have to pay for their crimes?
The idea is that they should be treated like mentally disabled or insane people. We don’t let them do whatever they want, but whatever we do to them is ostensibly for their own good. We don’t get to poke them with sticks or eat them.
Not that I endorse the idea of animal rights; I’m just pointing this out.
Most mammals don’t prey on their own species (at least not regularly). Being kinder to members of your own species / tribe than you are to prey species is entirely compatible with “animal morality”.
“Immoral / Amoral People are still People, Animals are always Animals” is arguable but not fundamentally illogical, especially once you’ve already committed to putting Humans in a separate category.
Animals may not prey on their own species but they rape, rob, and maul their own species all the time.
Who would base their morality on that of animals?
Another problem with the argument that it’s okay to eat meat because animals do, is that most animals who eat meat can’t survive otherwise, and even those who can, most of the time are struggling to survive and feed their youth and wouldn’t be able find enough food if they went vegan.
Human vegans, on the other hand, can be just as healthy and safe as human meat eaters.
“Human vegans, on the other hand, can be just as healthy and safe as human meat eaters.”
Tell that to the Inuit.
@ gbdub:
As I said in another post, I have never heard a vegan argue that primitive tribes that have to eat meat are immoral for doing so.
Maybe you can say that primitive tribes who know about civilized life are immoral for not adopting it if they could. That seems more reasonable, and on many other grounds, too.
Meat eating is either immoral, or it isn’t. It may be allowed as necessary to avoid greater evils (starvation), but it’s not like the whale killed by an Inuit in the Arctic suffers less than the deer killed by a trophy hunter in Texas.
I think that conclusion (that Inuit meat eating is immoral to the point of being unallowable, given their knowledge of modern technology) could be reasonable (in fact I think inevitable if you take anti-speciesism moral veganism to its logical endpoint), but it does start to run into other moral values like allowing groups to live their culture (and a general interest in preserving a diversity of human culture). It requires placing an extremely high value on reducing animal suffering to take that position – which is defendable but not for everyone, and honestly hard for me to think of as objectively determinable.
If eating meat has to be balanced against other moral values when the meat is essential to their culture, why doesn’t it also have to be balanced against the pleasure from eating meat? Are you creating two categories of benefits, one of which can be used in tradeoffs and another of which cannot?
The president of my high school philosophy club last year is vegan, the key words here are ‘philosophy club’, so he was a bit of a different vegan than the type that Deiseach described and he was basically the least preachy vegan I’ve ever met.
He even had a philosophy phd student from Stanford (who happened to be visiting his parents in the area) who he somehow knew give a mini run down of the utilitarian perspective on speciesism and animal rights and whatever. It pretty much convinced me that it is indeed morally wrong to eat meat, but I still eat it. The presenter, also a vegan, differentiated between accepting that eating meat was morally wrong and actually altering your life to accommodate that belief.
Anyways from what I can remember the argument is basically that we usually justify eating meat because animals are in a different moral group than humans.
But why are they?
The reason usually given is that humans have free will and have a level of consciousness that animals don’t.
Ok, so what if a human was born so severely mentally disabled that it basically had the same level of mental functioning as a pig or cow? Would it be ok to kill and eat him? Or even eat him if he died of natural causes?
Most people would say, “Of course not, that’s horrible!”
People have an instinctive revulsion to the idea of eating human meat, and they still have that same revulsion even if that human had the same mental capacity as their hamburger source. So it isn’t really that people don’t like the idea of cannibalism because humans are more sentient and thusly more wrong to eat than animals, its that we have a (what I think is culturally influenced, as I don’t think the first humans were probably as sensitive) revulsion towards consuming anything we consider more human-like.
Basically there isn’t really a morally defined dividing line for why any humans–even ones who don’t have higher brain functioning–are more deserving of respect, and not being killed to be eaten, than animals. Its just that as a society heavily influenced by many religions where “all human life is sacred” is a key belief, we recoil from the thought of eating people.
So the argument tries to force you into:
P1: There is no morally distinct line between ALL humans and all animals.
P2: It is ok to eat animal meat.
C1: It is ok to eat human meat.
And most people don’t want to be ok with eating human meat–at the very least from people who died of natural causes, not even thinking about killing someone to eat them–so they will accept:
P1: There is no morally distinct line between ALL humans and all animals.
P2: It is not ok to eat human meat.
C1: It is not ok to eat animal meat.
The problem is with accepting P1, which I do pretty much, but many people don’t agree with. I think the comparison between the severely mentally disabled human and a similarly functioning animal is the most persuasive, that is unless the person believes “all human lives are sacred no matter what.”
So that’s basically it. I’m too lazy to read this whole thing, but let me know if this needs clarifying.
The argument you bring up here is often called the “marginal humans argument”, and Diana Hsieh has a pretty good response to it.
Even if you accept the marginal humans argument—that there is no clear dividing line between humans and animals—you can defend a policy of protecting rights for even severely impaired humans on slippery-slope grounds.
Upvoting this. I feel like a deontological rule here: “don’t eat humans” may achieve a more optimum consequentialist outcome (depending on how you’re counting) than arguing about marginal cases, which might lead an overzealous rationalist to promote some morally abhorrent practices. One slippery slope leads you to Janism or even more restrictive diets (plants respond to injury after all) and the other leads to eating babies and idiots.
According to Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land) the main reason society disapproves of cannibalism is that we don’t want people tempted to murder one another just to save on food bills. 🙂
(Less amusingly, I believe there are also public health issues.)
I have made that argument as well, I think in a published journal article. Didn’t know that Heinlein made it, but I’m not surprised.
On the other hand, there is an exception in morality, and perhaps in law—the case of starvation cannibalism. There was a famous English case, I think 19th century, in which a group of starving sailors killed and ate one of their members—possibly after agreeing to draw straws for who would be the victim, but I’m not sure. They didn’t try to hide the fact, assuming that it was acceptable behavior. They eventually got convicted of something, but only because the court authorities pushed very hard to get the jury to convict for something that most contemporaries did not see as criminal.
The story is in _Cannibalism and the Common Law_.
Which suggests that rejection of cannibalism a strongly held cultural norm for good reasons, not a fundamental moral principle.
@ 57dimensions
Offhand, the latter part of this seems like an inside-out version of a stance that Scott wrote about with a title like ‘Unprincipled Exceptions’.
Iirc, it was something to the effect that according to Principle X, some large number of R-reproductive creatures should take precedence over a human, but trying to live that way would drive us nuts. So better to just make that exception in practice instead of either trying to justify it or throwing out Principle X. (Which seems to fit with what the vegans in your post said.)
I have a different argument:
P1: There is no morally distinct line between dogs and farm animals.
P2: It is ok to kill farm animals for food.
C1: It is ok to kill dogs for food.
And most people don’t want to be ok with killing dogs for food – so they will accept:
P1: There is no morally distinct line between dogs and common meat animals.
P2: It is not ok to kill dogs for food.
C1: It is not ok to kill farm animals for food.
Also note that it’s impossible to make commercial eggs and milk without at least killing most of the males in each generation. Vegetarians are kidding themselves.
The above is how I usually explain the reasons for veganism (although this doesn’t justify abstaining from fish or honey).
I’m amazed that they don’t respond with “P1 is wrong, dogs are morally distinct because of our friendlier relationship with them.”
There was actually a breakthrough on this, recently; genetically modified chickens which fluoresce in the egg if female, allowing males to never be incubated to existence in the first place.
You could also point out that, unlike chickens and cows, dogs aren’t going to become an endangered species if we stop farming them; or you could draw a distinction between carnivores/omnivores and herbivores. (Empirically, herbivores do seem to be less self-aware than carnivores/omnivores, so that isn’t entirely arbitrary. I guess we’d have to give up pork though.)
@ Harry Johnston
You could also point out that, unlike chickens and cows, dogs aren’t going to become an endangered species if we stop farming them
In an earlier discussion, a farmer posted his opinion that cows aren’t really as stupid as they act, but have been bred to act stupid for the farmers’ convenience.
In either case, imo, if the degraded factory-farmable varieties of cows, chickens, etc become extinct, so much the better.
Supposing for a moment that you object to the extinction of a species in the first place, does it really make a difference that the species in question has been domesticated? If so, why?
I can’t imagine anyone being happy with the idea of dogs, say, becoming extinct. That is (or was) a common enough science-fiction meme and I don’t recall it ever being played as a positive thing.
(Or are there unthreatened populations of pre-domesticated cows and chickens somewhere in the world that I’m unaware of, somehow having survived the past ten thousand years?)
are there unthreatened populations of pre-domesticated cows and chickens somewhere in the world that I’m unaware of, somehow having survived the past ten thousand years?
Zebu (B. Indicus) and American Buffalo (B. Bison) could be interpreted as such. Both are capable of breeding with domestic cattle (or each other) to produce fertile offspring.
Edit:
There are also populations of Red Junglefowl(Gallus gallus) which are believed to be the progenitors of domestic chickens still running around India and southern Asia
Not to mention wild populations of Wolves and Coyote representing the un-domesticated state of good-ole Canis Familiaris
Huh. I didn’t know American Bison and domestic cattle were so closely related; thanks. Although I see they are listed as near-threatened, so arguably … 🙂
(Zebu appear to be domesticated?)
… I think the dogs/wolves thing is kind of relevant, actually, in that I don’t think many people would be happy for dogs to become extinct even if wolves did not. Somehow I see arguing that they’re the same thing really as not going down well …
Zebu appear to be domesticated?
They are, but there are still wild populations scattered around Asia and East Africa. In either case it’s probably safe to say that they are far closer to the “ancestral pre-domesticated cow state” than your typical cattle.
Edit:
Agreed on the Dogs / Wolves bit.
Also:
American Buffalo (Bison) are far more closely related to Zebu and domestic cattle than they are to Asiatic or African Buffalo. We should be calling them “Wooly Zebu”.
They’re thin and their meat tastes pretty bad (comparatively), so yeah, they’re probably the naturalest breed around.
@ Harry Johnston
Supposing for a moment that you object to the extinction of a species in the first place, does it really make a difference that the species in question has been domesticated? If so, why?
I can’t imagine anyone being happy with the idea of dogs, say, becoming extinct.
Many varieties of dogs (and other pettable animals) have been bred into states as unnatural and unhappy as factory farmable cows and chickens, and are imo net negative and better off extinct. But many other varieties bred as pets are fine, capable of happiness, and valuably diverse.
@ Vaniver
I’m amazed that they don’t respond with “P1 is wrong, dogs are morally distinct because of our friendlier relationship with them.”
If someone believs that animals are all pretty much alike so we shouldn’t eat any of them, but zie does, as exceptions, eat non-pettable animals, here’s a partial defense of eating the non-pettable ones.
Streetlight effect. We get closer observation of our pet animals; thus we see more evidence of their behaviors (and presumably feelings) being like ours. It’s reasonable to assume that the wild animals share the domestic animals’ traits, but assumption is not as strong a motivation as what we directly observe under the streetlight. And that assumption may in fact be wrong. So when we have some need to eat some meat, pettable vs non-pettable is a reasonable place to draw the line.
I think there’s an essence-type agument also, but … later.
The fact that most people will not eat dogs is not based on principle any more than the fact that they won’t eat worms or the fact that most of them won’t engage in gay sex is based on principle.
As such there is no principle that can be extended from dogs to all animals. And your argument is just taking advantage of the fact that many non-rationalists won’t realize that there is no principled reason not to eat dogs.
I can confirm that this is a very common argument, though.
In college, I ended up debating Bruce Friedrich, a fairly prominent vegan activist/spokesperson, about the ethics of eating meat. He was invited by some kind of very small animal rights group on campus, and they couldn’t find anyone prominent to debate him, so word ended up going around to me because I was going to debate the same topic a week later for the campus debate club.
He tried to deploy the “you wouldn’t eat cute little puppy dogs, would you?” argument, and I think I surprised him by saying that there’s nothing wrong with eating dogs or horses or whatever. It’s just a contingent cultural fact about America that we don’t. There’s a huge difference between stealing someone’s pet dog to eat it and raising dogs like any other farm animal.
I did deliberately pick out my mink ushanka I bought in Russia to wear to that debate. (Which was otherwise totally justified because it was snowing outside.) I did not wear it while speaking, of course…
I take that argument as showing that our objection to killing dogs for food is unjustified. We think of dogs as being sort of like people, because we keep them as pets, so our moral objection to killing people for food spills over onto dogs–but it’s a mistake.
I knew of someone who kept pigs as pets, and probably felt the same way about them–but most of us don’t.
An alternative response to the argument is that the principle is “It is wrong to kill and eat a pet.”
Personally, I’d have to argue that not eating humans is a good schilling fence. Therefore p1 would not necessarily imply c2
I’m not a vegan, though I think being vegan-ish is probably close to the best diet. The only major flaw in it is B12. Recently, however, I read something on a vegan blog I though made a lot of sense: for ethical purposes, at least (might argue there are still health issues like mercury and lead), shellfish, which happen to be super high in B12, iron, and other things lacking in a vegan diet, might as well be considered plants, given that they lack a central nervous system.
I don’t see how taking B12 supplements is a “major flaw”. Clarify?
Not sure, but I believe b12 supplements are currently made from animals. If it was possible to synthetize in a lab (I don’t know if technical or cost reasons prevent this), vegans wouldn’t have a problem with it.
The total synthesis of vitamin B-12 is to organic chemistry about what Fermat’s last theorem is to mathematics; it was eventually accomplished by the legendary R. B. Woodward in 1973, but the process is insanely complex and I don’t know if anyone has ever industrialized it. You can get “synthetic” vitamin B-12 from bacterial sources, which I gather is somewhat controversial because it is really a B-12 precursor and so not a perfect substitute for the “real” stuff, but doesn’t require eating anything with a face and it seems to keep people from dying horribly.
AIUI, all B12 available today is from bacterial sources, because it’s much cheaper than synthesis. And the form of B12 found in pills is easily converted to the form your body uses unless you’re a heavy smoker.
Well, it’s “major” in the sense that you need B12 to not die, not in the sense that it’s difficult to get it from a supplement. But to my mind, a diet which requires supplementation to prevent you from dying cannot be an ideal diet.
Though knowing what it is and following it are two different things, I am very interested in what the ideal human diet would be. My current best guess is a low-fat, high-carb, mostly vegan diet with some seafood, especially shellfish.
This also seems to mesh with our evolutionary origins: on the tropical coast of east Africa people frequently forage for shellfish and there is also a lot of fruit available pretty much year-round. Getting most of your carbs and antioxidants from fruit, and protein, iron, zinc, omega-3s, and B12, etc. from shellfish (which can also be comfortably eaten raw) seems a pretty natural and balanced diet for humans.
(There is, also, the argument that we have more problems with B12 now because our ancestors ate not insignificant quantities of dirt, poop, and non-sterilized water, which is probably true, so far as it goes, but it is also obvious we are evolved to be somewhat omnivorous if, perhaps, mostly vegan).
There is a general trend of only considering food that can be eaten raw (such as fish and fruit) when trying to guess the ancestral diet.
I think that this is a mistake. Cooking is as ancient and cognitively demanding as hunting/fishing (for the weakly human being can’t hunt without tools and techniques). We evolved with cooking. Why are our teeth so much smaller and duller than that of just about every other mammal, if not because we evolved to cook our food?
If you consider cooking, then you can consider not just fruit, but tubers, grains and legumes, all of which grow in the wild (though I don’t know specifically about East Africa), as being part of the probable ancestral diet.
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to say “well, you can’t eat a potato without cooking it; therefore, we’re not evolved to eat potatoes.”
In reality, evolution is always a palimpsest: we’ve been eating grains, tubers, and legumes for at least 10-30,000 years, and we have some newer genes that allow us to handle that better than would, say, a chimpanzee.
Moreover, pretty much all major civilizations have some kind of staple crop as their nutritional base, as you can feed a lot more people with farming than hunter gathering–as evidenced by the fact that a “paleo” diet is much more expensive even today. What’s more, people who eat the now traditional starch-based diets tend to do well–people eating diets based primarily on rice, potatoes, etc. in places like Okinawa tend to be very healthy. The younger people who adopt a meat-heavy modern American diet tend to suffer obesity, heart trouble, diabetes, etc.
So I’m definitely not against rice and beans by any means. I think they are still the key to making a nutritious diet available to large numbers at a price they can afford, and a lot of us would do better to just eat rice and beans rather than attempt to eat like an Eskimo or something.
That said, I still think the “paleo” concept can be useful as a heuristic: how well are we adapted to x? is the question. We have 10-30,000 years of eating grain so we are probably reasonably well adapted to that. We have probably a million or more years of us and our ancestors eating fruit and bugs, so we are probably even better adapted to that. White people are better adapted to living in Northern Europe than black people due to our skin’s ability to absorb more vitamin D, but we are still not very well adapted to living in Northern Europe, considering we can’t do it without houses and clothes.
So is it unnatural to live in Sweden? In a way, yes. And you might need to take vitamin D or eat imported fruit or take periodic vacations to achieve optimal health living in Sweden. At the same time, there’s not denying that people live healthy lives in Sweden and have done so for thousands of years.
We also have an immense amount of evolutionary time behind us eating leaves, and yet we are no longer able to convert them into energy the way apes do. So I don’t think that the paleo heuristic is that good; there’s more to being adapted to something than the amount of time we’ve been doing it.
Why only 30.000 years of eating grain, tubers, and legumes? As far as I can remember, cooking, which allows us to eat those foods, is more ancient than that. Browsing the internet I find estimates from 100 thousand years to two million years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/22/cooking-origins-homo-erectus
You suggest eating fruit and bugs, but you previously suggested fruit and fish. Fishing, which requires fishing tools, is probably only as ancient as cooking starches.
Clothes aren’t a flaw in our adaption to northern climate. They ARE our adaptation. Buying clothes you can put on and off to adapt to different temperatures might be more efficient than growing a lot of nutritionally expensive, parasite harboring body hair. Houses aren’t an adaptation to cold climate; people who live in ancestral East Africa use houses too. Houses have many advantages. Animals don’t use houses because they can’t build them; they have no intelligence or hands.
You don’t need fruit to be healthy, and people only need vitamin D to live in Sweden because of modern innovations, such as electric lights and UV-blocking glass windows (not so common in the past), both of which make people stay indoors. Modern technology created the problem AND the solution, so, again, you can say that vitamin pills ARE our adaptation.
To think that humans aren’t adapted to cold climates is another variant of the cooking fallacy. Humans are an inherently technological species; our adaptations are technological and they relieve us from needing biological adaptations which are full of drawbacks.
Sorry, reading comprehension fail on my part; you said “at least” 30.000 years of eating starches.
Still, the point is that there’s no reason to assume that fishing is more ancient – or much more ancient – than starch eating.
There is also no reason to assume that let’s say ten thousand years is not enough to completely adapt to something. Swedes *are* adapted to Sweden.
By the way, I can’t point to a source, but I remember reading somewhere that elephants, like us, need an external source of B12 due to the way their digestive system is built, and being vegan they get all of their B12 from the dirt in their food.
“Fishing, which requires fishing tools, is probably only as ancient as cooking starches.”
Picking up shellfish doesn’t require tools.
“Swedes *are* adapted to Sweden.”
They’re not *evolutionarily* adapted to Sweden, at least not thoroughly. These guys are adapted to Sweden:
http://thingstodo.viator.com/sweden/files/2013/05/Sweden-Arctic-Fox.jpg
If you count being smart enough to make the shelter and clothes necessary to live in Sweden as part of the adaptation, then humans are already adapted to life on Antarctica, since, after all, some people do live there. The human evolutionary adaptation to Sweden is, at best, partial.
Re. cooking, I don’t know how old it is, but I think farming grains and legumes and tubers is not nearly so old as roasting an animal over a fire. Doesn’t mean we aren’t at least somewhat adapted to eating grain, since, as you say, it isn’t just about the length of time.
Still, I think the following heuristic still makes some sense to me: if it takes more work, more technology, more processing to live in a place or eat a food, then we probably aren’t as well adapted to it, at least not evolutionarily. Not that everything which wasn’t part of our native environment is bad: I quite like electric lighting. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t subtly mess up my sleep schedule, most likely.
The key, in my view, is to try to get the advantages of technology while minimizing the unwanted side effects. I use a dimming feature on my computer monitor at night, for example.
First of all, who said anything about *farming* grains and legumes and tubers? As I previously pointed out all these foods grow in the wilderness. The people of Kitava today gather tubers in the wilderness and live mostly on that.
And ancient hunter gatherers did gather grains.
http://donmatesz.blogspot.it/2011/06/gathering-wild-grains.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091217/full/news.2009.1147.html
I have seen evidence of ancient grain gathering elsewhere as well. I wish I had saved all the links.
I think that part of the reason that today we wrongly assume that hunter gatherers never consumed these starchy food we today associate with farming, is that if a foraging tribe lives in a fertile area where wild starches grow, it will be the first one to be displaced by farmers. Therefore most of the foragers who survived the agricultural revolution to be historically recorded or observed today are the ones who lived in areas less immediately suitable for farming, the ones who lived mostly on meat.
And anyhow, gathered tubers are part of the orthodox Paleo diet.
Regarding Antartica, look, you were the one who brought up lack of adaptation to Sweden as an example, so the burden of proof is yours that Swedes are *not* adapted to Sweden. To say “if you count clothing and such as part of the adaptation, then people are adapted to Antartica too, because people live in Antartica” isn’t much of a proof. I’m not saying that just because people live somewhere, they are prefectly adapted to it. Maybe if you leave people in Antartica for a few millennia, they will change biologically. I’m just saying that you still have to give proof that the same is the case with Swedes in Sweden.
The idea of evolution doesn’t work with human in the same way that it works with animals, because technological evolution worked in tandem with biological evolution since human being became intelligent. Adapting to an environment is, for us, an organic mixture of biological and technological change. It’s always been so. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of millennia you wait, a technological animal like us will *never* get to the point that it doesn’t need tool and technology and complicated work to survive, because THAT is our niche, our strategy, our nature. Instead our bodies will change *along* with technology. So it’s wrong to assume that if something is complicated and needs work then its innatural and we are not adapted to it and is therefore unhealthy for you. Complicated tool using is an organic part of our adaptation to an environment. That’s what human beings have always been.
So if human beings are efficient at making clothes, and they are, they may *never* grow fur like artic foxes, even if they live in Scandinavia a hundred thousand years, because fur may create more problem than it would solve.
And we will *never* develop the ability to eat grains without cooking them, because a massive grain digesting gut might be a greater drawback than having to cook the grains.
But we *can* lose our adaptation to whatever raw food we were eating one million years ago, before cooking appeared.
It’s a good point about our evolution occurring in tandem with our technology, but I still think it makes sense to think of humans “colonizing” places like Northern Europe versus being native to East Africa and the tropics.
One can tell which environments are and are not hospitable to humans by looking at the places homeless people gravitate towards: Hawai’i, Southern California, Miami. You can comfortably live in these places outdoors mostly year round, and there would also be a lot of natural fruit growing in places like Hawai’i. Sure, we can live in places like Sweden, but only by creating miniature Hawai’i in Sweden: houses, heating, etc.
That I believe has to do with the body temperature of mammals being around 38°C – 100°F.
Considering that some of this temperature comes from physical activity, this is very congenial to the African climate, and it becomes problematic in Scandinavia.
All animals, not just humans, face a heating problem at extreme latitude, which they solve using various tricks (blubber, fur, or thick clothing – each of which has its own downsides).
The pale Scandinavians are well adapted to Scandinavia; they don’t prosper in Hawaii. If they move there, they get skin cancer, and possibly birth defects from prenatal UV ray exposure. Imagine how much of those problems they’d get if they dared to go around naked outdoors all the time without sunscreen. They are also more vulnerable to tropical malaria. They must have some kind of climate adaptation as well because in my experience they are more susceptible to heat and dehydration than southern europeans.
If Scandinavians would have benefited from body hair for insulation, they’d already have evolved that – at least in part. If their body hair didn’t increase it probably means it is not a real advantage.
“If Scandinavians would have benefited from body hair for insulation, they’d already have evolved that – at least in part. If their body hair didn’t increase it probably means it is not a real advantage.”
Animals can’t necessarily evolve something just because it would be convenient– the path might be closed off.
Thanks for the information about UV and birth defects. I had no idea sunlight could be enough to be a problem.
You’re welcome Nancy, UV rays overheat the fetus, that’s how it happens.
I think that growing more hair isn’t a difficult evolutionary path for humans, because we already have body hair all over.
There might also be an issue with high altitude.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1096-8628(19990903)86:1%3C9::AID-AJMG3%3E3.0.CO;2-X/abstract
I’m not convinced that human body hair is the same sort of thing as typical animal fur.
@ wtvb,
I don’t qualify as an -ist of any sort, but here’s how I shuffle some of the -isms.
Terminal value: maximizing happiness and beauty in the world. (Not ‘average utility’; more like ‘number of creature-hours spent in un-mixed happiness’.)
Mature humans aren’t very good prospects for un-mixed happiness; no matter how good their situation of the moment, they are always worrying about something else. Saying that animals can feel pain but not suffering etc — describes (if true) a feature of animals, not a defect. When animals are in a good situation, they can enjoy it unshadowed by past or future bad situations.
So my ideal consequence for an acre of land, is lush wilderness. In practice this means protected by a functional human (me). Which means, keeping myself well-nourished*, financially solvent, accepted in society, etc.
Which entails, accepting human culture in most things so as not to go nuts (and because where I differ from it, I may in fact be wrong).
(Disclaimer: agnostic really, ie not jumping to conclusions one way or another)
* which at present includes some meat
From my experience with the green movement, I’d say the animal-rights corner is often one of the most emotional and zealous sections, and you probably want to be very selective in how you explore their arguments. For my part I think your main duty to non-human species is to ensure their species are not made extinct, prioritizing humans’ close relatives first (see my blog for long version). IMHO, if you still want to prioritize suffering, either you’re really a virtue ethicist and don’t know it, or you haven’t bitten the bullet about how brutal the natural world is. I’m an environmentalist btw (admittedly at the scientific end of green).
“For my part I think your main duty to non-human species is to ensure their species are not made extinct”
Many people obviously feel that way, but I’m not sure why.
IDIC.
I have my own philosophical reasoning behind it explained in some detail on my blog, but afaik my view is extremely unusual and most people that believe this do so because of a direct moral intuition that species are intrinsically valuable and losing them is bad. Also, some that feel this way have instrumental things in mind like concern environmental collapse could harm humans, which is a justified belief imho at least. Unfortunately not everyone with this view is using rationality and evidence to get there, something often pointed out by opponents.
I feel that extinction is bad for similar reasons that I feel that smashing ancient artifacts to be bad. An extinction is a lost of a special unique thing.
I’m a vegan for ethical reasons, and I never understood why it’s so important to avoid extinction of a particular animal.
It seems unfair that a panda bear is much more important than a cow.
One of the blogs on that survey is listed as ‘Bayesed and Confused (Michael Rupert)’ – but I can’t seem to find it by googling. I am intrigued because the name is a magnificently terrible pun. Is this another one like Black Belt Bayesian that just got taken down for unknown reasons?
Repost of what I said upthread:
“I included several ‘fake’ options to fake out people who just check everything but don’t actually read stuff.
Also sorry about Consider Phlebas versus Player Of Games, I’ve never read the series so I just went with the first book in it.”
The results of this should be fairly interesting.
JD is correct, and the name seems to have been taken from a Berkeley rationalist group house- so never fear, the pun does exist in reality!
Should I get the free upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 8 before it expires? Every mainstream publication I found recommends the upgrade, but I don’t trust them not to be Microsoft shills, so I’m asking you guys. Specially since I found Windows 8 to be a step backwards from Windows 7; Metro is horrible (I should not have to download a third party menu to make my computer usable) and having yet another version of programs to keep track of is confusing (an app version, on top of the portable version, the 32-bit installer, and the 64-bit installer).
As hard as they’ve been pushing it, I’d be astonished if it’ll expire in any meaningful sense. They’re probably just doing the limited-time-offer thing for psychological reasons.
Windows 10 returns us to a normal-looking Start menu, thank god. They also get rid of that weird menu that appears when you move your mouse in the corner. It hasn’t added any more versions of programs (and I haven’t bothered with the app version for literally anything). I haven’t bothered trying that new-fangled “Cortana” thing they’re offering, but I haven’t seen any downside to not using it.
Aside from that, there aren’t many visible changes. So I’d say you should get it. I have nothing to complain about, and it removes some of the UI things you didn’t like.
I tried to install it months ago, and it promptly made itself unusable thanks to driver issues that had gone undetected during installation. Rolling back to Win7, fortunately, did still work in safe mode.
Since then I’ve been resisting it.
I’ve got Windows 7. Is there any reason to go to 10?
You’ll need to by 2020. Before that, not much reason. The latest edition of IE (Edge) but that’s not very necessary in the multibrowser world.
Only if you play games and find one that requires the newest iteration of DirectX (the only thing that made me go from XP to 7) or otherwise have apps you use that require libraries only available for newer OS.
I never liked Win 8 either. I find Win 10 about as usable as Win 7, definitely better than Win 8.
From what you’ve said, I’d do the upgrade. You’ll probably be happier with the new OS, and the Win 10 upgrade is a really easy way to keep up with the mainstream, which is generally good to do.
(Nancy, I’d probably still do it, but with Win 7 the main reason would be (maybe) better security updates and (maybe) better compatibility with new software a few years from now.)
I kind of echo this question. My laptop is a few years going and I’ve set it up to be exactly the way I want it (e.g., using programs like Classic Shell). Any update is…scary. But Microsoft has been so intrusive pushing this on me that I’m not sure if it makes me more or less likely to accept.
My own policy is to never move to a new Windows release until after the first service pack or equivalent. By then most of the initial teething issues have been worked out.
(I’m skipping 8 entirely because I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about it. Windows has this weird history where releases alternate between disastrous and bearable.)
The marketing team gets cocky after 5 years on the job, pushes for a novel dank windows features causing a flop, everyone gets sacked, new marketing team works hard on windows 7, then they get cocky too..
Windows 10, by all reports, won’t have anything much like a service pack, just periodic new builds, the first of which is already out. I guess we could use the long-term servicing branch as a guideline instead, but it isn’t very clear to me how that will work. It might be best just to wait a year or two from the initial release.
I’m running it myself on my home laptop and, well, it’s not too bad. The release builds seem stable enough, at any rate. Personally I’m a little unhappy that the built-in games are gone, but I guess that’s a trivial matter really. I have to keep rolling back the video drivers every time a new build is installed, but that’s AMD’s fault, and it wouldn’t happen nearly as often if I weren’t signed up for the previews.
We’ve also got an install at work, in preparation for rolling it out early next year, and again it seems mostly OK, though I’m concerned that the Windows Update client doesn’t seem to be fully functional. (It doesn’t notify the user when updates are available. For one person, that’s not too much of a problem as I can just ask him to reboot, but for an entire building it’ll be a pain. I don’t hold out much hope for this being fixed, but perhaps someone will provide a third-party tool. Or I could write one myself, though the boss isn’t keen on that option.)
Assuming your workplace uses a normal corporate domain, you can use group policy to control update behavior, and there are several ways to remotely force a reboot.
Yes, but that’s exactly what I can’t do! The end user needs to be in control of when the machine reboots, not MS and not me either. (I’ll never understand why “reboot automatically without asking permission” is the default behaviour. It makes no sense to me.)
@Harry Johnston:
Hey, a sane administrator! One of my co-workers had his computer reset on him during a presentation to a boss 3 levels up.
The way we dealt with this at my old job was to send out notices in advance stating exactly when computers would be force-rebooted — always sometime overnight — and encourage people to do so earlier if they needed the control.
That might work, though I’d still have to write code in order to reboot only those machines that haven’t yet been rebooted, which would probably be just about as much work as doing it the other way.
(In principle I could use WSUS deadlines, but if I did that I don’t think there would be any sensible way to make exceptions for individual machines on request. We do have people running simulations and the like that just can’t be interrupted for an arbitrary deadline.)
It’s not really a good solution though, at least not in my context. Some people would inevitably forget, lowering the faculty’s overall productivity – perhaps not measurably, but it’s a matter of principle.
I’ll keep it in mind though. Thanks. (We already do something similar for the Remote Desktop server, but that’s used on a much smaller scale.)
I eventually got the upgrade, and it’s okay. I took a long time to switch to Windows 8 from 7, because 7 worked fine for me and I very much disliked the evident push to make 8 something for mobile and non-PC devices with touchscreens and apps – sorry, charms – that emulated smartphones.
I like 10 better than 8, even though when I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to 8 it wasn’t as bad as I feared. It’s just a matter of getting used to it.
Edge (the replacement for Internet Explorer) isn’t great, though. I eventually switched to Chrome for most of my things and keeping IE11 for things like the feeds I had set up (honestly, Google, you did great things with Chrome but no easy way of setting up RSS feeds? You want to push us all to use a reader? As well as pushing Google+ at me with creepily evangelical zeal? Go away for yourself!)
If you’re happy with 8, I wouldn’t rush to change, but 10 isn’t that bad. It’s simply a matter of getting used to the difference, and they at least belatedly listened to people asking them to please let us have some way of using the Start menu or an option for open to Desktop on start.
Shit, yes. A number of linux distros are guilty of this too.
Yes, mobile is king these days, but no, that doesn’t mean you can use a touch-centric interface with keyboard/mouse inputs and expect it not to come out retarded.
Windows 10 >> Windows 8;
Yes, definitely better than 8 (which I agree was worse than 7).
The only thing that drives me absolutely bugf**k about Windows 10 is that you have very little control over upgrades. I have two machines I use regularly, a desktop and a Surface. I upgraded the desktop that I use every day, with the idea I’d upgrade the Surface “later.” “Later” hasn’t come yet, since it bugs me so much when I get the “your computer will restart for upgrades message.” You can put it off a little bit, but it will eventually pop up a window that you can’t get rid of telling you your system is going down.
It’s like having the government IT department I work for managing my computer. I’ll install upgrades when I damn well please, but with Win 10, it’s Microsoft’s world and we’re all just squirrels looking for a nut.
I assume you’re talking about updates rather than new builds? You can configure Windows Update in the registry, I’m told this still works.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720464(WS.10).aspx
There doesn’t seem to be any notification of pending updates, though, the way there is in Windows 7. So if you change the settings you need to remember to regularly check for updates by hand.
This makes me want to burn down MS HQ. More.
I could understand it being the default behavior, because most people are not competent to be their own admins; but requiring people who are to go registry diving is less “benevolent paternalism” and more “occupying force.”
I don’t have much experience with Windows 8, but from what I’ve seen Windows 10 is an improvement. On the whole, I still prefer Windows 7. (But I’m biased; I don’t like change.)
What I did on my wife’s laptop was to swap the disk drive out for a spare, install Windows 7, upgrade to Windows 10, and then put the original drive back. Theoretically, at least, that should mean there’s a Windows 10 license already registered for the machine when and if we do decide to upgrade, even if the offer really does expire. (I make no promises.)
Would personally recommend the free upgrade from Windows 10 to Linux Mint, but I understand that not everyone has that option (eg work requires proprietary software that isn’t Linux-friendly).
Related to commentary on Windows being bad about upgrades (cw: n word): Windows makes people racist
As long as I like playing games Linux will stay a server-only OS for me.
I experimented with Linux when I was in college. I thought it was cool at the time, but these days I just don’t think it’s worth the trouble.
Which problems specifically? I get gaming and proprietary software, but I’ve used Linux exclusively for the past few years and have had markedly less trouble than I did with Windows. In recent years, at least, Linux has become user-friendly enough that I set up my parents (who are as tech-literate as you’d expect parents to be) and they were just fine until they needed to use proprietary software for work. Then they switched to Windows 10 and had all manner of problems.
I put Linux Mint on my son’s (second-hand) laptop and while it mostly works OK, it crashes if you close the lid. My research indicated that this was a known problem which nobody could be bothered to fix.
As it happens we’re only using that machine on the desk so this doesn’t really matter to us. But it’s just an example of why people might legitimately wish to avoid Linux.
(It also annoys me that I have to provide admin credentials to install updates. Kind of the converse of my complaints about Windows 10, ironically enough.)
I did the same. I spent days screwing around trying to get the login screen to display properly so I could log in, then decided I’d rather do tasks with my computer than screw around with the computer itself.
Do not switch to Linux Mint if you are running a laptop and want any kind of battery life; my own went from 5 hours to 45 minutes, owing to the fact that Linux Mint does not shut hardware down that is not actively being used, nor does it do much of anything in the way of power conservation.
I believe this is a fully general problem with Linux, which suggests, amusingly enough, that anybody who believes humans should minimize power consumption for “green” reasons should not be using Linux.
Having installed various distros of Linux on three different laptops without noticing a change in battery life, this fact surprised me. A bit of Googling around suggests that, by default, out-of-the-box Linux does usually reduce battery life, although nobody else has reported to the magnitude you experienced. There appears to be some fairly straightforward tuning to get performance on-par or above Windows. But users who can’t be bothered tinkering with settings and who value battery time or tiny differences in energy consumption would be advised to stick with Windows on laptops.
If your selling point is ease-of-use, you’ve lost out of the gate there.
I’m on Wiindows 7 and am delaying as long as I can because I don’t like the idea of forced updates. They’re easy for Microsoft to use to push advertising, push spyware, or suddenly decide they want to remove some feature from Windows. (Note that “quietly reset your anti-spyware settings without telling you” counts as pushing spyware.) Also, just disabling all the built-in spyware is a chore (and you can’t disable telemetry completely).
It is true that most of the worries about Windows spyware are exaggerated, but there seems to be a core of truth.
I’m probably never going to upgrade until
1) games require a DirectX that only runs on Windows greater than 7, *and* it’s a game I actually plan to play, which is unlikely since I am over a decade behind on games, or
2) My hardware fails, I need to upgrade, and I can’t run Windows 7 on the new hardware.
Also, I don’t believe for one moment that the upgrade will start costing money.
It’s a quite nice UI and better than 8, they’ve put a lot of work in getting that right, but it’s also another incremental step in the direction of having little control over your own computer. More stuff in the cloud by default, less control over upgrades. Do lots of research before you upgrade.
I recently got a new laptop, so it came with Windows 10 preinstalled.
There’s nothing wrong with it, but if I had my choice I would have just stuck with the old Windows, only because I now have to learn where everything is again. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not an improvement as far as I can tell.
If you’re taking suggestions other than upgrade/don’t upgrade, I recommend Linux Mint (MATE edition). This also has the benefit that you can dual boot with windows, unlike the upgrade where you keep just the one operating system.
I use this myself, and recently installed it on my dad’s computer (his windows 7 install was getting so slow as to be nonfunctional due to age, and he does not want to reinstall). He mostly uses his computer for web browsing and spreadsheets. It went very well. The learning curve from windows 7 is very gentle, there is a start menu and it comes preinstalled with office programs, configuration is generally done through graphical interfaces as opposed to text commands, etc.
The only problem could be specialized applications with no Linux analogue or games. If you require the former, you’ll have to do your research. For the latter, this has been improving due to valve pushing SteamOS, which is linux based, so most Steam games will work.
I personally do not see myself going back to a windows machine any time soon.
Repeating what I wrote in the other comment about Linux mint:
Do not switch to Linux Mint if you are running a laptop and want any kind of battery life; my own went from 5 hours to 45 minutes, owing to the fact that Linux Mint does not shut hardware down that is not actively being used, nor does it do much of anything in the way of power conservation.
I believe this is a fully general problem with Linux, which suggests, amusingly enough, that anybody who believes humans should minimize power consumption for “green” reasons should not be using Linux.
Thank you for the comment. I rarely use my laptop without plugging it in, so have not encountered this, but will certainly investigate.
That being said, I think it must at most be a problem with desktop OS setups, rather than a fully general problem with Linux. This is because Android is Linux, and as far as I know the battery life on Android phones is fine. Variations of Linux is also used in embedded systems applications where high power consumption would be an issue. This means the problems should be fixable in principle.
The problem is fixable, provided the users are willing to admit it is a problem.
But my experience with Linux users is that they don’t want to admit that their operating system is nearly a decade behind at this point.
I have a question regarding sleep.
My whole life I’ve always felt like I needed more sleep than most people to function well. Nothing too extreme, but basically, 8 hours is a minimum for me – if left to my own devices it will usually be more like 9 or 10. This hasn’t been too much of a problem, but I’m going to start a job really soon that will require frequent travel and working very long hours, often late into the night with early meeting mornings the next day.
I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to condition myself to be able to get by on less sleep. Is it something that, if I just “power through” long enough my body will adapt to? Are there any other solutions that don’t depend on constant intake of coffee and/or energy drinks? Is it possible that I have some sort of medical condition that is making me overly tired?
If anyone has any suggestions, I’d greatly appreciate it.
I am like that, I can usually transition to a 4+4 or 4+5 sleep schedule, one sleep session during the afternoon and one at night.
Given my job, that’s probably even less practical…
Is it possible that I have some sort of medical condition that is making me overly tired?
Sleep Apnea is the immediate possibility, also Thyroid problems. I think a lot of people (read:me) spend a lot of time on their computer in their bed and that makes it hard to get to sleep.
I’ll echo this answer. Try the sleep hygiene stuff — it really does make a difference. If that doesn’t help, and you have good insurance, get a sleep study done to check for sleep apena. If you don’t have that, you can keep chasing lower likelihood medical causes, but you are probably just unlucky and need a lot of sleep.
Sleep apnea always struck me as one of those “medical fads.” Everyone I know who has been tested for it has been told they have it. And the solution is to make you wear some ridiculous machine attached to your face when you sleep? Ugh… that doesn’t seem like much of an improvement.
I was tested and came up negative. A couple of people I know swear by those machines– claim that they didn’t know what well rested was until the started using them.
Have you ever listened to someone sleep where their breathing went like: inhale-exhale–inhale-exhale—————GASPINHALE-exhale – repeat indefinitely?
That’s basically what my husband sounded like right before he got his apnea diagnosis and his machine. He was so poorly rested he’d be falling asleep at traffic lights while commuting to work. With the machine, he’s vastly better off.
My partner had it for years. The machine helped a lot. Because the machine was cumbersome, he changed the slant of his bed a few inches*, which gave similar, or better, relief.
A cheap way to bypass the doctors and the machine, would be to set a recorder to capture a sample of your snoring (or ask a housemate) and compare it to the sounds on some sleep apnea site.
* From about waist level down, the bed was unchanged. From there up, he made a slant that rose to about 6″ at the head. iirc.
Some people are making money off it, my father got a letter through his GP saying he should get tested, and then that he should buy a CPAP machine.
Since I’ve got sleep apnea, I asked him about it, and he has none of the issues that led to me being tested, hadn’t had anything like AHI explained to him, and wasn’t shown the results of the sleep test.
Looking more closely at the letters and discussions he had, the initial letter was forwarded by his GPs office, not sent by the GP, and all the letters and discussions used the phrase, “at risk of” rather than saying he actually had sleep apnea.
The people I know with apnea, including myself, were well aware that there was something wrong, the test was to see how bad it was. So if you know people who went through their GP to get tested it’s not surprising that they all tested positive. It’s the scare letters being sent by clinics to anyone elderly or overweight to drum up business that are driving the fad side of it.
Was tested on the recommendation of girlfriend, negative result. No sleep apnea.
An meta-anecdotal study: Among the people I know, there are those who have benefited tremendously from CPAP and there are some who have sleep apnea and have tried a number of medical solutions and nothing has worked.
By the way, it’s quite possible to have sleep apnea without being fat.
I have/had sleep apnea. I was tested for various stuff and they found that my tonsils were large relative to my throat and likely blocking things when my throat muscles relaxed. I had them removed a few weeks ago, and I am sleeping noticeably better (waking up less times in the night).
I did try the CPAP machines – they suck if you are easily disrupted.
This has been my experience my whole life as well, except that when I have the time available to sleep as long as my body wants, I generally sleep 12-14 hours.
I wish I had some suggestions, but I haven’t found anything that works to decrease the amount of excessive sleep I need. When I need to do stuff (school or work) and simply don’t have the time available to sleep as much as I’d like, I just power through it, but it feels really, really awful.
I imagine prescription stimulants would help a lot, but I haven’t been able to get any yet, and doctors seem pretty reluctant to hand them out (and of course, tolerance develops easily on them).
I’m curious if this continues over the period of several days or weeks. I used to sleep 12-14 hours when left to my own devices…until a change in working hours allowed me to sleep in. I found that once I was no longer continuously mildly sleep-deprived, I started to wake naturally after 8-9 hours.
The times I’ve been off over the summer and not had much to do, I’ve usually slept 10-12 hours a day. Like Calvin Coolidge in the White House.
I hate it, though. I hate sleeping! My usual M.O. unless I force myself to go to bed is to stay up as long as I can until I get too tired and fall asleep. Which usually means reverting to a schedule of staying up all night and sleeping all day.
I am eagerly anticipating the day they invent some pill that eliminates or radically reduces the need for sleep. (Modafinil isn’t really it, although it’s okay.)
If I have a long period of time (like a few months) where I can choose however much I want to sleep and have no real obligations, my daily sleep requirements do seem to go down a little after a few weeks in, to maybe 9-10 hours per sleep cycle. But 8 or fewer is never enough for me, and I only do that when I have to.
Yes. When not sleep deprived I don’t sleep as much when I can — assuming otherwise good health.
Sleep need follows a normal distribution, and 9 is not abnormal. Structure your life around sleeping 9 hours a night, since the restedness is worth the time loss. I’ve had good luck with sleeping extra beforehand to power through periods of low sleep afterwards.
I’d also get a sleep mask, earplugs, and melatonin to take with you when you travel, so that you can get to sleep as quickly as possible.
Some random things to try:
Have your blood tested, specifically the level of iron.
Exercise regularly (even if shortly).
Don’t use computer/TV one hour before you go sleep.
Make your bed more comfortable (soft, warm).
Winston Churchill apparently had a system that involved a daytime nap to allow him to power through into the early morning during WWII.
Thanks for the input guys.
I really don’t think it’s sleep apnea – I’ve never been told that I have any weird noises – as far as I know I don’t even snore (then again, I sleep alone 99.9% of the time, so who knows).
Maybe I’m just on the unlucky end of the distribution and “live on coffee as much as you can” really is the best solution I can hope for.
I was also like this, solved it by waking up at 5:30 AM every day and beginning exercise regardless of how much sleep I’ve had. I don’t know why it worked but it did, I can easily function off of 7 hours a night with 9 on weekends now. Also modafinil.
Second the “exercise when you feel sleepy” strategy.
It doesn’t even need to be a formal cardio session, although that’s probably the best type. Jumping jacks, squats, push-ups, stretches, kata, abdominal exercise, maybe even see if there’s a collapsible pull-up bar you can take with you on your travels. Try to make your computer workstation have a standing configuration as often as possible.
Even something as simple as squishing those stress balls, or raising your hands as high as they will go, and then opening and closing them (into a fist clench) quickly and repeatedly until the forearms start burning. (either for a set amount of time, or a set number of squeezes) Those can be done while still sitting down and reading the screen.
In my experience, exercise makes me sleepy.
There are anecdotes about gestures being inherited. Is there any scientific evidence?
Imagine a character in a novel is married, and he wants to leave 2 letters in case he dies suddenly, one for his current wife and one for his ex-wife. The man is a loner so he can’t ask friends, and he wouldn’t have enough money for a lawyer. Leaving a letter in a hiding spot that his current wife would find is a possibility, but she doesn’t like the ex, so he can’t just hide both letters.
Is there some solution? Say, an email program that will send emails if you don’t sign in for a month? Or some other way of sending the letters after death?
Are you writing a novel? Why not just assert that there are programs like in your last paragraph? Why check that they exist? They do, but if they didn’t would that be a reason not to include them?
If it wasn’t important that the two women not know about the postmortum communications, he could draft his own will (which isn’t actually very difficult for people who lack a lot of property) leaving keys to and contents of two safe deposit boxes to the respective persons and put the letters in them. You could even make it a holographic will, which seems like the kind of obscure/archaic legal trivia that would be fun to include in fiction. You’d still have to have him pay for the boxes, though.
Depending on the state this could be foiled by the various processes that exist for bypassing the probate of small estates (e.g. transfer by affidavit)… although unless you’re writing a sequel to Bleak House, you probably don’t need to sweat those details of legal verisimilitude.
Coming up with a hiding spot that the ex would find only on the event of his death would be an interesting bit of characterization and challenge for the writer.
It’s called dead man switch software. I know it existed 15-20 years ago, and I’d assume there’s some web version these days.
If he is employed, could he leave the letter for his ex in his desk at work, stamped and addressed with a sticky on it asking anyone who finds it after his death to mail it?
Take out a small Post Office Box (costs start at about $3/month depending on size and location). Mail the letters to the box while he’s alive, with the wife’s and ex-wife’s addresses as the return address. When he dies and nobody makes payments, the post office will close the box for nonpayment and return-to-sender any letters left in the box.
http://www.deadmansswitch.net provides this as a service. Excellent for your character’s use case, not so much for, say, Snowden.
If he can leave a letter in a hiding spot his current wife can find, that’s the solution. Encrypt both letters, give letters to wife, private key to ex, they must cooperate in order to decode.
I could not find a good box to write this in the survey, so I’ll say it here:
I had LessWrong on my daily bookmarks list for several years, but I was never actually a LessWrong reader. I was an Eliezer Yudkowsky reader. When Eliezer posted something, I would read it. When someone else posted something, I would make a valiant attempt at reading it, then decide it was boring and give up. (Sometimes I would skim the comments section to see if Eliezer had posted anything interesting there.)
Scott is similarly interesting. (Obviously, given where I’m posting this.)
The idea of the “group blog” is not, I’m convinced, a workable idea. Some people have the skill to write interesting essays, and I’m going to read those essays and not the other ones. Mixing all the essays up in one stream does not improve my experience.
Well said, I agree.
I have almost never read anything on LessWrong except from Scott and Eliezer.
I do think there might be some room for improving the discovering-new-interesting-people experience. Like, maybe we could have a monthly Link To Good Essays By Other Rationality Bloggers thing, and encourage Rationality Community people to participate.
For example, I — haha, this is a bit embarrassing — I just now by taking that survey found out that Eliezer posts regularly on his Facebook.
You might argue that getting everyone to post on a group LessWrong-style blog would also help with discovering new interesting people. That’s true, but I think organizing a Link To Good Essays By Other Rationality Bloggers Day would be easier.
So, one of the things I’ve been thinking about as a potential improvement for LW is multiple parallel karma systems. Not in the Slashdot sense, of “this was funny” or “this was insightful” or so on, but in the “different credentials” sense of “as a lawyer, I think this is good legal advice” or “as a doctor, I think this is good medical advice.”
And so one could imagine, say, giving Scott and Eliezer a “great writer” flair so they see both the normal upvote and downvote and a, I don’t know, up-quill and down-quill. So one filter LW on posts with at least one upquill (which would be posts written by Scott or Eliezer or any endorsed by them specifically as great writing, since people could ‘credential’ their own posts).
This isn’t at all what you’re talking about, but it would be interesting to use a recommender system like ALS to tailor what gets shown. It might make LW more relevant, at the risk of causing groupthink.
I think “group blog” is a workable idea, but “community blog” is not. Some people have the skill to write interesting essays, and sometimes you can form a group of them. But just letting any jackass write his nonsense just drags down the non-jackasses, and attempting to filter doesn’t really work either.
Blog + forum + IRC channel? (Then again, forums suck.)
It helps cultivate a diverse comment section if you can direct a bunch of people in the same place. I get the feeling it was more common in the early days of blogging, though.
Less wrong has always seemed to me like it’s not sure whether it wants to be a content factory or a discussion forum. It started as the former and became something more like the latter.
SSC seems to be gradually making the same transition with the more frequent open threads, but the format makes it harder because the comment system is (more) atrocious.
The open threads have been biweekly forever. I experimented with having them weekly for a few weeks, but it felt too weird.
I think it would be best to just time the Open Threads to coincide with writing lulls, but I guess a schedule is easier to manage.
I still say having them every metric week is the best option.
Correction accepted. They feel more frequent but I guess that’s my brain lying to me for some reason.
Since it’s an open thread, I have an entirely off the wall question:
What is known about the genetics of taste preferences?
Context: I like peanut butter. My son by my first marriage and my daughter by my second marriage hate it. My current wife has nothing against peanut butter—I haven’t checked with my ex. As best my current wife or I knows, no parent or sibling of either of us had anything against peanut butter.
I say “hate” advisedly. Yesterday my daughter was going to load plastic eggs with candy to hide for my grandchildren, asked me to do it instead because some of the candy smelled of peanut butter.
If the two were children by the same mother, one could imagine that the distaste was a recessive gene and both their parents were carriers, but that seems rather unlikely in this case. Of course, the genetics could be more complicated, or it could come from some non-heritable cause.
I should add that my son by my current wife has nothing against peanut butter. I haven’t checked on the tastes of his half-siblings by my ex.
There’s at least one study about the genetics of hating cilantro (specifically, perceiving cilantro as tasting like soap). I don’t know if other taste preferences have been studied.
“Here, we present the results of a genome-wide association study among 14,604 participants of European ancestry who reported whether cilantro tasted soapy, with replication in a distinct set of 11,851 participants who declared whether they liked cilantro. We find a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) significantly associated with soapy-taste detection that is confirmed in the cilantro preference group. This SNP, rs72921001 (p = 6.4 × 10−9, odds ratio 0.81 per A allele), lies within a cluster of olfactory receptor genes on chromosome 11. Among these olfactory receptor genes is OR6A2, which has a high binding specificity for several of the aldehydes that give cilantro its characteristic odor. We also estimate the heritability of cilantro soapy-taste detection in our cohort, showing that the heritability tagged by common SNPs is low, about 0.087.”
http://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2044-7248-1-22
Cilantro being known as coriander for those of us on this side of the Atlantic, and yes, I have always gotten a faint soapy taste from it. It seems to have gotten more pronounced as I have gotten older, which is why formerly when I could eat something with coriander in it (as long as it was at a low level), now I find myself avoiding it.
Peanut butter is delicious, though 🙂
The usual distinction here is “coriander” for the seeds and “cilantro” for the greens.
Cilantro and corriander are the same thing? What an awesome plant.
Yes.
It was rhetorical. I believed you the first time. 🙂
Yeah right. A wonderful, maaaagical plant.
My “yes” was a response to your “awesome.”
I’m one of the people for whom it tastes soapy. I’m jealous of everyone else, because it sounds like it tastes really good.
Is there any neutral third substance that cilantro-as-soap people say tastes the same as cilantro? To me it just hard-to-describe-dly metallic or acrid, but not like soap (as far as soaps I’ve accidentally tasted). It certainly isn’t pleasant and can ruin an otherwise good mouthful of burrito or salsa if I bite into a sprig of it.
@dndnrsn
Personal anecdote: I taste cilantro as soapy and always have. I also taste it as delicious. When I was a kid I hated the stuff. In fact I hated it before I even knew what it was – all I knew was that occasionally a dish would contain some ingredient that made it inedible. But over time as I tried it more, I grew to tolerate it, then like it, then love it, as the soapiness became less overpowering and I could notice the other flavors.
So perhaps there’s still hope for you. Do you like beer? Coffee? Dark chocolate? My experience with cilantro was similar to with these: a long period of acclimatisation, perhaps gradually teaching my brain that even though it tastes weird it is not, in fact, poisonous. Maybe people without the gene simply don’t have to go through this and can enjoy cilantro immediately. But, I can definitely vouch for the fact that tasting cilantro as soapy does not guarantee you will never like it.
Hmmmmm. Maybe I just need to bomb myself with cilantro for a while. Because I like all three of those things, and initially didn’t.
This is exactly what I’m unsure about! Is this just me not liking the exotic tastes of coffee and I just need to acclimate (I still don’t drink coffee but don’t mind coffee stouts and porters) or do I actually have the cilantro-soap-tastebuds.
What is your closest non-soap analog to the taste you experience with cilantro?
Woah, I’ve never met anyone who hates peanut butter? How surprising.
I was somewhere in the dislike-to-hate range for peanut butter when I was a kid. From my point of view, the flavor was strong and weird. I liked blue cheese better.
As an adult, I’m capable of liking peanut butter but I don’t seek it out. I do like Thai food. Pad thai is comfort food.
Peanut butter is an American comfort food; children get lots of early exposure, often in conjunction with other generally-considered-tasty foods, and face social pressure to conform to Everybody Likes Peanut Butter. Hatred of peanut butter is much more common outside the United States, and I think the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is widely considered an abomination outside of North America.
I’m American, and I like peanut butter (and peanut butter sandwiches), but jelly tastes horrible to me. Something about the sensory feeling of it in my mouth is just revolting. I can’t understand why people add it to nice peanut butter and ruin the whole thing.
I like peanut butter okay, but I was never a huge fan. I like Nutella just as well.
My favorite “jelly” is definitely orange marmalade, though. As a little kid I didn’t really have that and mainly got grape and strawberry jelly, as George Washington himself decreed.
I was fond of marmalade, but I think that was due to rarity and the influence of Padington the Bear. It always seemed so exotic scooping it out of the containers at IHOP.
At IHOP, I had to go for the superior exoticism of crepes with lingonberry sauce. At least once I stopped getting the chocolate smiley-face thing.
I like PB&J sandwiches.
However, I used to go to a summer camp that offered the choice, when hiking, of peanut butter and jelly *blended together*, on white bread, or baloney, on rye bread with caraway seeds. I didn’t like the PB&J blend, but I took it, because caraway seeds are worse.
I like peanut butter, and I like jelly, but I think combining the two is nasty. When I was a kid, instead of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I’d put them on different sides of the same piece of bread so it was half a peanut butter sandwich and half a jelly sandwich instead of mixed. Still only like them separate.
“and I think the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is widely considered an abomination outside of North America.”
This may partially be because by “jelly” you actually mean what many non-US English speakers call “jam”, right? Jelly to us is what you call a gelatin desert, so “peanut butter and jelly” sounds super weird and gross.
In America:
“Jello” = brand name but in common use for gelatin dessert.
Jelly = a fruit-based spread made from juice only, with all the fruit particles strained out. It is actually similar to Jello in texture but much thinner and more strongly flavored.
Jam = a fruit-based spread made from crushed fruit, has texture and maybe seeds.
Preserves = a fruit-based spread with whole fruits or large chunks of them.
Marmalade = a fruit-based spread made from fruit plus the peel. I have only ever seen or heard of orange marmalade.
Ah, so what you differentiate between nice jam and cheap jam by calling them “jam” and “jelly” respectively! I think you occasionally get other citrus marmalades.
Jelly is usually cheaper than jam in stores, probably because it’s easier to ship fruit juice than whole fruit. But if you’re making it yourself (which is easy, cheap, and common in the US, especially among hipsters and people’s grandmothers) it’s actually harder — there’s an extra step, and you need to be more careful about pectin content. And there are some substances — e.g. pomegranate, or mint — that you can make jelly but not jam out of.
I’ve seen grapefruit marmalade, but it’s a bit of a prestige item.
The original meaning of “Marmalade” was quince preserve, from the Portuguese word for “quince.” I think of the modern distinction between marmalade and jam as being that marmalade is at least partly made from citrus of one sort or another, and a quick Google supports that.
I think American usage allows for things such as fish in aspic being called “jellies,” but it isn’t what the word immediately calls to mind.
Some people use the words “jelly” and “jam” interchangeably, though.
I’m looking forward to making some plum jam when they come into season. Commercial jam/jelly is a little too sweet, to my taste.
Are aspic dishes still around? I know they were a fad in the ’50s, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that wasn’t Jello with fruit chunks, which is thoroughly inedible and a crime against humanity.
My grandma used to make aspic dishes occasionally — savory ones, usually involving tomatoes in some way. But while she was an excellent cook, her culinary sense was very Fifties in some ways, so the general impression might hold. I haven’t had, or seen, one since some time before she died.
I wasn’t too impressed with them as a child. Might feel differently now but I have no urge to find out.
Huh. I remember my German cousins loving peanut butter.
In my non american experience, peanut butter is pretty awesome, and I don’t know anyone that’s worse than idifferent to it.
Of course, since it’s not widespread here, there may be selection issues at work.
I did not eat peanut butter as a child and hated it until a year ago; now I really like it. Perhaps the age and exposure to peanut butter of your family matter matters?
Since everyone in this thread seems to be specifying peanut butter so far, I have to ask:
Is there anyone here that dislikes peanut butter, but likes (or is indifferent to) peanuts? Or, for that matter, the inverse? If so, why?
American here, fond of both peanuts and peanut butter, and also of peanut butter + grape jelly sandwiches. Peanut butter combined with non-grape jams and jellies just doesn’t taste right to me.
I like peanut butter, don’t really have a strong opinion on peanuts. If I had to guess it’s probably something to do with the fat content? Either way, peanut butter has great macronutrient ratios.
Peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwhichs are okay, though I prefer grape outta habit, though I don’t like grape jelly on nearly anything else.
I substitute a can of peanuts for a meal every other day, so I like them. I tried peanut butter out for the first time last year, and the second jar is still sitting in the fridge half-finished. It is too salty and otherwise kinda bland. I don’t actively dislike it, but once the novelty wore off I never got the desire to eat any more of it.
Never tried the pbutter + jam thing, pbutter by itself is so heavy that the idea of adding even more stuff on the slice seemed like a joke. Even with just peanut butter I’m full after no more than three slices of bread.
I would never just buy a can of peanuts to eat them, but I’ll eat them when offered.
Their main advantage is that they’re very cheap, which is why they’re the filler in all the mixed-nut blends. I’m not a huge fan of nuts in general (though I suppose peanuts aren’t technically nuts), but I prefer cashews or brazil nuts. Maybe even pecans.
I guess I’ll take peanuts over almonds. Almonds are too hard and just don’t have much flavor. I do like almond (orgeat) syrup, though.
I guess I was 16 or 17 when I realized that maraschino cherries are almond-flavored cherries. I was eating some kind of almond-flavored macaroons with my mother and noticed that they tasted like cherries. She (and I guess I) had always thought cherries and almonds just had a similar flavor by coincidence.
But no, before Prohibition maraschino cherries were preserved in maraschino liqueur (Luxardo is the only major brand), made from marasca cherries (hence the name). Marasca cherries are apparently bitter and inedible, from Dalmatia. When that was banned, they switched to preserving the cherries in almond-flavored syrup. Even after Prohibition, they kept using the almond syrup because it’s a lot cheaper.
On the subject of peanutbutter and … sandwiches.
I like peanut butter and sliced apples. The apples, like the more conventional jam, balance the dryness of the peanut butter and they also give a pleasant crunchyness to the sandwich.
Failing that, strawberry jam.
I wasn’t aware that maraschino cherries are flavored with almonds until just now when you said it, but in hindsight, of course they are, or something close, anyway.
I wonder if there are ones that are actually flavored wioth maraschino, in the same way that you can get Anerican cheese that is not “cheese food” or non-artificial vanilla extract.
>Almonds are too hard and just don’t have much flavor
You have to activate them first.
@ Jiro:
The Luxardo company sells the most highly-regarded cocktail cherries, which apparently are marasca cherries, but they are candied in non-alcoholic syrup (which is not almond-flavored). I don’t know if any company sells cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur. It would probably be very expensive. (The Luxardo cherries already cost 5-10 times more than your standard bright red almond-flavored cherries.)
I don’t generally like nuts, for the combination of texture and bitterness. Peanuts are the least objectionable nut, but I’ll still pass if I have the choice. Peanut butter crosses over into marginally “I like it” territory, peanut butter plus jam, jelly, or chocolate is a definite win.
Peanut sauces in meat dishes, also a win but I’d prefer not to have to deal with the actual nuts.
There are a few trivial cases of certain tastes or smells being completely lacking in some people (almond taste of cyanide or being able to smell asparagus urine).
The other example would be extreme tactile sensitivity from autism.
On the other extreme, taste sensitivity experiences strong age effects (Baby food is bland for this reason)
Tastes are one of those things that are strongly environmentally conditioned. If you have a strong negative experience with a food – if you eat something and it makes you sick, or it’s closely associated with making you sick, then you’ll develop an aversive response very very quickly. Interestingly, this behavior is linked to breadth of diet in species – rats do the same thing, but less omnivorous species don’t. If you’ve got a strong disgust response to a particular food, I’d bet you had some bad interaction with it as a child.
The genetic interactions with taste are usually associated with the modulation of tasting apparatus. E.g., cilantro tastes soapy to some people but not others, and since most people don’t like the taste of soap, some folks like cilantro and some don’t. There’s similar variance in the sensitivity to bitter tastes – I quite like broccoli, but my father doesn’t, likely because he’s got the SNPs associated with elevated bitterness sensitivity and I don’t.
So, rule of thumb is: preferences are likely genetic, strong disgust responses are likely historical.
Hm, what about very picky eaters? I’m a moderately picky eater, but texture is usually my problem rather than taste. Since picky eating is generally considered a problem of the modern age I’m guessing it has something to do with environment and exposure to foods. What’s interesting with me is that foods that I really used to like I have grown to refuse over time, but it was more of a gradual drop off and I wouldn’t say I have a very strong disgust reaction to any of the foods.
Some examples: I used to love eating chicken off the bone, I enjoyed getting as much meat as possible off, now I can barely stomach anything but boneless skinless chicken breasts, anything that isn’t clearly meat grosses me out. There’s shrimp, my family’s favorite meal is pesto pasta with shrimp, and I would gladly eat the shrimp for most of my childhood, but in the past few years I even dislike the taste of pasta that came in contact with the shrimp.
Not liking texture of foods is one of those experiences I just don’t get (in the sense from this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/). I understand that food have different textures, but I can’t fathom how people can have such a strong negative reaction to them.
That’s very interesting. I guess it’s kind of like any unpleasant, but not exactly painful, sensation you feel on any other part of your body. I guess its not really the texture itself, but the associations that texture brings to mind, if that makes sense. I don’t really know how to explain it well.
I really like chicken, but a different texture of sauce on a chicken breast repulses me. I love just plain lemon juice on chicken, but I really can’t stand a creamier sauce that is still mostly lemon flavored because of the texture. Creaminess is one of my big texture issues. I don’t like any kind of cooked fish (I like sushi), but white fish is the worst for me. It’s usually very soft, mushy, and slimy and the blandness actually makes it harder not easier to eat.
Usually the textures of food don’t bother me, but I once ate some jellyfish. It was somehow simultaneously crunchy and chewy in a fashion I found distasteful.
If you prepared a pizza with all your favorite toppings and put that in a blender, would you find the result untasty? I mean besides the fact that it’s a waste of a perfectly good pizza, would it taste bad for you or just a little less good?
Have you ever bitten down on a hamburger and encountered a fragment of bone, slice of vein, or chunk of inedible gristle? I dislike that when it happens to me, though it doesn’t put me off ground meat in general; my husband, who’s been known as a fussy eater since childhood, REALLY HATES that to the point that he generally avoids commercial ground meat and has in fact bought a home meat grinder.
Contributing factor: his family was broke for much of his childhood, and so tended to eat the cheapest meat available, which is disproportionately likely to have gristle/vein/etc.
@Saint Fiasco
I think probably just less good. It’s not that I don’t apreciate good texture, I like the crunch of a pizza crust for example, but I just can’t imagine being disgusted by a texture the same way I would be by food that smelled bad.
The closest thing I can think of is one of those teas that has the gelatin balls in them. I was annoyed when drinking that because you use a straw and you are drinking and then all of a sudden you have food in your mouth and you are chewing. But was pretty far from a disgust reaction.
@Loquat
I have had that happen and it is annoying, or if you bite down hard sometimes painful. But again no disgust reaction or extreme dislike. I imagine if I ever had a mouse part or something I’d be really grossed out (and even thinking about gets me part way there) but that’s not really a texture thing.
Somewhat related: apparently there is a test for Alzheimer’s where they test whether you can smell peanut butter?
Also somewhat related:
I’m super interested in the notion that taste preferences may reflect genetics specifically because of the nutrients in food. There’s the “schizophrenics crave nicotine” thing Scott mentioned in a thread not too long ago, as well as, apparently, the “bipolar people like salt” thing–chemical similarity to lithium salts?
Women stereotypically love chocolate, for example. I wonder if that can be traced to something. Personally, I’ve noticed in myself an insane love of things high in tryptophan–tahini, turkey, etc. Wonder if my tendency to depression and anxiety makes me crave serotonin precursors? I also have some bipolarish tendencies, and I also love salt. This means hummus is basically my favorite food.
And for things some people dislike: maybe it reflects a genetic inability to process it well, or a genetic predisposition to already have enough of what it provides. I recall as a child that spinach and asparagus tasted absolutely disgusting to me. Not just in a “eww, green things are weird” way; like a “this tastes insanely bitter and awful” way. And as it turns out, asparagus may have a developmental neurotoxin? So it would make sense that it became tasty to me only after my neurons were mostly done.
My husband wouldn’t eat peanut butter growing up, but lately he’s learned to like it. (His mother was quite surprised to hear that!)
In light of the recent Open Thread brouhaha over the Amish, this struck me as relevant: http://lancasteronline.com/business/local_business/the-amish-effect-unique-cultural-strengths-help-plain-sect-businesses/article_ba60c8e4-e6dc-11e5-9cc7-73775e680585.html
Aw shucks I’m sorry I missed that brouhaha. What was it about?
Whether or not the Amish are abusing their children by maintaining their separation from the ‘English’ world. Either literally, as sexual predators among the Amish are harder to identify and prosecute, or in a vague sense of holding back their potential to be engineers.
I don’t want to reignite that argument, because it didn’t seem to really be going anywhere and was ugly by SSC standards, so you’ll have to dig it out of the archives.
That surprises me. I was expecting something more like “Have the Amish really got it all figured out and we’re all dupes chasing false technophilic multicultural progressive dreams?”
I’ve heard similar arguments to the one that went down (according to your description) over other groups too, but never about primitive tribes, interestingly. Maybe such a comparison WAS made in the aforementioned brouhaha though? If someone provides a direct link I’ll check it out, otherwise I probably won’t.
While some people may have made that argument, the bigger one was “they are above replacement rate and we aren’t; guess who the future goes to”. As for ‘want to be an engineer’ it is ‘want to be any job that requires more schooling that the Amish give’; shockingly our Objectivists and Libertarians don’t like people denied the possibility of perusing their dreams based on cultural dictates.
I’ve heard similar arguments to the one that went down (according to your description) over other groups too, but never about primitive tribes, interestingly.
You know, this now makes me think of residential schools in Canada and Australia for native children, as well as the system in the United States, where in order to civilise and uplift the aboriginals, as well as give the children the blessings of modern Western civilisation, they were removed from their parents and native culture.
There appears to be quite a lot of dissatisfaction over that. I don’t know if taking the children of the Amish away into state care so they can be engineers instead of farmers would work out much better? Even in the name of “But we’re saving them from potential child abuse! Sexual, even!”
@ Deiseach:
It is possible to believe that parents are raising their children in an harmful/immoral way without thinking that handing them over to the state would improve things.
I think the case is the same with Indians on reservations. Maybe the children would have been better off if they had been born in white families and raised according to their standards. That doesn’t mean it works to take them away and put them in reservations.
@Samuel Skinner:
Well…the Amish number a few thousand. Yes, their replacement levels are high. Yes, their retention rates are higher than ever and still going up. But I don’t think you can point to this as the reason why the “future belongs to them.” The future might belong to them for other reasons entirely. 🙂
I don’t understand the argument about Amish kids being denied the opportunity to be engineers. They are free to leave the Amish church, and even get an opportunity during Ruhmspringe. I’d bet the typical Amish 8th-grade graduate is better prepared for an undergraduate degree in engineering than the typical public school 12th-grade graduate.
Being Amish affords plenty of opportunities to engineer as well. The Amish are constantly innovating or modifying technology to provide benefits while not threatening their values.
@Deiseach and Vox Imperators:
This whole “child abuse among the Amish” thing is a somewhat ridiculous line of thinking. Any parent could be abusing his child in private. The Amish have relatively private communities, but they have much less privacy within those communities, since everyone knows everyone else, kids spend lots of time together unsupervised (harder for kids to keep secrets in that case), and random in-person visits are common. And who really believes the Amish have flourished for 100+ years without being able to police themselves?
This only works if your definition of abuse includes “doesn’t let kid have an iPhone” or “makes kid milk cows” or “doesn’t teach kid about multiculturalism and the evils of Christianity.”
Well…the Amish number a few thousand
If by “few” you mean three hundred or so. They’ll probably break a million in thirty years or so; the related Mennonites are already well past that benchmark.
… and all they have to do is leave their family, social network, and everything they ever knew, not to mention that making that kind of decision requires a level of sophistication and dedication to principles (principles foreign to their family no less) that they’re probably not going to have at that age.
Do you feel the same way about Amish kids denied the opportunity to be homosexuals? The same argument applies–they’re “free to leave the church” and do it.
@John Schilling:
Oops, yeah I guess so. I’m glad they’re doing so well! Still, I don’t think a few hundred thousand is enough to overpower the 3 order of magnitude head start of the “English” world any time soon, even with the different fertility rates. But my math could be wrong.
@Jiro:
Yes, I do feel the same way about Amish kids “denied the opportunity to be homosexuals” (by which I guess you mean Amish kids who have homosexual urges but can’t act on them openly within their native communities).
I never said it was easy to not come back from Ruhmspringe. Obviously it’s difficult, and many Amish kids suffer when they make that choice. But…making a choice and suffering the consequences is part of life. What do you propose should change?
While making a choice and suffering consequences is part of life, there’s more than one party whose choice is involved. The consequences of the child becoming an engineer or open homosexual would be different not just depending on the child’s choice, but also depending on the parents’ and community’s choice. The parents and community bear some responsibility for their choice contributing to the consequences.
I’m condemning the Amish way of life. Obviously, I propose that the Amish educate their children to a Western standard, and allow them to be engineers and/or homosexuals. If that means giving up their culture, so be it–there’s no merit in keeping an evil culture.
(This doesn’t mean we should have laws against being Amish, any more than objecting to, say, swear words means you think we should have laws against swear words. But certainly, we should stop acting as though the Amish way of life is a good thing just because it pattern-matches to applause lights such as “humble” and “hard working”.)
there’s no merit in keeping an evil culture.
So by what metric have you decided that the Amish Culture more evil than say Gay culture, Muslim culture, inner city black culture, uncontacted primitive tribe culture, or even polyamorous bay-area rationalist culture?
@ hlynkacg:
Who says he has?
On the resurrected Amish thread:
Doubling time is currently about twenty years. In a century, that brings their population to eight million, in two centuries (supposing the rate continues, which for that long it probably won’t) to almost the present population of the U.S.
So, according to how far in the future you are looking, they might well become a large fraction of the population.
The issue with youths is not literally leaving the religion but deciding not to join the religion. That’s a decision that gets made at adulthood, roughly defined. The Amish are Anabaptists, they don’t believe infants can make binding agreements. And choosing not to join the religion doesn’t mean completely cutting them off from their own family–there is no rule against associating with non-Amish, which is what they then are. Meidung only applies to people who choose to be Amish and then violate the rules and keep doing so.
My other comments on why I don’t think the claim that an Amish upbringing is unfair to the kids were made on the earlier thread.
@Jiro:
I don’t know if you’re a parent, but I can tell you from experience that a big part of the job is limiting the choices of your children. A big part of what a community is is a set of limitations, too. It’s understood that leaving your community or going against your parent’s wishes is often painful. That’s how it’s always been. It’s universal. It’s part of the human experience. You can’t erase that pain without also dissolving the family and the community.
At least you’re consistent: dissolving Amish society is exactly what you seem to advocate. You even label the Amish “evil.” You call for nagging and eye-rolling them into dissolution, which fortunately would never work, but you are calling for their dissolution nonetheless. (That makes you genocidal! How nice.)
@David Friedman:
Thanks for providing the numbers. So, the timeframe is several hundred years. This throws a lot of Ifs into the equation and makes certainty about the Amish inheriting the world much diminished, though I wish them best of luck.
Also, thanks for the technical correction on youths “joining” rather than “returning,” and for providing context on Meidung. It makes the case against the Amish even weaker.
I’m surprised an argument could get very far without some serious bad faith or disingenuousness.
Genocidal? While what jiro is advocating certainly fits the definition, do you have an argument against the sort of genocide which causes no loss of life? Do people have a right to practice their culture? (I make no claims about the harm of Amish culture.)
@ null:
It’s the classic bait-and-switch of “cultural genocide”.
If your concept conflates exterminating people with peacefully saying that their way of life is bad and should go away, then it is a bad concept.
As as for you, Tabitha Twitchit, all Jiro has said is that Amish society is evil. Not that he expects it actually to go away. I think inner-city gang culture is evil, considerably more evil than the Amish. I don’t think it is likely to go away.
@Vox: Thanks, but I am fully aware of the bait and switch and was curious what Tabitha would say in response. Perhaps you are taking issue with me asking a leading question instead of disputing the definition directly? (There I go doing it again)
@ null:
No, I’m not taking issue with you. I just thought it was an actual question, and therefore I answered it.
Did you edit your post? I’m pretty sure you did. It seemed more like a real question before.
The Amish are more than a culture: they’re also a religious sect, an ethnic group, and they’re relatively inbred and therefore a sort of sub-race. The dissolution of the Amish would be more than cultural genocide.
True, if we merely “stop acting as though the Amish way of life is a good thing” there might not be mass graves–though, if the Amish are evil as Jiro claims, then why not?
If somebody said “We should kill all black people. But I’m sure we never will,” is that person genocidal? After all, he clearly has no expectation that the genocide he advocates will be carried out.
I think Jiro and those who agree with him are trying to make the argument that like inner-city gang culture (which most rational people agree we’d be better off without and ought to take actions to dissolve if we can reasonably do so), Amish culture negatively impacts innocent people who do not wish to be involved–i.e. Amish youth who might pursue interests or lifestyles prohibited within their communities.
That’s the argument I answered in my previous comment.
@Vox: I did not edit my post.
@ Tabitha Twitchit:
Yes, that would be genocidal.
But no one is saying “we should kill the Amish” or “we should force the Amish to stop practicing their religion” (the latter of which would be wrong but not “genocidal”). People are saying: the Amish should stop practicing their religion, or at least stop bringing children up into it.
I suspect you understand this point and are just trolling, though.
@Vox Imperatoris:
“But no one is saying ‘we should kill the Amish’”
I was addressing your earlier comment about Jiro’s expectations that Amish society will go away. I was arguing that Jiro’s expectations are irrelevant to whether his opinions on the Amish count as genocidal.
“People are saying: the Amish should stop practicing their religion, or at least stop bringing children up into it.”
The idea that the Amish could keep practicing their religion but simply not bring their children up in it is ludicrous if you understand that the Amish’s religion is intertwined with their entire way of life. The Amish can’t stop practicing their religion and still remain a people. Eliminating or intending to eliminate a people through means other than violence can still count as genocide. Most accepted definitions of genocide include that understanding.
Some of Jiro’s arguments imply violence anyway. For instance, if we no longer tolerate Amish taking their kids out of school after the 8th grade, that will ultimately have to be enforced either with violence or the threat of violence against Amish parents and possibly their children as well.
When I said Jiro’s views were genocidal, I didn’t mean it as a big bold statement; it was just an observation based on what he had said, and I hoped that by pointing it out he might realize the implications of what he was saying were more dramatic than just making it easier for some kids with bowl cuts to become engineers.
There needs to be a kind of fallacy to describe unsupported accusations of trolling, since such an accusation is unfalsifiable and pretty effectively smears the accused. It frequently gets thrown at anyone who argues a point consistently. Once A calls B a troll, B looks even more like a troll if he defends himself against the accusation.
Here’s the link.
At a minimum, you are trying to use a very big noncentral fallacy. Even if you someonehow equate “that society is bad and we’re better off if it were to go away” to genocide, it’s clearly not a central example of genocide.
“The idea that the Amish could keep practicing their religion but simply not bring their children up in it is ludicrous if you understand that the Amish’s religion is intertwined with their entire way of life. The Amish can’t stop practicing their religion and still remain a people. ”
The Jews pulled it off. In fact for given values of ‘intertwined’, that describes most of human history and people managed to pull it off.
“Eliminating or intending to eliminate a people through means other than violence can still count as genocide. Most accepted definitions of genocide include that understanding.”
Yes, I remember how France’s mandatory schooling system which eliminated the local dialects and standardized their tongue is considered one of the most efficient genocides of the 19th century.
The connotations of the word genocide are mass murder. Use it in that context, or don’t use it at all.
“For instance, if we no longer tolerate Amish taking their kids out of school after the 8th grade, that will ultimately have to be enforced either with violence or the threat of violence against Amish parents and possibly their children as well.”
You mean like what every other citizen in the US has to deal with?
“I hoped that by pointing it out he might realize the implications of what he was saying were more dramatic than just making it easier for some kids with bowl cuts to become engineers.”
You do realize appeal to emotion is a logical fallacy because it isn’t actually an argument? And your defense of it is ‘it sounds scary so will change his mind’… which is sort of the opposite of encouraging logical thinking.
“The connotations of the word genocide are mass murder. Use it in that context, or don’t use it at all. ”
Those may be the connotations, but the definition in international law also includes:
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
…
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
That is why I argued some years back that the Texas Child Protection authorities were guilty of attempted genocide in their treatment of the FLDS.
That was a much clearer case, since they were taking children away from their parents in order to prevent the children from being brought up in the parents’ religion.
Forcing the Amish to have their children brought up outside of their control and culture at least approaches e, though I don’t think it quite makes it.
International law is an international ass.
@suntzuanime – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
@Jiro:
I never said it was a central example.
@Samuel Skinner:
Jews are constantly debating what it means to be a Jew. Also, Jews have the Biblical definition to fall back on. Yes, people’s values are intertwined with their way of life…so how does that help your assertion that Amish can remain Amish but not raise their kids as Amish?
Hopefully you read David Friedman’s response to your comments on genocide.
By the way, your and my and suntzuanime’s individual opinions on what counts as genocide aren’t really relevant since it’s the broader world that tends to judge what is genocidal and what isn’t, and international agreements carry a lot of clout in those matters. I didn’t say “I find your views genocidal,” I said “That makes you genocidal”—i.e. “Most people would consider your views genocidal.”
Genocide is of course an emotional image, but I wasn’t using an appeal to emotion to support my argument, so it’s not a fallacy. I never said to Jiro “Your views about the Amish are wrong BECAUSE they’re genocidal.” I pointed out the genocidalism of Jiro’s views in order to underline the drastic nature of what Jiro is calling for, nothing more. I even put it in parentheses to show it wasn’t central to my argument.
Yes, I remember how France’s mandatory schooling system which eliminated the local dialects and standardized their tongue is considered one of the most efficient genocides of the 19th century.
Similar mandatory schooling systems applied to aboriginal populations in North America and Australia, I think generally are considered to be “efficient genocides”.
Efficiency is generally considered laudable, and if someone manages to accomplish Nazi-esque goals with substantially fewer dead bodies, well, credit where credit is due. But if the master action plan is to render Culture X extinct by taking all the children of Culture X parents off to the Obviously Superior Culture Y’s schools, well, maybe we ought to come up with a specialized word for that carrying the connotation, “not quite as bad as Literal Nazis”, but don’t be surprised if we just broaden the definition of genocide instead.
Maybe we can call it second-degree genocide, or aggravated ethnic cleansing 🙂
You don’t have to say it’s a central example in order to be using the noncentral fallacy. Descriptions are assumed to be central unless specifically stated otherwise because that’s how people talk, and deliberately using a highly loaded term in a noncentral way without warning is the noncentral fallacy.
The master plan is to prevent harm from coming to the children. If the culture is such that doing this renders the culture extinct, it’s a side effect, not part of the master plan.
By your reasoning, if the Amish beat all homosexual children and stopping that destroyed their culture, stopping that would be genocide too.
The master plan is to prevent harm from coming to the children
That’s what the people who tried to extinguish Native American and Aboriginal cultures said, too. Most of the really big evils are done by people who claim to be Doing Good.
And for that matter, Hitler’s master plan was to prevent harm from coming to the German People, and if this rendered the Jews extinct, that was just a side effect. Are you trying to get me to revoke the “not as bad as Literal Nazis” clause in your case?
@ John Schilling:
Your argument seems to be:
You have good intentions.
Hitler also had good intentions.
Therefore, you are like Hitler.
If everything Hitler said about the Jews was fucking correct, then I suppose his policies would have been justified. The problem is that he was incorrect.
But—even if he were incorrect—Jiro is not analogous to Hitler or to the people taking children away from the Indians because he is a) not calling for the Amish to be killed and b) not calling for their culture to be forcibly suppressed.
He is saying their culture is bad and suggesting that they should abandon it for a superior culture. That is no different from any other suggestion that there are objective standards of good and bad and that people should practice what is good and not what is bad.
All you’re doing is playing this bullshit postmodernist game where any criticism of other cultures or suggestions that they are inferior is “colonialism” and “cultural genocide” and whatever nonsense they want to add in. The concept of objectivity was invented by white people to oppress Indians or something.
“He is saying their culture is bad and suggesting that they should abandon it for a superior culture. That is no different from any other suggestion that there are objective standards of good and bad and that people should practice what is good and not what is bad.”
I don’t think so. When he writes:
“The master plan is to prevent harm from coming to the children. If the culture is such that doing this renders the culture extinct, it’s a side effect, not part of the master plan.”
I think it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t propose a policy limited to persuasion.
I also, of course, would want much better evidence that their culture is bad than has been presented here before taking the argument seriously. The way they bring up their children limits what sorts of life the children will live, but that’s true of all ways of bringing up children.
I remember my sister commenting on that a very long time ago, pointing out that although I liked writing poetry I would not consider moving to Greenwich Village and living as a poet, because we had been brought up in a context where that wasn’t seen as an option, becoming a professor was.
And I think the history of the Canadian attempt to rescue Amerind children from their culture provides some evidence of just how bad the real world consequences are of the principle he is arguing for. It transfers control over children away from the people most likely to have their interest at heart to other people whose qualification for the job is political power.
Or the more recent FLDS episode, where the people seizing several hundred children did so on what they knew to be fraudulent grounds and repeatedly misrepresented the facts in order to maintain public support. Anyone curious can find quite a lot about that in my blog posts from that period:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=FLDS
@ David Friedman:
It’s not at all clear to me that he’s advocating such a thing. I guess we’ll just have to hear from Jiro himself. If he wants to drag all the Amish children away from their homes and put them in state orphanages, then I strongly disagree with his plan and think it would be disastrous.
It is not my impression that it he thinks that, but I could be wrong.
Even if we had really strong evidence that their culture was bad, I don’t think it would justify intervention under any plausible level of how bad it could be.
And I would certainly demand a higher standard of evidence from someone claiming to be an expert than from someone expressing an opinion on the internet.
In terms of action, Jiro has only explicitly advocated for a widespread change in public opinion against some core Amish practices. His wish to see the Amish dissolved as a people (a wish that cannot be separated from the ending of those core Amish practices) is what I consider genocidal. Since he is the one who holds that wish, he is genocidal.
(This doesn’t mean Jiro is the epitome of a genocidalist, it just means he holds views that fall under most widely-accepted umbrella definitions of genocidalism. Not Hitler- or Khmer Rouge-level serious, but still serious. I thought this nuance was conveyed effectively by my use of the G word in a short parenthetical phrase at the end of a paragraph, but apparently it wasn’t. Oh well.)
At the end of the day, David Friedman is repeating what I said earlier, only he of course does a better job conveying it. Part of what parents and communities are meant to do is set limits on the choices of young people. Children can often break those limits if they choose, but it’s accepted that doing so can be emotionally painful. That pain is not abuse, it’s not a humanitarian crisis; it’s just part of the human condition.
I am not in favor of dragging all Amish children to orphanages, but some force may be necessary. For instance, if an Amish parent keeps beating his kid for being a homosexual, or refuses to allow his kid to go to school past 8th grade (or equivalent homeschooling that is verified in some manner other than “trust me, the Amish education is the equivalent of secular high school”), he should be arrested and jailed.
@ Jiro:
Then I certainly agree. They should be held to the same standards as everyone else.
And I think, therefore, that you are being misrepresented.
…or refuses to allow his kid to go to school past 8th grade (or equivalent homeschooling that is verified in some manner)
If there is some question as to whether the kid is being allowed to go to school past 8th grade, wouldn’t the relevant verification be simply that the kid doesn’t want to go to school past 8th grade?
I am inclined to suspect that you want Amish kids to be forced to go to English high school or the equivalent, under penalty of their parent’s imprisonment. If that’s not the case, you need to clarify. If that is the case, and the expectation is that Amish culture shall thus be rendered extinct (for the good of the children, of course), then yes, that is included in broad usage of the word “genocide” and differs from the specific Nazi variety only in the reduced body count.
If you’re going to be pedantic over using the world “allow”, I’ll be pedantic in return and point out that I didn’t say that that was a comprehensive list of reasons; there could be other reasons that are not in the list. So parents could be punished for not sending their kids to school as well as for not allowing the kids to go to school.
Suggesting that people should be thrown in jail but that you’re not going to provide a full list of things that you plan to throw them in jail for, is another of those things that makes it really hard to not make unflattering historical comparisons.
“Jews are constantly debating what it means to be a Jew. Also, Jews have the Biblical definition to fall back on.”
And? You are implying the existence of Reform Judaism is equal to genocide. That is absurd.
“I didn’t say “I find your views genocidal,” I said “That makes you genocidal”—i.e. “Most people would consider your views genocidal.””
This may shock you, but most people do not use the UN definition for defining genocide.
“Similar mandatory schooling systems applied to aboriginal populations in North America and Australia, I think generally are considered to be “efficient genocides”. ”
Yeah, the US is a real genocide factory, genociding each incoming wave of immigrants. It is the melting pot… of genocide.
” But if the master action plan is to render Culture X extinct by taking all the children of Culture X parents off to the Obviously Superior Culture Y’s schools”
Afghanistan- because getting girls to go to school is Literally Hitler.
“Suggesting that people should be thrown in jail but that you’re not going to provide a full list of things that you plan to throw them in jail for”
Because Jiro’s plan is literally “enforce the legal code equally” so he doesn’t need to provide a full list since the legal code already exists.
“or refuses to allow his kid to go to school past 8th grade (or equivalent homeschooling that is verified in some manner other than “trust me, the Amish education is the equivalent of secular high school”)”
The real world issue, in the past, was refusing to allow the state to compel the kid to go to high school.
Putting it as not allowing the kid to go to high school badly misrepresents the situation, at least as it existed back when it was a live issue, before the Supreme Court came down nine to zero on the side of the Amish. It makes it look as though the conflict is between the kid and his parents, when it was actually between the state and the family— kid and parents.
For what it is worth, the two children of my present marriage were home schooled through about the equivalent of high school. There was no mechanism to verify that it was the equivalent of secular high school and it wasn’t. If we had wanted the equivalent of high school we would have sent them to a high school.
John: I’m not actually arresting anyone, so I have no need to give an exhaustive list of things for which people can be arrested. I’ll tell you what: if I am ever in a position to arrest the Amish, I’ll be sure they have as good an idea of what is illegal as everyone else does.
David: Then as I said, add an additional item to the list that is not about being allowed to go to school but is about requiring it.
Yes, you’re such an awful slacker that you’re working as a psychiatrist, writing a book quickly to tight deadlines, and keeping up one of the most insightful blogs on the internet. I bet you sleep 25 hours a day, don’t you?
I bet he does too! Frickin’ timeturners, man.
What I mean is that I knew about this for two months, all I needed to do was spend five minutes looking over the survey, I thought about it a bunch of times like “I have five minutes now, maybe I should do that survey thing”, and then thought “Nah, I’ll browse Reddit instead”.
Any discussion of time management which acts like time is the actual limiting factor has already missed the point, at least for me personally.
That describes my time management issues perfectly, too.
And then there’s time management self-help books, that I refuse to read because I feel like I wasting my time and could be doing something productive instead.
Any discussion of time management which acts like time is the actual limiting factor has already missed the point, at least for me personally.
Oh indeed! All the time management advice starts from a position of “you have things you want/need to do but are too busy to fit everything in”, when for me it’s “you have things you need to do and time to do them in but can’t be motivated to get off your lazy backside to do them” 🙂
I think in terms of “energy management” or “motivation management” when I want to discuss those sorts of issues, instead of “time management” (which is typically only appropriate when a deadline looms and there’s an actual planning problem in getting the steps done before then).
Absence of one obvious time to do the thing, leading to indefinite delegation of the thing to future selves and eventual dropping of the thing once it’s too late.
Yep. I have plenty of time and work ethic to cook dinner, clean dishes, and fold laundry, but the activation energy for task “clean bathroom” would move my body quite close to c.
Scott, please consider becoming an online therapy practitioner.
I am better at medication than therapy, online medication work is very nearly impossible, and even online therapy has so many bureaucratic hurdles that it’s rarely worth it.
I was amused by the choice of fictional titles the survey asks if you have read. The LessWrong Canon?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Significant Digits by Alexander D.
Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
“The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” by Nick Bostrom.
The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt.
Synthesis by Sharon Mitchell.
Worm by David Wildbow.
Pact by David Wildbow.
Twig by David Wildbow.
Ra by Sam Hughes.
Friendship is Optimal by Iceman.
Friendship is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens by Chatoyance.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams.
Accelerando by Charles Stross.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
It’s better than Pachelbel, for sure.
For those unaware of why Canon in D is awful. Also, this
I still like the Canon in D.
The first link is brilliant, but by contrast it reminded me of Ada Palmer’s Whispers from Ragnarok, which includes the premise that every singer should have something interesting to sing. It’s a neo-renaissance version of the Norse myths– big emotional range (humor to horror, with delight mixed in) and complex harmonies.
The prevalence of Pachelbel is only an issue in certain sectors of Western music. If you don’t spent much time there, it still retains its charms. For example, Jpop flogs the Royal Road Progression instead, AKA the Rickroll chords.
And even then, some of the issues with Pachelbel stem from the hammering of just the four chords, in short phrases. You get a full run of the four chords in seconds, and then repeat over and over. The effect can be much more ameloriated by letting the melody travel much further, such how the original Pachelbel canon actually goes across eight chords, not just your “Don’t Stop Believing” four. Similarly, the Rickroll is a 16-beat phrase, whereas Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” version of Royal Road unfolds across 32.
And yeah, just straight up having more chords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtPx6WdNM30
Many more passing notes and transitional chords.
Of course, in most current EDM and hip-hop genre families, the composition consensus is that the fewer chords, the better.
Pachelbel’s most evil form is actually somewhat a result of this, by maintaining the same progression across all sections of a song. In earlier times, you’d write unique melodies to different chords for the verse, the prechorus, the chorus, and the break/interlude.
I’m fond of Pachelbel’s. And also the Wonder Years episode where Kevin is supposed to play it at his piano recital.
Consider Phlebas is kinda odd. The standard advice for the Culture books is to start with The Player of Games, and if we’re going for density of LW-ish themes, Excession is probably what we’re after. Maybe Surface Detail but I thought that was a weaker one.
(My own favorite is Use of Weapons, but it doesn’t have much to endear it specifically to this audience.)
Similarly, Worm belongs here but I don’t think Pact or Twig do. (Less sure about Twig.)
It’s the standard advice but I don’t agree with it. I started with Consider Phlebas and getting to know the protagonist-society of the series through the eyes of characters who dislike them was really effective.
Excession made me wish I could read the Zetetic Elench novels, though.
Oh, there’s nothing wrong with Consider Phlebas. I’d rate it highly, actually, maybe second after Weapons — I especially liked the scenes on that dead world with the tunnels. But I think that’s the standard advice because it’s a very different book from the rest of the Culture series — more picaresque, heavier on the milSF themes, and depressing as shit. So if you want to know what you’re getting yourself into, there’s a good chance it’ll lead you astray.
It’s a good way to get to know the Culture but the modal reader of the Culture books probably doesn’t have that as an objective.
Although I’ve only read four, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with starting with Consider Phlebas. Use of Weapons is my favourite too (so far).
I think Pact and Twig might belong just for seeing how much people follow up on things like that. This sort of question is really cheap – simple, factual, and very very quick if completely inapplicable.
I really liked Twig for a world where there is “an objective source of morality” – the karma – and it is shown how the karma conflicts with real morality.
Huh. I didn’t get that far. Maybe I should pick it up again.
Twig? I think you mean Pact.
What was the deal with that guy with the huge amounts of good karma anyway? I imagine he got resurrected offscreen.
@ Vaniver, you are right. I was talking about Pact. I liked Twig for different reasons.
@ Anonymous, I believe all the Blake’s doubts there were a result of that guy’s karma. Anyway, karma isn’t reliable.
BTW, what’s this Synthesis thing? I’ve never heard of it, and my Google Fu is failing me.
I included several ‘fake’ options to fake out people who just check everything but don’t actually read stuff.
Also sorry about Consider Phlebas versus Player Of Games, I’ve never read the series so I just went with the first book in it.
Ha – I wrote in the survey to ask whether “Bayesed and Confused” was a Lizardman’s Constant, so you’ve answered my question!
Also, I lied and said I’d read Consider Phlebas, as it seemed likely to be a proxy for the Culture series in general. And just spent like 5 hours reading it.
I was so excited to hear about rationalfic I’dnever heard of before…
I’m kind of curious how many people are reading Unsong but I guess I’ll have to put it on the SSC survey.
I’ve read the first couple chapters, it’s definitely my thing, but am holding off to binge later when it’s more complete (if an arc is finished, or the whole story, or something).
Also holding off for a binge later. Could you post a warning for binge-readers when you hit significant moments in the story at which it would be good to indulge in a partial binge?
I was really curious about that too. Next time, I guess.
The first excerpt you posted here (about Apollo 8) totally turned me off Unsong. However, some of the buzz in open threads has piqued my interest, and I’m now planning to archive-binge when I’ve got more time.
Love it!
I started reading some of it. It’s a really funny premise, but I’ll have to see how well it holds up as a complete novel.
But what I’ve read has been entertaining!
I also liked what I read of Unsong (the first few chapters), but I’m waiting until it’s done, since I found the chapter-by-chapter updates of HPMOR really annoying to wait through.
I’ve also been holding off on reading Unsong until more is complete and I can binge. (Or, even better, until somebody decides to put together an audiobook/podcast project like they have with HPMOR and Worm; I rarely have time to sit down and read, so listening to audiobooks while running is a huge thing for me. But even if that never happens, I plan to get around to it eventually.) However, you might like to know, two friends of mine, who I don’t think even read here regularly, independently linked it on Facebook as something they thought was amazing, and said that the guy who wrote it must have been their spirit animal, or something.
Proof, if ever it were needed, that I am not a rationalist 🙂
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky – Could not pay me enough to read this, not unless you have something like a spare €20 million down the back of the sofa to induce me, and even then I’m not sure I could slog all the way through to the end
Significant Digits by Alexander D. – Nope, never even heard of it
Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky –
See above re: HPMORThat’s a lie, I have read it, but forgot it was by Himself. Not a bad story, I’m surprised to recall! This time the lecturing did not get in the way of telling the story and was not completely anvilicious 🙂“The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” by Nick Bostrom – No
The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt – Yes! This one I have read!
Synthesis by Sharon Mitchell – No
Worm by David Wildbow.
Pact by David Wildbow.
Twig by David Wildbow – treating the three of these as a job lot. No, and not inclined to, even if they are getting rave reviews on here.
Ra by Sam Hughes – No
Friendship is Optimal by Iceman.
Friendship is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens by Chatoyance – job lot time again; no, my “My Little Pony” fanfic needs are adequately met by an online acquaintance sending me chapters of the MLP cross-over with the Silver John character of Manly Wade Wellman WIP by him and his writing partner.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – I know this is famous, but never read it.
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson – I know this is famous, but never read it.
Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks – Yes. I’ve read a lot of Banks, both the SF and literary fiction, and even though I intensely dislike the Culture I acknowledge he’s a good writer (was a good writer, RIP).
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams – No.
Accelerando by Charles Stross – No. Recognise the name, never read any of the works except for “A Colder War”, which is a damn fine story.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge – No. Have read some other Vinge, though, if that counts.
The only one of these I’ve ever read is Ender’s Game. Assigned in school. (I read Speaker for the Dead on my own, though.)
I read about twenty pages of The Diamond Age and never got around to finishing it. I plan to at some point.
Most of the rest I have never heard of. I don’t like internet fan-fiction stuff.
The Diamond Age got substantially better on reread, fwiw.
But “Snow Crash” is more fun.
Debatable!
Ananthem is the best thing he ever wrote. Given what’s come since I think it will likely stay that way (though I hope not!) Probably the Baroque Cycle after that, then Cryptonomicon. Diamond Age and Snow Crash were a lot of fun.
Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Anathem, Baroque Cycle (on average; later books in the cycle are better), REAMDE, Zodiac. In that order. Haven’t read Seveneves.
The ideas in Diamond Age were neat, and the characters good, but I found the plot pretty weak, particularly the ending. It’s (spoiler for an old book) basically all just a big setup for a speech at the end about Seeds vs. Sources and Confucianism vs. Victorianism. Otherwise the grand story arc is a series of interesting episodes and then suddenly Fists of Fury! (end old spoiler)
Snow Crash was better paced, better characters, more of an action flick (hence “more fun”) while not totally skimping on the big ideas.
Ooh, another reader of My Little Balladeer! How’d you like it? I thought it was almost publishable quality, though the lore was (understandably) not as good as in Wellman’s own stories due to having to be compatible with the Equestrian setting.
(Or are you actually getting to beta the rumored-but-not-yet-posted sequel?)
You know “My Little Balladeer”! And no, I’m not anything as glorious as a beta, I just get early sneak peeks! Yes there is a sequel, no I haven’t heard anything in a couple of months.
Goodness, it really is a small world 🙂
I very much liked the attempt to meld the two worlds in “My Little Balladeer”. I know Wellman’s works better and have little to no knowledge of or interest in Equestria, but from what I could see they were matched up without too much forcing of square pegs into round holes.
Signifcant Digits is a Methods recursive fanfic, so you probably wouldn’t like it. If you like Friendship is Magic fanfic at all, though, I would recommend Friendship is Optimal and Caelum Est Conterrens; they are really, really good.
Interesting – I actually thought Friendship is Optimal was rather mediocre as a story, even though the idea was really powerful. Fortunately, a lot of the recursive fanfics (like Caelum Est Conterrens) treat the idea a lot better, though you usually still need to have read the original for background.
I’m not really initiated into fanfic customs but is that normal? Fanfics of fanfics?
Don’t read this as criticism so much as mild confusion.
Yes. Sufficiently popular fanfics often beget fanfics of their own. For example, Eakin’s Hard Reset series inspired Horzion to write Hard Reset 2: Reset Harder, which is an Alternate Universe that diverges somewhere around the middle of the first Hard Reset novel. Friendship is Optimal in particular was always intended to spawn a Verse, which is why Iceman wrote the “Rules of the Optimalverse” document to guide aspiring recursive fanfic writers.
See also Amends or Truth and Reconciliation, a fanfic about Hermione in the first year after the end of canon.
Unfortunately, it isn’t finished, but It’s still one of the better things I’ve read, and the author gives credit in notes to other fanfic which she got premises and details from.
This is more like fanfic as ecosystem rather than single lineages.
I have no idea why A Fire Upon the Deep is there instead of A Deepness in the Sky. Maybe the person behind the survey had a fascination with talking dogs.
Maybe because ADITS was poorly plotted, poorly edited, maintained two distinct plot threads without any but the most minimal connections between them for five hundred pages, and then the climax was everything being resolved off-screen and everything we’d spent five hundred pages on being pointless at best and counterproductive at worst?
Nah, it’s probably because AFUTD came first and is better-known.
Upon reflection, the part about the non-interacting plot threads is more or less true of AFUTD as well. But then it’s not clear that there’s a principled reason to prefer talking spiders to talking dogs, either.
I’m guessing it’s because the plot begins when an unfriendly AI escapes from the box to cause enormous destruction.
The World of Null-A? Really? As much as it pretends to be about non-Aristotelian, it’s never ever a plot point (or really even explained or explored). It’s just a pulpy adventure story with about 20 non-sensical double-crossings. It’s probably among the worst things that van Vogt wrote.
What do you make of mold in homes as a possibly underappreciated environmental/biological factor in public health and neurological dysfunction along the lines of lead levels, omega 3 deficiency, and such? A 2007 study found an average of 34-44% higher risk of depression in houses with mild to moderate mold, and another study from 2014 (though conducted on mice) found that “respiratory exposure to any mold […] may be capable of causing brain inflammation, cognitive deficits, and emotional problems.” (Anyone know of any more research in this area?)
All I can say is, as someone who had his first exposure to mold last year and ended up feeling depressed and on the verge of a panic attack for the first time in his life, I’m pretty creeped out.
Jeez, fungi sure make for a pretty disturbing kingdom – aside from the whole cordyceps-enslaving-half-an-ecosystem thing, phytophthora infestans (potato blight) may have indirectly killed not only 1 million people in Ireland during the Great Famine, but also an additional 700 000 in Germany following copper sulfate shortages caused by WW1. And even the bible mentions mold, stating something to the effect that if you find it in your home, abandon it. Also, a mold of the aspergillus genus killed an orca recently, though it was immunocompromised.
Study doesn’t look so good – they admit that a lot of it goes away when you control for stuff, and they don’t even check the biggest control, which is income – rich people can probably afford to live in less moldy houses.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I don’t see a lot of evidence for it either.
Yeah, guess it’s somewhat unimpressive at a closer look.
A single data point– I had a period of insomnia when I could hardly sleep, which of course was making me miserable. In a fit of inspiration, I opened the plumbing access, and discovered that the pipes were black with mold. I swabbed it down with rubbing alcohol, and stopped having insomnia.
About a related topic.
I think I once read that levels of oxygen dispersal and carbon dioxide in large buildings have been correlated with long-term cognitive decline. AKA, poorly ventaled buildings have a poor O2 to CO2 ratio, and while not being immediately threatening, accelerate age-related cognitive decline.
And word on that?
I live in a home with probably mold everywhere in structural things. Also small amounts elsewhere. I wonder if there is simple way to search for it (other than visual)?
I think I’m going to buy a humidity meter.
>be me
>have math minor
>click advert
>directed to instructor page
>see math doctorates, math olympians, and puntam competitors
>click back
>see the position is for 5 hours/week
>mfw math phds and olympians are the target demographic for a part-time job ad
I’m unsure what I feel about this.
On one hand, its really good to have global tutoring by brilliant people *for* brilliant people.
On the other, that site already *has* a good, but not great, online computer tutoring-instructing system called Alcumus that they deliberately made to only go up to mid AMC difficulty level to sell their other products.
Which to me is very annoying. There has always been, at least in pockets of civilized society, motivated brilliant teachers that could often eventually be found,though perhaps not affordable. However, having a good computer skill ranking tutor system that immediately locates your weakpoints up to the very highest level can easily be better(though perhaps boring and impersonal), and free.
Think of an AP calc testing system that after a large practice final, directs you to your weakpoints in multiple textbooks by different authors with different explanatory styles, with variable practice problems and then retests. It then uses basic statistics to find which classes of problems have the highest rate of improvement after other textbooks and practice problem groups, and perhaps locates possible strong-points after testing for other psychometric traits. And well, There have been sub-par and OK versions of that, but nothing up to the very highest level, and nothing done yet very well.
Its not that it *isn’t* possible. But well, making something like that puts a very select group of people out of a job ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a completely wrong assessment of their business model. If you take a look at their course offerings, you’ll see that the majority of the classes they offer are at the Introductory Math level, and some of the highest level material is not even offered regularly.
Alcumus only goes to AMC level because (a) that’s almost as far as you can go with short answer questions, and (b) that’s the level most students on the site are at. It’s not a nefarious scheme to get you to enroll in their more difficult classes in any sense.
Even calculus, which you might expect to be one of their most popular classes, is only offered in one section per year. They could make an Alcumus-like calculus trainer, but it’s not clear that high school students would even use it.
So, uh, anyone know anything about how much this job actually pays? Not that I can do it at the moment anyway, but for the future…
I’m also interested in what qualifications they are actually looking for.
The grading job page (which I applied for) says $15/hr, and the full-time and 5h/wk instructor positions are apparently negotiable.
How do you pay a grader by the hour, anyway? Isn’t it per paper or something?
I would also like to know what exactly ‘Legal to work in the US’ means for someone not physically in the US. Is it one of those oblique ways of asking ‘Do you have a green card?’
“We pay you this much per hour, you grade this many papers per hour. If you don’t grade this many papers per hour you are fired.”
Same as any other hourly job
Not a green card specifically, but close enough. Legal to work in the US means you have one of the documents from list A, or one each from lists B and C: https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/acceptable-documents
The graders self-report their hours, and that’s about it. It’s basically run on the honor system, but it’s automatically recorded how many solutions you graded so they probably take a look if that ratio is too far out of whack.
More importantly, the instructors look over the grading, and I have to say that some of the most frustrating moments have come with really bad graders, so please don’t be one of them. We give numerical and written feedback on the graders and if you do a bad enough job, they’ll obviously fire you.
The instructor job I have with them pays $45 an hour. I don’t know how much that depends on my own qualifications, and I didn’t try to negotiate it at all, so take that data point for what it’s worth.
I can’t answer for their standards for qualifications, but there’s very little harm in applying. If you look at their instructors, there’s actually a pretty wide variation of competition success.
Thanks, good to know!
I wish there was a paid tutoring service of some kind for >=graduate level math/physics. math.SE and physics.SE help there but they really work best for high school to undergrad material, while math overflow is impossibly high standard. And I think that’s it, there’s nothing more.
What standard is impossibly high? The standard for an acceptable question? No, the standard for the community to accept questions is graduate level. It is true that lots of people complain and try to impose higher standards, but just ignore them; the community does.
The questions I tend to have are of the sort “I don’t understand why X can be assumed in this proof of catamurphic whorlbishness of ultragnarlic manifolds in this roughly 1st grad school year level textbook”, or “I’m trying to solve this exercise from the same textbook and I’m running into a dead-end, here’s my work so far, what am I doing wrong?”. I never see questions of this sort on MO, they’re not likely to be “of interest to research mathematicians”, and I kind of assumed they’d be closed as off-topic or homework if I tried to post them – would they not?
Math.SE is actually *sometimes* helpful with this (and nearly always for <=undergrad level), but physics.SE seems much less helpful and just closed my recent question of this sort. If I were in academia, I'd go bug a TA, or that really smart friend, or to office hours. But I'm not. If there was a service "have a scholarly question? Here's someone with knowledge at least of a TA for an equivalent-level college course in that area, for an hourly rate", I would happily use it.
I predict that they will not be closed as off-topic on mathoverflow, which is definitely more welcoming than physics.se. They might be too specific for anyone to be interested in answering, though. I have seen such questions both asked and answered. Just ask a few and see what happens. Added: Also, look through the last few hundred recent questions and pick out the ones that are on hold to get a sense of the standards.
If your questions are about first-year graduate textbooks, I think it would be easy to find a grad student at a local university to tutor. I have known several grad students who did this.
I guess I’ll try posting in MO next time I have this problem with math – thanks for the advice.
I’ve never been to physics or math grad school, but in undergrad we had study groups and the professors had office hours. Between the two that was sufficient. Where do you see paid tutoring fitting in?
I’m no longer in academia, for quite a while, yet still have math/physics I want to learn. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, because we today are living with an embarrassment of riches in terms of STEM textbooks, monographs and tutorials, both really-free and Library Genesis-free. But it would be great to have a non-academic equivalent of precisely this: professors’ (or postdocs’ or PhD students’…) office hours. It may well be that my situation is rare enough for this to not make sense to exist.
Kids get music teachers and math tutors. As an adult, I can still easily get a music teacher if I want to learn an instrument. A math tutor, for a high enough level of math – not so much.
Ah. I misunderstood the context. Probably not enough demand for matching businesses to exist, but I’d send an email to the secretary of the local university math department with the subfield you are interested in and what you are willing to pay. Ask him to post it the appropriate mailing list or post it in the office.
Probably irrelevant, but possibly not–how I studied graduate physics.
Two or three of the senior grad students at Chicago, with the help of a professor, were writing a book aimed at grad students studying for the qualifying exam. The draft was available in the library and they offered some small reward to anyone who found a mistake.
I worked through it, finding quite a large number of mistakes. It was much more fun than working through a book where I could be confident the answers were right, because it was a challenge. If my answer disagreed with theirs, mine might be correct. With a book you are reasonably sure has only correct answers, if your answer disagrees with theirs it’s tempting to accept theirs, figure out some not very precise explanation of what you got wrong, and keep going.
And I did very well on the exam.
Why do Katie and Andromeda need money? What happened?
I mean, I’m all for helping people, but how do I know it will be worth it in the long run? Is this helping or coddling, in other words? This might be a bit personal, but I’d need to know about her career prospects and all, to be sure that my ethical ROI is good.
Yeah, I wondered that as well. It just says “Single mother” and leaves it at that. Especially in the Bay Area, with its extraordinary cost of living, I really wonder about the ROI here – I worry it’s just “keep (poor person) in (expensive area)” as a funding goal, which is effectively zero-sum for society, and thus very poor charity.
I’m not sure how much of it is private, so I’ll let someone who knows them better chime in.
I’ll just add first that they’re living in a group house which cuts down costs a lot, and that since most of the people they know and care for are there, preventing them from having to leave is part of the charitable cause we’re talking about.
And second that all of this is obviously not Effective Altruism in capital letters, that it’s aimed at people who know them or people who feel a connection to this community in general. There’s a gradient between “give malaria nets to people in Africa” and “help your parents in their old age”, and I think this is somewhere in the middle and that’s okay.
That’s an interesting way for you to phrase the scale. Given the choice between the two (Africa and parents), which do you think is preferable?
It’s not a dichotomy between good and bad, it’s a dichotomy between two different reasons for giving. As well ask “Which is preferable, driving to work or driving to a leisure activity?”
Okay, thanks, that wasn’t clear to me from the context.
Why is there not also a similar gradient between “have foreigners benefit” and “have Americans benefit”, in the immigration context?
a) What a derailment; b) immigration freedom doesn’t trade off against average American well-being; c) has Scott ever even called for open borders or a similarly radical change in immigration policy?—as far as I can recall he’s said we should be cautious, moderate, etc. like he says for everything.
Without saying there isn’t, I think public decisions should sometimes be held to a higher level of rigor than private ones. If I want to build a giant house that looks like a castle just because I can, and I have the money, great. If the government wants to spend our tax money building giant awesome castles in every major city, it should probably show some kind of benefit in a rigorous way.
Probably one of the ways (in the USA at least) to tell the difference between those leaning politically right and those leaning politically left is that the right will, when faced with this situation, respond something like:
I think public decisions (either restricting the actions of the public, or using the public purse, or both) must always be held to a higher level of rigor than private ones. If I want to build a giant house that looks like a castle just because I can, and I have the money, great. If the government wants to spend our tax money building giant awesome castles in every major city, it must definitely show an agreed significant benefit in a rigorous way.
(Please to note that I say ‘this is how a right winger would respond, in an emotional sense.’ I make no claim to what our politicos actually do in office.)
Whereas the left would never agree that it’s “great” to build a giant house that looks like a castle just because you can and have the money.
My brief version of what happened, as I understand it (mostly from Katie’s tumblr), is as follows:
Katie was married to person 1. They either had an open relationship or were poly or something similar, and Katie was also dating person 2, who is married to person 3. Katie and person 2 agreed that if their birth control failed, Katie would abort. Katie got pregnant, decided not to abort. Person 2 cut off contact with Katie, Katie’s marriage to person 1 disintegrated for multiple reasons, and that divorce removed Katie’s primary source of financial support.
Andromeda seems to be a bright young child, and I am optimistic about helping her out paying off in the long run.
There are decision theories which imply that you should not help a person who gets into a bad situation by making a promise they can’t keep. I don’t believe in them, but they do seem to be very popular here and perhaps this may be an occasion to rethink one’s support of them.
I did make a promise I could not keep when I said I would abort. I’ve lived with incredible guilt and suffering over doing that to my past lover and his family. I wish I could take back that promise, but I think ultimately that was my mistake, modeling myself poorly for what I would do in the event of an actual pregnancy. I don’t think it would have been healthy or wise for me to have tried to force myself to go through with an abortion that I didn’t want. I even did try to do so, going to the clinic at his insistence before emotionally breaking down. In the end, I did what I thought I could live with, and I don’t regret it. Also, I did my best to make this into a good situation following her birth, but it just didn’t work out for lots of reasons that were beyond my control, like other people’s choices too. Maybe people should not help me. Andromeda’s father does not help me I think for that reason and others. I hate that by having such a mother, Andromeda may be in a compromised position growing up, but I will keep doing the best I can for her. Or maybe you are right, that it is an occassion to think of about support of those things, especially when a life like Andromeda’s is involved, who wasn’t involved in any of the actions that lead to her birth.
The “you” who made the promise was very different from the “you” who had to make the decision. A reasonable man would have taken this possibility into account and assigned a significant probability to you doing what you ultimately ended up doing.
This sort of stuff is why I dread aging. One day you have your preferences lined up, the next day you wake up and your body has given you a compulsion and you’re a different person.
It’s probably nowhere close to the hormonal rush of a pregnancy, but still..fug
I’m not questioning you. I’m questioning the decision theories that seem to imply that people shouldn’t help you. I don’t, as I said, believe in those theories.
“Andromeda’s father does not help me I think for that reason and others.”
I’d be surprised if, legally, he has a choice in the matter. Have you consulted with an attorney? As a teenager my brother got a girl pregnant (in California) and the fact he was 16 and had no job did nothing to relieve his financial responsibility to the child. (Luckily for him my parents paid the child support until he was able)
I realize this is a very uncomfortable situation for you, but the father is just as responsible for Andromeda’s welfare as you are and IMHO you should be looking to him to live up to his responsibility.
@ mdv59:
Granted, the law is on your side in this case but that’s only because the law is still mired in 19th century sexual mores.
As I understand it the mother was already partnered with someone else at the time and the father never agreed to have the child in the first place. Morally speaking he bears no responsibility here.
hlynkacg, You wrote “the father never agreed to have the child in the first place.” If the father agreed to have sex, he agreed to have a child with some positive probability. Since the child is a third party the mother never had the legal or moral right to waive the father’s financial liability.
@James
You seem to be assuming that the father acted alone. One could say the same thing about the mother when she agreed to A have sex outside a committed relationship and B keep the baby against the father’s wishes
As thrustvectoring notes below, the people who most on the hook (as per the terms of the described agreement) are the mother and her (former?) husband.
I also feel it is unethical of Katie not to exhaust every legal recourse available to her against the father (or even her husband at the time if that’s what legal situation in California determines).
The reasoning being that it is in her daughter’s best interest to have her financial support guaranteed by legal ruling or mutual agreement rather than by the goodwill of her social circle or state assistance (both of which she will be free to seek regardless even if not to the same extent).
She has also written in this blog under her own name saying that she knows the identity of the father and can potentially face severe repercussions if she files for benefits claiming otherwise.
People who feel it is unfair for the father/husband (which it is, but it is more unfair to Andromeda for them not to pay) are free to set up a funding campaign to compensate them instead.
It would also probably be ‘fair’ to have them released from their financial obligations and even have Katie liable to compensate them if she ever came to means that would allow her to do so without endangering the well-being of her daughter but this is vague, impractical, and creates an incentives nightmare.
Polyamory is actually almost irrelevant here, nothing should be different from a ‘regular’ case of an extra-marital affair or child conceived during spousal separation period.
This is also another reminder that an easily reversible male birth control with the same cost-benefits as the pill would give its inventor a decent chance of god-kinghood, or alternatively create the need for a new monetary system as s/he would very quickly end up with all the money.
What if she had an opportunity to rob a bank with a very low chance of being caught? Would it be unethical of her to decline that opportunity because “her daughter’s best interest” is that she have a lot of money?
@Anoymous
Not even remotely analogous, the father shares the responsibility for conception even if he took every reasonable step to prevent it, that’s why if Katie had the means to support the child by herself she ought to have done that. As for the husband being potentially liable that sucks even more but it’s hardly a new concept and a possibility that he should have accounted for when making the decision to marry Katie in the first place and agreeing to the polyamory while staying married to her.
Not to mention that ‘robbing a bank’ is kinda the opposite of ‘legal ruling’
This idea that it’s “unfair to the child” not to seek child support from the father is bullshit.
This child is not going to starve or die or be miserable. She will certainly be better off than billions of people in the world.
This guy doesn’t owe anything to this child. Neither do the residents of California or the United States of America, for that matter. And I think neither one of them should be forced to pay. But if somebody is going to be forced to pay, I’d rather it be a tiny drain on the average taxpayer than an enormous drain on this one guy. This guy already took steps to avoid having a child.
If you can make the argument that putting him on the hook for child support will encourage him to be strictly monogamous or something, then you can also make the argument that putting the taxpayers on the hook for child support will encourage them to get rid of this coerced welfare.
@Vox
She doesn’t need to starve or die to be damaged by her mother’s decision not the seek child support form her father, only to be significantly disadvantaged compared to her life if she did.
As far as the order of *responsibility* in this case goes then it’s, Katie’s, Father’s, Tax payer’s the reason that hers is prior to the father’s is that hers was the final and sovereign choice to have this child, I’m not even sure having committed not to do so changes much here. But as long as she doesn’t have the means to uphold her responsibility it should be up to the Father possibly with state’s participation depending on the father’s means.
How is it reasonable to skip the father here ? Yeah the individual tax burden of one case is negligible but so is the individual tax burden of everything else.
And I don’t think this can encourage anyone into monogamy because as mentioned – as long as the current legal framework is in place a monogamous father can be on the hook just as well in case of an affair (assuming this is indeed the case in Cali., taking this on faith from previous comments)
@ dsotm:
It shouldn’t be the father’s responsibility because he didn’t want the damn child and presumably took steps like birth control to avoid it.
It’s not the general public’s responsibility, either. It’s the mother’s responsibility because she wants the child. The person who wants custody of it, pays for it: that simple. If she gave it up for adoption, it wouldn’t be the father’s responsibility, now would it?
Now, if neither the mother nor the father wanted the child—and if there were no private charitable groups willing to foster children or raise them in orphanages—then maybe you could argue that the mother and father should be forced to provide minimal support to the child to keep it from starving on the street.
But we are not in that situation, even if we abolished all welfare we would not be in that situation, and until we are in that situation there’s no force to the argument that it’s unfair to the father but “necessary” for the child.
@dsotm
You haven’t answered the objection. Is there an ethical obligation to provide the best possible life for a child or not? And if so, why not rob a bank to if it would further that ethical obligation?
It’s the mother’s responsibility because she wants the child.
Bingo…
You won’t hear me say this often, but I’m with Vox on this one.
@Vox
“It shouldn’t be the father’s responsibility because he didn’t want the damn child and presumably took steps like birth control to avoid it.”
Childbirth is not something that can be prevented by a unilateral decision by the father (after conception that is), and responsibility as opposed to culpability depends solely on the (foreseeable even if not intended) consequences rather than intent.
Also the fact that you’re using the term ‘that damn child’ suggests that you haven’t internalized the main point here – the whole decision should revolve around what’s best for that child, she had even less saying in being born than her father did.
So yeah had she been given up for adoption/foster-care the best thing for her would be to be on tax payer’s or charitable people’s expense, but unless you know the US adoption / foster care system to be extremely good or alternatively Katie being an unfit mother it is easy to say that by default, being raised by her own mother is more in her interest then being adopted.
Btw, while in the case of adoption it’s pretty clear that the adopting parents take on all the financial responsibility, foster care is funded by the state afaik – so if the parent’s have the means to do so there’s no reason that the state itself shouldn’t come after them for child support required to provide the same standard of living that could have been expected to be provided by the parents, of course the typical foster case usually involves parents without means whatsoever.
@Anonymous
“You haven’t answered the objection. Is there an ethical obligation to provide the best possible life for a child or not? And if so, why not rob a bank to if it would further that ethical obligation?”
Seriously ? Ok.
There is an obligation to provide a best-that-you-can-within-reasonable-sacrifice-before-externalising-on-society life for the child that you conceived. (the case of husbands being liable for extra-marital children is admittedly fucked up if true, but might still be in the child’s interest more than welfare)
And because one can only be expected to fulfill his responsibilities with the means legally at one’s disposal, and because doing otherwise would be just more violent and arbitrary form of externalization.
At this point we might as well say the state is responsible because society foreseeably could have avoided the existence of single mothers with any number of schemes, therefore the state owes child support.
@ dsotm:
The point is that, having disclaimed any interest in the child, the father has no obligation to do “what’s best for the child”. Yes, he contributed causally to the creation of the child—but since he has disclaimed any parental rights, there is no reason he should have to bear any parental duties.
Perhaps he has an obligation to see that the child has a minimally decent standard of living, but why in the world does he have an obligation to see that the child has “the same standard of living that could have been expected to be provided by the parents”? That’s completely arbitrary.
@Anonymous
“At this point we might as well say the state is responsible because society foreseeably could have avoided the existence of single mothers with any number of schemes, therefore the state owes child support.”
We could say that but we would just be saying hyperbole because we like saying things.
Besides, even as a general rule, parents don’t have an obligation to do what is absolutely best for their children. Parents have lives, too.
If you can move to another city and have a job twice as enjoyable while causing your child a small amount of psychological distress, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do it. Children’s desires are not infinitely above parents’ desires.
@Vox
I don’t think parental duties are conditioned on parental rights any more than the duty to avoid drunk driving is conditioned on the ownership of the vehicle.
Yeah there is a place to debate on what standard of living a child should have reasonable expectation to given the situation of the parents, that is what family courts do.
@ dsotm
You can’t have duties without rights, they are two sides of the same coin.
@Vox
Hence the
best-that-you-can-within-reasonable-sacrifice-before-externalising-on-society.
This ethical obligation to *maximize* the quality of life of your biological offspring but only within the bounds of the law and certain other social norms seems like a very odd ethical construct. It’s almost as if it is an aesthetic preference put in place by social conditioning that is being forced into an ethical framework because it sounds more compelling that way.
@ hlynkacg
Some would say it’s the other way around, but even if taken as-is – you don’t get to absolve yourself from the duties by retroactively forfeiting the rights, if you do then it’s even more the reason to expect you to pay.
Not to mention that the duty is towards a legally helpless minor whereas the right you claim to is to externalize costs on society.
Also you could say that your right to have sex with consenting adults without needing the approval of society is dual to your duty to be the first provider of your progeny.
@ dsotm:
What costs on society?
Precisely what people are arguing here is that neither the father nor society at large ought to be forced to support the child. So there are no externalities except those created by deliberate socialization of parenting. And you can make anything an externality by enacting socialism.
Maybe people would say that they should be forced to give the child a minimum standard of living such that it doesn’t starve. But that’s neither here nor there because there are plenty of people wiling and able to support unwanted children at a level far in excess of minimum subsistence.
Except the individual in question waved both rights and responsibilities at the same time, prior to either coming into play, clearly communicated to all other involved agents with far more than sufficient time for other agents to make appropriate decisions.
And yet you’re suggesting that the mother should get to externalize the cost onto the father. And that this is justified by the child’s welfare, in a way that externalizing to society in general is unfair.
Furthermore, there are a large number of people who use contraception and don’t get unlucky with its effectiveness, or who do choose to abort after contraception fails. And they don’t have to pay a significant portion of their income for 18 years, for the exact same behavior that you’re suggesting makes the father morally culpable.
@ InferentialDistance
I suggest that the mother should externalize the cost on the father *first* in the interest of her child who should not have her means of support depend on the goodwill of her mother’s friends and Scott’s readership towards her, to the extent and as long as such goodwill exists she can use the campaign funds to partially or fully compensate the father as indeed I believe she should, it can probably even be worked into the custody/child-support agreement.
Given that it’s your position that the interests of the child are insatiable, isn’t it unethical to give the donated money to the father rather than just spending moar on the child?
@ InferentialDistance
`
Furthermore, there are a large number of people who use contraception and don’t get unlucky with its effectiveness, or who do choose to abort after contraception fails. And they don’t have to pay a significant portion of their income for 18 years, for the exact same behavior that you’re suggesting makes the father morally culpable.
`
I think you missed a response where I explicitly said that he isn’t morally culpable but responsible non the less.
Abortion was his intent (and hers too up to a point) and I don’t find anything wrong with that, do you know a way that allows to ethically (from the child’s point of interest) avoid supporting your child that was born except for giving him up for adoption (as opposed to foster care) ?
@Anoymous
They are not insatiable at all, they are finite up to a sum to be determined by the court or agreed upon, and the father should have the obligation to pay them while also having the right to compensate himself from any such public donations,
The difference is that if the donations dry up for some reason it is the father’s life quality that will be impacted before Andromeda’s which is the whole point.
Is the form of morality you are pushing: whatever is legally required is ethically required and vice-versa?
@dsotm
There was nothing “retroactive” about it. The father made it quite clear that he would not support the child, going so far as to use birth control and demand an abortion if that failed. The mother’s choice to keep the child was made with that in mind.
@Anoymous
“Is the form of morality you are pushing: whatever is legally required is ethically required and vice-versa?”
Not really, my reasoning here is entirely utilitarian – secure the baby’s future via the strongest legal means available, use the public goodwill funds to compensate the victims of this legal coercion.
When she grows up she can decide what morality to pursue and if she reaches the conclusion that she received too much money from someone she can pay them back.
”
There was nothing “retroactive” about it. The father made it quite clear that he would not support the child, going so far as to use birth control and demand an abortion if that failed. The mother’s choice to keep the child was made with that in mind.
”
Making that clear doesn’t make it true any more than me making clear that I would not support currency inflation gives me a claim for a higher value for my dollars after it has occurred.
I don’t think you understand utilitarianism. It doesn’t privilege the interests of babies much less require biological parents to provide as high a standard of living as can be achieved through “reasonable” sacrifice within the bounds of law.
Instead it sounds like you have your conventional what-about-the-children and the law-is-the-law upper middle class socialization and are desperately throwing everything against the wall to avoid reflecting on them critically.
@dsotm
I think the confusion stems from you trying to be practical yet also inserting ethical justifications like “responsibility”. Yes, for this particular issue coercing the father into paying may be the best we can do to produce maximal satisfaction (or not; there’s other options that seem better to me, but whatever).
However, when we talk about ethical frameworks we’re usually talking on a meta level about how these things should go. For example, we note that the father is getting massively shafted because of factors beyond his control, and that’s not cool. In this particular instance, the father getting shafted may be the best choice out of many bad ones, but we shouldn’t let that fact steer us into reforming our moral intuitions to claim that the father is not getting shafted and he’s actually responsible and everything that’s going on is ethical.
As far as I understand your position you believe that getting child support is the object-level decision that maximizes overall happiness. But then you start talking about responsibility, and I begin thinking you’re asserting that shafting fathers each time they have sex is a moral principle we should be basing our society around, which isn’t what you’re trying to say.
Regardless of the object-level, we should be steering society to a state where fathers don’t pay child support unless they wanted a child, do we agree here? You don’t think there’s an actual moral responsibility for biological fathers to pay regardless of the circumstances, you just think that in practice it is not very easy to implement a situation where both the child is fed and the father (and for that matter, the state budget) unmolested?
@Anonymous
Fine, feel free to change it to local-optimum-pragmatism- I really have no interest in extrapolating this case to a full morality system.
Would the local optimum be different under a different legal system in a different society ?, – probably, so what – this is the society in which this kid has to grow up in.
@dsotm
Oh sure, I don’t care for that either, it’s just that when you say something like “the father is responsible” then I (and others, judging from how long this subthread has gotten) read it as saying “this state of affairs is just”. Which just begs for a response that no, we may be tolerating it because it’s the best we can do for Andromeda right now but the underlying societal systems don’t seem to actually match up to our ethical intuition and are producing injustices and should probably be looked at.
@Anonymous
I think your confusion stems from treating this as an ethics treatise or panel debate about what some society in which you would like to live should look like rather than what is the most effective way to resolve a specific fucked up situation in 2016 California.
With polyamory being almost non-relevant here this kind of situation is tragicomically common, the only thing that makes this case different is that it happened to take place in the rationalist community and reached the attention of this blog.
“Regardless of the object-level, we should be steering society to a state where fathers don’t pay child support unless they wanted a child, do we agree here? You don’t think there’s an actual moral responsibility for biological fathers to pay regardless of the circumstances, you just think that in practice it is not very easy to implement a situation where both the child is fed and the father (and for that matter, the state budget) unmolested?”
With due fear of using the words ‘child’ and ‘molested’ in the same sentence – who *would* get molested here if the mother doesn’t have any means ? Did the society we are steering towards solve the problem of all economic and human scarcity ? Did it involve a super-intelligent AI ?
The only departure I can strongly say is in order in the *current* society is to absolve husbands from responsibility for children born to their wives outside wedlock (the wives are already absolved in the symmetrical case because they can just divorce their husbands) and transfer it to the biological parent* assuming this hasn’t yet been done.
*The biological relation is obviously not the issue here, only that it was he who willfully and actively participated in the conception.
@ dsotm:
Well, in the context of California 2016, it seems a superior option all-round to put it on the government’s tab, if the choices are between that and going after this guy in court.
And that’s not to mention the prospect of voluntary funding, which is the very thing being discussed.
@Vox
Even if you disassociate yourself form that tab, unless things don’t work that way in California the government will likely go after the father for all that it can and give the mother the minimum it can get away with, so probably not efficient.
Unless you suggest that she lies about not knowing who the father is which morals aside might be risky for her given the public nature of this blog and her tumblr.
But if she gets qualified legal advice saying that the government is her best option then that’s what she should do (I’m not a lawyer, if it wasn’t obvious).
Voluntary funding is great as long as it exists (and that’s ignoring the question of similar cases but without access to similar communities) and I described how I think it should apply here.
Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not up to the job of designing a perfect society. Call me a monster, letting the father force an abortion at the cost of a potentially traumatized mother sounds to me better than the current standard; I know that’s not getting implemented anytime soon and I just entered a watchlist or five. In the realm of the less radical, I think with time people will catch on to what’s happening and either the laws will get changed in a way that screws with someone else instead (until that demographic catches on and starts protesting too, rinse-repeat) or it will become commonplace for everyone who doesn’t want kids to have a vasectomy.
I thought that saying it’s biofather’s fault for ever having sex when not ready to pay for a kid is bad, but now that I think about it, I guess it may actually cause men to feel responsible for unwanted births and thereby speed up the common-sense vasectomy future.
EDIT: Having posted this before seeing Vox’s comment, yeah, having everyone pay for it is also better than putting it on one guy who isn’t really guilty of anything except having sex in a supposedly sex-positive culture.
This entire discussion thread is why I’m very sceptical about the cries to solve problems of marriage equality, etc. by “get the state out of marriage!” because “people will manage their own affairs, maybe with only the minimum outside support of the courts to enforce contracts drawn up by all parties!”
This is why rules and regulations and laws about what is marriage, who is married, what are the rights, duties and responsibilities, who pays whom for what, etc. came into existence. And it’s also why messing around with existing social institutions can end up hurting people.
The child exists, the mother is in need, if the father was willing to have the fun he has to be willing to take the downside. Suppose he liked mountaineering – there’s always the chance of being hurt or even killed, even if you take all precautions. Weighing the preference for the enjoyment it gives you as outweighing the remaining risk of harm, even after minimising that risk, is a deliberate choice: you could choose not to engage in risky activities.
You can’t stop people being fucking idiots in their private lives. But when a child is involved, then it’s time for everyone to man up and take on their responsibilities. Sex makes babies. The only fool-proof way of preventing the risk of this happening is: (1) sterility (natural or surgical), preferably of both parties for extra assurance (2) don’t have sex.
People get into car accidents all the time. Nobody wants to be injured, maimed or killed, but it happens. If the father got both legs mangled in a car crash such that he had to use crutches or a wheelchair, he’d have to learn to cope with and put up with the bad consequences. He didn’t want a child, he wanted a bit of fun on the side, but there’s a child there now.
For fuck’s sake, all the long conversations we’ve had on here about childhood intervention, shared and unshared environment, effects on adults, etc.! The conclusions from those are pretty much: living in poverty is not great and the more money your parents/guardians have, the greater the knock-on effect all along the line. Sure, the mother and child probably won’t starve absent the father’s contributions to the child’s support, but to give the child (who is the innocent party in all this) the best fucking chance in life, daddy can put his goddamn hand in his pocket and hand over something every month, if he couldn’t keep it in his trousers.
@Deiseach
It’s fine to want the state out of marriage (probably a good idea too, as the husband may very soon realize), and most people can and will manage their own affairs – the state should intervene on behalf of the children when necessary (that’s why I suggested that they work out an agreement on their own before heading to court) and it should do so regardless of the formal arrangement or relationship definitions that the parents had between themselves or other people.
Yeah sex is a risk management discipline – in wedlock or out of it, but this has been the case ever since people discovered the causal link between sex and babies.
I don’t see what interest the state has in the matter unless the child is being raised in conditions that amount to neglect. If we really thought that there was a compelling state interest in children having the best possible upbringing our society would look a lot different.
It looks to me like the issue isn’t the state’s putative interest in the child’s upbringing but some kind of weird anti-sex / inter-gender fairness intuition that shouldn’t be a legal issue at all.
@Deiseach:
Let me put to you a question I put more generally. It is quite possible that, under the current law which you were discussing, it is the ex-husband not the biological father who is legally responsible for child support.
If so, do you still support what the law requires? Most of the arguments you offer still apply–there is still a child in need of support. But the rhetoric of “if he can’t keep it in his pants” does not.
@dsotm
I am not persuaded that the welfare of the child outweighs the welfare of the father.
Moral culpability and responsibility are the same thing. The father has, functionally, given the child up for adoption to the mother. Furthermore, coercing money out of fathers is neither necessary (if the mother makes enough income) nor sufficient (if the father doesn’t make enough income) to guarantee the child’s welfare. Additionally, while the mother, as custody holder, has the ability to give the child up for adoption, and thereby waive financial responsibility, the father does not.
In terms of pure pragmatics, going after child support may not actually be in the child’s interest. Engaging with the legal system requires money (one of those things the mother is short on), and may not give much, if anything, in return. Additionally, the welfare of the child involves more than just material goods; there may be emotional and/or social costs that are more damaging than the additional money can compensate for.
The policy of forced child support seems to have less to do with helping children than punishing parents. About the only case where it seems morally acceptable is if a parent reneges on a commitment to support the child.
Katie’s decision not to pursue child support from the father is a credit to her and I have half a mind to donate to her on those grounds alone.
“Katie’s decision not to pursue child support from the father is a credit to her and I have half a mind to donate to her on those grounds alone.”
As I did.
@InferentialDistance, @David Friedman
“I am not persuaded that the welfare of the child outweighs the welfare of the father.”
Well, you don’t have to be – the whole point here is to try and make sure that Andromeda’s means of support are not affected by
random-person-on-the-internet persuasions on the subject.
And of course it would have been wrong to go after the father if the mother had enough means/income, I think I’ve only said so five times.
She has the first responsibility to provide for her daughter – (given the circumstances it should not have even be a shared one), the father’s only arises due to her inability to fulfil it and Andromeda’s (not Katie’s!) right to be provided by the people who brought her into existence when possible.
As for the father having effectively given up Andromeda for adoption to Katie, it just doesn’t stand – adoption requires the approval of the state as well, and given her situation she is unlikely to have been qualified as an adopter on her own, and if you claim that she effectively jointly adopted with he ex-husband than the ex-husband took on the responsibility for child support as well and this better involve a huge burden of proof that the ex-husband either expected to support children to be born by his wife to other men or have explicitly adopted Andromeda together with Katie.
“Katie’s decision not to pursue child support from the father is a credit to her and I have half a mind to donate to her on those grounds alone.”
This is a rather myopic, feel-good way to look at it and unless that credit together with the donations can somehow be redeemed by her to amount the equivalent of 18 years worth of child support then you are taking a very noble and liberal stand, on the behalf and expense of a year-old baby.
No the whole point was to a link a fundraiser for those that might be interested. Not provide an opportunity for sanctimonious assholes to pontificate endlessly on thier own poorly understood moral intuitions.
By “here” I meant my original response of course, I know that Scott (and others) only want to help Katie and Andromeda and obviously if the donations are the only thing that comes out of it then it is still preferable to it not happenning
but they do seem to be very popular here and perhaps this may be an occasion to rethink one’s support of them.
It seems to me that, if someone has held and supported (even tacitly) such views all along, it would be wrong to, ex post facto, deny support to a member of they community who is now facing the sort of situation one had previously signaled one would be supportive of.
And, of course, Andromeda exists, is beyond aborting, and hasn’t made or broken any promises that I know of.
You seem to have read me as saying you shouldn’t support the person. That is not what I am saying. I am saying you shouldn’t support the theories (timeless decision theory and variations on it).
If you were looking for a discussion of abstract theories, you’ve got a really lousy sense of timing. And tact.
The point was that those theories fail in an actual case that you care about. This is pretty much only going to come up in an actual case that you care about.
“(or even her husband at the time if that’s what legal situation in California determines).”
A legal point nobody else seems to have brought up.
Under Lord Mansfield’s rule, common law since the 18th century, a husband cannot deny paternity of a child conceived by his wife during a period when they were cohabiting. So under that rule the child is, legally speaking, the child of her then husband.
I don’t know whether California courts have entirely renounced that legal rule in response to the existence of paternity testing—I know of one case, involving a host mother, where they didn’t follow it. On the other hand, a fair number of states seem unwilling to accept paternity testing evidence of non-paternity as grounds for not holding a man responsible for child support.
I cited the relevant statutes cross-threat. It’s a rebuttable presumption, in the case of married parents cohabiting at birth apparently requiring a blood test with a two-year statute of limitations. Andromeda is somewhere between one and two, and I’m not sure what happens if the biological father turns hostile and tries to run out the clock.
Looks like the statute of limitations looks to the date of the motion for genetic testing, so the father’s options for clock-running should be limited.
She should definitely call her her local child support agency to confirm one way or another, though.
“Andromeda seems to be a bright young child, and I am optimistic about helping her out paying off in the long run.” 🙂 Thank you. I agree and others have noticed that she seems quite precocious.
My tumblr, if anyone’s interested: http://andromeda-collides.tumblr.com/
Oh dear. I read through your tumblr, and I am so very sorry for all the pain that your daughter and especially you are going through. She’s a lovely little girl, and I hope you get a lot of joy along with the pain. I have a little girl about the same age and when she saw how upset I was after reading some of what you’d written, she came over and gave me a hug, a pat on the back, and then asked if she was being “helpful”. (That’s her new word.) It sounds like something your daughter would do, and I hope you’re getting plenty of hugs from her. Baby hugs are the best hugs.
I hope you don’t take offense, but I did pray for you and your daughter, that everything would work out OK for you. If nothing else, just take it as one of the strangers who read your story wishes you well.
Ridiculous family arrangement and bad faith dealing threatens possibility of leaving cool neighbourhood. Please attach cheque for $40,000 to a postcard addressed to…
Please remember I’m a real person reading this, having a very hard time, and I didn’t ask anyone to make the fundraiser or to contribute. I’ve struggled against asking for help for exactly the reason of knowing that I am responsible for my circumstances. I am very, very grateful to people who help despite that, and I think Scott signal boosted it for the people who know me and might not have seen it, not for me to get help from people who otherwise donate to better charity. No one is obligated to though and I don’t think people owe me money to keep me in cool neighborhood.
Oliver Cromwell has been banned indefinitely. Happy 100th anniversary, Ireland.
I would say that this is a remarkable coincidence, except nothing is a coincidence.
I get that this blog is your private space and you do what you want, but what message are you trying to send here? It looks to me like Oliver’s comment is an on-topic biting criticism of the idea anyone (other than the involved parties) should donate to Katie and Andromeda.
(Please don’t ban me too.)
@Annony, I don’t recall any announcement of the reign of terror ending. And in any event, there is an official comment policy, and the roundhead leader’s comment was clearly not kind, which means to be permitted it would have to be both true and necessary. I can conceive of rationalizations for why it would qualify for one or the other, but they all seem extremely strained to me. As a result, I don’t think any reasonable person should have expected the comment to be considered acceptable. I don’t mean to answer for Scott, but your tone suggests that you think the banning was something surprising and out of the ordinary, when as a non-Scott person it seems clear to me that OC should have expected it.
I found his phrasing impactful in the message he was trying to send. However it was too hostile for this blog, even before considering that Katie herself reads this. He could have traded some of his message’s impactfulness to fit the niceness level Scott tries to maintain here, but didn’t, so got purged for antisocial behavior (strengthening his message at the cost of making the community as a whole less pleasant).
I am a lot more tolerant of being cruel to Obama or Trump or someone, and much less so to real people who read this blog and are already doing badly.
Welcome to anonymous Oliver.
As someone who is using this comment thread (among other sources) to evaluate whether to donate, I feel that the effect of causing people who have certain opinions to self-censor is reducing my value of information slightly.
It’s possible to express the same idea as in Oliver’s comment using language that’s not cruel. I believe with high confidence that in that case he wouldn’t have been banned.
If anyone can provide an example of a post that covers the five major ideas included in Oliver’s post and is at most .1% as bannable, I’ll make a $50 donation AND update my belief that dissent is being systemically suppressed.
@Decius
I don’t know what you mean by “.1% as bannable”, but I think something like this would get the main points across (and not be objectionable):
I don’t approve of polyamory, and so I’m not willing to donate (and I don’t think anyone else should either). Even if was so inclined, I think there is will be little benefit from the donations — if no-one donates then the worst that will happen is the people involved will have to leave a nice city, not exactly the end of the world. This reads like a semi-fraudulent attempt to get an unreasonably large amount of money for nothing.
Now where’s my $50?!
Try again sweeneyrod. You need to hit on all these points:
1) This is a blatanly obvious consequence of polyamory
2) There’s no real need there since the beggar is just looking to stay in her cool hip city so she can continue to live the party lifestyle (as she sees a party lifestyle)
3) [mostly implied] Obviously her original promise was never going to be lived up to since no one ever expects women to live up to promises
All you got was point (2) and “I disapprove of polyamory” – not point (1).
1) Boo poly
2) bad faith was present
3) it isn’t certain that she’s going to have to leave
4) having to leave is a minor consequence
5) boo begging/entitlement
were the five points I saw.
Anon is a previously banned user, has been banned again from this IP
Would a slightly different promise have worked?
As far as I can tell from the description, here’s what people wanted, before Katie got pregnant:
Katie: Wants to engage in coitus with other-guy, wants to be in a committed open relationship with husband. Wants to not raise any children with other-guy. ??? on raising children with husband.
Husband: wants to be in a committed open relationship with Katie. ??? on raising children with Katie.
Other-guy: wants to engage in coitus with Kaite. Wants to not raise children wtih Katie.
So, the more complicated arrangement that *might* have worked is that Katie, her husband, and other-guy all agree that whatever children happen are considered her and her husband’s children, regardless of the facts of biological facts of parentage. Other-guy should be fine with this, only open question is whether Katie’s husband is okay with raising a non-biological child in case of an “oops”. Katie keeps her options open for dealing with a pregnancy as well.
There’s even some precedent of legal fathers being unable to fix child support arrangements when later testing reveals that they aren’t the biological father.
And then the dad realizes that he finds it impossible to care for a child that isn’t his own, and the law won’t allow him to unilaterally break his promise. Suffers from the same problem I think.
Which is a predictable consequence when you make the choice to have an open relationship.
OK. Relationships can be hard. But even if not all of the details can be solved with simple rules (applicable xkcd: https://xkcd.com/592/ ) then at least the hardship of situations like Andromeda’s should be improvable over our societies default, or?
Can’t some smart people collect results from decision theory, marriage counseling, game theory, economics and negotiation and create a better approach to this? At least on average? Yes it is difficult as presence of the approach has to be dealt with by some fixed point convergence criteria or whatever (maybe fall back on sulk and avoid?)
I mean I have read the OP and the Blogs/Tumblr of those involved and it is sad and appears clearly sub-optimal (or at least currently asymmetric). I can’t but imagine all the talk that presumably has or has not happened. Is drama inevitable? Is this just a sad random case? I’m not willing to believe that. Can’t we do better than starting a FundMe? Or is reach-out part of the solution already?
If you’re talking about government action, any sort of UBI would have helped on the financial side. Or just change the rules for the existing benefits.
As for private action, perhaps insurance? If I understand rightly the Bay poly community are typically fairly well-off, so if existing insurance companies aren’t prepared to insure against pregnancy would some sort of collective be an option? (Really I have absolutely no idea about the legal side of this.)
Hi! Thanks for asking.
I wasn’t involved in making the fund raiser, but as its subject, I’m probably pretty qualified to give an answer. I think whether it’s worth it in the long run is definitely something to access based on your other giving patterns and where you want to have an impact. Part of the reason I didn’t ask for help was because I know many of my friends and people in the community are Effective Altruists, or want their money used to do the most good. I don’t think helping me could qualify as “doing the most good.” That might be why Scott used the (adorable and amusing) language of “cute ingroup baby!”
I’m very recently a single mom (moved into the group house here) at the beginning of February. Due to circumstantial stuff like the relationship with Andromeda’s father and my spouse, and probably other random health things, I had severe post-partum depression, to the point of being suicidal, when friends intervened and helped me get to a more stable place. For the last decade I’ve had difficulties with chronic pain that are unresolved, and that is a complication. Right now my daughter is only 1, and I’m trying to find ways for me to work online and with her nearby, like nannying, so I can also give her care. She’s lost a lot of loving people in her life, like connection to her father and his wife and my ex-spouse and I think it would be more traumatic for her to be separated from me during the day.
I’ve found some temporary work and I’m still looking for as much as I can do.
The question of staying in the Bay Area is a good one. It’s expensive here, and I’ve been scared that because of that, I may have to leave. One problem is I don’t really have anywhere else to go, since this is my home, and almost everyone I know is here. My parents are in rural Georgia, and though they might help me in some ways, they were very angry that I did not have an abortion, and have been disappointed in me more broadly. I think emotionally it would be devastating to try to go back to that, and I would also lose the opportunity to contribute to things like CFAR and MIRI and the culture here. My entire support network is formed in the community here. The group house I’m in, many people who love us and care for us. My housemates help me if I’m sick and need someone to look after Andromeda, one housemate is paying my rent for a few more months until I’m able to do so myself.
Also not just what the community is doing for me, I try to give back as well, with helping my friends, doing things for CFAR, and starting to form a support structure for parents here. Even the smallest things I can do, like be a sounding board for friends’ ideas, or edit some rationalist blog posts, are ways I can contribute that I value. And I hope I’m able to give back more and more as my child gets older. When Andromeda is older I hope to help form some of the basis for homeschooling or group-schooling the Bay Area rationalist kids who wish to do so. I have training in math and education and my career before pregnancy was in private tutoring.
Rent is $785 for my small room here that I share with my daughter, and I’m doing my best to keep food to $500 or $600 a month for both me and Andromeda. Also applying for governmental assistance there, which is complicated, because they want proof of child support, which I don’t get from Andromeda’s father (since he didn’t agree to have her he told me when I was pregnant that he would not pay it if I were ever in this position in the future, so he wouldn’t incentivize me not to abort). Other expenses are things like doctors, car maintenance or public transit because my car isn’t safe and is falling apart, and other basics. I am living frugally, getting her clothes hand me down, etc. I don’t travel or buy things for myself and when we have meetups and such here I try to contribute with my labor since I can’t financially.
Andromeda is smart and wonderful. I suspect she’s going to be an amazing member of the next generation of rationalists, if our values are passed along here at all. She’s got a great pedigree, both me and what I bring, and her father, Will Eden, who is also amazingly smart and productive. If helping me feels bad, and it might, helping her might not. She’s only one year old, and she’s already had to deal with so much as the result of being born when her father didn’t want her and her mother suffering from depression. But also…I’m not asking you to throw money our way. I am extremely grateful of what help I get, I think I will be able to “pay it forward” in goodness to the world, but that also acknowledge it is an opportunity cost that could go elsewhere for more good. Thank you.
I’m sorry you have to put up with all this hostility.
Seriously, people here need to learn the meaning of the word “tact”. Regardless of what legitimacy you think your concerns have…there’s a person at the other end of the connection, you know.
It’s one thing not to give money to a homeless person, for instance. You have your own priorities. It’s another to yell at him that he should get a job.
I hope at least some donations come out of this. Because it is pretty excruciating.
I donated. I wouldn’t have if I didn’t see the post here. If more people in this community need help, I hope this doesn’t persuade them to not seek help.
I did too, and also only found out about it from here. I hope it ends up being some good after it all.
Agreed. No reason to be so boorish as to make the host’s friend an object lesson.
Well said.
This has gotten even worse today. Ugh.
Really puts this community in a terrible light.
Really puts this community in a terrible light.
In the event that this sentiment is diluted by the anonymity of its source, +1.
And +2.
In the future I’m not going to signal-boost anybody who needs help without their personal request and acknowledgment that they know what they’re getting into.
I think it is pretty clear which subset of “this community” is being nasty.
@Ilya agreed! The fundraiser and support from friends makes the bay area rationalists seem awesome. Some of the SSC commenters… Not so much.
I agree. At the end of the day though I think polyamory is a mistake, her single biggest decision was acting out of love to not end the life of her daughter. She surely deserves some support for that – people should not be made worse off for such decisions.
yes they should
@ drethelin
A reminder that Katie is an actual human being who is likely reading this thread. “You should be punished for not killing your daughter” is maybe not a message you want to be sending here.
This community generally doesn’t endorse “you should be insulated from the consequences of your decisions because you have the right values”-style tribalism, though.
The decision was apparently to join the Bay Area Rationalist Community with the Full Polyamory Option – and to not kill one’s own child even though it would have been legal and acceptable to do so in that community. The consequences are apparently to raise a child in the relatively Spartan environment of a group home supported by the good will of the broader rationalist-adjacent community.
This seems to me, natural, reasonable, and just. If there’s any question of perverse incentives I’m quite certain we’ll have plenty of overseers, anonymous and otherwise, to make sure any excess of good will is counterbalanced by a hefty dose of the other sort. Now, as for the consequences of that decision…
+1 Good thoughts. A lot of the comments here have been cruel and pointless.
tl;dr Run, don’t walk, to your local cutthroat family lawyer and sue him for support.
I’m not a member of the California bar, but I am very confident that, “she said she’d get an abortion, and I don’t want to incentivize her decision not to!” is not a defense to an action for support.
Maybe you feel like you shouldn’t be “rewarded” for your choice to break a promise. But what about him? Should he be rewarded for gambling on your willingness to have an abortion, for thinking that getting you to speak magic words would bind you his desired outcome? He knew or should have known the risks, and chose to have sex with you anyway.
Like, in creditor-debtor law, we certainly don’t want to encourage debtors to take out loans they can’t pay back. But we also don’t want to encourage creditors to make loans that they should know won’t be paid back.
And even aside from all that, your daughter can’t eat decision theory. Do you want to watch your daughter go without while her half-siblings live in comfort?
Take his fucking ass to court.
Have you considered that maybe she does not want to coerce his support?
My mother arranged a settlement with the father of my half-brother, in which he agreed to give up all parental and visitation rights in return for not paying any child support.
I’m sure she doesn’t.
How’s that going?
If she can get him to settle, great. But he seems pretty firm in his principled stance.
I’m as semi-libertarian as the next SSC reader, but it’s amazing what some legitimized thugs with guns, acting on the orders of a judge, can do to make someone see the value of negotiation.
If she doesn’t get people in the “rationalist community” to voluntarily fund her, she’ll have to move somewhere else. She’s not going to die.
I don’t know anything about this situation other than what little I have read here. It seems like this guy doesn’t want to be involved in the child’s life. If so, it seems reasonable not to demand that he provide support, even if she could do so within the law. That fight may indeed end up causing a lot more stress and pain than it’s worth.
As Moldbug teaches us,
I think a lot of that was because society allowed the Chad Thundercocks of the world to evade responsibility for their offspring.
A rule that says, “a man must take responsibility for his offspring” is worth sticking to, for consequentialist reasons.
“Taking responsibility for his offspring” in this case would have meant aborting the baby or putting her up for adoption.
You realize that don’t you?
@zensunni:
Are you advocating a return to the old system of social pressure to marry before having children, or just that we strengthen the new system of government pressure to pay child support?
The new system is an imperfect replacement for the old, since (1) a man whose self-image is as a good husband and father is motivated to work harder and earn more, and (2) a check is not an adequate replacement for personal involvement in child-rearing.
(On the other hand, in the old days children born outside of marriage often got no paternal support.)
If we’re going to say, “Hey, this guy shouldn’t have to support his child, because he didn’t want to in the first place,” then it seems that the taxpayers–upon whom the burden will soon fall, as the woman in question mentions she’s applying for government benefits–most certainly didn’t want to take on the role of supporting his child.
If a child needs upkeep, who is more directly responsible? The guy who had all the fun until the responsibility caught up to him, or the uninvolved taxpayers?
It’s not just whether J. Random Lothario wants/does not want to pay support. The state has an interest, and a strong one.
“Make raising a child as a single parent so difficult and stigmatized only people who are both fully desirous and fully-capable” seems like it had solid consequentialist underpinnings, but I don’t think people are really advocating for a return of Ye Olde Asylum days, are we?
>If a child needs upkeep, who is more directly responsible? The guy who had all the fun until the responsibility caught up to him, or the uninvolved taxpayers?
Because the father has more direct responsibility than the State, we can morally force him to pay child support.
Because the mother has more direct responsibility than the father or the State, we can force her to abort.
I would be fine with this arrangement if it was symmetrical either way, but it isn’t.
@Anonymous
“Because the mother has more direct responsibility than the father”
In what way? Generally more than one (but less than three) people are required to engage in the Argentinian dance.
Two people decide to have sex, but only one decides to give birth. Absent rape, a mother has at least as much decision responsibility as a father. Absent complete loss of agency once she gets pregnant (those must be some extremely dank hormones if they remove ALL agency, and they clearly aren’t because some women resist the compulsion and abort voluntarily), she gets to make extra choices about whether to keep the baby, hence carries more responsibility. Personally I think the decision to have protected sex is of much smaller importance than the one to not have an abortion, so claims that a man is responsible sound only technically true to me, but either way a woman carries more responsibility because she makes the same decisions as a man and then some more on top of that.
If I propose to give you a bet where you always get $100 and in .1% of cases I also cut off your leg, you’re responsible if you accept and lose your leg, but not as responsible as if you took a bet with 100% chance of limb loss. You’re responsible in both cases sure, but equating case #1 with case #2 is very unfair to the guys who lost their legs on a miniscule chance and wouldn’t be done by a reasonable person without ulterior motives (like arguing that both people who cut their legs off voluntarily and those who lose them on .1% chances deserve the same welfare).
IANACALIFORNIAL:
In the states where I have worked, application for government benefits is often accompanied by mandatory child support orders enforced by state child support offices, who are not nearly as nice as Ms Cohen appears to be.
Once the state gets involved, Ms. Cohen’s moral judgment is entirely moot – the state will seek reimbursement for the cost of the welfare support she is receiving. The father would have to pay or hope for lackadaisical enforcement in order to avoid jailtime for contempt.
Not knowing anyone involved, I have no comment on the specific situation and definitely don’t intend this as an insult to anyone, but this makes me realize that polyamory, if it isn’t always, at least can be, a metacontrarian justification for behavior we’d normally just call “irresponsible” and, frankly “low class.”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/
Like “conservative/liberal/libertarian” and “traditionalist/feminist/MRA,” type triads (none of which is necessarily more correct by virtue of being on a higher contrarian “rung”), it seems rather like:
sex feels good and babies make me feel fulfilled and worrying too much about contraception and who the father is are not really worth the trouble/smart, responsible people don’t give in to their urge to have sex and get pregnant when they can’t afford to deal with raising children/monogamy is unnecessarily limiting and…sex feels good and babies make me feel fulfilled…
Or put another way:
inner city “welfare queens”/traditional squares/people who think they’re too smart to be limited by traditional mores
If it sounds like I’m beating up on polyamory…well, maybe I am, but remember no rung on the ladder is inherently better; I’m just saying, let’s notice the strong resemblance between the first and third rung: I think it’s pretty problematic if we want to lambaste the first rung but excuse the third.
Put another way, if we feel the third rung is justifiable and the first unjustifiable, let’s make very sure we are, in fact, sitting on the third rung, rather than standing on the first rung, looking at the third rung, with the only difference between us and other first-rung dwellers being that we’re smart enough to come up with better-sounding justifications.
“babies make me feel fulfilled [and can be casually had without a strong expectation of a stable relationship with the father]” is not even CLOSE to part of any poly subculture that I’ve seen. (I don’t see Katie’s situation being considered normal.)
I think this is a pretty important point – do the people advocating for throwing the court systems at the father really want our government getting involved in this process? The actual situation was morally complex, nuanced, and absurdly easy to round down into a bullshit moral talking point (as is evidenced by most of this thread). Political and bureaucratic sensibilities need to be kept as far away from situations like that as possible.
There’s a sorting order of correct moral perspective here, based on proximity to the actual situation. It starts with Katie and the father; if you disagree with both of their judgements, then the next layer is their respective families. The next layer is their friend groups, and the next layer is the community they’re embedded in. The retarded rulebook-and-hundred-dollar-bill-flinging giant is pretty far down that list.
The GoFundMe is targeted at their friends and the community they’re embedded in. Whether or not the mother or the father ‘deserves’ to be ‘punished’/’disincentivized’ is irrelevant to the fact that there’s a little girl who needs material support, there’s mechanisms in place that will kick in if that support isn’t produced by other means, and those mechanisms are arbitrary and dumb. Trying to convince ourselves that those mechanisms AREN’T arbitrary and dumb will not make the situation better.
“…is not even CLOSE to part of any poly subculture that I’ve seen. (I don’t see Katie’s situation being considered normal.)”
Well, if so, I think that’s good, or at least, a case for there being a legit third rung. I honestly don’t know any polyamorists irl, so I will admit to a heavy degree of speculation in my outsider suppositions about it.
I will say, however, that I think this triad may also be more widespread and/or separate from the polyamory phenomenon. Someone mentioned recently how it’s become meta-high status to have a lot of kids. I have noticed this among a few professor friends, along with a certain cavalier attitude about pregnancy (sort of, we can afford it anyway, so why bother being super careful).
zensunni:
But the current laws are not keeping Chad Thundercock from having illegitimate children. They are keeping people like me (high IQ, low time preference, high self-control) from having sex at all. I do suffer serious psychological harm from the lack of sexual or romantic relationships, but I detest the alternative even more.
The current laws are both unjust and socially harmful.
The “state of nature” has the woman shouldering the greatest risk from having sex (pregnancy, etc.). We decided that this was an intolerable injustice, so we introduced marriage, etc. Then, medical developments made it possible to give the woman total control over the pregnancy. But now we have ended up with a reversal of the initial state: the man shoulders the greatest risk from having sex (20 years of child support).
This is obviously no less unjust than the initial state, and in fact more so: because instead of being an artifact of biology, it is something we are deliberately enforcing, and because we have the technical and legal means to eliminate this injustice if we wanted to.
In terms of social effects, I am tired and going to sleep. I may follow up tomorrow.
@ Outis
If you really think 20 years of child support is more onerous than actually raising a child you have some life to experience, my friend.
Unless you mean to say that the woman has the choice to abort if she does not want to have the child, while the man does not. In which case I encourage you to consider that a significant subset of women consider abortion to be equivalent to child murder and therefore unthinkable. So at the least some women are in no better a situation than men.
@Nathan: women have full control on whether to carry the pregnancy to term. I do not count something that you fully control as a “risk”.
Society has decided that abortion is not murder, which is why it’s legal. The women who choose not to exercise their legal options because of their own convictions are, in the eyes of the law, still making a free choice.
If there’s one obvious takeaway from this whole mess, it is that “women can always abort and so face no real consequences from sex”, does not accurately predict real outcomes. If you’d rather have a discussion about some abstract fantasy of no relevance to the real world, this maybe isn’t the best thread to do it in, but you’ve at least effectively signaled the irrelevance of your thoughts and words.
John Schilling: We’re thirty levels deep in a discussion, and I am making no reference to the case at hand. The person herself does not even want to pursue child support, so you could not even construe my post as a disagreement with her. If this thread is not the best place to discuss child support laws, certainly a rationalist blog is the worst place for third parties to get emotional and lash out at each other.
Yes, I get that. Do you get that there are in the real world many women, not just one, who find out that they can’t get an abortion when the time comes?
You might as well argue that anyone can provide for their hypothetical future children by taking out a massive life insurance policy, holding out for a few years, and committing suicide. Works just fine except for the fact that it generates massive negative utility according to the preferences the person will hold at the time, is not virtuous according to most human conceptions of such, violates lots of rules, and is psychologically beyond the capability of most people. But as a matter of pure intellectual theory, problem solved.
@Outis
But the current laws are . . . keeping people like me (high IQ, low time preference, high self-control) from having sex at all.
Really? The current laws are keeping you from having sex? How so?
Presumably because the current laws are configured in such a manner that no prior agreement (not even notarized legal contract) or amount of action taken to avoid conception is sufficient to discharge the legal obligation to spend a significant portion of their paycheck for 18 years if contraception should fail and the mother unilaterally decides to carry the child to term.
Odd reasoning, especially if, as stated, he suffers serious psychological harm from the lack of sex.
Hell, I drive a car even though there is no amount of driving precaution that can totally eliminate the risk of accidental death while doing so. And that’s just to go buy a Slurpee! And death is certainly a greater harm than a support obligation.
It doesn’t require reducing the probability to zero, merely low enough that the individual in question is willing to take that risk for that magnitude of harm.
That is the calculation, yes. My point being that if the lack is as bad as he says it is, it sounds as if his risk calculation is off. And that he probably performs several actions every day with greater risks of greater harm.
I’m sure some of the statisticians among us could figure out the utils/QALYs of the risks of driving a car versus the benefit of a Slurpee, factoring in reasonable precautions and the magnitude of harm, then compare that to the risks of having sex versus the psychological benefits, factoring in reasonable contraceptives and the risk of them failing, then the follow-on risk of being unsuccessful in pressuring the partner into getting an abortion.
tl;dr: Go get laid if it’s that important; child support laws are broadly popular, deadbeats broadly unpopular, and nothing’s changing any time soon.
This is bullshit. There is a form of contraception guaranteed to work. Get a vasectomy. I did as soon as I was old enough to have my own health insurance. It’s a twenty-minute procedure and you feel nothing. They give you percocet and valium an hour before and you’re barely even lucid. If you’re afraid you might actually want kids someday, you can freeze your sperm. Guess what? Unlimited sex with no risk of kids. There’s also anal. I went nearly a whole year once where all I did was anal. Again, no risk of kids. If you’re not having sex, it’s because by the principle of revealed preference, you don’t want sex.
@Adam, vasectomies are not 100% effective. According to this, the failure rate (not counting failures during the first two years, which are more common) is about 1 in 4000.
(Which is very good compared to other methods. But not 100%.)
There’s more than one way of doing a vasectomy. So if you take care to make sure it’s done properly, you can count on a substantially lower failure rate.
>letting someone cut open your best friend for anything in the world
better remain celibate
[If you don’t like my sense of humour, please accept my apologies.]
You’re supposed to get tested 12 weeks after the procedure. They’ll tell you whether it worked or not. If it worked, it’s 100% effective. If you’re a stupid idiot and don’t wait, or never get the test, sure, it might not work.
All I’m hearing are excuses from the whine all day sector about how their life is so terrible because the law prevents them from having sex. Get real. You’re not taking simple and obvious measures that would make your life better. That’s on you, not on no-fault divorce, not on shitty contract law, not on women who insist they get a say in the matter and actually want you to meet some standard of minimum attractiveness. If sex is really that important to you and supporting children really that scary, you’ll find a way.
@Adam, no, that 1 in 4000 is assuming you’ve been tested, and waited the full two years. The failure rate is much higher if you don’t.
From my perspective, I would expect that to be an acceptably low level of risk. But saying that there isn’t any risk at all simply isn’t true.
Fine, you got me. Chalk another one up for the most literalist commentariat in the history of blogging (and please don’t respond with a link to another blog that 0.0001% more literalist).
I wasn’t really trying to score points. The distinction just seemed important for anyone who might be considering a vasectomy, or might already have one and be counting on it more than he should.
>He knew or should have known the risks, and chose to have sex with you anyway.
Any time a man has protected sex, he should be prepared to pay child support for life? You really think that?
If we’ve traded the “any time a woman has sex, she should be prepared to live with that man for life” moral standard for the “any time a man has sex he should be prepared to feed a person for 20 years” moral standard, then I don’t think we’ve made that much progress in the last 100 years!
The fact that the courts allow that shit doesn’t mean it’s right. There’s just no better solution (that we’re allowed to consider, or maybe at all).
If an action has foreseeable consequences, and someone engages in that action, then yes I think that he is responsible for those foreseeable consequences.
@ zensunni:
So, in principle, you think no agreements that shift risk between the agreeing parties should be enforced?
What if men have a biological need to have sex that they can’t resist for years on end without heavy psychological consequences? There’s not really much choice involved in that case.
And again, does this apply to women? Can I say “If a woman chooses to have protected sex which foreseeably can lead to a child, the State can morally force her to X, because she is responsible for her actions”? (where X can be anything that leads to a good outcome, be it abortion or marriage so the child has a father)
Tern –
I think our legal system gets it pretty close to right: Such agreements should be enforceable, but not when it comes to support for offspring. We have decided that support for offspring calls for different rules than, say, the sale of goods or securitized debt.
Anon – Yes I think it’s morally permissible for the state to apply the same rules to women in the ways you describe. (Though I think that the specific case of forced marriage is probably a bad idea on the object-level, I think that category of coercion is permissible).
I find this whole situation viscerally terrifying in that it sets up a weird analogue to the old theological question “Can a woman make a promise so strongly that even she is bound by it?”
If the answer is ‘no’ then we have no basis for trust in anything.
In my case, my long time girlfriend has made it quite clear that she’d like to get married, but I just can’t think of a way that it could possibly be a good idea thanks to cases like these. I’d love to trust freely, but given that everyone who gets married presumably does so in good faith, there’s nothing she can do at this point that would reliably signal that she won’t change her mind on key points once I’m on the hook. So I won’t. Because that’s insane.
Are the people advocating suing this guy into the ground sure that we aren’t losing something here in giving up our ability to make promises that the other party can rely on being kept?
Well, no basis for trust in anything that the law refuses to let her be bound by. She’s still on the hook for, e.g., student loans.
@zen
Thanks for directly answering my questions. I respect your consistency. Yeah, didn’t really pick the examples for object-level merit, more for outrage factor.
@sun
only until the State feels the Bern
Anonymous –
I don’t advocate suing him into the ground. I think she should sue him for what the law entitles her to, which is far short of personal ruin. If I came across as bearing this guy ill will, I regret that. (I actually think he’s a smart guy who does a lot of important work.)
The common law has always said that some promises are enforceable, and some aren’t. I think that a promise to have an abortion, or to absolve someone of parental obligations, falls into the latter category for good reasons.
I’m not suggesting that deciding which contracts are or aren’t enforceable is easy … it’s not. But I do think that child-rearing is one of those areas we should be cautious about treating like any other contract.
But you’ve given me some reasons to at least question my position, I acknowledge it’s a hard problem, though I still think she should consider pursuing child support because in the real world you’ve got to have lunch or be lunch.
I’m starting to feel douchey for wading into all this drama of people I don’t know, so I’ll leave it there.
@ b/w Anonymous
What if men have a biological need to have sex that they can’t resist for years on end without heavy psychological consequences?
In order of surety:
Use a condom (etc), and
Hire a bonded professional, and
Find a mtf trans person, and
Get a vasectomy, or
Go gay.
Zen –
I’d like to start off by saying that I really appreciate the level of civility displayed here. I don’t necessarily agree with all your points, but I certainly respect the way you put them forward.
Forgive me if I took the “Hire a cutthroat family lawyer”, taking his “Fucking ass to court” and advocating for the use of “Legitimized thugs with guns” parts as harsher than they were intended. they, along with the “Have lunch or be lunch” philosophy just seem really antagonistic to me in the sense that we’re legitimizing being defect bots in the name of ‘that’s just how it is’.
I find it even more unsettling that (And this could be wildly off base) it seems like we’re only permissive of that sort of antisocial behaviour when it’s performed by someone of the correct gender. I’m presuming that we’d be less sympathetic of advice that he should “Run her through the legal wringer until she quits. Gotta have lunch or be lunch, right?”. And I think that the level of aversion that we have for that statement is equal to that deserved by the original.
Where I think the stance breaks down is that it ignores the fact that *everything* is a tradeoff. I agree with you that it’s a very hard decision to weigh between allowing people never to be stuck regretting a decision if they later change their mind, or disempowering them by taking away their ability to make credible commitments.
I certainly come down on the other side of that divide, because I think that once these dynamics are known and these dynamics begin to be used as *tactics* (Which let’s be honest here, they absolutely are), the other side has no choice but to plan with them in mind in order to protect themselves. I’m not sure if women as a group are going to be happier when men across the board become resistant to marrying or rightfully paranoid around sexual activity so that a small number of women preserve the right not to regret their decisions. All in all I think it infantializes women and treats them as not capable of knowing themselves enough to be trusted with making decisions about their future.
In this case, I feel the need to respectfully disagree with the advocation for going the cutthroat lawyer route, as I think that Katie not going the cynically stereotypical route of “Take all you can, give nothing back.” is greatly to her credit for roughly the reasons that Zippy has gone over below. I just can’t shake the feeling that this “In the real world you’ve got to screw people over and get yours” thinking is well meaning because she’s a friend and one of us and we want the best for our own, but exactly the way that a system crumbles into the adversarial power struggles it was trying to prevent.
Houseboat-
Do you really think that telling men to either a) change their sexual orientation (Which was just as impossible as it was when it was called ‘praying the gay away’)
B) Undergo a permanently sterilizing operation that ironically denies them the ability to change their mind later
C) participate in sex trade exchanges that are currently deemed to be criminal
Are more reasonable than giving them some say in their reproductive autonomy beyond the ‘abstinence only’ model that we decry everywhere else?
@ b/w anon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasectomy_reversal#Success_Rates
@Anon:
Why is it specifically marriage rather than fatherhood that would put you “on the hook?”
@ Julie K
I’m assuming that you wouldn’t force a woman to carry a child to term because the father wanted a child when the mother didn’t.
I would surmise it’s for the same reason.
(top) Anonymous:
Don’t forget that the old standard you described applied to men as well. In fact men were more constrained, since the woman could decide whether or not to give the child up for adoption.
One alternative would be to allow a father to give up all rights and responsibilities with regard to a child. If necessary taxpayer support would take the place of the father’s support.
Dalrock was right. We’ve tossed out marriage as the central organizing principle of family and replaced it with child support.
This thread is all my darkest suspicions of polyamory confirmed.
@Julie
I’m fine with the old standard where men are forced to pay, but women are also forced into responsibility by ensuring the child has a father regardless of how they feel about marrying the guy. Sure, women do all the choicemaking, but men reclaim some of that by the amount of power they have in a marriage.
I am also fine with the hopefully future standard where a man can say “no” and denounce all responsibility for a child, as the guy in Katie’s case is doing to the best of his ability.
What I am not fine with is the current system. Especially if it is presented as moral; I can understand a judge looking at three options:
– forcing a woman to have an abortion
– forcing a man to work for someone else’s benefit for a loong period of time
– doing neither and letting a child live in misery
and regretfully choosing the second as the smallest evil, knowing that it’s doing the man a great injustice. But looking at it as “wow this guy is irresponsible infantile scum for not wanting to lose 10000 hours because of a decision he didn’t even get a say in” is appalling to me.
This seems rather relevant:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/26/links-316-klapaucius-and-url/#comment-339580
@ Randy M:
I was going to say this post on blacktrance‘s Tumblr is rather relevant:
And I’m not even an advocate of polyamory.
@Jaskologist: “This thread is all my darkest suspicions of polyamory confirmed.”
Agreed, so much.
I respect Katie Cohen for reneging at serious personal cost on a promise to kill another human, but everything else about this situation is great evidence for the utility of traditional marriage.
To be fair, “Married one man, accidentally bore the child of another” is not exactly unrelated to polyamory and doesn’t generally get women much sympathy in the mundane world. It matters, in a good way, that Katie explicitly discussed all of this up front even if it didn’t work out as planned.
@Vox:
Part of what John said. This isn’t “relationship just didn’t work out.” This is instead an example of elite throwing away established solutions to human nature problems because they think they have evolved past such things as jealousy or maternal feelings, then finding out they really haven’t.
[edit: The maternal feelings and decision not to abort are] to her credit, imo. But to the extent that she had anticipated this and let herself be repressed into monogamy, a little girl would have a father, or at least an enforceable source of income.
Jaskologist: This particular case doesn’t generalize as well as you imply since:
1) Having already been in a married situation would be great, but since it hasn’t worked out that way, child support would sure be helpful. We’re talking 2nd or 3rd best options here.
This is really enough right there, but there are other sides to it.
2) this poly arrangement was made crosswise to the marriages involved – and since because poly marriages are not an option legally, it’s trying poly in an environment hostile to it.
3) if they HAD been married, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome – father separates/divorces for largely same reasons. Plenty of married people have that happen. Not a panacea.
4) This wasn’t an ideal poly case anyway, because too much tension between the actors regarding the existence of the relationship. If norms differed, maybe that would have been less, or the particular situation would have been averted more effectively because everyone would have had a clearer idea of expectations.
@ Randy M:
The problem is taking a random piece of anecdotal evidence and saying “This just confirms that my worldview is correct.”
Whether that’s Dylan Roof “proving” that racism is just as bad today as it was 50 years ago, the attack in Brussels “proving” that Eurabia in within sight, or a given hurricane “proving” that catastrophic climate change is near.
Traditional marriage, as practiced by the bourgeois (the “elite” didn’t really practice it; they had all kinds of mistresses and affairs), worked out fairly well for them, though many of them felt very constricted by it.
Among the non-elite—well, it also was often not practiced very consistently. And we don’t have terms like “wife-beater” for nothing.
It’s always been the upward-striving middle class that have the strictest moral codes, with “decadence” among the upper class and the poor.
What about taking a random piece of evidence and saying this is evidence?
The rest of your comment seems to be saying that my point is right but this is nothing new? I agree, if so.
@Randy M: [edit: The maternal feelings and decision not to abort are] to her credit, imo. But to the extent that she had anticipated this and let herself be repressed into monogamy, a little girl would have a father, or at least an enforceable source of income.
Exactly. There’s a temptation to buy into worldviews that say “we have used our minds to overcome the flaws of lesser breeds”. The consequences of learning out that, no, even Bay Aryans are flawed can be catastrophic.
Heck, this was the function of tragedy in Athens. The tragic hero was always an aristo, to teach the lesson that “even the best of us is doomed if he does X.”
@ Randy M:
In a technical sense, it is evidence. But it is a piece of evidence so small that it is compatible with many different theories and should not cause anyone to change his view on the matter.
If you got that out of it, you misinterpreted it.
The point was that these traditional values were practiced most strictly by the people who probably needed them least. And that if the poor interpret “liberal” values in dysfunctional ways, they did the same thing with traditional values.
Bay Aryans? Wow. I don’t even care about the sheer condescending tone of this all, that’s hilarious.
“Need them least” is a funny way of saying “didn’t need them” which is what I think you mean, and yet…
The poor get bureaugamy, the umc get gofundme?
Just reread this
Would you agree that the entire purpose of any contract is to constrict behavior?
@ Randy M:
Or: some aspects were beneficial, some aspects not.
In terms of people feeling constricted by “traditional marriage”, I was thinking more of women being restricted to domestic matters and not having property rights, men having to take sole responsibility as head of the household: that sort of thing. But I see how it could be unclear, that I could be taken as complaining about it constricting their random whims to do whatever they want at any time.
Yes, in some sense a contract is a way of constricting behavior. But I was referring to undue constriction of behavior.
I’m not deliberately misunderstanding, so thanks for clarifying, but our thread is growing tiresomely nit-picky, I think, and anyhow I am contradicting my admonishment from last night and so wish to say no more on the matter at the moment.
Apropos of an earlier comment I made on the law, and with regard to probing people’s moral intuitions …
Suppose that, under California law, the result of going to the court is that the ex-husband rather than the biological father is found liable for child support. Do the people who favor compelling the biological father to pay also support compelling the ex-husband to pay?
@David
I’m actually more in favor of making the husband pay – supporting your partner’s offspring is kind of the thing that you sign up for when you marry someone. In usual marriages, your partner engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage is a breach of contract that my intuition says drops the expectation of support.
Since they had an open marriage where extramarital affairs weren’t a breach-of-contract, and they were married when she got pregnant, he’s still on the hook in my book.
I’m also really interested to see more opinions on saddling the husband with 18 years of debt.
I’m the anon above who is apprehensively considering getting married to a woman and forming a somewhat open relationship with the understanding that at some point in the future she may want to date other men. Having or supporting children, especially another man’s children are definitely not things I want. She also has no interest in children and says that she would abort any kids that slip through our protective efforts.
At this point I’m feeling a strong double bind wherein if I’m not ok with other men in the relationship I’m hit from all sides from the poly community with accusations of abusive, insecure, oppressive, one penis polyamory and that I’m slightly worse than Hitler for being so controlling and sexist.
However, if I do go through with it and give my consent to extramarital guys, then I open myself up to my girlfriend reneging on any terms we might have had, carrying a child, and leaving me holding the cheque. Meanwhile throngs of onlookers and lawyers say I brought this on myself by accepting an open marriage, that I should have expected this all along, and that I should just accept servitude for the next few decades without a fuss.
The whole thing sounds like a big ball of “NOPE!” to me.
How do other poly people reconcile this?
@Anon: The poly community sounds abusive. I can only recommend getting out of it.
@ anon
http://www.spermbankdirectory.com/sperm-banking-cost
@ Anon
I recommend a vasectomy.
Nathan –
Like, on me, or on the other guys she’d hypothetically be sleeping with?
I meant on you. Despite some comments in this thread, I find it hard to imagine a man could be legally required to provide for a child he definitively did not father.
Of course if your significant other is also certain about her decision to never have kids, you could talk to her about having her tubes tied too.
@ Anon
If your partner is planning to have no children, a highly effective method like a contraceptive implant or tubal ligation would be appropriate. (Obviously, you should also have a vasectomy, for the same reason.)
But you should still consider various unplanned outcomes — pregnancy, STDs, your wife finding Jesus or having a stroke, etc. — to determine whether you are prepared and willing to take the risks.
Anon:
As said, if the poly community is telling you you need to put penises into places in your relationship in which you don’t currently want them, for any reason, they’re Doing Poly Wrong. Drop ’em.
But as for the bigger question? By default, poly or no, if you are married to a woman, and that woman becomes pregnant and chooses to have a kid, you are obliged, full-stop. In most states, you can’t evade this by proving the child isn’t yours, or moving out, or even divorce.
If you do not trust your partner to refrain from getting pregnant and having a baby, you should not marry her. This is both because this is an issue in which you won’t have legal recourse, and because marriage is a complex enough intertwining that without that level of trust, it is doubtful that things will work long-term anyway.
From multiple online anecdotes, it’s apparently quite difficult for a young women (not sure about the age limit) to find a doctor who will tie her tubes, especially if she hasn’t had children.
A majority of Americans live in states where a child born to married woman is presumed to the child of the husband, but there is some period of time during which this presumption is rebuttable by genetic testing. I’m not sure about the majority of states, but I’d guess it’d also be in favor of the limited time rebuttable presumption.
>If we’ve traded the “any time a woman has sex, she should be prepared to live with that man for life” moral standard for the “any time a man has sex he should be prepared to feed a person for 20 years” moral standard, then I don’t think we’ve made that much progress in the last 100 years!
Not only have we not made progress, we’ve obviously declined.
There’s just no better solution (that we’re allowed to consider, or maybe at all).
Improvements in contraception? Contraceptives for men? Voluntary control of gametogenesis? Just because nobody here has considered these doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to consider them.
I appreciate all the feedback from everyone.
It definitely sounds like the best course of action is to avoid marriage at all costs, stay firm on no other men, and be really careful myself.
To the people suggesting ligation, Nancy was bang on with the docs being unwilling.
Thanks again all.
@Anon:
The best course is to marry a woman who wants children and is happy to be monogamous—assuming you would like to bring up your own children. Failing that a monogamous woman who doesn’t want children, accepting a small risk that she will get pregnant, not abort, and you will get to discover whether you really like children after all.
Not doing so because you think people will call you names for not being poly strikes me as silly, but I’m not sure if that part of your comment was intended seriously.
For what it is worth, my elder son was polyamorous, posted stuff in favor of polyamory, and eventually concluded that, at least for him, it was a mistake. He is now engaged and does not, I think, intend to repeat the mistake.
@ David Friedman
I don’t think that describes Anon’s concern. From the reference to “one penis polyamory”, it sounds like Anon wants to have sex with other women, but would like to prevent his primary partner from having sex with other men.
@ Anon
Look into long-acting hormonal implants. They’re less scary to doctors due to being non-permanent, but apparently even more effective than tubal ligation. (As with any hormonal method, your side effects may vary.)
Same anon.
Nita is correct in this case. We currently casually sleep with several other women, thus far always as a pair, and this is all good and fun.
However, she’s been up front that despite both of us being into girls and only one liking guys, it would feel like a double standard to do a long term other women only arrangement and she predicts that she would thus begin to feel resentful.
Given that the scenario in the kickstarter seems to be an absolute nightmare to me (While I realize that individual feelings on the matter may vary) and we’ve established that there is absolutely no way to hold a woman accountable once the consent to engage in extramarital coitus has been given, it seems like my best recourse is to hold firm, weather the possible resentment, and hope it turns out right.
I appreciated the comment upthread about “Any Poly that tells you to put penises anywhere you don’t want them is doing it wrong.” I fully agree, and I doubt anyone would go against it directly. However, from here it seems like there’s another dictum that “Any poly that prevents a woman from putting penises wherever she wants is doing it even more wrong” which supersedes it. Although, the city in which I live has a ridiculous skew towards an abundance of working age males, so a lot of the rhetoric we’re hearing is highly motivated towards getting into her pants.
So at this point, there doesn’t seem to be anything gained by agreeing to either marriage, or other guys, and everything to lose. I’d love to trust harder, but people with absolute power to impose their will over others with no consequences to themselves have a pretty lousy track record when it comes to fair treatment.
Anyway, the TL:DR is that I’d love to do right by the whole situation, but if we’re all ok with Zen’s “Eat or be Eaten” (Or at least the law is alright with and will enforce it to the letter) then it seems insane not to protect yourself.
Thanks again.
@ Anon
I wonder how your partner feels about the risk you’re taking by having penis-in-vagina sex with other women. If you end up impregnating someone, it could have a significant impact on her life.
I don’t know where you are getting this from. Under the tradition rule consent is irrelevant because there was an irrebuttable presumption of paternity from birth if you were married and cohabiting. Under the modern rule you have a certain period of time (i.e. 2 years in the case of California) to establish non-paternity and again, consent is irrelevant.
She seems pretty enthusiastic about it given that she’s been pushing for the past year and a half. Most of the other girls are her festival friends with whom she’s had a lot of ongoing sexual tension, but weren’t huge fans of her former boyfriend. So, especially given the city’s demographics, she has a lot of power to control the speed at which things happen.
I’ve also told her that I’m perfectly alright restricting activities with the others to just oral/anal if she’d prefer, which she’s always just laughed at.
The idea that if I impregnate another woman (Who subsequently renegs on all agreements not to have any kids, etc) it will significantly affect her life by diminishing my pool resources for which she could hypothetically reneg on agreements not to have children with and extract for herself… seems like a special kind of dehumanizing to me. In any worst case scenario of my siring illegitimate children, she’s never on the hook beyond what is trivially solvable by ditching me and picking up someone else.
[Before I start this rambling comment, I’d like to note that I wish Katie the best, but this derailment isn’t very relevant to remedying her plight so she could probably skip it]
David Hume tells us that you can’t derive an ought from an is. I’m here to tell you that you can’t derive an ought from a can.
Though “canned oughts” sounds delicious for some reason.
Run this by your morality sensors:
You make a deal with someone. You break the deal because you just couldn’t go through with it. Then you go and demand money from the person with whom you broke the deal, with the power of the state to extract said money.
In the second sentence, you are probably an understandable person with foibles. In the third, you become an asshole.
I guess the problem here may be that I assume responsibility comes from one’s own actions, and I’m having a hard time picturing what this guy could have done further to excuse himself from the responsibility of a child he clearly did not want. (Recall, if you will, that Normal Human Beings do not sign contracts before coitus) He seems, from my very rough understanding of this subject, to have undertaken all the steps it could reasonably be demanded he take to clear himself of responsibility. Perhaps if the agreement was explicitly, “We will have a child, and you will care for it entirely?”…
I guess this is what Men’s Rights Activists are always talking about.
And if your solution is “Well, don’t have sex unless you want to risk supporting a child” then I don’t see why people should be held to such a standard.
You cite consequentialist reasoning, which is good, but i must cite it right back at you. The ability to make serious, life-altering commitments outweighs the ability to stick random people with the debt of children they sired under arrangements wherein they wouldn’t have to care for them. The ability to make serious, life-altering commitments would be weakened if there were random Take-Backsies zones that only you know the locations of, so to speak.
You write, “He knew or should have known the risks, and chose to have sex with you anyway.” and I note that that’s totally valid, so long as the conversation went something like:
Him: Hey if you get pregnant you should get an abortion, so I don’t have to care for it.
Her: I agree in an absolutely non-binding way that allows me to demand child support from you later.
Anything else would be unkind.
> (Recall, if you will, that Normal Human Beings do not sign contracts before coitus)
That is exactly what Normal Human Beings did for thousands of years. It was called “marriage”.
Premarital sex is an invention of the dastardly baby boomers. Never happened before that.
You’d think people that worshiped the past could at least bother to learn something about it.
@Anonymous
Humans always did have a problem with keeping the cooperate-cooperate equilibrium, which keeping it in one’s undergarments outside of a formal procreative agreement is, but until recently, it was the dominant societal perception that defecting on this more was a Bad Thing (TM). Nowadays, extramarital promiscuity is de facto the norm, while chastity is the exception.
Procreative agreement is a funny name for what, until 150 years ago, was in most places and times more of a property transaction.
Is slavery cooperate-cooperate if the husband *and* the father agree?
You realize that the “slave” had to agree as well?
I think historically fathers paid dowries when their daughters were married, a far cry from pimping.
“Premarital sex is an invention of the dastardly baby boomers. Never happened before that.
You’d think people that worshiped the past could at least bother to learn something about it.”
The usual arrangement for premarital sex, at least in western societies a century or two back, was that if pregnancy resulted it was followed by marriage. The evidence on several European cities in the late 19th century suggests that about a third of brides were pregnant. Until about the 1930’s in the U.S., a man who seduced a woman under promise of marriage and then abandoned her could be sued for breach of promise.
Premarital sex certainly happened, but it was supposed to be fitted into the same system of commitment.
Premarital sex certainly happened, but it was supposed to be fitted into the same system of commitment.
Which should be obvious from the name – premarital sex, not amarital sex. You can have sex if you haven’t gotten around to getting married yet, but it was linguistically unthinkable that you’d be having sex and not getting married eventually.
I believe most traditional societies tacitly accepted premarital sex roughly to the extent that it was obvious you weren’t going to make a fuss about the “get married” part when the time came. If you were, that’s why they invented shotguns.
I’ve heard that the current Christian rural custom is the small town throws a big happy wedding, where the old gossipy ladies smile and nod and say, “First babies often come early.”
I wouldn’t be supportive of vindictive legal action but the fact remains that the child is in existence and in need and the father has responsibilities. He should contribute something to the child’s support.
And aside from all that, leaving all the responsibility for not getting pregnant on the woman is bullshit. Contraception fails, as in this instance, and if you absolutely don’t want kids, you either get sterilised or you don’t have sex. (I am not pro-abortion rights so no, I don’t accept option C you abort the child).
I continue to maintain what I have always maintained on here: if people fuck up their own lives, that’s one thing. But as soon as children are involved, you grow the fuck up and stop being pissy: you support the child as best you are able.
So yes, ask for child support and go to law if necessary.
“But as soon as children are involved, you grow the fuck up and stop being pissy: you support the child as best you are able.”
Are you now going to berate Katie for not moving back in with her parents? She admits that it would be helpful; her reasons for not wanting to do so, while understandable, dealt entirely with her own well-being and not her child’s.
Mr. L, Katie said it would be helpful in some ways, but not in others. I don’t know much about the situation, but it doesn’t seem to me like her moving to live with her parents, who wanted her to abort her baby in the first place, would necessarily be best for the baby.
A baby’s well-being is intimately tied to the mother’s well-being. Trying to stay in a community that provides them both with the most social support, and the best future prospects (if it proves financially sustainable) sounds like the best solution for the child.
Deiseach:
The woman has all the power on deciding whether the pregnancy is carried to term, and therefore she should have all the responsibility.
Except that your euphemism “deciding whether the pregnancy is carried to term” is covering infanticide.
Actually, I agree with most people that the
fatherhusband should be on the hook. But after hearing a bunch of people say that Katie should have murdered her kid because she made the mistake of making that deal, I’m going to donate once I get home.Edit: I meant to say husband, instead of father. You are the father of your wife’s children; if you have a problem with that, divorce her when she’s screwing around on you.
CatCube: I hope you are not suggesting that *I* am saying that she should have killed the child.
Re: husband being on the hook, while I don’t have much sympathy for him, I do think it’s weird to say that polyamory is ok but then reach for XIX century morality when shit hits the fan. To her credit, the mother is not even doing that – it’s all third parties, for some reason.
I don’t hold any truck with polyamory. Deisach has pretty much covered my feelings on the matter; there’s a reason things were set up the way they were, and that was to provide for the children from a union.
tl;dr Run, don’t walk, to your local cutthroat family lawyer and sue him for support
Even the TL;DR version isn’t entirely clear on who “him” is, but the implication seems to be that Katie should sue her former lover.
Which runs into the problem that, per California Family Code sections 7540 et seq. and 7610 et seq, Andromeda’s legal father is probably Katie’s former husband. IANAL, and I don’t know some of the situational details that the statutes call out as relevant (e.g. whether Katie and her husband were still cohabitating at the time of birth), but it seems to require deliberate legal effort to rebut the presumption that a woman’s husband is the father of any children whose conception might plausibly have occurred during the marriage or engagement. In some cases there seems to be a two-year statue of limitations, and I gather Andromeda is already on the far side of one.
By the old rules, that’s deliberate. One of the things a man agrees to when he says “I do” is to provide financially for all the woman’s children, no matter who provides the sperm. It’s pretty clear that these relationships were conducted with mutial consent under the new rules of Bay Area Polyamory, but that hardly simplifies things. The new rules, for reasons that are now obvious, aren’t well thought out. They also aren’t recognized in law, which means a court cannot be counted on to deliver an outcome morally consistent with the agreements actually made or the desires of the participants.
And, absent mutual consent (in which case you don’t need a court), this becomes a three-way contest of assigning and denying responsibility which is almost certain to leave at least one and possibly two or three people unhappy. People who might otherwise be a positive influence on Andromeda’s life in the future. It might also disrupt the broader community that is currently providing Katie and Andromeda with moral support and a cheap place to live.
It is almost certainly impossible for any outsider to say with certainty that taking this issue to court is the right move.
That said, as Deiseach noted it is not unreasonable to ask that everyone involved make at least a de minimis effort at arranging private child support if that’s what it takes to unlock the official assistance that is supposed to be available for cases like this.
“One of the things a man agrees to when he says “I do” is to provide financially for all the woman’s children, no matter who provides the sperm. ”
My guess is that you are wrong about the origin of Lord Mansfield’s rule, which is what you are discussing. It did not apply if the couple were not cohabiting at the time of conception, and when the rule originated that was the only likely way of being sure the husband was not the biological father.
I interpret it as a way of avoiding legal conflicts over a question that could rarely be determined with certainty, and where the conflicts themselves were likely to be costly for the parties.
Lord Mansfield’s rule as written by Lord Mansfield in 1777, said that neither party was allowed to testify as to “non-access” to establish illegitimacy. A rule, according to Mansfield, “…founded in decency, morality, and policy”; which he doesn’t seem to have expanded on but which I take to mean that the baby has a presumptive father who signed up for fatherhood and we’re damned well not going to take that away just because some pesky fact gets in the way.
Subsequent lawmaking, judicial and legislative, seems to have kept the term “Lord Mansfield’s rule” while modifying Lord Mansfield’s actual rule with various forms of “…unless it’s obvious the husband didn’t provide the sperm”.
Which is to say, the laws and customs of marriage have evolved from their traditional roots and we haven’t always been open and honest about what changes were being made for what reason. This is not new.
Sounds to me more like he just didn’t want to have to listen to people talk about their sex lives. 🙂
I put the same question to you that I just put to
Deiseach. Suppose, as seems quite likely, that under current law it is her ex-husband and not the biological father who owes child support. Do you still think she should get a lawyer to make him pay it?
I can’t speak for Deisach, but I definitely don’t have a problem with it. (NB: As I understand it, it was an “open” marriage.) The presumption that you are the father of your wife’s children didn’t spring up yesterday. If he was OK with her stepping out, he’s running the risk she comes back knocked up. I don’t see it as much different than either keeping it in your pants or tying it in a knot.
> Also applying for governmental assistance there, which is complicated, because they want proof of child support, which I don’t get from Andromeda’s father (since he didn’t agree to have her he told me when I was pregnant that he would not pay it if I were ever in this position in the future, so he wouldn’t incentivize me not to abort).
Child support is not for your benefit, and it’s not for the father’s benefit, it’s for the child’s benefit. If Andromeda needs support from her father, she should get it. If you’re struggling to pay for food, rent, and health services you need to be a good mother to your daughter, then absolutely you should be getting child support from him. Get it.
Money is fungible. “For your benefit” and “for the child’s benefit” are indistinguishable.
(Also, the legal system is not very good at actually enforcing that the money is used for the child’s benefit at all, although that isn’t all that relevant here.)
I’m sorry you seem to be getting so many harsh comments. I think a lot of people in your situation would not be so honest about the agreement that existed. I guess the reality is much different from the hypothetical. It’s a difficult situation for everyone, and it won’t help to beat yourself up over it. Hopefully some good can come from it.
About government benefits, if it’s not too late, you can insist that you don’t know who the father is, and there normally wouldn’t be a way for the government to find out. Blogging under your real name might complicate that, though.
About government benefits, if it’s not too late, you can insist that you don’t know who the father is
Is the argument, then, that it is somehow immoral to hold the father to the support of his child, but not immoral to lie about it so that uninvolved persons are forced to pay the support of his child?
Why are genetics so important? He would be absolved of responsibility if he donated his sperm to her through a physician, even non-anonymously. He would be off the hook if the kid was adopted, too.
What if someone else encouraged her not to have an abortion, and that factor ended up being important in her decision to keep the baby. Would that person be responsible for child support, because he/she was deliberately involved in the decision to bring that child into the world.
I don’t see why this man has a special obligation morally beyond anyone else.
Michael, only about two thirds of states have adopted the Uniform Parentage Act (which has that provision).
Vaniver: I didn’t know that, but this happened in California, which does have that law.
Hi Katie,
As a fellow mother, I just want to encourage you to keep doing the best you can for your daughter, and I hope things will improve for you.
I am also not a member of the California bar. But I second what zensunni said.
The world is a better place for having an adorable little Andromeda in it. Well done, there.
However, contrary to what some people in the thread believe, it’s not a question of whether the father wants to pay support. Few do. The system, as awkward as it can be, has concluded that a child must, and will, receive some sort of support for just the living expenses you mention. And in the balance of equities, while it may be (arguably) unjust to stick a guy with a bill he doesn’t want to pay, it is more unjust to stick that bill to the remainder of the people of California, who had no say in the whole arrangement. The support isn’t for you. It’s for Andromeda, the most vulnerable person involved, who also had no say in the fun the grown-ups were having. Her need for upkeep outweighs father’s desire to have consequence-free romps.
Lawyers are expensive. California courts have Family Law Facilitators for just this situation. Go see one, for Andromeda’s sake.
Agreed with everyone expressing this sentiment. Andromeda never signed away her rights, and she deserves the support of the man who brought her into this world. A child’s right to be cared for is way more important than a father’s right to consequence-free sex.
Katie, I’m sorry your decision not to abort has created so much social difficulty for you. Being a single mum is fricking tough and its all the worse when people look down on you for it. For what it’s worth, know that you have the respect of one random internet person here.
So if a man donates to a sperm bank, he should be on the hook for child support? What about if a woman is an egg donor or a surrogate? What if the child is given up for adoption, and the family falls on hard times?
Make that at least two.
I think she deserves respect for not doing what various people here urge her to do. I can understand her deciding not to abort, even thought it was a violation of her agreement with the father. But having chosen, for what she saw as compelling reasons, to violate that agreement, I don’t think she is entitled to impose the cost of her doing so on the father.
I am curious about how far other people are willing to push the argument that it’s for the child’s good, hence justifiable. Suppose she has the opportunity to steal money from a random victim and use it to help support her child. Is that morally justified as well?
I agree with David Friedman here.
But David, dsotm has already argued (poorly, I think, but nevertheless) against someone bringing up the “but what about stealing?” case. The argument is that the father is “more responsible” than the random strangers who would be stolen from. After all, he could have chosen not to have sex.
Without meaning to massively derail (further), my answer to those counter examples is basically “yes”. A child has rights, and no esoteric arrangement between the parents can extinguish them. The only person with the moral authority to waive the rights of the child is the child, and that person does not have the ability to do so.
Other people, quite possibly including Katie, may have different views. I’m not really looking to have an argument about this, just stating my perspective.
Edit: and to David Friedman, I’m not arguing that Andromeda has the right to stolen property. I’m arguing that she has the right to be provided for by her parents.
@Vox
And the strangers could have chosen to give her money.
I’m sorry, to what extent did the bio-father and the legal father have a say here? And for all children whose fathers do not fit those categories, or who do but can’t pay, what happens to them, since it’s unjust to pay for this with taxes?
This is some painfully obvious motivated reasoning going on here. People who actually believe in a right to child support believe it should be standardized and paid for out of a general tax, the way we pay for things that we have agreed that we want, as a society.
And for people talking about responsibility? Responsibility lies solely with the mother, since it was by her choice that the baby was gestated and born.
The current system of “Find the nearest facsimile of a father and stick him with the support bill.” is a hack. It is not justifiable under any kind of first-principles justification unless you’re already, e.g., enslaving the mother. Now, hacks exist because there are genuinely difficult-to-solve problems, and getting people who don’t want to be parents to act as them is definitely one of those. But hearing people wax rhapsodical about one party’s responsibility and obligations, only to fall silent when cases outside the one they want to justify turn up, really grates on my ears.
We should call hacks hacks, and not enshrine them as principles of justice. This is, especially in emotionally-fraught cases like this, really hard. It’s hard to say “You have done nothing wrong, but you are in the same rough category as a lot of people who do, so we’re going to drop an obligation on you you took every reasonable precaution to avoid, because we don’t care about people of your rough class as much as we do about these other people of this rough class.” But that is what we are doing in this case, because we, as a society, aren’t willing to actually pay for child support, but are willing to enforce it on the broad class of “irresponsible men”, even when they look pretty responsible at first glance.
Robert, I think you’re premature in imputing intellectual or moral dishonesty here.
The father took several steps to reduce his responsibility. These were incompletely effective, and the incompleteness of their effectiveness was predictable.
Predictable how? In what reference set? People are in polyamorous relationships, or have sex with people that are not their spouses, all the damn time. People who agree to have an abortion if a specific situation arises very often have an abortion.
It is predictable that this situation would explode only so much as it’s predictable that people who drive over 75 mph will die in auto accidents; there’s a giant reference class of people who do the thing and don’t have any serious issues, and accordingly don’t have a lot of attention drawn to them.
And, well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on the intellectual dishonesty here, but I would love to see some of the people arguing for responsibility lay out their premises of how responsibility should be accrued or divided, and what obligations can be laid on people according to that responsibility, from first principles, because you can justify a whole lot of bad shit with the principles that lead to assigning child support to either biodad or legal-dad in this scenario.
So, I’m noticing a huge amount of bullshit equivocation and derailing going on in this sub-thread.
The original link was to a GoFundMe. A GoFundMe isn’t saddling the poor, innocent California taxpayers with the burden. A GoFundMe isn’t saddling the mother with the burden. A GoFundMe isn’t saddling the father with the burden.
A GoFundMe is asking for people who want to share the burden, to share the burden willingly.
Everyone directly involved seems to agree that there’s some moral ambiguity that makes pushing for child support questionable. Everyone NOT directly involved, on priors, has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
With a community of our size and wealth, it *seems* like voluntarily solving the problem so no one who doesn’t want to be gets “stuck with the burden” is pretty fucking close to optimal, here.
And if you don’t want to participate in said GoFundMe, what’s it to you? I’m betting that most of the people bitching on this thread make at *least* $50 an hour; if you’ve wasted 15 minutes of your time compiling your replies, you could have just saved your money and donated $12.50 and reduced the burden of whoever-you’re-actually-concerned-about by that much. And if you don’t *want* to donate, well, don’t donate. On the other hand, if you’re arguing out of principle – especially out of the general principle of “people who aren’t me need to be protected from this evil predatory toddler’s rapacious grab for money”, proxied through attacks on her mother or attacks on her father (neither of which created the GoFundMe).. well, fuck you.
The difference is that I’m enjoying these 15 minutes.
You’re delusional.
Hey, Ialdabaoth! Good to see you posting again. However, I think you’re off-base here. One, I think the railment happened in direct response to and proportion to the discussion of child support. With a few notable exceptions, I don’t think anyone currently posting objects to the GoFundMe, and even if they do, I don’t think they begrudge people spending their money as they choose, even if it’s for things like cute ingroup babies.
I also think that you’re over-weighting the number of Silicon Valley tech types here.
And I think that even though I’m not directly involved, I can look at the information that’s been presented by firsthand sources who are involved and come to conclusions. It certainly might be the case that there is non-public (and not-to-be-publicized) information which makes pushing for legal assignment of child support vs. not doing so a better or worse option. But I’ll disagree with you on the balance of probability there; my priors are that child-support cases are often very messy, but not necessarily complicated.
The system, as awkward as it can be, has concluded that a child must, and will, receive some sort of support for just the living expenses you mention.
Didn’t we have a discussion a while back about how “the system” has, in its ham-fisted attempts to Make Things Better, destroyed much of the actual social and communal structures that kept things tolerable for people on the lower rungs of the ladder? The official government safety net has the advantage of black-letter law specifying what people are entitled to – but that’s a pretty low bar even in theory, and the practical implementation leaves much to be desired.
In this case, there is clearly an unofficial safety net that is doing a fair job of addressing the problem. No outsider can possibly be certain that the State of California will do a better job. No outsider can possibly be certain that the safety net that is supporting Katie and Andromeda now, would survive state intervention. And far too many outsiders here, have gone well past anything that could be considered helpful advice in this matter.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
I strongly disagree: I think sticking the people of California with the bill is far more appropriate than sticking the father with it.
The people of California want to live in a society where children are supported regardless of their parents’ finances. They (we), through our representatives, write and enforce laws to that end. And collectively, we have more ability to pay than any individual.
I’d rather spread this burden out onto taxpayers like myself, just as I’d rather contribute to UBI than put the burden of supporting the working poor on Walmart customers through minimum wage hikes. Providing financial safety nets is the government’s job.
Anonymouse:
As a taxpayer, I’d rather contribute a little for that purpose (which I already do for all the children of the underclass, whose fathers can’t pay child support anyway) in exchange for not having my sexual freedom annihilated.
You are also forgetting the incentives. If middle class mothers are entirely responsible for paying for their children, in the absence of *voluntary* agreements from a man, then they are incentivized to seek such an agreement. Result: fewer unplanned pregnancies, more stable families, more children with an actual fatherly presence rather than just a check in the mail.
Incentives cut both ways. Consider the impact of your proposal on men’s incentives.
Consider further that you are describing the same effect as an “incentive” for women and an “annihilation of sexual freedom” for yourself. Is this not a double standard?
Men would have a lower incentive to use birth control. This could increase the likelihood of a birth if a low-level (low IQ, low self-control, high time-preference etc.) woman (i.e. one who does not have sufficient willpower to use or require the use of birth control) mates with a high-level man (i.e. one who would have used birth control if provided with a higher incentive – a low-level man would not have used it anyway). Which is not the worst thing that could happen to that woman (the alternative being that of eventually ending up pregnant anyway, but with the child of a low-level man).
“Annihilation of sexual freedom” is descriptive of the fact that in practice I don’t have sex because of this. It also follows the same standard used for women. Any restriction of women’s control on procreation is described as an unacceptable assault on their reproductive rights. Surely the fact that men have no reproductive rights at all deserves language at least as strong.
Also applying for governmental assistance there, which is complicated, because they want proof of child support, which I don’t get from Andromeda’s father (since he didn’t agree to have her he told me when I was pregnant that he would not pay it if I were ever in this position in the future, so he wouldn’t incentivize me not to abort).
Okay, from my work experience with single parents applying for social housing, and it may be very different in the USA – you have to provide evidence of looking for child support. Even if he agrees to pay something as minor as €10 a week it’s enough. If he refuses, or claims he can’t because of inability to pay, you provide evidence you tried to get it (e.g. the lawyer and going to court).
As long as you can show you tried to get child support, you can apply for anything and everything. Of course, some of our clients get round that by not putting the father’s name down on the birth cert, or claiming they don’t know who the father is, or the father is on social welfare payment as a single man himself and can’t afford more than €10 a week, but whatever – that’s his problem as long as you provide evidence you looked for support from him.
This is the requirement as per the application form:
Again, I don’t know how the US system works but if you have a letter from a lawyer (even a sworn affadavit) that you were not married to the father of the child, you were not cohabiting, there is no agreement about separation/maintenance, you are not receiving maintenance for the child, and maybe if you are pursuing the matter through the courts (if you do decide to go that route for maintenance) should be what is required re: applying for help. My only advice here would be try to avoid any wording such as “My client informs me that – “. This makes us low-level bureaucrat minions mutter about “your client can tell you they flew to the moon, that does not make it so”. If you have anything to show he’s refusing to pay, even emails, that you can show the lawyer so they put down in the letter “the father of my client’s child refuses/is unable to pay maintenance”, that is much much better.
Thank you so much for your answer. As someone who doesn’t know you personally, I was a bit skeptical of the utility of such a fundraiser, and of sharing it with rationalist community at large through SSC.
I’m sorry if I was a bit rude. Of course humans are not perfectly instrumentally rational, and what is done is done. I wish both of you a happy and fulfilling life.
If I did know you personnally, and had the money to spare, I would obviously help you out.
Good luck!
As an outside observer with antinatalist tendencies, I find it reprehensible how this child is used as an advertisement (“So precocious!”) for a fundraiser that will also benefit her tormentor, for it is ultimately you who is the cause of your daughter’s situation.
She did not ask to be brought into conscious existence, but was forced to by your selfish instincts of procreation, and now also has to bear her mother’s financial irresponsibility and lack of personal integrity.
You deserve neither sympathy nor your daughter. There would be so much less suffering in this world if only people could conquer their selfish genes.
“There would be so much less suffering in this world if only people could conquer their selfish genes.”
heh
The world would be a lot cooler if dragons were a cheap alternative to jetliners, but until then I’d rather cut fuel costs than berate pilots for not growing wings.
What is it with this wobsite and the asinine analogies?
“The world would be a lot cooler if dragons were a cheap alternative to jetliners”
Are you nuts? Jetliners don’t eat people.
Says you.
I suppose it would depend on how you calculate costs, but the way I would do so, dragons that ate people would not be a “cheap” alternative to jetliners. Thus, the dragons in the hypothetical are presumably not people-eaters.
Are you nuts? Jetliners don’t eat people.
Yeah, but we could fuel the dragons by feeding them the people who can’t or won’t conquer their selfish genes.
Starting with disappoint, who would be the self-sacrificial sterling example for the rest of us.
I wrote:
“Are you nuts? Jetliners don’t eat people.”
Deiseach replied:
“Yeah, but we could fuel the dragons by feeding them the people who can’t or won’t conquer their selfish genes.”
You might want to think a little about what is known about what category of women dragons prefer to consume. In your own self interest.
Yeah, but we could fuel the dragons by feeding them the people who can’t or won’t conquer their selfish genes.
Thermodynamics says that we couldn’t possibly replace the existing airliner fleet with dragons without running through our supply of such people very, very quickly.
FWIW I find this comment is the kind of message that can’t be expressed while going for maximum kindness.
I find it interesting how you, even though “Anonymous”, are hedging your claims in your successive edits.
I have a habit of posting whatever first comes to mind and then refining it. Felt that leaving “necessary” in would leave someone to claim that no, the only type of post necessary here are encouregements; plus it was distracting from my main point, which is that your post wasn’t mean for the sake of being mean, and hence doesn’t exactly break the kindness rule.
Banned, banned, banned. You’re all banned. None of you are free from sin.
Antinatalists confirmed for most sinful
I feel like I should be sending you an Easter bouquet, between this and the Proclamation of the Republic.
On behalf of a grateful nation, I as representing the Plain People of Ireland (and you can’t get much plainer than me), thank you 🙂
I just thought you should know, this comment was the one that made me finally make the decision to donate, despite neither living in the Bay Area, nor being particularly close to anyone else in the Rationalist community, and having a general sense of squeamishness over the thought that if I donate to THIS random stranger, then why am I not donating to every random stranger everywhere in the world.
Curse my selfish genes, and their tendency to make me part with good money to assuage a sense of petty spite against assholes on the Internet! :op
If you have to rely on public transit anyway, I think it would be worth selling the car for whatever you can, and then you won’t need insurance, car maintenance, or gas, which should save a decent amount of money.
On the one hand, (most of) this thread is a fascinating conflict of intelligent ideas.
On the other…Jesus, what a shitshow. Sorry you’re going through this.
Donated $100. Partly for the same reason as David Friedman above, partly out of sympathy for whatever you felt while reading the more poisonous parts of this thread.
I wasn’t going to send any money, but I’m going to now after seeing the way some people are treating Katie here in the comments. Hope you’re enjoying yourselves, guys.
Note that this implies that someone who wants Katie to get more donations should behave outrageously towards her, which I don’t think is the behavior you want to encourage.
SSC SF Story of the Week #12
This week we are discussing “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison.
Next time we will discuss “I” by Philip Goetz
I never found it realistic that A.M. could do everything it did, and yet not rescue people from the kinds of injury described in the climax. I feel like the story treats “alive/dead” as an ontologically basic binary rather than thinking of “life” as something that can be reduced to simpler parts that could be manipulated by the abilities A.M. had demonstrated previously.
Then again, the point of story is not so much to be realistic as it is to evoke a certain dark, despairing mood, and it did that brilliantly.
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of this that doesn’t really make sense as a “this is a thing that could happen in very strange situations” thing. That said it doesn’t really try to be that.
Fantastically scary story all the same.
Wonderfully creepy story. Is it realistic? Eh, um, – not particularly.
But as a cautionary bedtime tale for existential risk believers, absolutely fantastic as “And this is why, children, we must solve the problem of Friendly AI!” 🙂
It’s very much of its time in the attitudes expressed, so I’m not going to give it a kicking over the representation of the sole woman, etc. The idea that not even death can save you, because A.M. can resurrect you (presumably it has your stored engrams or some such) is horrible. How cryonics could go wrong – yes, the far future they are able to scan your brain and restore your personality into a new body, but the newly resurrected are made to fight in gladitorial games, or bought as torture subjects by the wealthy and sadistic for fun (and our current culture has “Dexter”, a series of novels and a TV show making a serial killer into someone we are expected to cheer for, so we can’t say “but nobody would enjoy torturing real persons for fun!”), or otherwise abused by the society of the day because they don’t count as legal humans 🙂
After some discussion of genes and symmetry (here, I think), I have some questions. An article used facial symmetry as a surrogate for how stable the effects of a person’s genes are. This seems reasonable, but are there other good surrogates? How much of facial asymmetry is the result of an asymmetrical skull, and how much is habitual facial expression? In more dangerous times, asymmetry could also be the result of injury or infection, but even now, there’s a lot of variation in how symmetrical people’s faces are.
Has facial symmetry increased over time? Does a preference for facial symmetry mean that people are getting selected for stable gene expression? (I think that was it rather than mutation.)
I find I’m pretty bewildered about how genes can lead to reliable asymmetry. How do genes building a body in a directionless soup identify which side is left and which is right so that the heart is almost always on the left?
The answer to this question is super interesting! You may be aware the many complex molecules such as proteins have a “handedness” such that they are not interchangeable with their mirror images. The handedness of the human body actually has its origin all the way down in molecular handedness. There’s a protein called left-right dynein which has been studied in mice– it is active in special cilia (moving hair-like cell organelles) found in the mouse embryo. The left-right dynein (which, like all proteins, has a handedness) seems to help determine the direction in which the cilia beat– left, as it turns out. The enables an accumulation of certain signaling molecules on the left half of the embryo, which then determine left-right patterning.
We figured all this out because there’s a human disease called Kartegener’s Syndrome in which people’s cilia don’t work properly. Among all the other problems this causes, like increased risk of respiratory tract infections, people with Kartagener’s have a much higher risk of situs inversus, the condition in which people’s internal organs are reversed left-to-right. And mice with mutations in the left-right dynein gene have the same problem.
Oooh, I didn’t know about the dynein protein! Thanks!
Well, on that topic, averaging faces across the entire spectrum of normal bodyweight people produces faces much more attractive then the “average” face, though not faces considered unsuually attractive.
If the average face is a ‘6’, then the average-average face is an 8.
Can you explain this more, what does an “average-average” face mean? I would have expected that an “average” face was already averaged over the entire population.
I think the difference is that an “average-average” face filters out people who’re unusually fat or skinny, while the regular average includes them?
What he means (I think) is that when you take all faces and sum them together, then that is more attractive than the average attractiveness of all faces.
I think it means if you took all the “6” (“average-rated”) faces and averaged the faces themselves (as opposed to their ratings) together, you would get an “8”-rated face.
Well, its better to state median for the second one.
Taking the average face of faces not far from the median face (top 5 or bottom 5 percent, mostly to get out clear strong genetic diformities of faces far away from evolutionarry tendencies, such as extreme obesity) , and that face is a good deal above quality of the median face.
Should have stated median
I think it has to do with removing or averaging out the types of genetic drift/minor mutations that evolution hasen’t selected for as a determinant of attractiveness.
It’s not a *directionless* soup. Eukaryotic development is contingent on maternal imprinting. Anterior-posterior organization in fly development, for example, is driven by maternally-imposed mRNA concentration gradients.
Okay, that’s anterior/posterior. Is there anything like that known for left/right?
Sure. Some references you might find interesting:
http://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/publications/documents/2004Gastrulation.pdf
http://belmonte.salk.edu/pubs/2000/2000-76-iubmb.ryan.pdf
“Right Hand Left Hand” by Chris McManus is an excellent popular science book all about left-right symmetry in biology as well as culture, etc. It
So about that survey… I absolutely don’t identify as a Less Wronger, but I read a lot of Rationalist Diaspora blogs, and Ozy says on their blog that “If you are reading this blog, you are in the target market” for the survey. Does someone like me qualify?
Take it
I was wondering that as well, particularly with Scott’s use of “iff.”
Sounds like a good excuse to start identifying as a Less Wronger!
I’d say the only people who shouldn’t take it are extremely anxious singularians. The part about Roko’s Basilisk is phrased in such a way that it seems designed to make people worry about it.
We’re all part of the LW diaspora here, even if some of the newer people never read or commented at LW proper.
Well, I read and commented on LW, and don’t consider myself a Lwian. Even though in the past I took Scott’s surveys.
It is very odd that question 79 “Would you consider rejoining LessWrong?” does not offer an option of “I was never there.”
For a survery RE: The Less Wrong Diaspora? Are you real?
In the context of OP (should I take the survey if I’ve not read LW?), it can be read as a sarcastic remark that no, the survey doesn’t have an answer for “I was never there” because you’re not part of the target demographic for the survey.
Shieldfoss, you just told Evan to take the survey despite his answer to that question not being at all clear. If he never did read LW, would you regret that? Well, too bad, he’s in the data and there’s nothing you can do about it. But if that option had been available, then you would have your option of excluding him in analysis.
“If he never did read LW, would you regret that?”
Yes absolutely. It did not even cross my mind that Evan had never used LW what with this being the LW survey.
In my case, yes, I’ve lurked on Less Wrong a bit. But I wouldn’t think that’s true as a general rule – I’ve referred a couple people to this blog who’ve probably never even heard of Less Wrong.
Right, the point is not your particular case, but Ozy’s announced interpretation. You were a little skeptical of that interpretation, but it appears to be the majority view in this thread. I think 79 shows that Shieldfoss correctly interpreted Elo’s intention, but Elo’s intentions only matter through their effect in shaping other people’s interpretations, and thus decisions. He should have made his intention clearer in the announcement, but he also should have designed the questions to accommodate those who violated them.
Okay, I took the survey, and I was quite disappointed there was no textbox to criticize the wording of questions:
* “Do you think Roko’s argument for the Basilisk is correct?” should offer separate options for “No” and “No, because I disagree with Timeless Decision Theory.”
* I checked both “I wasn’t around for LW’s peak” and other options about the community at the peak. Why? Because I delved through the archives a bit.
* My opinion on immigration can’t be boiled down to “more/less restrictive.” I think enforcement should be significantly increased, general legal immigration standards should be somewhat loosened, and then standards shouldn’t be loosened for general humanitarian needs.
* I answered “Does non-human, non-earthly intelligent life exists in the observable universe?” as 100% – but at least 95% of that probability mass is the probability that angels fit into whatever definition of “observable” we’re using.
I’m in favour of not having a way to respond to the wording of the questions. In this community people need a firm nudge in the direction of “no, shut up, stop trying to be sophisticated and over-complicated and just answer my question”.
Yup, and a large part of running a good poll is being able to balance the critical tradeoff between being too restrictive with the answer options and essentially making every question a free response. Free response is pollster satan and you shouldn’t invite the data gremlins in unless you have to.
“Free response is pollster satan and you shouldn’t invite the data gremlins in unless you have to.”
Yep. Maybe I was too vague above; what I was hoping for was one free response at the end to give notes on the survey itself, like TheUnitOfCaring had on her blog survey several months ago.
“Free response is pollster satan and you shouldn’t invite the data gremlins in unless you have to.”
Well, it rather depends on what the survey is for. If you want stats to back up, or deny, or befuzz preconceptions the free response is a satan. But if you want to learn something from a poll then free response is kind of necessary.
(I ran company internal polls for about 10 years, and all the stats useful for management came from the predetermined answers, while all the changes actually necessary to the business came from free response).
“Does non-human, non-earthly intelligent life exists in the observable universe?”
We haven’t observed any yet, so how should I answer that question?
No – because (as it’s phrased) see above: no observed non-human etc.
Maybe – it’s hard to think that we are it, given the size of the observable universe, but the phrasing doesn’t allow for “Could non-human etc./Do you think it possible non-human etc.”
Yes (a) – but I’m answering this on faith, not on any observations as yet. I think the possibility so great, and it so unlikely that we’re the sole unique intelligence to have arisen so far that I think it must exist
Yes (b) – but like Evan, I’m including God, angels, demons in this category (non-human, non-earthly, intelligent, and if you believe the sources alleging such encounters, observed to interact with humans on Earth, which certainly is part of the observable universe) 🙂
Well, do you think it’s likely that there are aliens somewhere out there or not?
“No” wouldn’t be “I don’t believe in UFO spottings” (which is kinda how your answer phrases it), it would be “I don’t think it’s likely that there are aliens out there because reasons” and “Yes” would be your Yes(a) or even Yes(b) if you want to be a pain in the butt.
I think it’s very likely, I can’t see any reason why not, but I would not say flat-out “Yes” to a question like Does non-terrrestrial intelligent life exist.
Give me a few bacteria on one of the Jovian moons or some kind of “yes, definitely non-terrestrial life” observed anywhere, and I’ll bump that confidence way up.
As it stands, the only intelligent life (or life of any kind) we have yet observed has been here. Yes, it’s very early days yet and we may not be capable of seeing what is there to be seen until we finally get the autonomous drones out there, but right this minute, I could not give a definite “yes” about intelligent life outside of Earth.
(Some days I can’t give a definite “yes” about intelligent life on Earth, given the stupid things humans do).
“Observable Universe” is a term of art in astronomy to describe the volume of space in which we could in principle see a thing through a telescope if it were arbitrarily big and bright and had been around since the literal dawn of time, as opposed to e.g. parallel universes, alternate dimensions, heaven, hell, the inside of black holes, and anyplace a hundred billion light-years away even though the universe isn’t nearly a hundred billion years old.
Agreed that it is confusing to use that term outside of a specialist audience. But, e.g., the surface of a hypothetical planet orbiting Tau Ceti is part of the “observable universe” even though are telescopes aren’t yet big enough to observe it, and if you think there might be aliens in such a place, that’s what the question is asking about.
the surface of a hypothetical planet orbiting Tau Ceti is part of the “observable universe” even though are telescopes aren’t yet big enough to observe it, and if you think there might be aliens in such a place, that’s what the question is asking about.
“Might be”, certainly. “Does” which to me invites a degree of certainty along the “yes/no” axis – can’t be sure enough to say. I don’t have any reason to think there isn’t or can’t be non-terrestrial intelligent life, and I don’t have any religious/philosophical/ethical/moral/you name it systems riding on “there are/there aren’t”, but I can’t be sure enough to say “yes there are” or “no there aren’t”.
If the question lets me answer “Maybe”, I’m happy enough. If it’s asking me “does it/doesn’t it”, I have to say I don’t know enough to answer either way 🙂
My first thought was that it was an oversight not to have a “maybe” option, my second thought was that a “maybe” option would be a terrible idea. The goal is to tease out which case you think is more likely, if a “maybe” option existed then everyone would select that regardless of which way they lean, losing the nuance. Although they could’ve rephrased the question itself.
I don’t see why ‘No, because I disagree with TDT’ needs a separate callout.
My opinions on some of the political ideas boiled down to, “If I were god-emperor, then that would definitely be one of the things I’d change, but it would be a very bad idea to change that without doing some other things that aren’t on the political horizon, first.”
For some strange reason, I didn’t see this option.
Well, at least if I were designing the survey, I think it’d be interesting to separate out people who disagree with TDT from people who think Roko misapplied it?
Well I took the survey, despite only ever lurking and despite only having come across LW sometime after it had (judging by the archives) dropped off the peak and more-or-less dissolved in itself.
And the survey itself has a sort of offputting air about it. Which of the following do you do … physics stuff, maths stuff, academic biology stuff blah blah? I’m a shopkeeper. Doesn’t seem to fit somehow. As a shopkeeper I get into all manner of Socratic things with my customers and LW, and more recently SSC, have been very useful sources. But the survey doesn’t seem to me to be all that inclusive.
Plus, from a starting point of Overcoming Bias there seems to be a bit of a bias built in towards MIRI and Cryogenics – for the latter I am bemused, as no-one seems to understand that there’s a difference between a thing and a process.
It’s all kind of bonkers and well-meaning and partially interesting, but in the end cultish. The world is sufficiently complicated that I prefer to take it on in smallish chunks, which is why SSC is nicer.
Also, “which race do you identify with?” is kind of a rubbish question outside the USA. I wrote in “Human”.
The general idea behind LW is admirable, as was that behind overcoming bias. But it seems at the moment to be very narrowly focussed, which is (a) a pity and (b) doesn’t appear in the survey.
“which race do you identify with?”
In this the centenary of the Easter Rising, what other race but the Gaelic race, as so eloquently put in Myles na gCopaleen’s The Poor Mouth:
And that from a man who spoke Irish when it was neither profitable nor popular, if I remember it right.
But are you sound on the National Question? 🙂
“Which of the following do you do … physics stuff, maths stuff, academic biology stuff blah blah?”
Three different entries for computer science, not one option for history or ancient languages! Bah. Just goes to show how weird I am compared to most LWers, I suppose.
Three different entries for computer science, not one option for history or ancient languages!
You don’t want that stained glass window cluttering up a perfectly good flat wall that could be used to project improving educational real facts lectures on, you know 🙂
Since a lot of us here are tabletop gamers, has anyone here ever heard of or played “Prince Valiant: the Storytelling Game”?
I recently purchased a copy of it, though I haven’t had a chance to run a game as of yet, but it looks fascinating.
The game was written by Greg Stafford of Chaosium in 1989, based on the world of Hal Foster’s newspaper comic Prince Valiant. It’s a ridiculously simple system based on flipping pools of coins, with advanced rules allowing players to temporarily take over STing from the regular Storyteller. It’s very reminiscent of the later games World of Darkness and Dungeon World mechanically.
I have no familiarity with the world of ‘Prince Valiant’ at all, but it seems like a serviceable setting judging by the information given. Basically a turn-of-the-century pulp version of 5th century Europe, with anachronistic high medieval dress and technology and a few dinosaurs. There’s some dissonance from the fact that it was written in the 1940s, but nothing scandalous.
Curious to hear how a play-through goes. I tend to like Chaosium systems for their focus on theme and relatively simple mechanics.
I played one session of the role-playing game, because a friend of mine also found it completely fascinating, and we found it horribly unworkable and immediately switched the system running the campaign to Fate-with-a-couple-houserules, which we much preferred.
Basically, it fell apart with the first attack roll of the first fight scene. The combat system, as I remember it, is that the attacker flips [arms] coins, the defender flips [arms] coins, and if the attacker is higher than the defender, he inflicts a -X penalty on the defender’s coin pool, where X is based on how much higher it is. But because even one coin’s difference is large, this means that whoever lands the first blow wins the exchange, since the other guy is too injured to fight back.
It was a really great campaign after the switch, though; we still used the Prince Valiant skill list, and I was The Glamourie-And-Battle guy… good times.
Yeah, you remember the combat system correctly.
I know stat damage in combat is a bit of a bugbear to a lot of gamers for the reason you mention, fights quickly becoming one-sided as injuries pile up, but it’s actually the reason I like it. The idea of a wound actually mattering to combat performance and first blood being a big deal do a lot for my verisimilitude. Then again I haven’t been a player in years so it might not be fair judging from the other side of the screen.
Did you guys end up using the advanced rules with ‘special effects’ and Storyteller Coupons? That’s the part I’m most interested in but have the weakest handle on tbh.
The problem with the system isn’t the one-sidedness – well, not just the one-sidedness – but the randomness. Because both sides are rolling each action, and because the bell curve isn’t sufficiently steep, one bad roll not matched with a bad roll ends it. We’re not just talking about a wound penalty system where the better side starts with a small advantage, wears the other side down, gets a big advantage – we’re talking about a system where Sir Lancelot has something like a 5 or 10% chance of slipping on a banana peel and falling headfirst on a random mook’s sword each mook each round, and then, well, fight’s over.
There’s a tendency in role-playing games, especially recent ones, to try to move away from instant death, away from permanent or long-term stat penalties, in favor of mechanics like hero points and bonuses while injured and reserves of health consumable ‘don’t die now’ abilities. I think that’s trading verisimilitude for good gameplay, and I think Prince Valiant is trading too much quality of gameplay for verisimilitude.
And I don’t think so about the advanced rules, but I know; I wasn’t the Rulebook-Owning Guy. We stopped playing Prince Valiant after one session – it was that much of a disaster – and switched to Fate on the spot.
Everyone thinks they want realistic, hyper lethal, fast paced combat
Then they roll badly and get offed in the first round of the first fight of the first session of the campaign
Well Prince Valiant doesn’t actually have lethal combat per se. If you run out of coins in combat you’re injured or knocked out, and at ST discretion an enemy might choose to finish you off on his next turn. But the book discourages killing characters unless they were especially stupid.
That said, I can see why players would feel cheated especially if they’re used to more tactical combat systems.
I prefer systems with hero points or other expendable resources to change results because I like to have more control over the narrative; more challenging combat may be appealing in a computer game, but I don’t find it that important in a tabletop setting.
Everyone thinks they want realistic, hyper lethal, fast paced combat
Then they roll badly and get offed in the first round of the first fight of the first session of the campaign
And then they get to roll up another character and look for smarter solutions next time. Or transition to another 0th-level character they’re running through the character funnel (my preferred).
The real question is not how “good” or “realistic” the system is. The real question is how blatant the GM has to be about cheating in order to make it fun.
If one bad roll is enough to kill your character the ‘smarter solution’ is to never get in fights, which might be appropriate for whatever setting you’re running but which dramatically shrinks the GM’s toolbox if the players always refuse combat.
It’s similar to all those modules that kill or cripple your character for touching the magical artifacts. Yes, it’s good to teach your players caution, but if you punish them for ever interacting with anything it can make them impossible to GM for (I’m looking at you, Death Frost Doom).
E: What’s unfortunate is that even games where combat is supposed to be a last resort don’t seem to really understand how this works. Look at Call of Cthulhu or Eclipse Phase, games where the core setting assumption is that nothing human carried is going to make a dent in mythos monsters and shootouts are for the foolhardy. Then look at published adventures like Masks of Nyarlathotep, Glory or Million Year Echo, all meatgrinders filled with gun battles that the designers don’t really seem to want the players to avoid (which is doubly unfortunate since the point of both games is to watch your character go mad over the course of the campaign, which never happens if you’re constantly writing up new investigators or restoring from backups).
If one bad roll is enough to kill your character the ‘smarter solution’ is to never get in fights
What is the point of playing a fantasy roleplaying game if you are going to be as risk-averse as you would be in real life?
And what is the fun of rolling a die when, no matter what, you get to keep rolling until you win?
Oh, Death Frost Doom. I have a special place in my little gonzo heart for that thing.*
* Primarily as a function of aesthetics rather than playability. And an enduring love for people who go out and make stuff rather than kvetch on the internet.**
** Also, obligatory: The man who brought you LotFP.
Instead of having the penalty count directly against the coins to be flipped, maybe a less punishing rule would be to have it provide a minimum number of failures?
Like, if you’re each flipping 5 coins, and on round 1 you flip 3 heads and your opponent flips 4 heads, then you suffer 1 damage. On round 2, you flip 5 coins and get 2 heads. That leaves 3 failures already, so you suffer no effective penalty. Unfortunately, it was a bad result, and your opponent gets 3 again, so you take 1 more damage.
On round 3, now it’s you who get 4 heads! But, that leaves you with only 1 failure and you have 2 damage, so you flip over one of those heads and end with a 3. Your opponent gets a 2, and you do a damage in return.
That seems a lot less unstable to me. What do you think?
Tabletop gamer and worldbuilding blogger here. I can’t decide if I’m delighted or horrified that I live in a world where “Prince Valiant: the Storytelling Game” exists.
Haven’t played it. I can’t get over the idea of a party full of badass adventure-seekers all wearing… Prince Valiant haircuts. Get thee to a helmet!
That said, I don’t have the problems with a lethal/rapidly snowballing combat system that others do. It bills itself as a storytelling game, which strongly implies a decision-space much larger than “hit it with axe? y/n.” Most of our everyday lives manage to pass without hitting people with axes, so it seems obvious there’s plenty of room for alternate storytelling, even in our escapism.
I’m glad someone else has a strong opinion about that haircut. I didn’t think haircuts in RPGs were very important to me, until I looked up who Prince Valiant was just now, and I can’t get over it.
What I’ll say about lethal combat is, in my experience, it can be enjoyable in a system where the party is encouraged to find non-lethal solutions. I was in a GURPS fantasy campaign once where our party treated combat as a last-ditch solution to be avoided at all costs. We would resort to diplomacy, stealth, trickery, bribery, intimidation, or anything else we could think of to fulfill our objectives before resorting to combat. As a result, we only had a fight about once every 2-3 sessions, but those fights were intense and deadly. One good hit could result in death.
It was a fun campaign. Most of the tactical decision-making was in figuring out how to NOT fight, rather than in deciding how to conduct ourselves in a fight. Also, if we had to fight, we tried to set the fight up to be as one-sided as possible, via an ambush, calling in allies, trickery, etc.
Now, in a Pathfinder campaign where about 75-80% of the session time is spent fighting, if fights were incredibly lethal, you’d TPK every session. There, a lot of the fun is expected to take the form of making tactical decisions, so that character death only comes as a result of very bad luck or poor decisions.