OT48: Open Your Heart

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

1. Thanks to everyone who attended the SSC meetups in California. A few people have asked about doing something like that more regularly even when I’m not visiting; if anyone wants to arrange something like that I’ll do my part to popularize it. Otherwise, there are always rationalist meetups in Berkeley and EA meetups in Stanford; I don’t know the exact times and locations but they should be pretty easy to find out if you ask.

2. Some people have asked about a forum to replace the overloaded Open Thread system. Right now I feel like there’s already a subreddit, it’s underused, and I don’t see why people would use a forum if they’re not using the subreddit, but if anyone strenuously disagrees I’m happy to listen to counterarguments.

3. I’ve been posting a lot less recently because I’ve been on vacation, but now I’m back and should return to a more normal schedule.

4. Comment of the week is TD on the role of 4Chan vs. SomethingAwful in internet culture wars, plus the ensuing thread.

5. Book 1 of Unsong is finished. If you’ve been waiting to read it until there was a big chunk you could read all at once, now’s your chance.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

1,467 Responses to OT48: Open Your Heart

  1. Ruprect says:

    Is the following completely mad?
    My feeling is that women have it bad in certain respects – they are weaker and they have to give birth. But, really, that’s about it. (I believe it’s probably just about as hard for a man with a desire to work in a traditionally female profession as it is for a woman to work in a male one…)
    I remember, when I was a teenager, I went for work experience in the law courts. While I was listening to the court cases, all I could think about was everyone taking all their clothes off and having sex. It was difficult for me to understand why we were there.
    I think that dying in a war, if there were at least a chance of perpetrating some serious violence, would be, in many ways, far, far preferable to living a long life working on a checkout aisle. I think I would rather kill someone, than work on a checkout aisle (or at the very least, that is all I would be able to think about while I was working on one.)
    I don’t know if I’m typical of men, or if I’m just a lunatic, or what – but my impression is that it’s easier for me to understand what it is like to be a woman, than it is for women to understand what it is like to be men – and most of the political women have *no idea* what it is like to be a man. And, that’s why it is a problem if vulgar feminism becomes really influential.

    • Dahlen says:

      It might be completely mad. See a therapist for a definitive answer to that question.

      Maybe they should have picked someone else for work experience in law courts. And maybe you shouldn’t find murder preferable to shitty employment. And just maybe, you should research all the myriad ways in which women were forbidden this and that as early as three generations ago, and think long and hard whether any of the causes of the mentalities that produced those laws lingers on, or, if not, if a complete 180 degree cultural change can happen in three generations.

      And what happened with no race or gender in the open thread?

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        And what happened with no race or gender in the open thread?

        It got de-facto lifted when Thing of Things stop doing the race&gender specific one.

  2. The big advantage of a forum would be that it could add some structure to discussion through categories. For a start, political discussion could go in a political section to keep it from oozing everywhere (and to keep the more obnoxious political hacks from repeating the same leftVSright/guns/SJ/insert-object-level-stuff-here over and over like broken records (the rest of the interwebs is full of that rubbish, does every conversation have to be poisoned by it here). It also means that you can navigate to the topic you are most interested in without wading through gianormous swamp of random topics. And lastly because its more organised and specific, long-term conversations/themes can be identified and pointless repetition is more obvious and so can be discouraged.

    I propose if there is a forum the politics section also be split into object level and meta level discussion. Also, maybe some forum software might allow opt-in private messages.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Doesn’t pretty much all forum software allow private messages?

      • Yes, just meant something that isn’t going to bug people if they don’t want to read private messages from people. Ideally you could opt-in or disable PMs so people knew you didn’t want to be contacted. Not sure how many forums do that, but I’ve seen sites with that feature.

  3. Nero tol Scaeva says:

    Anyone here record/produce metal?

    I got a DAW a few months back and have been trying to learn all about mixing/EQing and all that good stuff. I listen to my finished products on a variety of sound systems (headphones, speakers, car stereo, etc.) but I have a hard time figuring out if my stuff really sounds “good” since I think my headphones mask a lot of possible errors. Even though I bought the headphones when I bought the DAW and recording equipment so I assume that the equipment person who helped me buy them at Guitar Center should know his stuff.

    So here’s one of my recording attempts: A metal version of the Final Fantasy fanfare.

  4. Landshill says:

    Why don’t countries just load their nuclear waste onto a plane and dump it off on enemy territory?

    Pretty much everybody has enemies.

    • Leit says:

      Probably because someone would quickly rules lawyer any such action as nuclear warfare, and this would utterly ruin the country involved under the weight of the international reaction.

      • John Schilling says:

        “Weapons of Mass Destruction should be defined to include atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which have characteristics comparable in destructive extent to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above”.

        U.N. Document 5/C.3/32/Rev.1, 1948

        Way ahead of you on that one.

    • Anonymous says:

      Why bother with that instead of just dropping actual nukes?

  5. Deiseach says:

    Dragging the unquiet corpse from its shallow grave, but has anyone here read “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and liked it? And if so, what did you like about it? Because I’m getting told it’s heartwrenching and exquisite prose and poetic and all the rest of it, and all I can go is gape in slack-jawed yokel amaze, as it does nothing of the kind for me.

    I’m currently engaged in an exchange of views on this and trying my best to remain civil, avoid all Sad and Rabid Puppydom, refer as little as feasible to the Hugos, and discuss the story on its literary merits, such as they are, and as an example of award-winning genre fiction – it won a Nebula – but we’re at the third exchange and I’ve just quoted Baudelaire, so I can tell I’m getting into One Of My Strange Moods* and I want to back off a bit and cool down and not start arguing over politics (both of the Hugo kerfuffle and the politics in the story).

    I think it’s a poor story; it leaves me “meh”, I do not discern this great literary style alleged to be present in it, and as genre fiction it simply isn’t: the dinosaur fantasy is a bit of desperate daydreaming by the main character, and the fiancé being a paleontologist does not make it SF. If the “singing dinosaur on Broadway” were an actual singing dinosaur on Broadway, that would make it SF/Fantasy; a “suppose you were a dinosaur like the ones you study, I wonder if you could sing, hey if you could sing they’d put you on Broadway, imagine a singing dinosaur” stream of consciousness babble is not. To take HPMOR as a possible Hugo nominee, at least it qualifies as SF/F because magic is real and works in the universe of the story. It would be completely different if the magic in the story were stage conjuring, and no amount of “hey there’s a dinosaur singing on Broadway daydream” makes Swirsky’s story metamorphose from a standard piece of mainstream literary fic into SF/F anymore than “what makes this story SF/F” “there’s magic in it!” “Penn and Teller magic, not real magic!” “what’s the difference?” would make a story SF/F.

    My opinion: it’s a poor story – okay writing, nothing special, not SF/F genre, only reason it won a Nebula is that skiffy authors are always thirsting for mainstream respectability so of course this is the kind of thing they’d vote for.

    *How I can tell is when I start writing like a third-rate Georgian belles-lettrist, and that’s George V not the Regency and after Georges. For example, I made a reference to “the limpid wave of the Pierian Spring” about Ms Swirsky’s prose, and this was me being coyly, even archly, unfavorable about it.

    • The Nybbler says:

      It’s pretty clear that THAT Nebula-winning, Hugo-nominated thing is not in the genre by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. Even if it were a great story, it wouldn’t be an SF/Fantasy story.

      This year’s response to it, “Space Pirate Butt Invasion”, a gay porn story by “Chuck Tingle”, sounds like it might at least sorta fit the genre. Well, no less than “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”.

      From Amazon: “Space can be a lonely place, especially when you’re stationed by yourself on the distant planet Zorbus. In fact, Lance isn’t quite sure that can last the whole year before his shuttle pod arrives, but when a mysterious visitor appears at Lance’s terraforming station, he quickly realizes that he might not be so alone after all.”

    • keranih says:

      *sigh*

      By my perhaps excessively charitable standards, it is the sort of thing which is well liked by the kind of people who like that sort of thing. It is not horrible. There is a bit of beauty in the descriptive prose and the rules of grammar are followed.

      I am deeply put off by the blatant pandering to the sort of audience who likes this sort of thing, as well as the tired and well-worn stereotyping of redtribe sorts. HOWEVER the idea – a bone digger who can transform into a real live dino – is not very far off a great deal of golden age SF – nor modern superhero movies, for that matter.

      (And Micheal Swanwick explored something like this some years previously.)

      I don’t see the sort of people who really liked IYWADML appreciating a story about a dino-transforming superhero in which the cape’s best beloved only appeared at his hospital bedside, weeping as she stroked his hand and imagining a revenge fantasy.

      So it’s not a horrible story, and it might be considered SFF-ish. (“The Water…” had a far better SF concept, and actually trembled on the edge of engaging with the wonder of the idea.)

      Campbell famous instructed his authors to take a SFF concept, assume it, and then tell a story in that setting. It’s not enough to have an awesome idea – you also have to have the story.

      But if you don’t really take hold of the idea – and I firmly feel that neither TWTFoYFN nor IFYWADML did this – then all the story in the world can’t overcome that.

      • suntzuanime says:

        IYWADML did not have a sci-fi conceit. It had the conceit of a sci-fi conceit. TWTFoYFN had a sci-fi conceit, and proceeded to use it in the least imaginative possible way. TWTFoYFN actually passes one test of good sci-fi: it creates a “playground of the mind” by encouraging you to imagine your own stories in its universe. Unfortunately the way it encourages this is by goading you into listing hundreds of different ways the premise could have been used more meaningfully than in the story itself.

        I don’t support the attempts to politicize the award. What I do support is mercilessly mocking the award body for choosing such terrible bullshit. The nomination of “If You Were an Award, My Love” kind of straddles the line between the two, and I can respect the troll, at least.

        • Deiseach says:

          “The Water That Comes From Nowhere” fit a lot better in as SF/F because it did have the central conceit. Unfortunately that was used as a McGuffin and never adequately explored. The story needed to be tightened up with some rigorous editing (stop being such a pissy little brat about your sister, Mouthpiece Character, for a start) but there was an actual story there.

          I hesitate ah to hell with it, am going to say flat out that it was voted award-winner not because of the science fantasy element but because it was a story about a gay Chinese man coming out and it ticked all the representation boxes. It’s not like there have never been LGBT characters in science fiction before, but I do think a lot of the current voters/reviewers are young(ish) and haven’t read anything printed before their birth date 🙂

          • keranih says:

            it ticked all the representation boxes.

            You forgot interracial relationship.

            It’s not like there have never been LGBT characters in science fiction before, but I do think a lot of the current voters/reviewers are young(ish) and haven’t read anything printed before their birth date

            Interestingly, the Related Work from a couple years back (“We Have Always Fought”) is more or less a discussion of this huge blind spot that is the past for readers of a certain sort. I read the work slackjawed at the realization that no, she didn’t know these things, and no, she’s not going to think deeply about why she didn’t know them.

        • Forlorn Hopes says:

          Same.

          I have some sympathy for the points Sad Puppies were making, though I felt they didn’t argue them well.

          Rabid Puppies, I disagree with. But they entertain me so much.

        • Jiro says:

          I think there’s a tension from using a sci-fi premise to make a point and actually exploring the sci-fi premise.

          In the Star Trek episode with the black and white cookie people, nobody sat down and said “Wait a minute, I know the brain’s hemispheres function asymmetrically, could it be that there actually is a difference between the people who are white on one side and white on the other?”

          And plenty of people think that things like that are what made Star Trek good sci-fi–that you can take contemporary issues, slap a coat of paint on them, and that’s what the genre is for.

          • suntzuanime says:

            “The Water” didn’t even go that far, though. It didn’t take a contemporary issue and give it Klingon head ridges to sneak it past people’s internal censors, it took a contemporary issue, presented it straight up, and also there was random pointless magic water because this is a sci-fi story guys.

          • keranih says:

            Which also would have been fine – if SFF was the only venue where this could be discussed. Kirk and Uhura were literally the first black/white couple to kiss on broadcast tv.

            Now, people dealing with nonstandard sexual identity is mainstream. Not everyone agrees on it, but the discussion is absolutely out there.

            TWTFoYFN’s lie detector water was, imo, a decent SFF idea. And the writing in that story was engaging. But the use of the idea (as said elsewhere) was so pedestrian. So…mundane.

          • Deiseach says:

            “Water” could have been an even better story not alone if it had done something with the magic water (for a guy who works as some kind of geneticist, Protagonist is remarkably uncurious about the whole phenomenon from a scientific angle – is it science, magic, gods, what? Have the laws of physics changed slightly? could they all be characters in a simulation and not the real world, and this kind of arbitrary addition to their environment is a not-so-subtle clue?) but from the angle of “ethnic minority gay guy coming out to strict traditional parents”.

            A tougher editor would have tightened the story up considerably and got the author to add some much-needed grittiness (I don’t usually recommend “add conflict for the sake of it” but this story needed some). Boyfriend was unrealistically wonderful – fit, smart, completely devoted, and apparently so wunnerful Dreaded Strict Traditional Parents fell for him at first sight. A bit more “so what the fuck do you mean your parents don’t know about me, hold on, what the fuck do you mean they don’t know you’re gay??” from Boyfriend would have helped ground the story in some kind of realistic reaction. As it is, he’s set up as a cuddle bunny and Trophy Wife: I made it, I scored a white guy! (which is a very, very vexed question).

            Also, Protagonist is not as smart as he thinks he is; plainly his parents are well aware he’s gay, otherwise why would they be so unflustered about him turning up with Boyfriend to the Christmas party? Or else he has an image of them as much stricter and traditional (and ignorant) than is the reality, which is probably also true.

            His attitude to his sister is dreadful, and Protagonist plainly doesn’t consider the benefit he gets from the traditional attitudes he complains about: as the son, he gets a lot more slack than his sister precisely because of the cultural value placed on sons. Since he’s very much rejecting his role, his sister has to compete for attention by taking up the role of the Dutiful Daughter and carry the weight of expectation for both siblings which he has been able to escape.

            I’d also like to hear the Strict Traditional Parents; Protagonist tells us a whole lot about (what he thinks are) their attitudes and beliefs, but we never get to hear directly from them or meet them as people, not cardboard figures. The ending was pure fairytale wish-fulfilment (it all went marvellously, parents are happy, boyfriend is wonderful, Protagonist has Learned To Love and the contemplation of genetically engineering a baby with his and Boyfriend’s genes to round it off with the perfect ending – take that, sister with your two kids, I’m able to have my cake and eat it by providing the necessary continuation of the family name through a baby of my own without having to involve a woman!) – and not in the kind of fairytale style that would better suit the story if it had been written in the style of one, when the absence of an explanation for the magic water wouldn’t have been so evident and irksome (in a fairytale, magic truth-telling water is a given of the environment).

            I could go on but that’s enough 🙂

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Deiseach:

            Sounds like you got a Hugo nomination coming up, just wait a few years and fudge the details.

      • Deiseach says:

        HOWEVER the idea – a bone digger who can transform into a real live dino

        But it wasn’t about that, that’s the trouble! Weepy Girlfriend (okay, that’s catty of me, she has real reason to grieve) is imagining a consolatory fantasy as a distraction from the reality of her wait by the deathbed that suppose fiancé had been a dinosaur like the ones he studies right from the get-go – it’s not that he’s a were-dino or is an alien dino masquerading as human or is going to be injected with dino DNA as a cure, all of which are good old SF tropes, it’s all a fantasy that were he not what he is, he would have avoided being battered into a coma and brain-death by rednecks in a dive bar.

        I mean, Girlfriend could just as well have been fantasising “if you were white cis het, my love, they’d never have picked on you” or “if you were coded as a Republican voter, my love, you’d have been safe in redneck territory”. If she was daydreaming that her fiancé would arise from his deathbed transformed into a terrible antediluvian creature of revenge, that would have been a SF/F story.

        But it wasn’t, and Girlfriend’s “if you were a dinosaur you’d be the cute’n’cuddly kind who could maybe sing and get married but they’d marry you to a lady dinosaur not me okay I’d give you up even if we can’t have woman-dino sex just to make sure you were safe” fantasy doesn’t make it one.

        I am an evil, evil person but the news that another delicately evocative tale of human-dino romantic interaction has been nominated for this year’s Hugos makes me very, very happy 🙂

        And at least Chuck Tingle appears to have a sense of humour about the whole situation.

        • Vorkon says:

          I was particularly impressed by this interview with Chuck Tingle on the subject.

          This response, specifically, struck me as a particularly cogent summary of this entire controversy:

          “Don’t know about any puppies but it’s BAD NEWS BEARS if you want to disrupt awards. That is a scoundrel tactic and probably part of Ted Cobbler’s devilman plan. Ted Cobbler is notorious devil and has been seen using dark magic to control puppies around the neighborhood. I do not support the devilman agenda but i think that Space Raptor Butt Invasion proves that LOVE IS REAL and no scoundrels can stop that. Especially not some dumb dogs.”

          The rest of the interview is definitely worth a read too, of course.

          Reject the Devilman agenda!

    • dndnrsn says:

      In regards to the actual story, I liked the way it was written – the way it was structured from paragraph to paragraph didn’t get too precious, as it was only 1000 words. I’ve read a lot of worse short fiction.

      In regards to the cultural angle, I don’t get the whole “oh no there’s MESSAGES in this sci fi, let’s go back to Martian babes with their tits out and ray guns and shit” complaints. There’s been plenty of political/social messages in sci fi before, and both sides in the US have had a crack at it. The Puppies are being disingenuous when they claim that political/social messages are a new thing, or a left-wing thing.

      In regards to it getting an award, if you gave me the story without any background, and asked me what genre it is … I wouldn’t say “science fiction”. It’s a bit of short fiction with a message to it. Hardly the abomination the Puppies seem to think it is. But if it’s sci fi, what isn’t? There’s plenty of awards for short stories out there.

      I do suspect the “it got nominated because of its message” argument is technically correct, but that says more about science fiction’s yearnings to be Classy and Relevant than a secret left-wing cabal deciding to ruin fun.

      • InferentialDistance says:

        In regards to the cultural angle, I don’t get the whole “oh no there’s MESSAGES in this sci fi, let’s go back to Martian babes with their tits out and ray guns and shit” complaints.

        That is a grossly uncharitable framing of the complaint. The actual complaint is “their MESSAGE fics aren’t any better that our Martian babes with their tits out and ray guns fics, but they shit all over us, the hypocritical bastards”. It’s not a problem that fics have messages. It’s a problem that mediocre fics are getting a pass because MESSAGES, and the condescension surrounding having the “correct” MESSAGES.

      • Leit says:

        I really thought that this had been thoroughly explained here before, and Deiseach even alludes to it in posts in this thread, but let’s go one more time.

        The issue the puppies had was not that there was message in sci-fi. That is, after all, a grand old tradition. It was that only authors who stuck to the approved messages were recognised, and that recognition of craft and story had become secondary to displaying the approved values.

        The virtue signallers, of course, thoroughly denied this.

        The sad puppies have, by now, entirely demonstrated their point. Larry Correia, who ran the original Sad Puppies “campaign” (such as it was, being only the nomination of one book), hasn’t even been involved in last year and this year’s debacles – he’d already conclusively provided proof of his thesis for a couple of years running.

        Unfortunately, last year some complete blithering idiots on the virtue signalling side managed to execute a media campaign accusing the puppies of racism, sexism, poor taste and anything else that they thought might stick. This, along with self-righteous behaviour at the actual award farce ceremony, didn’t sit well with the story fans. And Vox was there with open arms to let them in on his fun.

        So now we have the completely predictable reaction.

        • Anonymous says:

          that recognition of craft and story had become secondary to displaying the approved values.

          The sad puppies also railed against judging works on the basis of mastery of craft and story. That’s too elitist and literary or something. Instead, apparently the only proper way to determine what’s good is to see what sells the most. Which seems pointless since selling books is very much its own reward.

          Insert obligatory something something signaling something something status something something sexual fitness here.

          • InferentialDistance says:

            The sad puppies also railed against judging works on the basis of mastery of craft and story.

            That’s the first time I’ve heard that. Do you happen to have a citation?

          • Anonymous says:

            The original rallying cry, with politics as a decidedly secondary issue, was that pulp fiction authors couldn’t get no respect. For reference, wikipedia defines ‘pulp fiction’ as “run-of-the-mill low quality literature”.

            See e.g.

            http://monsterhunternation.com/2013/01/16/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo-part-2-a-very-special-message/

          • suntzuanime says:

            Pulp fiction can’t even get respect from Wikipedia.

          • Nornagest says:

            That’s the historical meaning. But pulp, these days, is also a genre: one mostly written by people who grew up on cheap SF/F and liked its tropes.

          • Anonymous says:

            Regardless, I think it’s fair to say that the sad puppies, or at least Larry Correia, had significant disputes with traditional ideals of literary merit being used to judge science fiction and fantasy for the purpose of the Hugo Awards.

            I think it is also fair to say that there were and are people that in good faith believe that the traditional ideas of literary merit are valid as applied to SFF and an appropriate way to judge works when voting in the Hugo Awards.

            It follows then that Leit’s description was both remarkably uncharitable and significantly inaccurate.

          • Vorkon says:

            If you think that saying “I think it’s fair to say that the sad puppies, or at least Larry Correia, had significant disputes with traditional ideals of literary merit” is the same as saying, “The sad puppies also railed against judging works on the basis of mastery of craft and story,” then Leit isn’t the one being uncharitable here.

            It is fairly obvious from the link you provided alone (though various other things Correia has written confirm this) that Correia’s main argument is that “traditional ideas of literary merit” do not, in fact, revolve around “mastery of craft and story,” and are mostly about “displaying the approved values,” precisely as Leit described.

            You can argue whether or not Correia is correct about this if you like, but trying to argue that he does not, in fact, believe it is willfully misinterpreting his argument.

          • keranih says:

            I’m going to tweek that and say that there was, in days of old, a set of ‘traditional measures for the quality of story’. We no longer use those measures. Because we are no longer in the days of old and tastes change.

            The SJW crowd shifted – by dint of focused voting and control of the media discussion – the measures used to overtly include identity politics and social signaling. Because that was the sort of thing they liked.

            LC, et al, objected to this shift – as this was not the sort of thing they liked. Instead, they/we are attempting to adjust the measurements towards a broader focus on “fun” and “action” and away from moody internal monologues on the landscape.

            The SP theme – if that bag of cats can be said to have a singular theme – is to a) avoid identity-based writing without action and fun and b) if it is not possible to avoid that entirely, at least ensure that the voice of fans who like action and fun is heard and a seat is set for those fans at the table as well.

            “We need more fans to read and vote and get involved” has been a CONSTANT theme on the SP side. Anti-SP, not so much.

          • Anonymous says:

            Larry Correia wrote:

            (show old-timey picture of HP Lovecraft, show old-timey picture of Robert E. Howard, show old-timey picture of Robert E. Howard punching out a Tyrannosaurs Rex while a woman in a chainmail bikini holds onto his leg)

            Even though those guys are totally freaking awesome, and Conan the Barbarian is a thousand times more awesome than the Great Gatsby, you wouldn’t know it by listening to literary snobs.

            Is The Great Gatsby message fiction? What “approved values” does it display?

            There’s one paragraph about politics and many many about the “literarti”, “literary critics”, “College English departments” and similar.

            Larry Correia is above all a partisan of the low brow. Yes, the movement was subsequently latched onto by the histrionic Manicheans who see themselves locked in a epic struggle with the dastardly Social Justice Warriors. But those of us that appreciate well written prose, multidimensional characters that develop over the course of a work, and the development of complex themes have every reason to oppose the Sad Puppies regardless of politics or ideology.

          • keranih says:

            Butt hose of us that appreciate well written prose, multidimensional characters that develop over time, and the development of complex themes have every reason to oppose the Sad Puppies regardless of politics or ideology.

            …have you read Hard Magic or any of the other Grimnoir books? Have you read anything by John Wright?

            I mean, you don’t have to like them, but rejecting them on the grounds of crap writing or simplistic characters is just…inaccurate

          • Vorkon says:

            Yeah, I should have known better than to bother responding to an anon@gmail.

          • Anonymous says:

            @keranih

            …have you read Hard Magic or any of the other Grimnoir books? Have you read anything by John Wright?

            I haven’t. But I’ve read plenty of the “golden era” Science Fiction that he lauds. As I grew older, I eventually had to start being extremely picky about SFF because so much of it is so badly written.

            The sad part is that if the publishers demanded better writing I bet they’d get it.

            I’ll tell you what, if you want to personally vouch for the literary qualities of one of LC or JW’s books I’ll pick it up and read it this weekend.

          • keranih says:

            90% of everything is dreck.

            I will personally say that the Hard Magic series has complex characters and wrestles with hard problems. And is fun and exciting.

            I will also say that John Wright is an exceptional wordsmith, and to check out Awake In The NightLand.

            I will not say that you will like any of them. There have been very well written things that I did not love at all.

          • Randy M says:

            Orson Scott Card is not involved in the Hugo debates in any way I’m aware of (other than probably being likely to be booed by one particular side). He writes a column on his website where it occasionally rants about literary style, though, in a way that I suspect would well describe the Pups laments.

            Specifically, in as much as I can quickly do the argument justice from memory, that many contemporary writers are trying to please critics who do not include such criteria as how clearly a story a told, how coherent the plot, or how believable the characters under “literary quality,” as these make books too accessible to the masses, and if books are easily read, understood, and enjoyed, who’ll need critics to point out what is really going on?
            Think of someone preferring Tolkien to (what my uninformed impression is of) James Joyce or DF Wallace.

            I think Correria et al would posit that what is derided as “pulp” is of better literary qualities in many senses other than “what literary critics like.”

          • Anonymous says:

            Keeping in mind your caveat about you relying someone else’s argument as best you can, I think there are some holes in it.

            First, if you think the genre has any merit at all, and despite claims of entryism I don’t think that’s true of anyone involved on either side, you aren’t going to consider Tolkien pulp.

            Second, believability of characters is an important part of the standard literary package, and it’s absence is one of the serious criticism of pulp. In particular, the claim is that they are all too often populated by one dimensional characters, including but not limited to protagonists that are great at everything they do and omni-benevolent. Do you know anyone in real life that doesn’t have a mix of positive and negative qualities?

            Plot coherency and clarity are things that *can* be played with in literary fiction, but that doesn’t mean they are in every work or that it is necessary to do so in order for a book to be praised for its literary merits.

            There is a case to be made that SFF, since it has to take on the burden of extensive world-building, doesn’t need to or maybe shouldn’t play around with literary devices as much as literary fiction. Things like unreliable narrators or metafiction, for example. I’m not sure that’s true, and I think some great SFF has been experimental in that way, but it’s a plausible point.

            That’s not really what I was talking about though. What I’m saying is that a book that is up for an award should be good or excellent on the bread and butter issues of literary quality. Strong prose and dialogue; evocative descriptions; realistic, multidimensional characters that change in response to events that occur in the book and whose reactions make internal sense; no unintentional plot discontinuities; deus ex machinas kept to a minimum; and so on.

          • Nornagest says:

            His characters were good, but I would not hold up Tolkien as an outstanding example of clear storytelling or tight plotting. He’s also one of the less accessible writers in the SF/F canon in terms of prose style.

            At least in The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is much tighter on all counts, but it’s not generally considered his best work.

      • dndnrsn says:

        @InferentialDistance: OK, I will cop to being uncharitable. However, their presentation of their fiction as apolitical fun-in-space is a little bit dishonest.

        @Leit: The complaint of right-wingers being frozen out, and messages elevated above other things, is probably more legitimate. It’s not as though the entertainment industry in general is that right-wing, socially speaking. I just object to the stance some Puppies have taken that their favoured stories are apolitical.

      • John Schilling says:

        I don’t get the whole “oh no there’s MESSAGES in this sci fi, let’s go back to Martian babes with their tits out and ray guns and shit” complaints.

        That’s not the complaint, and it’s hard for me to believe you don’t know that’s not the complaint.

        Award-winning science fiction has been heavy on MESSAGE from day one; that’s a huge part of what drew people to the genre. But there has always been a tradition, thanks to people like Heinlein and Campbell, that A: the MESSAGE needs to be packaged in a GOOD STORY, or you should have just written an essay so as to waste less of the audience’s time, and B: We as a community ought to be open to all well-packaged and well-argued messages. Also, C: the community outgrew Bare-Titted Martian Babes and Rayguns in the 1930s, except as parody and homage. And this has traditionally been reflected in the awards.

        The complaint is that, over the past decade or so, this traditional tolerance for diversity of thought and high standard for storytelling has been replaced by an insistence on a single MESSAGE to the exclusion of all else.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I’ve acknowledged I was being uncharitable. A moment of weakness.

          However, in regards to “IYWADML” … the problem isn’t the packaging – as far as I’m concerned, it’s a perfectly fine short story. The problem is that it isn’t science fiction.

          • Deiseach says:

            The problem is that it isn’t science fiction.

            That’s exactly what I was arguing with the other guy and not getting across; items in quotation marks are his responses to me.

            “There’s a dinosaur singing on Broadway in it, that makes it SF”

            No, not unless it was a real dinosaur really singing on Broadway. The singing dinosaur bit is all part of the girlfriend’s fantasy and is not intended to be taken seriously at all.

            “The author is an established SF author and has written over fifty SF short stories”.

            Not relevant. Kipling wrote two proper SF stories, that does not mean he’s regarded as a SF author. Wells wrote a history of the world, that does not make him a historian. The writer could write a romance story but that does not make her (unless she switches genres) a romance novelist. This particular story was not SF, whatever her other stories may be.

          • BBA says:

            Cryptonomicon isn’t really SF either, but it got nominated for a Hugo and nobody complained. It’s by an established SF author and feels like SF, and I guess that’s enough. (There’s one fantastic element but it’s completely irrelevant to the plot.)

          • John Schilling says:

            Cryptonomicon isn’t really SF either, but it got nominated for a Hugo and nobody complained

            Alternate History is generally included in the Science Fiction and Fantasy spectrum even without otherwise SFFnal elements, and there’s more than a hint of that in Cryptonomicon. I agree that if it had been written by an author without genre cred it probably wouldn’t have been nominated, but mostly because it wouldn’t have been widely read within fandom.

            Nominating Reamde would have been a clear example of what you are trying to get at, I think, but that didn’t happen.

            Hmm, I do recall Apollo 13 being nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, but the standards are a bit different there.

      • keranih says:

        I’m going to support @dndnrsn just a hair – while I think his interpetation is completely off, it’s also the fairly widely pushed narrative presented by the anti-puppies.

        In more than one instance in the last few years, I have seen people of good intent completely talking past each other on this topic. It can be hard to get accurate information to your conversation/debate partners.

        My sympathies are overwhelmingly with the SP, and even when they aren’t, my distrust and anger towards the SJWs are enough that I have no sympathy for them when they duel with Vox Day.

        But I have seen enough emotionally overwrot pieces from good people on both sides to say that calling this entirely for one side is not actually possible.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I probably get more pro-Puppy than anti-Puppy exposure, though – this hasn’t made it into mainstream sources like the Ants have. The SSC commentariat probably leans pro-SP, although probably not pro-RP.

          And I have definitely seen, not just “their message fic gets promoted, ours gets frozen out” or “their message fic gets promoted even when it isn’t that good” but “their fic is message fic, our fic is neutral fun-in-space”.

          Again, I was being uncharitable. Mea culpa. But with regard to the dinosaur story, it’s not that it’s crappy message sci fi. It’s that it’s not sci fi.

          The message definitely played a role – if Vox Day had written “if you were a dinosaur who’d listened to Derbyshire, my love” where the paleontologist had gotten beaten into a coma by black guys instead of rednecks, it would not have been nominated.

          I should have been more charitable and I should have expressed my position more clearly.

          • Vorkon says:

            And I have definitely seen, not just “their message fic gets promoted, ours gets frozen out” or “their message fic gets promoted even when it isn’t that good” but “their fic is message fic, our fic is neutral fun-in-space”.

            I have no doubt you’ve seen that last message, but I don’t think it’s fair to consider it an accurate representation of the mainstream puppy opinion on the matter. I could find crazy opinions on almost any topic if I looked hard enough, but they’d still be outliers. No one actually believes that the fiction they like never contains political messages, or that fiction with political messages can never be good, and I think that pretty much any statement you find in this vein that isn’t just a snarky two-line angry drive-by comment will spell that out. The problem with the puppy situation is that it’s gotten a lot of people riled up, so there’s a preponderance of snarky two-line angry drive-by comments.

            When you see statements like that, I think it’s mostly shorthand for another problem, which is slightly different from “their message fic gets promoted, ours gets frozen out” or “their message fic gets promoted even when it isn’t that good,” but is far more complex than, “their fic is message fic, our fic is neutral fun-in-space”. They are also trying to say, “neutral fun-in-space will never get promoted, unless the author also promotes their messages, either within their fiction or without.”

            I suppose there is also a side of “they write too much message fic without a good story to back it up, while we write more neutral fun-in-space without a very strong message,” but that’s still a far cry from saying that they never write message fic themselves, or that their more neutral stories never have messages embedded in them. Either way, I think the concern I listed above is mainly what people mean when they say things like that.

          • keranih says:

            I should have been more charitable and I should have expressed my position more clearly.

            It’s all good. You’re fine.

            (At least you’re not one of those morons in the Judean Popular Front who says oh its just silly space stories, why do you care?!?!?)

          • dndnrsn says:

            Plenty of people seem to believe that what they like doesn’t contain political messages. “It’s just a dumb action movie!” type thinking.

            Anyway, who represents the Puppies? It seems to me like the Rabid ones have basically taken the whole thing over.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’m also curious about their antagonism with Scalzi. Is this mostly about his online persona (Twitter activity, etc)?

            Because I’ve read some of his stuff. “Redshirts” was entertaining. “Old Man’s War” series had a decent story – I enjoyed reading them, but I wouldn’t read them again. OK writing, dialogue not so great.

            And it’s like, I don’t see the cutting-edge essjaydoubleyou messages in his work. OMW might have the “aliens are not bad just because they’re different, all people are people even if they have forehead ridges, war isn’t nice” messaging, but Pratchett had that in fantasy in the 90s, and got into feminism later on (and of course did everything involved in writing way better than Scalzi).

            If their allegation was “fun-in-space gets nominations when the author has the right opinions outside of the books”, I could see that, I guess.

          • Vorkon says:

            Yeah, “fun-in-space gets nominations when the author has the right opinions outside of the books” being their main point there is pretty much exactly what I was trying to get across, just put a little more succinctly.

            Also, yes, the antagonism with Scalzi is entirely about his online persona, as far as I’ve been able to tell.

          • keranih says:

            @dndnrsn –

            “Who runs the puppies” is a really interesting question, as one of the traits is a declaration of independence from being run by anyone.

            SP1 and SP2 were Larry Correia’s. End of that second one, he announced himself done with them, having established to his (accountant) satisfaction that the voting logistics of the Hugos were fair, but that the social side of it was a bigoted biased mess.

            SP3 was supposed to be just Brad Torgenson (sp?) who did not build a rec list off just his opinions, but also asked for suggestions. This led to a final list of 5 or so recs for each category (instead of 1-2 as LC had it) and this eventually was cast as “building a slate” so people could vote in lockstep. (This might have made sense to some people. I saw the same people have screaming meltdowns over the SP list in years previous with just 1-2 names on it, with calls to no award anything on that list without even reading it and I agreed with LC that this was never going to be a fair fight.)

            And then there were complications. BT was called up and deployed, which left a leadership hole of sorts. Sarah Hoyt had been intended to help, but she was ill much of the year. And in the middle of all this, professional rabble rouser Vox Day released a list under the ‘Rabid Puppies’ name which over lapped with SP a LOT.

            And then last year the SP/RP lists pretty much swept the nominations and all fandom went to war.

            (Probably the most distressing thing was seeing moderate people who had been ignoring things jumping (or getting dragged) in without a firm grasp of what was going on, and getting *hammered* under the opinions of people who had been fighting about this for three to seven years.)

            (Ok, no, that wasn’t the worst. Annie Bellet’s case was the worst.)

            This year, Kate ‘The Impaler’ Paulk was head Puppy Wrangler, and Vox Day increasingly split off to do his own thing with the Dread Ilk and the Rabid Puppies.

            Have yet to hear who’s the poor dumb sod who’ll take it for SP 5.

          • keranih says:

            And yeah, Scalzi’s feud with LC and the rest of the SP related sorts is personal/political, and not so much literary.

            Scalzi gets a lot of grief because besides saying intemperate things on twitter, his Hugo winning novel Redshirts is pretty much everything the SJWs say they hate about SF, he self promotes pretty well on the internet and took advantage of being one of the first SFF writers to do so, *and* he stayed with Tor, a publishing house whose head SF editors are *heavily* affiliated with the anti-SP side, won tons and tons of Hugo awards, and who have been leading the charge to change the Hugo voting rules to prevent any future populist upset.

            IMO, the worst thing is that he’s a pretty talented writer who has a quick flip to annoying self righteous ass. Which as far as mortal sins go, is fairly weak tea.

          • dndnrsn says:

            What’s supposedly objectionable about “Redshirts”?

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m also curious about their antagonism with Scalzi. Is this mostly about his online persona (Twitter activity, etc)?

            His online activity and his tenure as president of the SFFWA

            Old Man’s War and possibly Redshirts were written when he was just a guy who wrote fun adventure stories set in outer space. At a minimum, he was able to channel that guy for Redshirts.

            But he was also the SFFWA president when the organization kicked out future rabid puppymaster Vox Day and made a number of decisions that were perceived as caving in to, or outright endorsing, the militant social justice wing of fandom. And, yeah, his online persona.

            Scalzi was one of the lesser SJW targets during Racefail ’09, and while I do not know I do believe that he made the professional decision to adopt a persona as a Champion of Social Justice to insulate himself against further attacks. Or maybe he actually believes the stuff. But it’s the role he’s playing whether he believes it or not, and the way he plays it gives me the clear impression that he wants people like me to crawl back under our rock and disappear from polite society.

            I am quite happy to return the sentiment. And having played that role even from the minor bully pulpit of the SFFWA presidency, elevates his threat profile.

          • Vorkon says:

            Oh, there’s nothing at all objectionable about Redshirts. It’s just that the puppies are convinced that if someone other than Scalzi had written something exactly like it, it would be decried as the same sort of “low brow” nonsense that people like the anon@gmail in the thread above this one believe don’t deserve awards, and must be defended against at all costs.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @dndsnrn: “I’m also curious about their antagonism with Scalzi. Is this mostly about his online persona (Twitter activity, etc)?”

            That’s my read on it. Scalzi loves to jump into fights and when he does so it’s with the sort of snarky, dismissive tone that absolutely infuriates people on the other side. Gasoline on the fire.

            (He’s also an old-school veteran of alt.* USENET groups, which might explain why he’s so good at stoking flamewars.)

          • Anonymous says:

            FWIW as said anon@gmail, while I haven’t read Redshirts I did read Old Man’s War and I don’t think it deserved any literary awards. It was pretty pulpy as I recall.

          • tmk says:

            As a bit of an outsider: If they think there is too much politics in SciFi awards, how does it make sense to fill the nominations with candidate that are definitely there for political reasons?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Fighting back sometimes ultimately serves the cause of peace better than surrendering.

          • John Schilling says:

            @tmk: The Sad Puppy position is roughly that the problem is caused by SJW entryists who think their numbers and echo-chamber collusion have enabled them to claim this space for their own; if a more explicitly organized native group can block them from doing so, the SJWs will mostly give up go away and we can revert to an apolitical nomination process with less overtly and one-sidedly politicized winners. Getting from here to there may require in the short term, nominating either anti-SJ works or at least explicitly-not-SJ works, otherwise the SJW entryists will just unite behind whatever SJ-friendly work winds up on the ballot.

            The Rabid Puppy position is that it’s too late for that, the SJW contingent is dug in and never going away, and there’s nothing left but to scorch the earth and deny them victory. At some future time, some group of fans might be able to create a way to award the best SF writing of the year (general fannish consensus), without having to deal with the Hugos falsely claiming that namespace and the reputation that goes with it.

          • tmk says:

            @suntzuanime: Well, that is the problem I have with anti-SJW. It’s just about fighting the evil SJWs at any cost. I don’t see a consistent ideology or any kind of moral stance behind it. It’s also too poorly defined who and what is “SJW”. It’s an easy label to throw around.

            When the someone from one side is being generally unkind it’s “fun to watch” and they deserve it. When someone some the other side does, it proves they are evil and impossible to reason with.

            @John Schilling: First, I am not convinced that “entryism” is a real thing, or that whatever it is has been shown to be bad.

            Is it true that the “SJWs” are newcommers and the “Puppies” are natives? Especially the rabid puppies looks like a group that showed up as an organized invasion. There seems to be few established authors among the puppies in general. I have the impression that SF has long been quite liberal/libertarian but not very focused on politics. If the puppies represented mainstream SF, you would expect them to get more support from authors or are apolitical or centrist.

            I can believe that progressives have been particularily effective in controlling the awards for some years. But are they invaders, and not progressives that had existed in SF for a long time?

            Is it possible that before social media people could imagine that the SF world as a whole was just like themselves, and with the sudden transparency people start seeing things they disagree with?

            I suspect if you drive out any accused “SJWs” to create a world of pure science fiction, you will actually end up with nothing but right-wing politics. It’s too tempting for a movement like this to only count themselves as pure fans and dismiss anyone else as biased.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I don’t agree with how they’re going about things here, but there’s nothing in principle contradictory about it.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Well, that is the problem I have with anti-SJW. It’s just about fighting the evil SJWs at any cost.

            I don’t know what you’d expect of someone who defines themselves as anti-something other than acting against that something.

            I don’t see a consistent ideology

            What’s wrong with that?

            or any kind of moral stance behind it.

            It’s pretty simple, “these guys are messing with our fun/jobs/lifestyle for no good (enough) reason, these guys are assholes”.

            When the someone from one side is being generally unkind it’s “fun to watch” and they deserve it. When someone some the other side does, it proves they are evil and impossible to reason with.

            Such is the way of tribalism. Of course, there’s two issues with this:

            First, not all unkindness is made equal, though the trend might be that of permanent escalation, it’s nowhere near there yet, and it’s up to you to determine which is worse.

            Second, in big conflicts in which perfect coordination of everyone involved is impossible, unkindness is inevitable. What’s sadly not inevitable is kindness and compassion. It’s again up to you to determine which side has more of it, if any.

            Is it true that the “SJWs” are newcommers and the “Puppies” are natives?

            I don’t think so. I’m not sure why it matters… oh, right, the “entryism” claim. Yeah, I don’t think that applies to that case.

            I suspect if you drive out any accused “SJWs” to create a world of pure science fiction, you will actually end up with nothing but right-wing politics. It’s too tempting for a movement like this to only count themselves as pure fans and dismiss anyone else as biased.

            Of course it’s a risk, there’s no doubt that if the balance is changed back, the cons will become (even bigger) assholes just like the progs did the moment they got power, just like the Puritans did back in the day (cross-referencing to Scott’s review, yay!).

            Perhaps this is because I’m not very invested in SF Fandom, but it seems to me like the only positive place the Hugos can go from here is death. They’ve been broken, the man behind the curtain has been exposed: It can’t be Serious Award, it can’t be a People’s Award, it’s the award for a bunch of dudes jerking off each other by buying a 40 buck subscription to a con in god knows where, whether that bunch of dudes are SJWs, Puppies of the sad kind, or Vox Dei and pals, it makes very little difference.

          • keranih says:

            Well, that is the problem I have with anti-SJW. It’s just about fighting the evil SJWs at any cost. I don’t see a consistent ideology or any kind of moral stance behind it.

            A good point, but not entirely relevant. The point for the SP is not “purge SF of evil SJWs” – okay, people have said a lot of intemperate things in the heat, but no, purging is not Our Shtick.

            SP wants space/open fields for everyone who claims to be a SFF fan/writer/player in the pool. No membership cards. No gatekeepers. The reason why we say “get rid of the SJWs/CHORFs/etc” is because of a conviction (born of experience in the last decade) that the SJWs do like purges, and will force out everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

            SP is made up of a variety of ideologies, and many disagree and/or don’t fancy what the other likes. The unity is “everyone can play.” Oh, and “We don’t like the SJWs because they don’t know how to tolerate stuff they don’t like.”

            Is it true that the “SJWs” are newcommers and the “Puppies” are natives?

            Yes. (And also, no.)

            I have the impression that SF has long been quite liberal/libertarian but not very focused on politics. If the puppies represented mainstream SF, you would expect them to get more support from authors or are apolitical or centrist.

            You’ve missed the back story, which has to do with the rise and consolidation of New York publishing houses, the shrinking of the traditional market, the rise of indie publishing, and the pretty near complete capture of the publishing industry by NE Blue Tribe elites. Followed by the entry of SJWs into those publishing fields, and the widespread use of economics and social shaming to push conservative & moderate writers out of traditional publishing.

            Moderate writers with contracts have stayed out of the picture because they had everything to lose. Meanwhile, “established” writers on the SJW side have been of varying levels of establishment – beloved of critics does not equal earning out your advance.

            Leftist domination of SFF publishing has been a given for a long time. However, until about 10-15 years ago, that has been the form of a majority, not of near complete control. The rise of SJW focus on identity politics and the purging of those who disagree has led to the current situation. *That* is new, and everyone involved agrees that it is new. There is just disagreement over it being a good thing or not.

            It’s too tempting for a movement like this to only count themselves as pure fans and dismiss anyone else as biased.

            Oh, absolutely an issue. I agree. And something to be guarded against, just as we should reject Marvel vs DC or Trek vs SW conflicts as being all defining.

            SP isn’t there yet. The CHORFs are scrambling to hold on to their positions as TruFans. The SJWs are well past that and into “we are true fans and you aren’t even proper humans.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @tmk

            It’s not particularly hard to spot an SJW. If they talk about “welcoming” and “inclusiveness” and “diversity”, those are SJW tells. If they use those as an excuse to _exclude_, they’re certainly SJWs. If they judge books by the color and gender of the author (white and male being bad), they’re definitely SJWs. If they judge books by the color and gender and sexual preferences of the characters, they’re almost certainly SJWs. If they talk seriously about “microaggressions”, they’re probably SJWs. If they claim racism or sexism requires societal power, they’re SJWs. They’ve got this whole language and whole set of beliefs which defines them as SJWs; there’s no secret about it. The only question is whether you’ve found a true believer or merely someone who has fallen under their influence.

          • Zorgon says:

            Agreed with The Nybbler, with the caveat that some of those phenomena are clear markers while others are indicative of influence – for example, “racism or sexism requires societal power” is often expressed by SJ-influenced people rather than outright SJWs, not least as it’s such a sacred cow to them that even mentioning either of those words in the wrong context is enough to spark a full-on SJ shitfit, so SJ-adjacent people tend to police their language.

            Meanwhile, “judge books by the color and gender of the author” is much rarer and far less likely to pass without comment. A lot of SJ-adjacent people have a basic concept of fairness that is at odds with that particular bit of blatant bigotry. It’s one thing to let what appears to be a fairly academic argument over definitions pass, but it’s quite another to take part in what to most people is pretty blatant segregation.

          • tmk says:

            @Nybbler: On one hand “SJW” is defined widely as anyone who talks about “welcoming”, “inclusiveness” and “diversity” etc., on the other hand it’s defined narrowly as bullies who hate free speech. And people switch between the two definitions at will in the same argument. This is why it feels like an ideological purge to me. It’s a long list of forbidden topics. Anyone who has any sympathy for quite mainstream concepts like “inclusiveness” must be removed and replaced with the pure.

          • Anonymous says:

            Make sure you check under your bed every night before you go to sleep. SJWs can be anywhere!

          • The Nybbler says:

            @tmk
            No, I’m not playing motte-and-bailey with the definition of SJW. Talking about “welcoming” and “inclusiveness” and “diversity” is a tell, not a definition. “Welcoming” is a fairly strong tell; only SJWs and the SJ-influenced use it. “Diversity” is a weak tell on its own; it is used by a wide variety of groups, and it’s used in the “not a white male” meaning by non-SJWs as well. “Inclusiveness” is a fairly strong tell. But even all three don’t make an SJW, they’re just indicators.

      • Deiseach says:

        I don’t think the Puppies are campaigning for “Martian babes with tits out and rayguns” and that’s a very dismissive attitude. I happen to like Martian babes (tits in or out or no tits at all, see Dejah Thoris) and if ray guns fit the milieu, then let there be ray guns – or blasters, or phasers.

        The complaint was that non-SF stories were being nominated and awarded, and there was a whole self-congratulatory aura of “we are going to be sure to include and represent [whole set of contemporary shibboleths]” which was perceived to be privileging “story that ticks boxes of political correctness” over “story that is based on being a story first and any messages second or not at all”.

        A “Martian babe with tits out and ray guns” story would fit the new Hugo template, as long as the Martian babe was A Strong Female Figure, or This Is A Story About Space Lesbians In Space Being Lesbianically Space Lesbians, Did I Mention She’s A Lesbian, Don’t Worry I’ll Tell You Every Third Paragraph This Martian Babe With A Ray Gun Is A Space Lesbian.

        I don’t care tuppence if the comatose fiancé in “Dinosaur” is male, trans, nonbinary, POC, gay, straight, bi, pan or poly. I do care that it’s not a SF story and should therefore not have been nominated for a SF award. But to make that complaint apparently leaves me open to charges of being racist, sexist, homophobic, and wanting to see the return of slavery and burning people at the stake.

        • My problem is that puppy complaints about the awfulness of the Hugos seem to rest on two stories, one of which was only nominated rather than winning.

          I’m sympathetic in principle to their claim that nothing they like is getting nominated, the problem (from reading a moderate amount of last year’s nominees is that what they like isn’t anything I want.

          More exactly, I had a decent amount of fun reading the Butcher novel, possibly because I don’t read much of that sort of thing. It was pretty good D&D flavored fantasy.

          The 2015 novelettes were so dire (and I include “The Day The World Turned Upside Down”, which was non-puppy) were so dire that I was ready to give up on the human race for several days until I realized I was overdoing it.

          I liked “Totaled” but it was good, not excellent.

          Admittedly, I liked the Marko Kloos trilogy (one volume from it was on the puppy slate, but Kloos withdrew it) quite a bit, but it seems to me that the puppies just don’t have very good fiction to compete with. Where is their current Heinlein?

          In re the Kloos, it’s excellent for combat and emotion, but there are serious defects in the world-building. You’ve been warned.

          Anyway, I’m suggesting that the ssc commentariat start recommending their favorite sf from the past calendar year. Maybe there’s better from the puppy side than I’ve noticed. Maybe there’s good rationalist stuff beyond the obvious choices. Maybe there’s more or less SJW material than would be welcome even here. And I’ll try to remember to repeat this in the next OT.

          Meanwhile, I”m recommending Jo Walton’s The Just City, Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown, and Ada Palmer’s Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok.

          As for John Wright, let’s just say he isn’t my author. I made several tries at reading _The Golden Age_, which seemed like something I’d like, but I just couldn’t get into it.

          By coincidence, I was reading his “Judgement Eve” (2010) during that Hugo period, and I can’t abide the prose. It was like taking several Weird Tales writers’ stories and putting them into a blender.

  6. Anonymous says:

    Ребята, знаете вы может какою-то хорошу русскую музыку? Мой русски плоха, и я хочу научится говорить более хорошо. Мне нравитса метал, рок и етничная музыка, межды инными.

    • Nita says:

      А, рашн мюзик. Аф кос, аф кос. I hope you’ll excuse the utter lack of metal.

      1. An old song about slowly dying on the battlefield:

      Лесоповал – Чёрный ворон (solo)
      Кубанский Казачий Хор – Чёрный ворон (choir)
      Extra: the lyrics, with a poetic translation.

      2. A late Soviet era song about the dreams of astronauts:

      Земляне – Трава у дома
      You can shout along with the chorus and improve your Russian Rs.

      3. A couple of post-Soviet songs about romance:

      Валерий Сюткин – 7 тысяч над землей
      Валерий Сюткин / Браво – Я то, что надо
      These have nicely straightforward and clearly articulated lyrics.

      4. And a couple of modern songs about love and loss:

      Земфира – Хочешь?
      This one teaches a useful sentence template – “Do you want X?” E.g.:
      Do you want some sweet oranges?
      Do you want me to read you a story?
      Do you want me to kill the neighbours?
      Extra: the lyrics with a literal translation.

      Бумбокс – Та, что
      This one’s good for the subjunctive mood (“I wish I knew X” / “If I only I could Y”). Also includes casual language and a literary reference.

      Hmm, these last two are kind of sad. So, here’s a playful folk song about pretending to beat your wife to placate your mother:

      Reelroadъ – Гуляю, гуляю (concert video)
      Reelroadъ – Гуляю, гуляю (studio mp3)
      Note: it features an old-fashioned rural dialect instead of standard modern Russian.

  7. anon says:

    Speaking of forums and anonymity, there’s a rationalist board on 8chan now, /ratanon/.
    There’s an Eliezer/Hanson/Tay fic that’s pretty epic, and some quality shitposting.

  8. Shion Arita says:

    Can someone explain the U.S. voting primaries to me in a sensible way? I look for information, but I’m not really getting the kind of info I need to determine likelihoods of certain people winning given the current scores. I really don’t understand why the following isn’t the format that’s used to describe this, because it’s what makes most sense to me. I’ll use the democratic race as an exmaple.

    The format I think makes sense:

    X% of the total voting points across the nation have been cast, and 100-X% still remain to be determined.
    Clinton has received Y% of the cast points and Sanders has recieved 100-Y%.
    Clinton needs to receive W% of the remaining points to win the nomination, and Sanders needs to receive Z% to win the nomination.

    So, by comparing Y to W and Z while taking X into account, it should be easy to see how strongly votes would have to deviate from how they have gone up to this point for the current underdog (Sanders) to win. My guess is that they would have to deviate very strongly, but again I haven’t been able to see the data in this format or anything I can easily convert to it.

    • Protagoras says:

      Have you checked out fivethirtyeight.com? Some of their articles discuss the numbers you seem to be looking for.

      • Chalid says:

        fivethirtyeight.com is always the right place to start for basic quantitative analysis of US elections.

    • BBA says:

      The “points” are people (delegates to the National Convention), most of whom are required to vote for a certain candidate, but some of whom can vote for whoever they want. The Democratic party has a relatively large number of unbound delegates (“superdelegates”) and Clinton’s narrow lead among pledged delegates becomes nearly insurmountable when you consider that nearly all of the superdelegates support her.

      The Democratic party requires delegates to be pledged proportionately to the votes for each candidate in the primary (either by state or by congressional district). The Republican party essentially leaves it up to states to decide how they want to assign delegates to candidates, from purely proportional to winner take all.

      And the number of delegates per state isn’t strictly proportional to the population, so adding up every vote won’t necessarily tell you who wins.

      tl;dr it’s a huge confusing mess and it’s not easy to make a one-line summary of it.

      • Shion Arita says:

        Thanks. That makes sense

        I guess here’s the real question, given that information.

        What fraction of the delegates have already ‘committed’ their votes, as in we know what is going to happen/has happened (this includes superdelegates that we know reasonably well how they will vote)? or to ask the converse, what fraction are up in the air (they either are superdels where we do not reasonably know their choice or they are regular dels where the votes determining them have not yet occurred)?

        and what fraction of the delegates are ‘committed’ to clinton vs sanders?

        what fraction of the remaining would have to be committed to sanders for sanders tow in

        • brad says:

          http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary-calendar-and-results.html

          Because Sanders supporters flipped out about it, they no longer include superdelegates in the bar chart, but they are easy enough to add back in. Clinton has 1640 pledged delegates and 519 likely superdelegates, for a total of 2159 delegates. She needs 224 more to secure the nomination. California alone has 546 pledged delegates at stake. The democratic nomination is already decided.

          • Chalid says:

            Yes, Clinton is the nominee barring a really major disqualifying event, e.g. being indicted for a crime, or her having a heart attack.

        • notes says:

          Most of the delegates are required to vote, at the convention, for the nominee who won their [state/county/congressional district], with the rules dependent on their state. This requirement can stem (usually unenforceably) from state law, and enforceably from the nominating convention’s rules, but typically binds them to vote this way only on the first or second ballot at the convention; afterward, they may vote their conscience. Bear in mind that the nominating convention’s rules will not be set until roughly a week before, and may be changed during the convention: if the delegates really want to do so, they can unbind everyone and nominate whom they please.

          Many of the unbound delegates (n.b., all superdelegates are not bound) have made announcements that they intend to vote for a particular nominee, or in accordance with who wins their [state/county/congressional district]; these announcements are not binding, but are indicative of which way the wind’s blowing.

          More than enough unbound delegates have publicly committed to Clinton that a Sanders nomination would require her to lose CA and NJ entirely, and not pick up further superdelegates.

          Realistically, Clinton only loses the nomination if her delegates start defecting, and it would take a strong reason to motivate that. Death, an indictment, a heart attack — little less would do it, and perhaps not even the latter two would cause it.

          • keranih says:

            Death, an indictment, a heart attack — little less would do it, and perhaps not even the latter two would cause it.

            Clinton’s a Democrat who went to school in Chicago. I think you should be open to the possibility that none of the three would be sufficient for her to not get the nomination.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Didn’t superdelegates defect from clinton eight years ago, for reasons less strong than death or indictment?

          • Aegeus says:

            Superdelegates defected because Obama was winning the popular vote. That’s pretty normal – superdelegates have never “stolen” the nomination from someone who won the popular vote. But Sanders getting a lead in the popular vote is probably less likely than Clinton having a heart attack.

  9. anon says:

    I really, really don’t like reddit’s layout but if someone made a phpBB forum/classic forum I would definitely use that.

  10. BBA says:

    In the last open thread a Kickstarter for “Social Autopsy” was linked, with the consensus being that it was a dangerous doxxing app with a chilling effect on free speech or possibly a hoax.

    New shit has come to light. It involves the Ants, so up front you know you aren’t going to get an unbiased source anywhere. It’s been discussed in the culture war thread on the subreddit, which is already generating more heat than light. I hesitate to link anything here, or express any opinion on the matter for fear of setting off a flame war, but we’ve talked about it here before and I feel compelled to mention that there’s more to it than we saw before.

    Suffice it to say I think everyone involved in this controversy is lying, which makes it extremely hard to figure out what’s really going on.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I’m sitting on the sidelines enjoying my popcorn with that one. Some of the ants seem to think Owens is sincere if naive, but I’m not buying it. I’ve also seen the opinion that she’s running a false flag on behalf of the ants, which seems farfetched but possible; one of the things Owens is doing now is accusing LW1 of setting a pack of her twitter followers to harass her.

      As far as I can tell, however this comes out, unless it turns out she’s literally one of Milo’s 40 interns, it’s good for “my” side of the culture war.

      • Manpanzee says:

        I find the whole thing really fascinating, too. It’s such a mystery.

        My best guess is that Owens is an earnest, well-meaning muggle who thinks she’s a lot smarter than she actually is. I think that she’s correct that she’s been a victim of some sketchy behavior from some prominent, controversial SJ figures — the allegations against Jesse Singal seemed particularly damning to my eyes. And it would be nice if this exposure would help change some minds.

        However, I also think Owens is doing the normal human thing of blaming everyone but herself for her own failures. Social Autopsy really did seem like a horrendous idea, and I know that a ton of the people trying to shut it down were doing so in good faith. Owens seems to have made the leap from “Some of the people who caused me to fail were unethical conspirators” to “Unethical conspirators are the entire reason I failed”. Unfortunately, her attempts to prove the latter claim make her seem not very self-aware, which I think is going to limit her persuasive power to only people who were already predisposed to believe her.

        • Deiseach says:

          I thought Owens was a con artist (a site that asks for the names of professionals who can have hate speech/cyberbullying tied to their names on a database sounds like a “nice professional reputation you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it” protection racket) but reading some of her own words makes me think she is, as you say, sincere.

          But stunningly full of her own self-importance and with little to no idea of what her proposed database sounds like, i.e. a blackmail repository, and no apparent awareness of doxing and how it’s been used. I’m not surprised it failed to get off the ground because honestly? “we will strip away the power of anonymous online bullies by uncritically accepting anonymous online accusations that so-and-so is a cyberbully at face value and using them to put up names of real people linked with the alleged offending material” – how is this supposed to be anything anyone with a shred of sanity will invest in, as it leaves them wide open to be sued into well-deserved oblivion for libel?

        • DrBeat says:

          It doesn’t matter if unethical conspirators were the entire reason she failed, or only a small part of it. The actions of the unethical conspirators and the fact they are indeed shown to BE unethical conspirators is what matters, not the relative percentage of responsibility for the failure of her Kickstarter.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Well, the question is, it matters for what purpose? If you’re trying to finally pin some crimes on http://pastebin.com/mUbZd8FU that will stick, that’s what matters. (Although if none of the other crimes have stuck, not too hopeful about this one.) But if you actually care about Candace Owens and Social Autopsy, you have to care about other factors that may be contributing to a lack of success.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          This is a very good description of Owens. She didn’t know what she didn’t know, and tried to stake herself out as King of a brand-new Hill. Then she was stunned to find out there are a bunch of other people who already think themselves Kings of that Hill going back years. And everyone is too proud to back down.

          Those messages from Jesse Singal to Owens are downright creepy, though. He’s pretending to be on her side and encouraging her to delay writing her article because his is going to come out and have more more exposure, all the while knowing he was going to write about how horrible her whole company was.

          Read his article about Owens first, and then read the private conversation he was having with her to get information before it came out, and he comes across as a psychopath who is faking friendship to get information.

          • Deiseach says:

            he comes across as a psychopath who is faking friendship to get information

            But that’s what journalists do: they get in close to the subject, get them to lower their barriers in order to get the most access, and pump them for every last scrap of information for the story. Look at the kind of things journalists write about “So I had to pretend to be really sympathetic to this horrible murderer, even though his crimes made me sick, to get him to talk for the series of articles in the paper/my book”:

            Within a month of MacDonald’s conviction, the journalist began a series of letters. Malcolm quotes McGinniss’ expressions of sympathy—”any fool can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial…it was utter madness”—as well as his tacit assurances that the book would help win his release: “it’s a hell of a thing—spend the summer making a new friend and the bastards come and lock him up. But not for long, Jeffrey—not for long.”

            Malcolm states that in fact McGinniss had become swiftly and easily convinced of MacDonald’s guilt during the trial. She also describes how, in the same months that he wrote warm letters to the now-jailed MacDonald, he was also writing to his editor Morgan Entrekin, discussing the technical problem of not spoiling his work’s effect by making MacDonald, in the book, appear “too loathsome too soon.” Throughout the years of interviews, as Malcolm writes, “MacDonald imagined he was ‘helping’ McGinniss write a book exonerating him of his crime.” What she terms MacDonald’s “dehoaxing” took place in “a particularly dramatic and cruel manner”—a 1983 taping of the CBS news program 60 Minutes. As host Mike Wallace read aloud portions of the now-completed Fatal Vision, the cameras broadcast MacDonald’s look of “shock and utter discomposure.”

            Journalists and TV/Radio interviewers, whether it’s a serious current affairs programme or a chat show, are not your friends. They are not on your side, even if they claim they want to tell ‘the real story’ and need ‘your side of it’. They are there for the story, nothing else.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            But this person isn’t a murderer or a terrorist. This is a person with possibly good faith intentions who was pursuing a bad idea, and Singal went out of his way to humiliate her for it.

          • suntzuanime says:

            But the ethics of the situation are the same whether it’s a psychopath who opposes http://pastebin.com/iYDSakwL or a mere murderer or terrorist. It’s seriously wrong to come under guise of false friendship in order to do someone harm to benefit yourself, and if that’s what’s normal in journalism, journalism is deranged.

    • Peter says:

      Oh my! I did a little googling, and, as you say, figuring out what’s really going on through the fog of culture war is hard, but it’s well worth reading up on nonetheless.

    • dndnrsn says:

      Watching the whole Ants affair from the sidelines, it more and more resembles one of those books/movies with a twist ending that makes the whole thing different reading/watching it over again.

      The thing that seems oddest to me is that Owens says she didn’t know about the Ants thing, didn’t know what doxing was, and seems generally uninformed about trends in online shitshows over the past few years. But these are hardly top-secret Internet People-only things … the Ants have made their way into mainstream-left news sites, for instance. It comes off a bit like a character in a Jack Chick comic saying “Jesus? Who’s that?”

      Further cemented in my conclusion that it’s impossible to tell who’s trustworthy, more than enough awfulness to go around, etc.

      • InferentialDistance says:

        A lot of things make it into mainstream-left news sites, that doesn’t mean it gets far in terms of public consciousness in an absolute sense (there’s too much for everything to be memorable). Owens seems to be focussed on bullying of minors, of which the ants are mostly orthogonal (the major antagonists are mid-20s who talk shit on Twitter and Gaming Journalism) so I wouldn’t be surprised by someone who’s apparently used to doing object-level activism about high schools being unaware of a mostly irrelevant culture war being fought on the internet, about the internet.

        • dndnrsn says:

          The Kickstarter, though, seemed to be focusing on harassment in general, or harassment of women in specific, and had a real “women-in-tech” angle to it. A few minutes of Googling about online harassment would have brought this stuff up.

          She comes off as savvy in some ways but not in others, in a combination that seems kind of strange.

          • InferentialDistance says:

            In Owens own words, the kickstarter was supposed to be a proof-of-concept and beta for a version for minors:

            To clarify, I built this database with minors in mind.

            We weren’t so quick to assume that everyone in the world would though, so we knew that we first had to launch and actually EXIST first. As a database dedicated to adults, so that parents would see it and get an understanding for how effective it might be for children.

            And no, googling “online harassment” would not bring this stuff up. There’s a metric fuckton of stuff about cyberbullying, women in tech (etc…) that predates the ants. And more stuff coming out that doesn’t mention the ants either.

          • dndnrsn says:

            A Google for “online harassment” brings up nothing ants based, “online harassment” + “women in tech” has something Ant-related as the fifth hit. I will acknowledge that my reading habits are adjacent to the whole thing more than is the norm.

            If she meant it as a demo of something that was supposed to target the sort of people who do stuff like drive teenagers to suicide … perhaps I’m reading too much into the “women in tech” sheen the Kickstarter had.

          • Deiseach says:

            That Kickstarter appeal was all giggling about girliness and never mentioned minors, not even in a “if this works, we’ll expand it to a version to protect the children”.

            The more I see quoted from her, the more I’m thinking she was trying to pull a fast one and got burned and is now throwing everything she can at it to make herself sound innocent (this was for women! for everyone! for kids – won’t somebody think of the children?)

          • InferentialDistance says:

            Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. A person who does object-level anti-bullying activism (i.e. talking to parents and teachers of high schoolers) can be ignorant of internet drama. An individual can be arrogant enough to think they can solve one problem (internet harassment) in order to facilitate solving another (bullying in high schools). Mentioning the for-kids version in the kickstarter is risky because you don’t have your proof-of-concept to show it’s safe yet.

          • dndnrsn says:

            So, the leading possibilities are:

            1. Incompetence. She wanted to do something against cyberbulling of the “14-year-old girl sends nude to boy she likes, he spreads it around, her life becomes a nightmare” variety, but she ran a Kickstarter supposedly against online harassment of the variety we know about (Twitter mobbing, doxing, etc) with a sheen of “women in tech yay!” thrown on, so if it worked she could say “now let’s do this, but with kids”.

            Didn’t do her homework, didn’t know what she was getting into, etc. Has some weird interactions with activists and journalists, and the timing of that and the abuse she received leads her to conclude that she has uncovered a false-flag self-victimization operation, which plays to the Ant narrative. Depending on who you believe, she is right, or she has been gulled by the Ants.

            I think you’re right, upon reflection, and this is the most likely. It makes more sense than the other two options.

            2. Malice. Ran a Kickstarter intended to take advantage of the whole women-in-tech-online-harassment-bad zeitgeist, get the money, deliver a subpar product or just disappear. The “it was about kids!” thing is just a cover.

            Then she has a run-in, as above, and either becomes seriously convinced she’s uncovered something, or comes up with that as a smokescreen.

            This one seems less plausible, because the whole thing being a scam seems not to line up with her life story. And if she was a scammer, why use her real identity, for a relatively small monetary gain?

            Still more likely than

            3. Ants False-Flag. This was all set up to have a non-Ant support the whole “all the harassment is fake, they just want sympathy and sweet Patreon dollars and to hate nerds” narrative.

            This one makes the least sense, because there’s no given reason why she, a real person, would be involved in this, no reason why the contact with the activists and journalist would happen the way they did, etc.

            The open question is “was her contact with the activists and the journalist as weird and off-putting as she says it was, and if so, why?” (There’s probably no proving who was behind the harassment).

    • Zorgon says:

      The most important thing to come out of this is that absolutely any suggestion that the folks who have been hounding Candace Owens ever “listen and believe” black and female victims is now completely absurd.

      Every word out of her mouth could be a lie and this whole situation would still be blatant evidence that SJWs only care about abuse when it happens white middle class women.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        Every word out of her mouth could be a lie and this whole situation would still be blatant evidence that SJWs only care about abuse when it happens white middle class women.

        That is both too uncharitable and too charitable, it applies only to women who say things that confirm their opinions, race and class is 100% incidental.

        • Zorgon says:

          I dunno. I could grant you race, but they’re always middle class. Never met a single working-class SJW in my life, never expect to either.

          • Anonymous says:

            I don’t know exactly what you consider working class, but you know how there’s a sort of labor/gentry divide in the tech world between IT and programming? I know a server monkey that screams low class to me — and if he isn’t exactly a SJW, he’s got to be close. A goon, naturally.

  11. sweeneyrod says:

    LWers:

    Do the Sequences make any interesting points that Thinking, Fast and Slow and Language in Thought and Action don’t?

  12. Merzbot says:

    Psychiatry side of SSC: How do I determine a safe (i.e., unlikely to cause significant tolerance or dependence) usage frequency for benzodiazapines? I have Klonopin prescribed “take as needed” for social anxiety. But the thing is, I need to interact with humans every day. So “as needed” there would probably mean “every day,” but that sounds like a bad idea.

    (No replies to this comment will be construed as medical advice.)

    I know I could just ask my psychiatrist, but if there was a way I could actually determine this myself it would be more helpful.

  13. Anonymous says:

    The Line Between Professor and Predator Isn’t Always So Clear

    Some contrarianism printed in an unlikely place.

  14. onyomi says:

    A general comment: in this OT there’s a thread suggesting new ways of categorizing political ideologies and there are also frequent complaints about people conflating “leftists” with “liberals” with “progressives” with Democrats, etc. etc. I haven’t read it all and don’t have an opinion on any specific proposals there.

    My question is: does anyone have trouble actually knowing what people are talking about in these cases? I understand the desire for precision and not smuggling in unfair assumptions (just because you voted for the Democrat last election doesn’t mean you’d describe yourself as a “leftist,” I understand), but I don’t personally find I do have any such trouble (though maybe some would say I unfairly stereotype my ideological opponents as a result?).

    Given the huge historical diversity of political ideologies and coalitions, I don’t think we’re ever going to have one perfect scheme whereby we can locate every political movement ever on some kind of graph (attempts to do so invariably start more debates than they end), so the discussion of how applicable a given label like, say, “fascism” may or may not be to a particular case is inevitable.

    To be perfectly honest, my usual reaction upon seeing “let’s not conflate leftism and progressivism!” type comments is to secretly think “oh, stop being pedantic; you know what they were talking about.”

    So my question is, are these debates really necessary or helpful and what do we hope to accomplish?

    • Walter says:

      My take on this:

      People come in 2 flavors (grownup and screwup). (Criteria, grownup clan can trust their future selves. Responsible/irresponsible for shorthand) The two defining notions that have any traction are:

      A: Grownups must take care of screwups, because they are humans.
      B: Grownups can do as they like.

      Progressive/Democrat/Leftist/whatever is shorthand for “Grownup Clan: Believes in A”, their opponents (call em what you like) are generally “Grownup Clan: Believes in B”. As long as I can tell which of these groups you are talking about I don’t care what the word is.

      • blacktrance says:

        Communitarian/traditionalist conservatives and some altrighters also believe in A, but they’re hardly in the progressive/leftist cluster. Your A vs B is more about libertarian-communitarian than left-right.

      • birdboy2000 says:

        I’d consider wealth being concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, who need not work for their money, and often inherited it (but have plenty of employees) to represent “screwups” (the bourgeoise) being taken care of by “grownups” (the proletariat). Nonetheless, doing away with this situation is generally considered a leftist idea.

        • Walter says:

          My usage of screwup is mostly “irresponsible”. You can have a rich one or a poor one. Most are poor, because they can’t get hired/tend to lose jobs. Windfall or inheritance might give you a rich screwup, but its not typical of the clan.

          This doesn’t mean that wealth -> grownup. It goes the other way. Grownup -> wealth.

          Your example would still work though. Given a useless zillionaire, the left’s position would be that he remains a human, heir to all that that entails. Even if he squandered every dime, he’d still be the state’s obligation. The right’s notion would be that when his cash runs out his henchfolk have no further obligation.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            So you see some kind of distinction between those who live off the labor of others because they are in need or incompetent, and those who live off the labor of others because society recognizes their ownership of capital?

            The only distinction I see is that the latter group demands a lot more support per-person.

          • Walter says:

            You are taking this weird places. Money doesn’t come into it at all. Grownup will tend to have more, but that’s just because one of the things that people try to do is get money. They tend to succeed, screwup to fail, so you can squint at a bank account and make a guess. Money isn’t a perfect indicator of that, as you’ve repeatedly pointed out. Its alright in a pinch, but there are a lot more things to consider.

            I’m trying to say that I divide the set of “people who talk on politics websites” by their reaction to Barnaby the Scrivener. (Who famously prefers not to work) Blue sees useless PEOPLE. Red sees USELESS people. Barnaby doesn’t generally speak up in this conversation.

            In answer to the original question, as long as I can tell where someone falls the axis I care about, I don’t mind calling them progressives, conservatives, Lutherans, whatever. The words aren’t important if I can get a sense of what camp they fall into.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Walter

            It’s Bartleby the Scrivener (thought you should know).

          • Walter says:

            @Anonymous

            Thanks man. Got that wrong.

    • Nita says:

      So, is open borders “a right-wing idea” or not?

      • onyomi says:

        I take it your point is that just saying someone is “right wing” is not enough to tell you whether or not he favors open borders (though in the US, and, I think, most of Europe, at least, the answer would be overwhelmingly, “no,” outside a few libertarians), but my point is precisely that no simple set of terms is going to be sufficient to encapsulate all the possible memeplexes and coalitions and sets of related ideas which have existed throughout history.

        My point is just that there seems to be both a deep dissatisfaction with colloquial terms like “progressive” and “right-wing” around here, as well as a sense that a more intelligent system of categorization could make things much clearer. I don’t think I agree with either of these ideas.

        The only thing I find really annoying is how “liberal” in the US means almost the opposite of what it means in most other English-speaking countries. But this problem doesn’t seem likely to go away anytime soon, unfortunately (though I think SSC readers tend to avoid the term maybe for precisely this reason).

        • brad says:

          Part of it is that if you accept the label ‘progressive’ because you e.g. think that single payer health care is a good idea, all of a sudden you are held responsible for 19th century eugenicist enthusiasts.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      There are two complaints people make on SSC about “left” vs “liberal.” One complaint is that they are orthogonal concepts. This occasionally causes confusion, but most of the complaints are unjustified. The other complaint is about the difference between absolutes and relatives. Some people say “the left” to mean the leftmost of the two big parties and some people use it to mean the far left. This causes confusion much more often.

    • Chalid says:

      I feel like the examples you give only rarely cause confusion. But use of “Blue Tribe” and “Red Tribe” almost always causes misunderstandings, and I’m glad people seem to be using them less.

    • Matt M says:

      “To be perfectly honest, my usual reaction upon seeing “let’s not conflate leftism and progressivism!” type comments is to secretly think “oh, stop being pedantic; you know what they were talking about.””

      Agree with this completely. I have this argument regularly with many of my friends, who are absolutely insistent that things have changed such that “left” and “right” or “democrat” and “republican” no longer have any meaning.

      And while that may be true in some specific cases, I think 90% of the time, opinions one issue ARE in fact easily predicted by opinions on other issues, and they cluster together fairly cleanly/evenly.

      We’re actually witnessing it in the libertarian community right now, as the divide continues to deep between left-wing and right-wing libertarians. But the thing is, literally nobody is surprised at who is gravitating to either side. It was obvious from the very beginning which libertarians were more left-leaning and which were more right-leaning. And not from the “list their positions and analyze which way they go” way, but from the “listening to this person, I intuitively appreciate which side they obvious sympathize with most”

      I feel like this is a mixture of “nuance signaling” (basically, “you idiots see things in terms of black and white, but *I* am more enlightened than that and see all of the shades of grey”) and a way to sidetrack the actual argument (meaning, if my point is “leftists support the minimum wage, which is bad economics,” then it’s easier to respond with “OMG NOT ALL LEFTISTS SUPPORT THE MINIMUM WAGE” than it is to make an economic argument in favor of the minimum wage.)

  15. From the department of overly complicated thought experiments:

    A mad scientist with an interest in rationalism has kidnapped you and appointed you as one of a group of 4 judges of a strange competition. A group of intelligent people will debate a randomly selected topic, while the judges watch from separate, locked, sound-proof booths. Judges will not vote on the debate itself, but after each time a participant speaks, judges will instead each have the ability to push any or all of a series of buttons, with each button corresponding to a debate participant. If three or more of the judges push their buttons for a particular participant after the participant speaks, their words will be ignored, a trap door will open up, and the participant will fall to their death. If one or less of the judges push buttons for the person, nothing happens. However, if two judges press the buttons, a trap door will instead open below all four judges and they will fall to *their* deaths.

    The participants are aware of the rules. Unfortunately several of the participants had a stack of soft cushions and a pile of money placed under their trap doors. These participants know who they are, but you do not. If they tell anyone of this, the scientist will instantly remove the cushions. Also, amongst the participants are several randomly selected idiots.

    The mad scientist allows the four judges time before the debate to discuss how they will coordinate their button pushing. However, the scientist, who is the world’s best logician and rationalist, warns that the entire debate should be both interesting and as rational as possible. If it is not of a sufficiently interesting and rational standard he will execute all participants, judges, and a very large room full of cute innocent kittens. Finally, he has injected you and the other judges with a serum that makes you fierce consequentialists who value life, at least for the duration of the debate.

    What rules will you and the other judges decide (while under the influence of the serum) upon as to whether to push a participant’s button after they speak? Why?

    EDIT> Alternative version – A mad scientist places you in a room full of fellow contrarians where your thought experiments are doomed to failure.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      I’m not sure I get the premise here. Why would the judges have any reason to press the buttons at all? Why would they want to kill anybody?

      • If the debate is irrational, all involved would die. The judges can prevent this if they coordinate to silence irrational statements.

      • This is a thought experiment. You aren’t supposed to treat it as world-building.

        I think world-building is much more interesting than thought experiments. I’m probably the kind of person who will be tortured to protect huge numbers of other people from dust specks.

        • *sigh* I’m fairly sure the replies missing the point is deliberate. Maybe the serum thing was a trigger for people or something, even though it wasn’t even the point of the question. I thought it was obvious and fairly innocent what I was really asking – what rules can a debate have to improve the rationality of the discussion.

    • Aegeus says:

      Well. This is possibly the strangest thought experiment I’ve been in.

      Is there a reason we can’t just agree to not push the buttons? I would say that the stance of “making a mistake in a debate is not worthy of the death penalty” is an eminently rational one to take. You could also point out that if someone acts irrationally in a debate, it’s typically the opponent’s job to refute them, not the judge’s. You could also point out that if you have a serum that makes people perfect consequentialists, you could inject the participants instead of the judges and that would be a much more direct way of getting a rational debate.

      If that doesn’t satisfy the mad scientist’s standard of “as rational as possible”, and we actually need to drop bad debaters into trapdoors to keep him happy…

      Since we don’t know what the participants will say and we can’t communicate once the debate starts, there’s no perfect winning strategy. And since judging a debate is subjective, and there’s an incentive to not get a 50-50 split, I would say to push the button only for really obvious fallacies that look like they’d piss off the mad scientist.

      Alternate strategy: Drop everyone who speaks into a trap door. Both sides of the debate will soon start making the perfectly rational decision to not say a word about the topic. Hey, the mad scientist didn’t say that the debate had to have content, only that it had to be rational.

      EDIT: One more strategy – have two judges push the buttons. Without judges, the mad experiment can’t continue. As good consequentialists, we are perfectly happy with sacrificing ourselves to save a room full of innocent debaters and kittens.

      • Your second strategy seems sound 🙂 if a little dark :-/ I’ve done an edit to add “interesting” to the scientist’s requirements of the debate. Care to expand on your “really obvious fallacies” strategy?

        Edit> Wow nice third solution. Not sure I have an edit to fix that!

        • J Mann says:

          I think #3 is risky – the mad scientist is a rationalist. Surely he precommitted to kill all the debaters and kittens if the debate was not sufficiently interesting and rational regardless of the existence of judges.

          Even if not, is it rational for the judges to assume he’ll let the kittens live if the debate disappoints?

          #1 is good – I think you can assume comfy cushion people will signal their preference early and obviously, so that just leaves idiots and bad debaters. The more clear rules you can set out and apply in real time, the less risk you have of collapse.

    • hlynkacg says:

      They’ll shoot the mad scientist rather than subject themselves or anyone else to this farce.

      After all, 1 dead scientist is a small price to pay compared to several dead participants and a room full of kittens. 😉

      • Well I sort of agree, but I’m not sure the mad scientist remembered to put a firearm in everybody’s jacket during the kidnappings.

        • John Schilling says:

          Duh. That’s why you bring your own. If you insist on living in a community where people don’t go armed as a matter of principle, you can expect to be killed by random mad scientists conducting silly experiments.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            Exactly!

          • Thanks for your discomfort poorly disguised as humor. Care to explain it honestly?

          • John Schilling says:

            I am strangely uninspired to compose such an explanation for you.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            Care to explain it honestly?

            There is an unstated assumption in your reply that “shooting the mad scientist” as I suggested, requires the mad scientist to furnish the prospective judge with a gun. The obvious rejoinder being “why can’t the judge use their own?”

            The rest is just poking fun at the typical trajectory of gun control debates and the (non)prevalence of mad science.

            Person A: “What do you need a gun for?”
            Person B: “To win meta-ethical debates against mad scientists performing perverse experiments… Why do you think?”

            But you know what the say, if you have to explain the joke…

    • Zippy says:

      How old’s the bus driver?

    • Ruprect says:

      Hmmmm… so… you want a way to get rid of people who have something to gain from derailing the debate, but to keep those who derail it because they are stupid, unless they are *really* derailing it, in which case you have to get rid of them to save everyone else.
      I suppose ultimately we have to just ignore the reasons as to why they are derailing and just get rid of anyone who derails severely.
      And we have to agree absolutely on the conditions for getting rid of people.

      Hmmmm… to be interesting it has to be related to experience. To be rational there has to be a consistent association of terms (with the proviso that my “blurg” might be different to your “blurg”). So, I would get rid of anyone who didn’t listen or show much interest in other’s definition of terms, and how they relate to their experience.

      Bit too vague though… I would insist that everyone uses normal English to refer to direct emotional/sensory experience, everyday actions, but uses made up words to explain more complex combinations of those experiences/combinations of terms.
      You can only ever disagree with a person by saying “I don’t understand what that word means?” – ask them to break it down into a more basic, physical level.
      As soon as someone makes the objection, you have to stop using the word. You insist on using the word “democracy” after I’ve objected to it, you get trap doored (with one warning?). If someone objects to something which can be demonstrated through mime, they get trap doored.

  16. Deiseach says:

    So, has anyone heard of the Whole Foods hate crime? Any opinions?

    I was made aware of the allegations via a religion journalism site; apart from the original reporting of the allegations in the mainstream media, the sites which are reporting on it now appear to be conservative/right-wing ones with agendas of their own (hint: they’re all pretty much convinced this is a hoax to extort money out of Whole Foods).

    The reason it’s covered by a religion journalism site is that the alleged victim is claiming to be the pastor of a church plant in Austin, Texas (though as yet there is no evidence he has a congregation or anything other than some preaching/talks posted as Youtube videos) who is gay and claims to be pastoring a church where “tradition and religious doctrine” have been “thrown out the window”.

    I know nothing about Whole Foods but apparently this is the last place you’d expect a homophobic slur to be iced on a cake? Especially when the store in Austin is defending itself by, amongst other things, claiming the employee who iced the cake is themself a member of the LGBTQ community?

    So I have to say, the view I’ve formed so far is this guy seems to be in a financial hole and may possibly have thought this was an easy way to make money. DISCLAIMER SO SCOTT WON’T BE SUED FOR LIBEL: ALL MY OWN PERSONAL OPINION, IN NO WAY REFLECTS THE VIEWS OF THIS SITE, AND ALLEGEDLY AND WITH NO PREJUDICE ALL ROUND, OKAY?

    What I’m interested in discussing is how the whole (a) forcing bakeries etc. to provide services for gay couples via lawsuits (b) the use of “no platforming”/boycotting/threats of bad publicity for crimethink have possibly maybe could have happened influenced someone to think that accusing a business of anti-LGBT prejudice or homophobia would mean the business would settle out of court fast and pay up out of fear?

    Given that we’ve seen lists of businesses condemning North Carolina because of the “bathroom law”,and some saying they’ll withdraw their business and so cause the state to lose money (including sports franchise saying it now won’t play the 20 games it was going to host there), and this has happened in other states as well, is Social Justice Blackmail now becoming a thing?

    • Walter says:

      You’ve packed a lot of stuff in this post. I’ll try to react to each bit.

      Cake: I tend to think it’s a fake. That said, lower level employees don’t act with the best interest of their bosses (remember the dudes caught on tape standing on the lettuce containers at that one Moe’s). I’m like 80/20 dude faked it vs. some flunky did it. I’m pretty confident that it wasn’t a deliberate act by Whole Foods though.

      Lawsuits bring Lawsuits: Yeah, once you prove that you can sue someone to make them do something then everyone will do that. They’ll have to start doing whatever it is they got sued for routinely. That’s kind of the system working as designed though, right? Like, if the court says “Start putting seat belts in your car, pay Bob a million bucks”, the intended message is “If you don’t do what we say you’ll pay everyone who buys your cards a million bucks, and go bankrupt. You’ll lose all future cases due to this precedent, so back down.”

      Unpopular folks get sued more: Makes sense. A jury of my peers won’t vote for Bobby Bigotface, regardless of the facts of the case. Why not sue him?

      Related tangent, whenever I see a case like Cosby, or that one football coach who got convicted of molesting all those players, I always wonder about free riders. Like, say you were going to school there, or met Cosby once. If you join the suits as plaintiff number 11, you potentially get a portion of whatever eventually comes out, and you probably don’t have to pay any legal costs. It’s not like the jury is going to find 14 cases guilty, 1 case innocent. Seems like nothing but upside.

      Social Justice Blackmail: I sort of doubt that it’s a deliberate coordinated effort. Like “I’ll get him labeled as a bigot, you move in for the kill.” is just not how I picture the whole thing working. It’s more like, independently, a lot of people want to expose bigotry. Once someone is labeled a bigot, they become attractive targets due to their unpopularity.

      • Deiseach says:

        This case seems on the face of it to be a scam, but remember the pizza parlour which had a whole firestorm of protest (and even one idiot woman making a not sincere but really stupid tweet about “who wants to come with me to burn it down”)?

        Suppose the guy had picked his target better? Given that the idea of “any victim of X will never make a false accusation; anybody accused of X must and should be automatically considered guilty” else you are victim-blaming and victim-shaming, the idea is certainly in place and ripe for exploitation, and I’ve seen it at work in my own home place (one false accusation of sexual molestation while in care, made by a very mentally confused person who was not acting maliciously, resulted in a complete witch hunt of the alleged guilty party led by the popular press and a short period of jail time until it was established that the initial accusation was false).

        I don’t mean that the Social Justice movement is engaged in blackmail, but that the establishment of “guilty until proven innocent/the alleged victim is never alleged and always in the right/no false accusations ever/use boycotts to force undesirables out” has put in place a precedent; I know that using Brendan Eich as an example is going to be met with eye-rolling about “not that old chestnut again!” but seeing as how OKCupid were able to use a scare about homophobia to land a hit on an opponent (I really think it was seeing Mozilla as a competitor by the owners of OKCupid, who are InterActiveCorp and have a raft of interests in online services, that triggered the whole “boycott Firefox” call), I do think that attempts to gain advantage (or plain old cash payouts) under the guise of “Supporting peace, equality, justice and rights for all” is going to become more and more of a way of behaving.

        Suppose this hadn’t been a LGBT employee of a company with vaguely liberal-credibility associations like Whole Foods? Suppose he’d picked a more acceptable target for a two minute hate? He didn’t try to say the cake gave him food poisoning or was stale or anything of the kind about its ‘fitness for purpose’, he tried to claim a slur was iced on it. I imagine many businesses might decide to take the hit and pay out quietly in order not to have a campaign about being haters and homophobes spilling out onto the internet and triggering bad publicity, loss of business, and wholesale boycotts and demands for the heads of the managers on a pike?

        Suppose he’d claimed an employee of Wal-Mart had made derogatory or hate speech remarks to him about ordering a “Love Wins” cake – that would be the kind of “he said/she said” that, unless there were CCTV footage with sound on the bakery counter, would be hard to disprove and you’d have all the usual suspects defending him on the grounds that “a gay man is never going to make a false accusation, how dare you blame the victim, there is no presumption of innocence and this should be dropped from the law to protect the victim” – it would be seen as more hate and bigotry to even suggest we didn’t know for sure it happened the way he said it happened.

        I have seen online people claiming that they would unquestioningly believe someone who claimed to have been sexually abused, harassed, slurs used against them, etc. because otherwise you are making the victim’s experience of rape or hate crime even worse, you are treating them as a liar and denying their suffering, and any attempt to give equal weight to the accused is saying the crime never happened and denying the truth of what the victim says.

        I really think some people would like to do away with the whole idea of a trial – just tell the police X abused you/called you names/used hate speech and have them locked up.

        • Zorgon says:

          The principle behind this is, as with nearly everything else, about status. The victims are assumed to be contextually low-status and, therefore, deserve it. The only reason we even notice Brendan Eich is that he’s sufficiently broadly high-status to make his media-localised low status stand out.

          Or to put it another way – these people are keen on trials, just only for people like them.

          • Anonymous says:

            Robin Hanson, is that you?

          • Deiseach says:

            I think the presumption of innocence is the principle under threat, and a very important principle we should defend, even in the case of a horrible crime where you’re 99% certain the guy is guilty as sin and you feel the only just and fitting punishment is to have him eaten by rabid squirrels from the feet up.

            If we abolish the rule for the sleazebags, we can’t then turn around and rely on it when it happens to us, because there is always the chance, no matter how remote, of someone maliciously or opportunistically or because they’re easily pressurised/not mentally well making such accusations.

            Even in genuine cases of abuse/harassment, there are always opportunists who want fifteen minutes of fame (or a nice little earner selling their story to the tabloids) by jumping on the bandwagon of currently running investigations.

            Operation Midland was set up for investigating accusations by a single alleged witness/victim arising out of related investigations but seems to have more or less collapsed due to the unreliability of the sole accuser (who may or may not be a con man, a fabulist or a simple liar):

            A £2m police investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring accused of killing three children more than 30 years ago has collapsed amid calls for resignations from three of the UK’s most senior police officers.

            The Metropolitan police said Operation Midland has been closed without any charges being brought against any of the former politicians, military officers or government officials said to be involved, after a 16-month inquiry involving 31 detectives.

            …Senior officers face scrutiny over a high-profile inquiry into an alleged murderous Westminster paedophile ring based on claims by a single witness.

            …The high-profile investigation was based on claims from a single alleged victim known as Nick. He said he witnessed a group of powerful men in the 70s and 80s abusing young boys in central London locations, such as a flat in the Dolphin Square block near Westminster.
            Nick’s allegations centred on a number of figures in the establishment at the time. These included Proctor; Leon Brittan, a former home secretary; Lord Bramall, a former head of the armed forces; Sir Edward Heath, the late prime minister; and the former heads of MI5 and MI6, all of whom were said to have been part of the savage paedophile ring that killed three boys.

            … Nick, a man in his 40s, first made allegations of child abuse to his local police in 2012, when he reported sexual and physical abuse by his stepfather, a military figure. Officers did not pursue the investigation because the man in question had died several years before.

            He emerged as a complainant to the Met after Watson’s allegations in parliament in 2012. Contacted by Exaro [a news website which published or sold stories based on many of the claims], Nick made his allegations first on the news website, and later underwent three lengthy police interviews that led to the opening of Operation Midland in November 2014.
            The inquiry examined Nick’s allegations that he and other young boys were sexually abused between 1975 and 1984 at various locations across London and the Home Counties, including military establishments. The venues included a flat in Dolphin Square.

            As a result of Nick’s allegations officers opened murder inquiries into the killing of three young boys. But they never established the identities of the victims or recovered any bodies of young boys who had gone missing in the period in question.

            In December 2014, Scotland Yard held a press conference in which they revealed they were investigating the murders of three young boys and the abuse of children which had taken place over a decade at the various locations. Most significantly a senior officer on the homicide command, Det Supt Kenny McDonald, said Nick’s claims were “credible and true”. The latter part of the statement was subsequently withdrawn.

            …Nick’s credibility as a witness was questioned last year after the BBC’s Panorama disclosed that he had appeared anonymously on a television programme claiming to have been abused by Jimmy Savile, but had not mentioned his alleged abuse at the hands of the paedophile ring.

            …Some have defended the approach of the Met. Pete Saunders, from the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, said: “I have been dealing with the police for 20 years. They do get it wrong sometimes, we all do, but generally speaking they know when they are dealing with someone that is credible and they know when they are dealing with a liar.”

    • onyomi says:

      It’s definitely fake:

      http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/19/are-you-planning-a-cake-hoax-these-5-tips-will-make-sure-its-a-success/

      I believe Whole Foods is now suing the guy for defamation or something and I applaud them for taking an active stance against this sort of thing (there have to be consequences for fake accusations to offset all the attention and, possibly, money people stand to gain from this sort of thing).

      • gbdub says:

        Yep, definitely fake. They have the guy on video buying the cake, and the price sticker he swears up and down he didn’t tamper with is in a completely different location on the box.

        I think the lesson for Whole Foods is “don’t agree to make cakes with a big blank space that could be used to turn your otherwise innocuous message into a hate crime”.

        • onyomi says:

          “don’t agree to make cakes… that could turn… into a hate crime”

          I don’t know whether the fact that cake decoration and public bathroom usage are two of the most hotly debated issues of our time indicate that our society has finally arrived at the point of having no real problems or about to collapse.

          I imagine telling Harriet Tubman: “in our time, black people write hateful messages on their own cakes in order to get attention.”

          • gbdub says:

            On FB one of my acquaintances posted, to much approval, something to the effect of “In America, Christians say they are under attack because they can’t kick gay people out of their restaurant. In Pakistan, Christians say they are under attack because they are getting blown up by suicide bombers. I know which ones have my sympathy”.

            I was very tempted to reply “In America, gay people say they are under attack because they might not get their first choice cake decorator. In the Middle East, gay people say they are under attack because they get executed for existing. I know which ones have my sympathy”.

            I ultimately held my tongue, but really, a quick blessing count would do most people some good. We’re not perfect, far from it, but thank [insert personally deity or lack thereof] for First World Problems.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @gdub

            You both have a point, but some gay people in the US say they are under attack because they are aware of their risk of being beaten to death.

          • Jiro says:

            sweenyrod: All people have some risk of being beaten to death. You need to compare rates of prevalence, which a list of beatings is not.

          • gbdub says:

            We also have some non-zero number of people killed for their religious beliefs, national origin, and race – or for liking the wrong sports team or motorcycle brand. Note the part where I said we are a long way from perfect. The level of societal acceptance of homosexuality is vastly improved over what it was even 20 years ago and vastly better than many other parts of the world. “Count your blessings” does not mean “ignore all problems”. Just keep some perspective is all.

            Anyway I’m kind of wondering about the standards of that list – I skimmed the most recent couple decades and an awful lot of them are of the form “body of trans woman found in XXX”, with no other information. While trans and homosexual people are probably at a greater risk of hate-crime type murders, assuming every foul play death of a person in those groups to be motivated primarily by that seems like a big leap.

          • John Schilling says:

            some gay people in the US say they are under attack because they are aware of their risk of being beaten to death.

            From the list you cite, that awareness ought to be mostly confined to trans women prostitutes. I think this demographic has very little overlap with the gay couples demanding cake.

          • Deiseach says:

            I don’t think he did it to get attention (a handy payout to solve his money problems seems the most likely explanation), and he was definitely going for the homophobia, not racism, angle but yeah: if your greatest complaint of bein’ oppressed is “my florist won’t decorate the church for our wedding”, you have it good.

            Not that all LGBT people have it that good, but again – if that’s your biggest problem, you are doing well.

  17. Telma says:

    Love the dinosaur sign.

  18. Anonymous says:

    My rent is too high. Are there cities in the US that are lgbt friendly and have cheaper median rent than places such as Portland, Berkeley, Boston, and Nashville?

  19. keranih says:

    Of possible interest in the survey/tribal/sociological sections of the commentariant:

    Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart has been made into a quiz with some preliminary results on those parts of the US with the “most elite” zipcodes.

    (My apologies if this was linked before, I tried to find if it had been mentioned and came up empty.)

    • dndnrsn says:

      I took this quiz online a little while back and scored pretty much as I expected to.

      One thing that puzzled me: Is smoking really this “oh, the gentry hate it” thing? Is that a generational thing? I’m a millenial who went to a good university, and I know lots of smokers my age. It doesn’t seem particularly judged. Parties will always have a few people smoking outside, and plenty of people will smoke when drunk when they wouldn’t otherwise. The only social circle I’m in where people judge it is the gym.

      While statistically the middle and upper classes smoke cigarettes less, that question seems off to me.

      • Anonymous says:

        In my experience, the older you get the worse it is. When I was in a (highly selective) college smoking wasn’t that big a deal, though there were some patterns. By the time I got to law school it was much more of a status marker. In my current world (thirty something, married, urban east coast professional) if you still smoke you might as well carry a sign on your head that says “white trash”, especially if you have kids. Immigrants get a little bit of a pass.

        N.B. Just reporting not making my own judgments.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          What if it’s weed?

          • Anonymous says:

            MJ is a very tricky and contentious subject in the circles I travel. Especially among women there is a huge variance in reactions. If you don’t want to blow up groups or cause drama the safest thing to do is use secret handshakes to find other MJ smokers and go off very discretely. I myself haven’t for something like a decade.

            Everyone drinks or at the very least is expected to tolerate drinking.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’ve never encountered, among people my age (caveat: almost exclusively left-leaning and university educated) especially dramatic negative reactions, but habitual users are certainly stereotyped.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Even in grad school (including law and even medical students), though, you’d find a crowd of people outside of social events smoking.

          What happens to the people who smoke, though, as they age? People aren’t dropping dead from it in their 30s, and I was under the impression that quitting was incredibly hard.

          • Anonymous says:

            One guy I know uses one of those electronic cigarettes and he gets something of a pass. It’s considered like a disease he is treating or something rather than a disgusting, low class habit. A few more have quit over the years. Some I’ve lost track of, maybe they found other communities where it’s okay.

            I don’t think any of the lawyers in my (medium size) firm smoke. Maybe a cigar for some of the older guys, but it is definitely the secretaries and filing clerks that go outside regularly to smoke.

          • Piglet says:

            Mid-40’s lawyer here. A few points. 1. It is not hard for everyone to quit. I’ve been able to pick them up or put them down as needed with no issue, going on 18+ months at zero with no real effort. Of course, my habit was rather light. So, for some, even modest social impact suffices to prompt quitting due to their incentives. 2. There are more closet smokers than you think. For some years, I smoked only on business travel, for instance. I’d be mortified to admit smoking, and indeed was mortified the one time I was caught by a colleague. 3. Some smoke only when drinking alcohol fairly seriously, and take away that context, as is often the case when one grows up, and lots of people just…don’t.

      • J Mann says:

        I would say that habitual smoking is a class marker. Like a lot of other class markers, it might come across more like an affectation or an eccentricity when couple with a lot of other class signifiers.

        I know a few people who smoke seriously enough that you can smell tobacco when you are within handshake distance, and it definitely reads as a class signifier to me, like conspicuously bad grammar. Not really something about the person’s worth, but it adds to the first impression.

      • In my current world (thirty something, married, urban east coast professional) if you still smoke you might as well carry a sign on your head that says “white trash”, especially if you have kids.

        it definitely reads as a class signifier to me, like conspicuously bad grammar.

        That’s pretty much the way it is in my world. And (tobacco) smoking is not just seen as low-class, it signifies compromised physical and mental health.

        (As others have commented, attitudes about marijuana are more complicated.)

        Some years ago, Steven Bochco, creator of “Hill Street Blues” (1980s TV police drama) commented on how the perception of smoking had changed in the U.S., saying (approximately): “If you put a cigarette in a character’s hand, you’re saying he smells bad and doesn’t take care of himself.”

        The writers of The Economist magazine, over in the UK where this change hadn’t yet happened, were shocked and uncomprehending of this. Since they couldn’t conceive that smoking was seen that negatively, they wildly reinterpreted Bochco’s remarks as reprehensible social engineering, “putting cigarettes into the hands of baddies” in order to campaign against smoking, and they denounced him.

        But smoking IS seen that negatively.

        • Nornagest says:

          It is, but that attitude’s not universal among Blues; it’s more prominent among Blues of roughly ages thirty to sixty than older or younger, and more on the East Coast than the West. Twentysomething hipsters in Portland and Seattle smoke like chimneys; in SF somewhat less so, but it’s still not a major gaffe.

          • It is, but that attitude’s not universal among Blues; it’s more prominent among Blues of roughly ages thirty to sixty than older or younger, and more on the East Coast than the West. Twentysomething hipsters in Portland and Seattle smoke like chimneys; in SF somewhat less so, but it’s still not a major gaffe.

            But the smoking trend lines don’t show any such uptick.

          • As mentioned above, it’s not that lifelong smoking is more popular among the youth, but rather than smoking is viewed as a youthful vice, to be left behind once you leave college.

            (I smoked in college but stopped when I met my wife. Evidence!)

          • dndnrsn says:

            Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of people I know seem to be keeping habits that you’re supposed to drop after undergraduate education is done, or at least after you’re out of university.

            I know people who still drink like university students despite being several years out of university. Is it normal for employed adults to be hung over once a week?

          • Jaskologist says:

            @dndnrsn

            Are they married?

          • Teal says:

            The ever more extended adolescence and chest beating about same is a favored theme of editorialists of a certain age and disposition.

            I think they are right that something is changing, but I’m not so sure about their normative conclusions.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Jaskologist:

            Nope. I know very few people my age or close to it who I met in university who are getting married. There’s definitely a good case that all the “settling down” activities are kind of a bundle: getting married, getting a house, having kids, and not getting blasted every weekend are a package deal. I have no idea of the drinking habits of the married/engaged people, because nobody in my immediate circle(s) is married or engaged.

            On the other hand, my parents, who married (and owned property, and had kids) late, both seem surprised at the fact that people in their mid-to-late 20s, especially those outside of university, are still having parties devoted largely to drinking.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Your parents may have married late, but how many of their peers did? You need a certain number of post-college singles in order to have the drunken parties in the first place. As the number of unmarrieds increases in an age cohort, extended-adolescent behaviors will become more and more normalized.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Jaskologist:

            My parents are both highly educated, so their peers would have gotten married later as well, but the overall point is probably true – my parents didn’t (or at least won’t admit to, and I suspect they are telling the truth) drinking the same way that I did when I was in undergrad, or even grad school. Either the crowd they ran with were less heavy drinkers than average students, or university students in general drank less back then.

            Overall though it’s pretty obvious that things like having kids, getting married, owning property, and stopping getting messed up every weekend are increasingly delayed, and among some groups certain of these aren’t even happening.

          • Deiseach says:

            Purely anecdotal, but I’m seeing (online) some evidence that younger people (teenage to early twenties) perceive smoking now as cool and glamorous, rather in the style of the heyday of Hollywood movie stars.

            I think this may be a generational effect; the anti-smoking public health education campaigns of the 70s/80s had a big effect; the parents of those kids smoked, the kids of that time grew up to be non-smokers, and now their kids in turn are seeing smoking as cool and glamorous because it has the aura of the exotic, the forbidden, and is not something they see commonly.

          • Psmith says:

            Deiseach, I’ve seen it mooted that this is the result of laws requiring tobacco firms to sponsor anti-smoking PSAs. The result (on this theory) is that the ads are designed to be deliberately uncool and make anti-smoking seem like Grundyism.

  20. merzbot says:

    Is the Last Psychiatrist kind of incoherent or is he just 2deep4me? I find him incredibly fun to read but a lot of his posts (e.g. this one) seem to go way over my head.

    • Psmith says:

      It ain’t just you. I never really understand what he’s talking about past the first couple of paragraphs, at least beyond getting the impression that I should feel bad about it..

    • Orphan Wilde says:

      At least for that post, incoherent, in a stream-of-consciousness-without-any-editing sort of way.

      There are three major topics there, and the author bounces between them pretty much at random. Topic #1 is what it opens with – that people think in terms of stories, with three major acts; the things leading up to a thing, the thing that is the thing, and the things that happened as a result of the thing (there’s a claim that there’s a fourth act, but doesn’t actually specify what it is). Topic #2 is the idea that women in comedy often talk about sex, rather than talking about comedy, because it’s a more acceptable way for women to talk about sex and men to listen about sex. Topic #3 is gender norms, with some normative claims about what people are really like thrown into the mix. (There are also a bunch of minor topics in which the author makes a random foray into talking about television aspect ratios, drug addiction, or gambling.)

      Topic #1 is the topic the author returns to most frequently, and is probably what the author is attempting to actually talk about, but keeps getting distracted from.

    • Andrew says:

      I adored that post in particular, and while it was definitely madcap and scattered, none of it was incoherent to me. So take that as a counter-anecdote, I guess!

    • Zippy says:

      Before, the experience of addiction was entirely subjective, is it messing up your life? Now, it’s been objectified, the subject’s relationship with the drug is is no longer relevant, it is the fact of the drug that is relevant. The obvious example of this sleight of hand is that there’s alcohol use and alcohol abuse, but there’s no such category as cocaine use, even though the vast majority of its ingestion has nothing to do with addiction. The reinforcement is from the outside to comply with this idiocy: say you party down one weekend, then a random drug test at work, oops! So two things can happen, Guess What Happens Next: you could tell the truth that the coke was on her ass and how could you not? doesn’t make you a bad person;

      Guys, I think I may have just figured out why the Last Psychiatrist is so incoherent.

      But in all seriousness, he’s always seemed coherent to me, despite his frenetic style, but only occasionally does he have a point that he manages to convince me of. I also think he has good form; admire the Startling Revelation structure of this next quote, along with the artful use of the word “Nowadays”:

      If you heard this as a feminist criticism you have missed 50% of the fun: men can’t safely hear about sex from a woman except as a joke, or else they are labeled as perverts by women, who are still unsure of their (sexual) place in this free for all we call Nowadays. “I want to tell you about last night but I don’t want you to judge me or appear interested.” Huh? Nowadays can be exhausting, but they were also inevitable.

      He uses the same Startling Revelation structure for the next point he makes:

      The censorship doesn’t come from women, it comes from you. If you feel like you can’t ask her about her sex because you’ll sound like a repressed stalker, you are, in fact, a repressed stalker.

      I’m not going to say that he contradicts himself, because he doesn’t, just that the contrast between his two points isn’t especially useful.

      Another example: the theses of “No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up“, for example, seem to be something like:
      1) “the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it’s both.”
      2) Society is messed up because it doesn’t agree with (1).
      3-16) Some other shit.
      17) Women are being allowed into traditional ‘positions of power’ not because women are being allowed into actual power but because the actual power is moving away from the traditional ‘positions of power’ into other positions that (surprise!) women are not typically allowed into.

      There is minimal evidence or connection to a broader topic for most of these theses, but many of them are clever and/or reversals of conventional wisdom. What you might call insight porn I guess. Good humor mixed in as well. 9/10, it’s like if Scott blogged drunk and he was a feisty drunk.

      • Deiseach says:

        All right, I was getting through that makeup piece and thinking “Okay, I don’t quite agree with everything in the way you’re putting it but you do have some rudiment of a point there” when I came to this and he just torpedoed his own argument:

        How would you like to live in a world where men had to wear make up? “Oh, I love make up on a guy, especially eyeliner.” Of course you do, you’re having a stroke. Ask it this way: how would you like to be in a world where men said,” oh, I feel so much better about myself when I’m wearing makeup.” You’d run for the nearest totalitarian regime.

        Well, setting aside that you don’t need to trowel on full slap, gentlemen, and that a touch of eyeliner on a man is damn attractive when he has expressive and beautiful eyes, why the hell shouldn’t men wear make up as well? If the primary purpose of a woman wearing make up is to look attractive to men (or other women, or both), why wouldn’t men want to look attractive to women (or other men, or both) as well?

        Men don’t want to look attractive? Rubbish – why do they cut their hair, shave, wear decent suits, cologne, exercise and work out to have muscular rather than flabby bodies?

        It’s natural for women but unnatural for men to wear make up? So explain to me how putting white lead, malachite and red ochre on your face is a completely natural and instinctive process like developing breasts at puberty. Go ahead, I’ll sit here and wait.

        If you’re going to veer dangerously close to chauvinism and say the only acceptable reason for women to wear make up is to attract men and otherwise they should go bareface, then why do men find make up on women attractive? What is appealing about nail varnish and eye shadow? I’m still sitting here, I’ll be patient while you explain.

        Don’t even get into the history of it – cosmetics have been unisex in many cultures and started off as skin protection from the elements as well as having decorative purposes.

        Every football player with eye black under their eyes is wearing functional make up, does that mean the United States is a debauched hellhole of positively Sardanapalian decadence, from whence all right-thinking women should flee to a totalitarian regime in search of proper manly men? Perhaps we should not answer that? 🙂

        • Tseeteli says:

          Alone isn’t saying that makeup is natural. Quite the opposite.

          He’s saying that makeup is an externally-imposed social norm. But that, over time, people internalize these norms & invent fake justifications for why they’re adopting them.

          Then he discusses the weird dynamics that come out of people lying to themselves about why they’re doing things. It’s the lying that’s objectionable.

          Alone is fine on the makeup itself. The line before your block quote is: “You are enhancing your outward appearance, which is great, but then you pretend it’s for internal reasons?”

          He’s saying that makeup isn’t really about male-female dynamics, either. The line after your quote is, “The trick to the makeup debate is that it pretends to want to be free of male pressure, yet the pressure to look a certain way is actually much worse from women. …”

          Then the article goes on to talk about the dynamics of things that seem like cooperative groups, but aren’t actually groups, or aren’t actually cooperative.

    • Walter says:

      He’s fun. I generally take his main thesis “narcissism epidemic” as true. So, he persuaded one person at least. He had help from the world though.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      It’s not just you. That post is full of parts that feel to me like bizarre non-sequiturs; there’s too much inferential distance to cross. One problem is that for various assertions he considers self-evident of the form you do X or you want to do Y I think: There must be readers for whom this statement resonates, but I’m not one of them. Or I think: I don’t even know what I would need to know to understand and/or agree with this claim.

      But I don’t normally read TLP – maybe if I did it would make more sense.

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      It seems to me like an excercise in piling up more and more layers of contrarianism.

  21. Nero tol Scaeva says:

    After I finish my MS degree in CS, I’m thinking of becoming a professor at a community college (though I think this might be tough because I have no teaching experience and I work full time, working on my degree part time).

    Opinions? Anyone have any experience with academia in 2 year colleges?

    • Evan Þ says:

      Here’s a good blog by a community college dean. Most of his hiring posts are about the liberal arts rather than CS, but I’d recommend you check him out anyway. At least in the liberal arts, he says you’re way too optimistic; community colleges have been facing a glut of qualified candidates for at least the last ten years, and just about no one gets hired without good teaching experience.

      Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

  22. Well... says:

    I’d like to post a prediction here for posterity (Longbets.org charges $50 to publish one, so eff that):

    I predict that if Donald Trump becomes president, he will not over the course of his administration seriously pursue building a wall along the Mexico border, AND he will not seriously pursue a ban on Muslim immigration.

    By “seriously pursue” I mean use the maximum powers at his disposal, as president, to implement those programs, OR to make a public show of using a large amount of said powers.

    He may make a weak display and then shrug and say something about checks and balances, or that his views on those issues have “evolved.”

    If anyone would like me to put my money where my mouth is, leave a comment on my blog (hyperlinked as my pseudonym) indicating your terms and how you’d like to get in touch.

    • Alphaceph says:

      I agree with this assessment so I won’t bet against you.

      However, I expect Trump will be generally incompetent, and get away with it by creating distractions. I would much rather America be led by Hillary.

      • Well... says:

        At the risk of getting into a boring wonkish debate about non-high-level politics, I disagree that Trump will be incompetent, but I do agree he will create distractions.

        I worry he will be very competent, since he is a skillful negotiator, persuader, and delegator, but that he will use this competence to do Hillary-like things (which I generally oppose). Trump will create distractions–and use other tricks and rhetoric–so that he can do the Hillary-like things while still keeping his supporters loyal, and even inspire them to defend him against his detractors.

        His detractors will be the same people they are now, and they will oppose Hillary-like things done by him even though they would have supported Hillary doing them.

        (Thanks for giving me an opportunity to get all this in writing. It’ll be fun to see if my predictions bear out.)

        • John Schilling says:

          I worry he will be very competent, since he is a skillful negotiator, persuader, and delegator

          I have seen little evidence that he is more than moderately competent in those three areas. He is superbly talented at self-promotion, which is useful in selling branded products and winning elections, but not so much in running governments.

          • Well... says:

            I’m basing my statements mostly on the compelling observations of two Scott A’s. One is Scott Adams (on his blog) and the other is Scott Alexander (in his review of “Art of the Deal” on this blog).

          • anon says:

            @Well…
            You should email Scott Aaronson to get his opinion. Or perhaps he’s already blogged on this subject?

            Incidentally do you think Scott Adams’s insightful posts on Trump this year and last have earned him a place on the High Council of Bloggers Named Scott Who Should Rule the World? I worry that a third Scott A. will upset the balance of power and could lead to Sumner getting purged for his heretical last initial. (Although I suppose balance would be restored should our host choose to renounce his pseudonym.)

    • Vorkon says:

      I’m with you on the ban on Muslim immigration, but I’m not so sure about the wall. The guy’s a real estate mogul; I’d imagine he stands to gain a lot by implementing a massive government funded construction project. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he doesn’t seriously pursue the “make Mexico pay for it” proposal, though.

      • anon says:

        Disagree. Even though our federal contracting laws are ridiculous and corruption-prone, I’m pretty confident that politics will prevent Trump from profiting personally from the wall.

        He could profit if somehow he managed to convince Congress to pass a law superseding the various state and local zoning regulations that make it virtually impossible to construct housing in America’s most productive urban centers. If so, I would forgive the graft because the policy outcome would be so beneficial. But it’s entirely possible that liberalizing real estate development law would be disadvantageous for an incumbent like him, so I doubt this will be high on his agenda.

  23. benwave says:

    So apologies if this is something out of rationality 101, but I still have some lingering confusion over this:

    It is generally accepted that a person’s revealed preferences are a good way to find out what that person wants, but at the same time, I can remember reading of studies concluding that a person will in many cases not choose options which result in greatest reported happiness in retrospect. There seems to be a sort of a tension there.

    I realise that humans are far from perfect hapiness maximisers even on an individual level, but it seems like this would create some difficulty in problems of government, ethics, or friendly AI.

    I dunno, maybe I am conflating the problem of measuring hapiness or utility with the problem of maximising for it (and in fact I’m not even that sure that the two above premises are correct), but are there any standard ways of dealing with this?

    • Aegeus says:

      The answer I would give is simply that revealed preferences are not always what someone wants. They’re generally related, in an Econ 101 “the customer is always right” sense. If your customer tells you that he likes Coke but keeps buying Pepsi, you’d better sell him Pepsi. But it breaks down when you apply it to something more complicated than what brand of soda you’re buying.

      For instance, drug addicts will invest a lot into getting their next fix, even when they’re trying to kick the habit. Does that mean that they don’t “really” want to be clean? Should we not invest in treatment and rehab programs for addicts, because they don’t “really” want it?

      The Non-Libertarian FAQ points out that governments solve this problem by disconnecting our principles from our preferences – i.e., if we don’t like that the widget factory uses child labor, but we don’t care enough to stop buying widgets, we can vote to ban child labor even though our individual preferences show we all like the widgets more.

      I would say that most of the time, this is just a quirk we have to deal with, and we’re getting pretty good at identifying how we’re irrational and making marginal changes to work around that. There are lots of case studies like making organ-donor programs opt-out rather than opt-in.

      But I would also say that you’re right, this makes it very hard to identify exactly what it is that we’re optimizing for, which in turn means a lot of headaches for ethicists and AI developers.

      One idea that I recall floating around on Less Wrong is basically “Tell the AI to figure out what it is we really want to maximize, then maximize it.” It’s not a terrible idea – even if we can’t formally specify what we want, we should be able to teach an AI what it is – but it’s also a bit of a cheat, replacing the ethics problem with a black box labeled “the thing that describes what we want.”

      There’s also a thing called “Coherent Extrapolated Volition,” which is roughly “what we would want if we were smarter, kinder, and knew more about where our choices would lead,” but I don’t know how well-specified it is.

      • benwave says:

        Thanks for your reply!

        Any idea how one would go about finding what one’s coherent extrapolated volition is?

    • J Mann says:

      I don’t know the rationalist answer, but I think it’s probably a combination of:

      1) Sometimes people are mistaken about the current state of affairs or likely future outcomes. So if I know you to be high on drugs when you announce that you now have superpowers and are going to jump out of our 10 story building, I’ll stop you and let you update your beliefs when sober. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with motorcycle helmet laws, because I’m pretty confident most people who ride without helmets are mistaken. (Some people would strongly disagree with that last one).

      2) There’s also the issue of competing desires. If I could push a button that would remove my ability to eat food after I had eaten more than 110% of a healthy amount for a given period, I would totally do that. But in the moment, if I’m hungry and frustrated and faced with large quantities of free and delicious food, I sometimes eat more than I would have wanted myself to do an hour earlier, or that I retroactively wanted an hour later. See also Beeminder, where people try to commit themselves to habits that they want in the long run, but not in the moment.

      • benwave says:

        Thanks for your reply!

        I’m aware that failure of prediction is probably the biggest disconnect between peoples’ desires and their actions, but I’m more worried about the fact that even in cases where people can make very good predictions, we will still sometimes not select for the outcomes that in retrospect give us the greatest utility.

        That part seems to be the hard problem here. Or if not the hard problem then at least the part which causes me the most confusion!

    • My answer is here: http://blog.beeminder.com/revealed/

      Excerpt:

      Here’s a more concise reductio proof [that actions don’t reveal preferences]: People use commitment devices; therefore by revealed preference their preferences don’t match their actions. QED.

      In other words, my use of a commitment device proves (by the orthodox economists’ own criterion) that I really do wish to be doing something else.

      • benwave says:

        Thanks for your reply,

        Sounds like revealed preferences are not considered such a strong indicator as I thought (or at least have more limitations than I thought). Which in retrospect I guess is not very surprising!

        • J Mann says:

          I think that with the exception of knowledge failures and competing preferences, revealed preference works pretty well.

          If I complain about my commute, but the next time I move, I still select a suburban house, then it’s pretty reasonable to infer that given the choices available to me, I prefer a longer commute + a less expensive/larger house in the suburbs to a shorter commute + a more expensive and smaller dwelling in the city.

          If I am trying to lose weight, but still eat 3000 calories worth of chips, dip, and beer at a party, then you can model it as I prefer to eat the chips *in that moment* but not in the long run, or you can model it as me being under chemical influence of my body and not able to employ my rational preference – both work.

      • J Mann says:

        Thanks Daniel! Revealed preference gets kind of fractal at some point. I have a calorie count Beeminder, but I set it to top out the penalty at $10, because I want to be able to blow the cap if I feel strongly enough.

        I guess my revealed preference is to have a weak lock-in to counteract (somewhat) my short-term self’s habits.

      • Chrysophylax says:

        That proof doesn’t work. Use of commitment devices just shows time-inconsistent preferences. At time t, you prefer that you do X at time t+1, so you set up a commitment device that makes you do X then even though you disprefer it at t+1. You may feel glad at t+2 that you committed yourself at t.

        It might not even show that in a situation of imperfect information. Lots of commitment devices are about convincing someone else that you’ll do the thing you prefer to do; for example, even if you really do intend to make your court date, you might still have to post bail. A precommitment (e.g. removing your steering wheel while playing chicken) is just a more extreme form of this.

        (Also, that’s not a reductio ad absurdum, that’s a modus tollens. A modus tollens has the form “P implies Q; not Q; therefore not P”. It’s the converse of modus ponens, which has the form “P implies Q; P; therefore Q”. A reductio has the form “P implies not P” – P isn’t just false, it’s inconsistent.)

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      @ Benwave

      I am puzzled when some economists say that by ‘revealed preferences’ many people really prefer to get up early and commute to work, rather than stay in bed.

      • J Mann says:

        I’m OK with that – economists mean that out of the choices available, that’s apparently the one people prefer.

        E.g., they could try to get a different job, become homeless, etc. Of the alternatives they have available, they seem to prefer going to work.

  24. J Mann says:

    Can anyone give me a primer on what SJ types think of as gaslighting? I’m familiar with the Hitchcock movie and the general term, but it seems to have a little extra connotation in the SJ-sphere.

    I’m thinking mostly of Suey Park, who complained a lot that she was being gaslighted when people pointed out that Colbert played a satirical character in response to #cancelcolbert, but it feels like I’ve seen it popping up other places.

    • onyomi says:

      But doesn’t he, in fact, play a satirical character? Gaslighting as I understand it means trying to get someone to believe something false or disbelieve something obviously true through the power of social proof.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I think it is pretty meaningless (side note – accusations of gaslighting aren’t limited to SJ’s).

    • suntzuanime says:

      Gaslighting means trying to convince you you’re mistaken.

    • The Nybbler says:

      (note, I’m an anti-SJW)

      The central examples of what SJWs call “gaslighting” are when someone dismisses a complaint of a woman or minority member (particularly a complaint of harassment, racism, or sexism) as either false, exaggerated, or overemphasized.

      • onyomi says:

        This seems like a real abuse of the term, probably related to the “denying someone’s personal experience” thing. There is no objectively true answer to the question of, for example, whether Columbia’s mattress girl was raped, only her “lived experience.” It’s also weird how this seems like a kind of successor to Marxian class-based polylogism: that is your truth as a bourgeoisie; this is my truth as a proletarian.

        • J Mann says:

          I agree in theory, but I think Nybbler’s explanation is probably a correct description of how the SJ-sphere uses the term. It fits with SJ’s emphasis on narrative and experience, and it makes sense that you can’t disagree with a narrative or correct elements of it without weakening it, and that some SJ-ers would find that offensive.

      • SJW isn’t just one thing. For what it’s worth, part of my social circle is moderate SJW, and they haven’t been using “gaslighting” politically.

        Here’s an article which has been well received, and which is mostly about gaslighting in relationships, though there’s a little about politics.

        • keranih says:

          That’s…wow. That’s something that I’ve a hard time wrapping my head around. This is seriously a thing?

          How on earth do you tell the difference – objectively – between someone gaslighting someone and someone trying to persuade someone to change harmful behaviors?

          • Which part of the article are you referring to?

            It seems to me that trying to get someone to change harmful behaviors, if it’s done honestly, involves being truthful about the behaviors and their effects.

            Gaslighting could include lying to people about what they’ve actually been doing and exaggerating the effect– possibly by lying, possibly by actually amplifying the effects.

          • The Nybbler says:

            > How on earth do you tell the difference – objectively

            For there to be a difference, there has to be an objective reality. If all you have is unquestionable “lived experience”, it’s all “gaslighting”.

            Which isn’t to say that the abusive behaviors don’t exist; they do. But sometimes when someone is insisting your view of things is incorrect, it’s because it is indeed incorrect. And in many cases, both parties believe in the reality they are putting forth; even if one side is much further than objective reality than the other, they aren’t doing it to be manipulative.

            The political example given is telling: “For instance, every time an obvious hate crime is portrayed as an isolated case of mental illness, this is gaslighting.”

            Well, no. Sometimes an “obvious hate crime” really is mental illness. You certainly can’t tell by a news report.

          • I think there’s a plausible connection between background levels of prejudice and hate crimes committed by people who are mentally ill.

            The background prejudice can affect the choice of target.

          • keranih says:

            I think there’s a plausible connection between background levels of prejudice and hate crimes committed by people who are mentally ill.

            The background prejudice can affect the choice of target.

            …I think if we put a lot of weight on this, we have to also give credence to the idea that modern Christianity teaches people to burn witches and that the government is actually in league with aliens to probe people’s teeth – along with random hairdryers actually causing houses to burn down on a regular basis.

            Just because someone is convinced that there is something wrong that needs avenging/addressing doesn’t make it so.

            Gaslighting could include lying to people about what they’ve actually been doing and exaggerating the effect– possibly by lying, possibly by actually amplifying the effects.

            Well, in that case, I’m being regularly gaslighted by my eight year old niece, who frequently complains that I am neglecting her and causing her mental anguish by not bucking her mother and buying her a horse.(*) I’m a horrible person, I am.

            (*)She has no place to keep it, my brother is against the idea as well, and I’m not in a position to buy a horse. I’m still off her “nice aunt” list.

          • I’m not an expert on gaslighting, but I think there’s a continuum. If your niece did a sustained campaign to convince you that you didn’t have the ability to judge whether you can afford to buy her a horse, that would be gaslighting.

            Gaslighting is presumably easier for higher status people to do to lower status people, and this isn’t a simple matter. Sometimes status is just a matter of persistently claiming to have status.

        • J Mann says:

          Thanks, Nancy, that’s very helpful – I clicked through to the “how mainstream society gaslights marginalized cultures” link and that was interesting too.

          I mostly just wanted to understand how the term is being used, but now that I’ve read the article.

          1) I’m sad for the author that she didn’t go back and watch the movie. (She checked wikipedia to learn that the term was coined in “some old movie”, but she missed out – it’s pretty good and would have offered an interesting foundation.)

          2) My guess is the term will have to evolve a little bit. There certainly are some claims that are capable of being examined and challenged (for example, the author herself says that a former partner accused her of abuse, but she doesn’t seem to believe that her denying that abuse is gaslighting), and there are others where it’s not meaningful. (If you’re offended by something, you’re offended).

        • John Schilling says:

          See, they lost me with “Gaslighting only requires a belief that it is acceptable to overwrite another person’s reality”.

          There’s no such thing as “another person’s reality”. Reality is the thing there’s only one of and it belongs to everybody. And deliberately trying to make it so that another person can’t trust their perception or understanding of that one objective reality, is a horrible thing to do to someone and deserves nigh-universal condemnation. Whatever word we use for it, ought to have a strongly perjorative connotation.

          And now, in far too many contexts, it doesn’t. Just like I now hear “rape” and have to stop and think, “wait, do they just mean ‘cop a feel’?”, I have to mentally translate “gaslight” as basically “whine persistently”, and so what?

      • Anonymous says:

        Coincidentally enough I was accused of gaslighting by The Nybbler a week ago in the links thread.
        https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/15/links-416-they-cant-link-our-dick/#comment-347832

        In that case he had a rather more charitable definition:

        The anon is just engaging in what the SJWs like to call ‘gaslighting’ (from the movie, a bit of slang sliding into obscurity before they took it up) — doing stuff to people and then pretending they are crazy when they mention it.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Yes, that’s basically the definition that comes out of the movie. But an SJW example would be something like

          SJW: “I’m constantly being sexually harassed. Just today this creepy guy came up to me and asked me out on a date, ewww. It’s so creepy, I barely even know they guy. And the way he LOOKED at me…, ugh, I told him to buzz off”

          and the response

          “Uh, that’s not harassment; a guy asked you out on a date, you said no. No big deal”
          would be considered “gaslighting”.

          • Should you be allowed to be angry at spammers and telemarketers?

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            You should be allowed to be angry at anything you want to (I hate the washed up lavender color of your gravatar, by the way), but that’s not quite the same as declaring them to be inmoral and/or evil.

  25. Chrysophylax says:

    What are the risk factors for being a terror victim and how high do the risks get? I’m going to work in a place in the City of London that has its own bomb scanning equipment for parcels, so I’d be interested in knowing whether I’m taking on a material risk of harm by working there for several years, riding the Tube to work, being near all kinds of high-value targets and suchlike.

    • CatCube says:

      It’s honestly probably lower than average, since terrorists will have softer targets to choose from. Kind of like how now nobody would try to take over a plane with a box cutter, since the other passengers will probably rush them instead of complying, which was the (eminently rational) pre-9/11 standard.

  26. Sa says:

    What are some of your favourite podcasts people?

    • Anon. says:

      Norm Macdonald Live is absolutely perfect if you “get” Norm. Gets better every time you re-listen. Probably never coming back, though.
      In Our Time
      Partially Examined Life can be good, depending on the topic
      The Projection Booth if you’re into film

    • Nita says:

      More or Less (BBC Radio 4) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrss1/episodes/downloads
      Competent science journalists analyze dubious statistical factoids seen in the media.

      Moral Maze (BBC Radio 4) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qk11/episodes/downloads
      A motley panel of opinionated British folks interrogate several guests on a controversial topic, then discuss the answers among themselves.

      Science in Action (BBC World Service) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsnb/episodes/downloads
      Assorted news from the world of science, presented with a bit of context, interviews and banter.

      Business Daily (BBC World Service) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsxs/episodes/downloads
      Assorted news from the world of business, with interviews + satire by Lucy Kellaway.

    • Urstoff says:

      Econtalk [economics]
      Freakonomics [economics]
      More or Less [stats in the media]
      In Our Time [history/culture]
      Planet Money [economics]
      Science Magazine [science, duh]
      Nature Magazine [science]
      Spontaneanation [improv comedy]
      The Pistol Shrimps Podcast [comedy]
      How Did This Get Made [comedy/film]
      Various Sports (mostly American Football) podcasts

    • J Mann says:

      Hardcore history, plus some special interest material. (Commentary on TV shows I like, plus some bible stuff).

    • onyomi says:

      No Adam Carolla? I find he has a good mix of humor and serious social commentary. He is also the rare example of a very non-ideological libertarian.

      • J Mann says:

        I like Carolla, but I find that after about 30 episodes, it felt like he was repeating. (I felt the same way about Marc Maron – after a certain point, I kind of knew how the episode would go, so unless I heard that a particular guest had done an awesome show, I skipped it).

        I still use a couple of his comedy bits, though, especially one comparing smokers and gun owner’s reactions to encroaching regulation.

        (Have you seen The Hammer? An enjoyably weird mash-up of a pretty standard independent film and various classic Carolla themes.)

    • Sa says:

      Thanks for the responses, I’m looking forward to hearing these! 🙂

    • stargirlprincesss says:

      Tyler Cowen. “Conversations with Tyler” is my favorite among podcasts not mentioned.

    • anon says:

      In addition to those already mentioned (I heartily second Conversations With Tyler and Hardcore History), here are some of my favorites:

      * No Agenda — could loosely be classified as “media criticism”, but mostly it’s just hilarious. An illustrative example of what they do is play clips from The View and make fun of how ridiculous its hosts are. Warning: may be too sympathetic to contrarian beliefs about vaccines and climate change for some tastes.
      * FT Alphachat/Alphachatterbox — Cardiff Garcia and Shannon Bond are really good, thoughtful interviewers, mostly economics type stuff.
      * Seminars About Long-Term Thinking — I hope you already know about this one! While not all the speakers are that great, and sometimes I can tell that I’m missing out by not having video (you have to pay for it), some of the seminars are really fantastic.
      * The WOW! Signal — Neat podcast about space. Kinda quirky, probably not for everyone, but I like it. E.g. recently there has been a multi-part “explainer” series about the various scientific issues at stake with “Tabby’s Star”.
      * Vox’s The Weeds / The Ezra Klein Show — while I am almost diametrically opposed to Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff when it comes to politics, and I only agree with Matt Yglesias on a few things, I find their discussions pretty interesting. On Ezra’s interview show he gets really good guests, sometimes not just lefties, e.g. Grover Norquist, and asks pretty good questions.
      * Amicus — SCOTUS commentary by Dahlia Lithwick
      * Rational Security / Lawfare / Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast — this triumvirate covers national security issues and law related to the internet, from a mostly very law-enforcement-sympathetic perspective. They often feature speeches by or interviews with the DC lawyers and bureaucrats who are most in the weeds when it comes to crushing civil liberties. Useful in a “know thy enemy” way.
      * Cooking Issues — food.
      * The Slashfilmcast — movies.
      * The Fifth Column — a new podcast from Matt Welch at Reason. I can already tell it’ll be a must-listen.
      * The Glenn Show on Bloggingheads.TV — politics, mostly. Some of the best episodes are the recurring conversations with John McWhorter and Harold Pollack, IMO.

      • Urstoff says:

        I second The Fifth Column; the “Some Idiot Wrote This” segment is particularly entertaining.

    • I’ve bookmarked this subthread, but I was thinking about finding similar useful recommendation discussions from ssc by going over past discussions. This would be rather a large task.

      Instead, does anyone have favorite recommendation discussions from ssc already saved?

      How hard would it be to have crowd tagging of comments? How hard would it be to keep it reasonably honest?

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I like Ascending the Tower. It’s pretty much the official Death Eater podcast and it’s very interesting. I particularly like the “Descending the Tower” episodes in which the hosts answer question they have received on Ask.fm and Twitter.

    • Uncle Fungus says:

      I am unlurking to say that you really should listen to the Man Buy Cow podcast. (funny)

      And Mad Dogs and Englishmen (politics)

      Thanks for raising this thread, I will check out some suggestions

    • I can usually find something interesting at Bloggingheads, and I’m fond of Tim Ferriss’s podcasts.

  27. John Nerst says:

    I’ve been curious about what the SSC commentariat would make of this week’s big big political event in Sweden: “handshake-gate”. Tl;dr: Green Party politician quits after controversy erupts when he refuses, for religious reasons, to greet a woman by shaking her hand.

    The chatter around it has been interesting, as it puts the spotlight on internal contradictions in the identity-political narrative. Judgning by media reaction, feminism seems to have the edge on genuine multiculturalism.

    • Hlynkacg says:

      My first, admittedly uncharitable, impression is that in a battle between Islamic socialists and radical feminists the true winners will be the popcorn vendors.

      Though this does highlight why I feel that multiculturalism is largely unworkable.

    • BBA says:

      Multiculturalism is okay with Islam as long as Islam is okay with multiculturalism. Too bad there’s no existing Islamic equivalent to the United Church of Christ or the Jewish Reconstructionist Communities, so the multiculturalists will just have to wait until there are enough “enlightened” Muslims to give it a go.

      (I attended a feminist, Reconstructionist-flavored seder over the weekend. To me it felt like grasping at straws, trying to read a feminist message into Judaism that just isn’t there.)

      • dndnrsn says:

        The attempts by some flavours of Judaism and Christianity to find feminist messages in documents from societies that were, uh, definitely not feminist is really interesting, but kind of tragic: they want to keep their religious faith, but want to reconcile it to the modern world.

        It’s the left-wing version of “God is talking to us, now, through these documents”, which is usually a right-wing (Christian?) thing.

        My favourite example is a female minister preaching on First Timothy.

  28. Dániel says:

    Ross Douthat’s New York Times editorial, The Reactionary Mind, links to SSC’s summary.

  29. Darkly enlightened commenters here would perhaps like to know there’s a gathering of the brightest thinkers of the reaction where they can discuss topics of interest without voting or communist interference. Many ex-LW people among us.

  30. onyomi says:

    Does anyone else have this experience?

    Mainstream scandals used to try to take down mainstream politicians are, in the main, so pointless and disingenuous that they almost make me like the person more.

    Like, I don’t like Hillary Clinton. I don’t want her to be president. But not because she had a questionable real estate deal once. Or used her e-mail improperly. Or even failed to call people in time to rescue a US embassy (the last one is the most serious, but would not, by itself constitute a “scandal” so much as a “mistake,” I’d say). And this goes for both sides.

    It’s not exactly that I think these things don’t matter at all, but rather that I know for a fact the people expressing outrage would not care for two seconds about these issues if someone on their “side” did the exact same thing.

    I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, exactly, as probably mostly unintentional, but it feels as if the rather convenient effect of such scandals is to distract from people asking more fundamental questions. That is, I’m sure Hillary doesn’t relish answering the 10,000th question about her e-mail server, but I feel like this sort of thing is actually very safe territory for the candidate, and more so for the party, and even more so for the mainstreamish consensus type position.

    I feel like when you tell a mainstream politician “ooh, we got you now on this gaff!” they, or, at least, their tribe, is thinking “oh please don’t throw me in that brier patch!”

    Of course, if Bryan Caplan is right that we get a smarter government than we deserve precisely because the masses are distracted from fundamental change by focusing on stupid stuff, then it may not be all bad. Though as someone who really, really dislikes the current political mainstream, I’m skeptical.

    • suntzuanime says:

      Mainstream scandals used to try to take down mainstream politicians are, in the main, so pointless and disingenuous that they almost make me like the person more.

      This is the source of at least half of Trump’s power, people trying to take him down over pointless shit, which only makes him stronger, which makes people reach even further to try to take him down, and he spirals out of control and makes America great again.

      (I think the email impropriety in particular is more substantial than the sophisticated consensus considers it. It’s the sort of thing you would do if you were engaging in major corruption or treason. She might just be incompetent, certainly she’s given little reason to think she isn’t, but it raises some doubts.)

      • John Schilling says:

        I think the email impropriety in particular is more substantial than the sophisticated consensus considers it.

        This. Consider that while Gen. Petraeus does have defenders on the right, it is a fairly low-key defense in which everyone, including Petraeus himself, understood that getting caught doing that sort of thing meant he had to resign and perhaps plan a future return to a less central role. Not blow it off and pretend that it doesn’t matter, that only Evil Partisans on the other side care. And in Petraeus’s case, we are pretty clear on his motive and that the only thing he was covering up was a bit of illicit nookie.

        Security discipline is very likely something Red Tribe cares about more than Blue Tribe, but they do genuinely care about it rather than simply pretending to do so when they can turn it into a partisan attack.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        It’s the sort of thing you would do if you were engaging in major corruption or treason.

        Her default mode is “paranoid,” and not entirely without reason.

        For the paranoid, the most important thing is Control, and this was a measure to Control all her messages, without annoying things like Republicans or Freedom Of Information Act Requests getting in the way.

    • Theo Jones says:

      I think that confirmation bias has a role here

      Person who is predisposed to think that Clinton is awful —> person hears about email server —> this reinforces person’s impression of Clinton –> person way over estimates how persuasive email scandal is to others —> person promotes email scandal to others as evidence that Clinton is awful

      • onyomi says:

        Scott Adams talks about this a lot with respect to Trump’s “persuasion” skills, and I think there’s something to it: implicitly predict something inevitable, like Jeb acting “low energy” and then wait for the person to unavoidably fulfill your prophecy by the power of confirmation bias.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      The media’s gotcha game has become a bit excessive. Trump says 7/11 instead of 9/11. Is this really news? Sanders has a bad hair day bringing up facts in one interview. Not interesting. The fact that a politician can remain gaffe free for months on end is almost a detractor. They are are staying on script and very likely not telling you what they really think. It gets robotic. I challenge anyone to be followed by a gaffe obsessed press for months and not do something really stupid. My answer? Election cycle is legislated to be 3 months long.

    • hlynkacg says:

      @onyomi
      I understand what your getting at but I think you’ve chosen exactly the wrong person as your example. You say …the people expressing outrage would not care for two seconds about these issues if someone on their “side” did the exact same thing. …and I really want to smack you.

      The fact that ,the deaths of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty have been dismissed by all the right-thinking people in the media as some sort of “gotcha” is exactly why there is a dark corner of me that wants to watch them all burn.

      Remember this ad? I do, and the fact that Hillary Clinton is being considered for the position of Commander and Chief rather than being stripped of her clearances and ridden out on a rail is an insult to the living and dead a like. A more civilized individual who had failed as thoroughly as she has would have at least show some contrition if not throw herself on her sword.

      Your message has been received loud and clear. Nobody cares about the life of an idealistic state department employee, and a couple of ignorant slopeheads except insofar as they inconvenience the Democratic machine.

      You may think that your average grunt is too stupid to notice being thrown under the bus but trust me, they notice. and their entirely justified response is “Well fuck you to”.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Part of it is just that the job of Secretary of State involves holding lots of lives in your hands. There are a lot of diplomats and diplomatic security around the world, and the actions of those diplomats might endanger more than just themselves. Those four deaths were not the sort of thing we would endorse, but they pale in comparison to the deaths caused by the uprisings and coups she incited during her term as Secretary. That’s why Benghazi is treated as a cheap distraction: you’re blaming Clinton for what happened to that compound when you should be looking at what was happening to the country around it.

        The counter-argument is that the lives of foreigners are cheap and Clinton had a duty to protect those four Americans. And I think the differing perspectives on this can account for the differing perspectives on the Benghazi attacks.

        • hlynkacg says:

          I don’t blame her for the attack. I blame her for the state department’s failure to respond and then trivializing it afterwards.

          Characterizing the loss of a US ambassador and his detail to hostile action as a “cheap distraction” from the important business of partisan politics is to miss the whole point.

          • Jaskologist says:

            I also blame her for picking a random Christian immigrant and painting a big “kill this guy” target on his back for the crime of speaking ill of Islam in order to distract from said failures.

            “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” That’s policy now.

          • onyomi says:

            Well, as I said, I think of the things they’ve tried to stick to Clinton Benghazi seems by far the most serious to me. But my heuristic is: if someone seen as the right-wing savior in the next election cycle had done the same thing, how forgiving would the Republican pundits be? Arguably less so, given the general GOP emphasis on defense, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got swept under the rug.

            Also, to the extent we agree Benghazi is an issue for legit outrage, I think there’s something of a “boy who cried wolf effect”: everyone knows that both parties are disingenuous and hypocritical about what they’ll use to try to tar the opponents, so it’s easy to say “oh, those Republicans are at it again…”

          • Jiro says:

            if someone seen as the right-wing savior in the next election cycle had done the same thing, how forgiving would the Republican pundits be?

            If some Republican had taken an attack by Muslims and blamed it on Islamophobic speech? I expect such a Republican would find his career as a Republican ended.

          • onyomi says:

            “If some Republican had taken an attack by Muslims and blamed it on Islamophobic speech? I expect such a Republican would find his career as a Republican ended.”

            Well, one may need to adjust the hypothetical to account for GOP priorities. Though I have to admit I’m harder pressed to imagine a particular scandal which would ruin a Democratic politician so long as he continued to toe the party line.

            I am biased, but I feel like it may be that Democrats have a stronger sense that their side is inherently on the side of the angels, and so they give more benefit of the doubt to their own people (e. g. Marion Barry) even than Republican voters give to Republican politicians (Republican voters may also be more hostile to politicians as a category and/or have stronger Haidt-esque disgust-type reactions about personal failings as well).

          • Jiro says:

            An analogous situation would have Americans attacked by radical members of a group who Republicans generally sympathize with, and Republicans falsely claim the group was provoked by someone else who they think Democrats sympathize with.

            I can’t think of a reasonable one. You might come up with an example that uses attacks by anti-abortion or militia groups, but attacks by those that do as much damage as attacks by Muslims are pretty rare, so your analogy will be comparing apples and oranges just because of that. And I don’t believe that Republicans could get away with saying such attacks were provoked by Democrats, not even when talking to other Republicans.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            It may very well be a case of the Democrats not having as wide a coalition between ideologies between their voters. The GOP has traditional conservatives, libertarians, evangelicals, ‘classic’ liberals, market enthusiasts, nationalists, as well as populists by now amongst its ranks. The democrats seem better at being something of a united front, with their two frontrunners at this point being much less disagreeable amongst each other than the Republican ones are.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            But my heuristic is: if someone seen as the right-wing savior in the next election cycle had done the same thing, how forgiving would the Republican pundits be?

            This depends: are there other serious contenders to whom the party could switch allegiance, or did the Republican meet in secret with all of them months before the primary season began to encourage them all to sit the race out?

            Also, to the extent we agree Benghazi is an issue for legit outrage, I think there’s something of a “boy who cried wolf effect”

            I have to agree with this. It’s tough for me to get a good read of Benghazi because so many people are determined it is The Issue That Will Take Clinton Down that I can’t figure it out. But the e-mail server, while no one died, is an issue where I knew a lot about it ahead of time. Perhaps I’m just bike-shedding.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            I’m curious, what were the other “cry wolf” incidents? Not, that I doubt you. I just don’t recall any scandal that even approached the magnitude of Benghazi or Hillary’s security lapses.

            From where I’m sitting there seems to be a serious disconnect between how the two parties have handled their respective scandals. Nobody seriously argued that the Outing of Valarie Plame, or the Petraeus affair “didn’t matter”.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            I put Benghazi under the “shit happens” category. You aren’t going to prevent people from hitting soft targets. If there were very bad directly traceable decisions or incompetent management (more than usual) than I might get excited about it. Small potatoes.

            The perplexing knee jerk response to look inward first and immediately start warning people to not blame Islam after their warriors kill in its name speaks for itself.

        • birdboy2000 says:

          The fact that they’re talking about Benghazi and not Sirte says a lot about our political class, and none of it is good.

          • EyeballFrog says:

            Could you go into more detail about this? I had not heard of Sirte before now.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            I assume he’s talking about the Battle between ISIL and Quadaffi loyalists in early 2015 but I’m not sure why he thinks its particularly notable.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            Sirte is a city in Libya which had been a Gadaffi stronghold during the 2011 civil war where NATO backed the rebels, and is now ruled by the Islamic State. If one wishes to criticize Hillary and Obama on Libya, I’d consider this a much bigger failure than a consulate getting attacked.

      • Anonymous says:

        Your message has been received loud and clear. Nobody cares about the life of an idealistic state department employee, and a couple of ignorant slopeheads except insofar as they inconvenience the Democratic machine.

        You may think that your average grunt is too stupid to notice being thrown under the bus but trust me, they notice. and their entirely justified response is “Well fuck you to”.

        Get back to me when anyone that had anything at all to do with the Iraq debacle — whether in the GWB administration or Congress — garners the same vitriol from these “average grunts”. Until then my verdict is partisan bullshit.

        • Jaskologist says:

          There is a difference between sending somebody to do a dangerous job and abandoning them. The military exists for the former, but part of the deal is supposed to be that we won’t reward them with the latter.

          • Anonymous says:

            First of all, what does the military have to do with it? Two of the named men were state department employees and two were mercenaries. Second what exactly do you mean by abandoned?

        • Hlynkacg says:

          Has anyone (on either side) seriously argued that those deaths didn’t matter? or that Bush did not bear an obligation/responsibility for those under his command?

          As Jaskologist said, there is a difference between asking someone to do a dangerous job, and throwing that same person under a bus for personal gain.

          You want to blame Bush and Rove for Iraq? I think that’s perfectly reasonable but you damn well better blame Obama and Hilary for Libya and Syria too. Otherwise your accusation of partisan hackery are nothing more than projection.

          • Anonymous says:

            I certainly haven’t seen the same vitriol for Bush and Rove and Cheney for the many more killed and injured in Iraq. At best there’s some ambivalence about how maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. More often just recriminations about how if we had only bombed harder we would have totally won and it would have been totally worth it for reasons.

            As for blaming Obama and Hillary for Libya and Syria, I do think they take the blame for the servicemen that died in those places. Happily far fewer than died in the tar pits of Afghanistan and Iraq.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            The difference is “the throwing people under the bus” part. Between accepting blame and claiming that there was never any blame to be assigned in the first place.

          • Anonymous says:

            Did I miss an interview where Bush, Cheney and/or Rove apologized for throwing away American lives? This I’ve got to see.

          • keranih says:

            I certainly haven’t seen the same vitriol for Bush and Rove and Cheney for the many more killed and injured in Iraq.

            Where are you not seeing the vitrol for Bush et al? My recollection of the hatred and fury aimed at Bush was that it dominated the national leftist disourse at a level far exceeding the whole of the current rightwing anger at Clinton.

            At best there’s some ambivalence about how maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. More often just recriminations about how if we had only bombed harder we would have totally won and it would have been totally worth it for reasons.

            This is where I wonder about your sources. The people I’ve heard talking don’t say “should have bombed harder.” They say “should have questioned people harder” or “should have had more soldiers there.” So I wonder how representative your sources are.

            And had we produced a stable Iraq ready to lead the Middle East forward into peaceful economic development and human rights, it would have been a bargain at twice the price.

            (That it was foolish to think such a thing could have been had for all the gold in Croesus’s kingdom…well, that is another thing.)

          • Anonymous says:

            @keranih
            I was talking about among the veterans and servicemen Hlynkacg was referencing (average grunts).

            There’s plenty of anger on the left towards GWB, and I’d be happy to accuse at least many of them of hypocrisy in their differential attitude towards Obama’s version of the war on terror. But as it happens I was talking about partisan bullshit on the right this time.

            “Bombed harder” was intended as a shorthand for the whole cluster of arguments that we just messed on the military strategy rather than we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Bush stated that the Iraq war was a mistake based on faulty intelligence and described it as the biggest regret of his presidency.

            So, kindof

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @ anon@gmail

            As keranih says above…

            had we produced a stable Iraq ready to lead the Middle East forward into peaceful economic development and human rights, it would have been a bargain at twice the price.

            …Yes its a dangerous job and you can argue about execution, but every one agreed on the score and no one is claiming that the losses suffered should be ignored, or that Bush does not bear responsibility for them. Defenses of Bush tend to be of the “mistakes were made but he did the best he could” sort.

            On the flipside, Democratic defense of Hillary can be summed up as “who gives a fuck about a few dead American so long as a Democrat wins the next election?”

            You’ve got some serious chutzpah if you’re going to accuse others of partisanship after endorsing that.

          • Anonymous says:

            We are talking about orders of magnitude more bodies. And not exactly falling on swords — as you put it more of a mistakes were attitude.

            Meanwhile here’s Hillary Clinton:

            QUESTION: Any do-overs that you would — relative to Secretary of State?

            HILLARY CLINTON: Oh, sure. I mean, you know, you make these choices based on imperfect information. And you make them to — as we say, the best of your ability. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be unforeseen consequences, unpredictable twists and turns.

            You know, my biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy, losing four Americans, two diplomats and now it’s public, so I can say two CIA operatives, losing an ambassador like Chris Stevens, who was one of our very best and had served in Libya and across the Middle East and spoke Arabic.

            Hardly the who gives a fuck attitude you portray.

            And yet Hillary Clinton is portrayed as the devil incarnate and GWB, if not exactly worshiped like Ronnie, certainly isn’t being kicked out of the family of Republican affection. Not to mention other architects of that war who haven’t even expressed a scintilla of regret.

            If you can’t see the partisanship inherent in that, you should look in a mirror to find the problem.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            “I certainly haven’t seen the same vitriol for Bush and Rove and Cheney for the many more killed and injured in Iraq.”

            You must be 3 years old or less. Congratulations on how quickly you picked up reading and writing!

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Tom Scharf banned for two weeks for unnecessary meanness

        • Vorkon says:

          You all should know better than to respond seriously to an anon@gmail when they start talking shit about military matters. Well, when they start talking shit about anything, really, but they’ve demonstrated repeatedly that there’s at least one or two of them who are either unrepentant trolls, or who lose all sense of objectivity, whenever a military-related issue springs up, so that’s one area where I’ve found it pays to be particularly skeptical of anon@gmails.

          Tell me, are you the same one that called us “baby killers” a few threads ago?

          (Not that I’m likely to take you any more seriously if you say you aren’t, but to be fair, that was more of a rhetorical question than one I actually care about the answer to. Put some kind of name behind your statements, and I might take you more seriously.)

          • Anonymous says:

            If I thought of U.S. servicemen as “baby killers” then I couldn’t well object to the architects of the Iraq War having throw their lives away frivolously, could I?

            Also, it really ruins my day to hear that you don’t take me seriously, Vorkon.

    • J Mann says:

      Does anyone else have this experience?

      Mainstream scandals used to try to take down mainstream politicians are, in the main, so pointless and disingenuous that they almost make me like the person more.

      I wouldn’t say they make me like the targets more – it just depresses me.

      And I think it’s even worse than you say – the Hillary takedowns you cite aren’t directed at her policy positions, but at least they say something about the quality of her execution and her professional abilities.

      What depresses me most at the focus on language – Obama saying “you didn’t build that” instead of “you didn’t build the roads and laws that made your success possible.” Romney saying “binders full of women” instead of “binders full of women’s resumes” (in the context of a story that everyone agrees is (a) true and (b) pro-women’s engagement!) And now Sanders saying that Hillary’s history means she’s “unqualified” to be President when he really meant “disqualified.”

      The people looking to influence the electorate honestly believe that they can swing voters who can’t be convinced by “Sanders’ policy positions won’t work” or “Sanders doesn’t have the skills needed to execute his policy goals” by saying “Sanders called a woman with a long resume ‘unqualified’!!!” And for some voters, they’re probably right. It’s very depressing.

      I almost wish more takedowns rose to the (admittedly pathetic) level of your examples. At some point, when you add up enough of the Hillary trivialities, they start to look like a pattern of cutting corners, personal vindictiveness, and generally underperforming, at least IMHO. A voter might still decide that Hillary’s likely policy positions while in office are preferable to any alternative, but the general quality of her activity is still more relevant to the debate than a fight about who said “unqualified” or “superpredator.”

      • onyomi says:

        Yeah, those little verbal gaffes are probably even more annoying, though I think they serve a different, if also unfortunate function:

        Confirmation bias+giving a label to a previously felt bias

        Lots of people already “knew” in their gut that Romney hated poor people and didn’t respect women before he said the “47%” thing or the “binders full of women” thing, just as lots of people already “knew” Obama was hostile to private enterprise before the “you didn’t build that” thing; but these gave them something to latch onto; a way to say “ah hah! Just as we thought! Here’s the proof in a nice little soundbite.”

        On the one hand, I’m sure Romney regrets those specific statements; on the other, if it hadn’t been those statements it probably would have been something else. For this reason it’s probably best for candidates to tackle their perceived weaknesses head on, taking proactive, preemptive action to dispel what you can guess will be the biases against you.

        By backing down on the abortion thing and saying people can use whatever bathroom they want, for example, Trump is probably trying to preemptively defuse the “Trump hates women” and “Trump is a mean, uncultured, reactionary boob” narratives the Dems are no doubt warming up for the general.

    • gbdub says:

      Honestly I find the fact that you (and a lot of people) think the Hillary email thing is just a “gaffe” to be mildly infuriating.

      Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State. Protecting state secrets ought to be pretty damn high on her priority list (and so should following transparency laws, the avoidance of which were likely her main reason for having the private server). The fact that she was so cavalier about a core job function for apparently crass personal reasons is (or ought to be) a big damn deal.

      Honestly to me it’s a bigger deal than Benghazi, which was a SNAFU. Those happen. I’m annoyed by how she handled the aftermath and attempted to deflect blame rather than just owning up to it. But ultimately it was “just” a screwup. The email thing was deliberate, planned, ongoing, dangerous, clearly in violation of the rules, and if not actively malicious then at the very least undertaken with a major disregard for propriety. That to me is the bigger sin – mistakes can be learned from, but every indication is that Hillary still thinks keeping her private email server was absolutely the right thing to do (at least as long as she could get away with it).

      There’s also the “rules are for the little people” aspect. I work with information that is sensitive but not nearly at the same level of what Clinton had access to. If I was 1/10th as careless as she was, I would definitely be unemployable in my current line of work and quite possibly spend some time in jail. Why should Clinton’s name and position protect her from the same fate?

      • Hlynkacg says:

        Why should Clinton’s name and position protect her from the same fate?

        You said it yourself, because “rules are for the little people” you are one of the little people.

        • gbdub says:

          Right, I would just expect more of my fellow little people to be resentful of this rather than just writing it off as a distracting “gaffe”.

          Is it just that the little people outside security-adjacent industries aren’t really that interested / knowledgeable about state secrecy? Or is it that journalists, relying as they do on leaks, are actually hostile to the laws that Clinton broke?

          • Hlynkacg says:

            I have no answers but I know the feeling.

          • Teal says:

            We don’t actually believe a word that the national security state says anymore. In concept we accept the existence and importance of state secrets but something like “top secret” has been dog-that-cried-wolf’ed into meaninglessness. Saying that such material hasn’t been treated with the proper reverence has no emotional salience.

          • Gbdub says:

            Sigh. That’s kind of what I was worried about. There’s this romantic Fox Mulderian notion that Top Secret means “sinister stuff we hide away to keep the common man away from the Truth!” And there may be some of that.

            But there’s also an awful lot of stuff that is kept secret because there are people who will use that information to kill people working for American interests. Stuff like weapon system capabilities and vulnerabilities. Or names of covert operatives. Or I don’t know, specific security arrangements for American embassies in war zones.

            Even if you believe that state secrets are mostly the former, why would that make you ignore Clinton’s misdeeds? She’s not a Snowden-esque whistleblower (quite the opposite – she was likely using the server to keep her Clinton Foundation dealings away from FOIA requests).

            Pretty much the only reason for the Mulders of the world to like this behavior is if they believe it’s likely to “bring the system down” or “set the truth free” by its very vulnerability. It’s certainly not something you’d want a competent administrator of state secrets to do.

          • Teal says:

            I don’t think there’s a lot of deep dark secrets being hushed up. I think there’s millions, or maybe even billions, of pages of perfectly mundane pages locked under the classification system. Mostly because the national security apparatus and most of the people in it have every incentive to see it expand. You know how many people have TS clearances? Can you really tell me we have that many legitamite secrets to just such a work force?

            Read between the lines is the email scandal and it’s pretty clear that there was, and probably still is, a lot of tension between the state department and the “intelligence community” in part over the subject of overclassification.

            None of this is intended to excuse or justify anything Clinton did or didn’t do. It’s meant to explain why many of us are blasé about things the National Security State claims are damaging.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Teal:

            Exactly. It’s not that I’m all paranoid about the government hiding aliens from us. It’s because I don’t think this is really important stuff that I’m not very worked up about it.

          • BBA says:

            The BT Tower houses critical communications infrastructure so for nearly 30 years its existence was deemed a state secret, despite being a 37-story 600-foot tower in the middle of London with a revolving restaurant on top.

            If that’s the kind of stuff the British government calls top secret, I can only imagine how much worse the American government is with overclassification.

          • Fahundo says:

            @Teal

            You know how many people have TS clearances? Can you really tell me we have that many legitamite secrets to just such a work force?

            Not to contradict your point that documents may be erroneously labeled top sectret, BUT

            The number of people who hold top secret clearances is not evidence of this. Not everyone with a security clearance handles classified documents.

            A lot of people with secret and top secret security clearances are entrusted with specialized equipment that has classified components.

            For example, certain types of communications encryption devices used by the DoD are only handled by people with security clearances, because if they fell into the hands of unauthorized persons they could be used to listen in to encrypted messages.

            Point is, you can’t just look at the number of people with security clearances and assume that all of them are sitting at desks handling classified documents.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t think there’s a lot of deep dark secrets being hushed up. I think there’s millions, or maybe even billions, of pages of perfectly mundane pages locked under the classification system.

            Yes, of course. You have custody of a thousand pages of documents full of boring minutia, some small fraction of which are of mild legitimate interest to whistleblowers and reporters. And there’s probably a 50-50 chance that one of those documents has enough information to doxx the few remaining Bothan spies who haven’t been killed and are still feeding you Death Star plans. You don’t have time to read a thousand pages of minutia as thoroughly as you’d need to be sure you caught everything. Imperial counterintelligence, is going to have a whole team of experts going through anything you don’t stamp “Top Secret” all over.

            Everything gets stamped TS. If a reporter with a clue files a narrowly specific FOIA request, you can go through the five pages they are specifically interested in and see if those are safe to release. And if someone in your office thinks all these files belong on their home server because it’s more convenient that way, you fire their sorry selfish ass and make sure they never work in a sensitive area again.

            If the files are on your boss’s home server not because it is convenient but because they are worried that something in an FOIA request might embarrass them and so they want it all under their personal control, that’s not quite treason but you can see it from there.

          • Teal says:

            @John Schilling
            I suppose we are in agreement about the situation — viz. that an arbitrary page marked top secret is really only about .05% likely to actually be top secret.* We just disagree fundamentally about whether or not that’s a reasonable situation, what conclusions about the national security state one should draw from it, and what that means for claims that leaks or similar are risking people’s lives.

            *Actually given Snowden and Manning that percent may be too high, but I’ll concede it for the sake of argument.

          • Fahundo says:

            Even Edward Snowden personally read through all the individual files he leaked and withheld the ones he thought would actually be damaging to national security. I’m not sure where you get your 0.05% figure from but I would imagine Snowden’s own estimate would be higher than that.

          • John Schilling says:

            I suppose we are in agreement about the situation — viz. that an arbitrary page marked top secret is really only about .05% likely to actually be top secret.

            We are not in agreement.

            An arbitrary page marked Top Secret is 100% likely to actually be Top Secret.

            The only thing that actually works to e.g. keep your agents from being identified, captured, and tortured to death is to make ACTUALLY REALLY NO SHIT FOR REAL TOP SECRET, a collection of documents that is about 2,000 times larger than the set of documents that you think contain information identifying your agents.

            And to actually fire the people who don’t take that seriously.

            We are not in agreement.

          • Teal says:

            Surely not the only way. We could, for example, not have secret agents or spend the time and money to review those pages properly.

            Particularly given that we are the imperial counterintelligence with well nigh unlimited budgets and our enemies range from wildly underfunded in comparison to unpaid sheep farmers.

          • John Schilling says:

            OK, but Hillary Clinton signed up to be Secretary of State of the United States of America, not the Transparent Utopia of Never-Neverland. She dealt with truly life-or-death secrets, and she’s asking us to trust her with even bigger ones.

            Also, I wouldn’t consider Russian or Chinese state intelligence to be underfunded. And while “funding” is kind of a nebulous concept in North Korea’s case, they can throw a lot of technically capable manpower at problems like sorting through thousands of pages of documents looking for interesting correlations.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “We could, for example, not have secret agents or spend the time and money to review those pages properly.”

            The more people you have reviewing the files, the more likely leaks are going to occur.

          • anon says:

            @Schilling

            The claim that the classified corpus needs to be much larger than the corpus of “face-value sensitive” material, seems to me related to the Mosaic Theory of intelligence. This is something that intelligence analysts — and even some people outside of the IC, like certain financial analysts — clearly believe in. But almost by definition it doesn’t seem like the sort of theory that can be substantiated by publicly-verifiable, scientific data. So it strikes me as a relatively subtle philosophical question the extent to which we non-cleared plebes should defer to it.

          • John Schilling says:

            Mosaic theory is part of it, but that’s not exactly confined to the deep black world. Look at how big data is used commercially. At how doxxing is done on the internet, or at how the FBI found Dread Pirate Roberts. At how obscure bits of typography brought low Dan Rather and company.

            The other part is the bit about how we generate so much useless fluff documentation in the first place. In 1977, if your Bothan Spies brought you a technical readout of the Death Star, you probably made three carefully-written documents at various levels of classification. Now, you get three thousand, mostly produced without effort or thought, all of them collateral Top Secret until someone takes the time to carefully vet them. Probably including an HR report on compliance with diversity requirements in the hiring of Bothan spies.

            Which brings us to, so what? Yes, much of that documentation can eventually be shown to be harmless, but also banal and mostly useless. So what great social harm is being done by leaving the Top Secret stickers all over it, against the possible harm of having your loyal spies rounded up and killed? What is the overriding value in being able to read all that fluff, that requires we endure that risk?

            There’s a separate threat in having government officials use inappropriate security classification to conceal their corrupt misdeeds, but that’s going to happen whether we generate thousands of documents or just a handful. And if that’s what worries you, which is the bigger threat? A government official’s corruption, documented in a file in the Top Secret vault where honest government officials can read it and an FOIA request might pry it loose on review? Or the same file on a private email server until yesterday when, oh, did I delete that by mistake and wait, my hard drive just crashed?

      • CatCube says:

        Hear, hear! We had a captain in our brigade accidentally send out a PowerPoint slideshow that had a map in the background with some classified information on it over NIPR*. They gathered up the hard drives and BlackBerries of everybody on the recipient list and destroyed them, and gave the captain a GOMOR. Meanwhile, HRC sets up her own fucking privately-owned server and everybody falls all over themselves to explain why it’s not that bad.

        (*I never did hear how the map got onto the unclassified system to begin with)

        • It might be a matter of luck. Nothing bad actually happened as a result of Hilary’s private server.

          There *have* been breaches of federal data.

          I’ve wondered whether she did it out of a vague feeling that a private server was safer. I’m not saying this is true, just that I might have done it for that reason.

          • Anonymous says:

            It might be a matter of luck. Nothing bad actually happened as a result of Hilary’s private server.

            Right.

            …and we know this because the first thing a foreign intelligence agency does when they breach the Secretary of State’s private email server is send a press release to the Washington Post.

          • Fair enough. There have been so many big public data breaches that I forgot about the possibility of covert breaches.

            Availability bias for the lose.

          • gbdub says:

            There is no way in hell she could honestly believe here system was safer than an actual classified server. Actual classified servers are kept in locked rooms with strictly controlled access lists. The requirements for actually hooking them up to a network that leaves the room fill up a book.

            Which is not to say no one has badly implemented classified servers. Just that the actual requirements are pretty stringent, and stricter than the systems you usually hear about getting breached. The sort of agency capable of breaching these networks would almost certainly not publicize the fact (since then the security folks would immediately close up the system and change it to close the breach).

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @gbdub:
            Her server didn’t stand-in/replace a classified server. Her server was an SMTP server intended for non-classified communication.

            If she had used a federal email address on a federal SMTP server, it would not have been a classified server either, sending classified information on it would still have been illegal and it would not have been hardened like a server intended for communicating classified information.

            I believe the Secretaries of State before Clinton who used email also used personal email servers. See this article for example. Clinton wasn’t doing much of anything different from any other Secretary of State in terms of how they used email, but did run afoul of some policy changes.

          • gbdub

            If her using her own server was such an obviously bad idea, why didn’t her people tell her? Is it possible they didn’t know? Or that they told her and she ignored them?

            I’m inclined to think that people can make astonishingly stupid honest mistakes.

          • Randy M says:

            People who make important, though honest mistakes and usually canned for being careless, though. Or fined, or imprisoned, etc.
            At least, the kind of people who are subjects of government agencies rather than rule through them.

          • Chalid says:

            Another, more charitable, way to put it would be that a mistake’s importance is judged relative to the importance of the rest of your job. I don’t think email server management is particularly important compared to the rest of Clinton’s job.

          • Chalid says:

            … and actually, I think I’d say that in my experience people who make important, though honest mistakes, are *not* generally fired or disciplined. I’m sure this varies by industry/region/etc though, and of course it would depend on the nature of the mistake.

            I am sure that if I made technical violations of the the email policy at my job (e.g. emailing non-confidential work-related items to my personal gmail) I wouldn’t be fired. The probable consequence would be a ten minute lecture from the company lawyer.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t think email server management is particularly important compared to the rest of Clinton’s job.

            Do you think that email server management is important compared to anything at all? If so, why?

            The only plausible reasons I can see for anyone caring at all, is that information that ought to be kept secret is instead made available to the Black Hats, or that information which ought to be archived and accessible is instead concealed or deleted. In either case, the potential damage is proportional to the importance of the information likely to flow through the server in question.

            Even before we get to the philosophical and ethical problems with “X’s job is too important for them to have to follow the rules we set up for the Little People”, there’s the practical problem that these rules really are more important than anyone’s job. Even POTUS.

            and actually, I think I’d say that in my experience people who make important, though honest mistakes, are *not* generally fired or disciplined

            When it comes to deliberate security violations, yes, people really do get fired for that. Little People, at least. A truly accidental violation, like forgetting your cellphone when you enter a secure area, is forgivable, but Hillary didn’t accidentally set up a private email server.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            You guys know that Colin Powell used his private email address when he Secretary of State, right? But if he wanted to send classified information, he used the separate classified system. Clinton did the same thing, she just used email in general more than Powell or Condaleeza Rice. Before that, Secretaries of State and the State Department mostly didn’t use email at all.

            People are conflating two things, 1) using private email, and 2) using private email to send things which were classified. Powell and Clinton both did #1 and neither did #2. Sending something via non-secure channels that subsequently gets classified happened to both Powell and Clinton. Rice didn’t use email for communication at all.

            The whole darn thing is trying to make something nefarious out of something fairly run of the mill.

          • Randy M says:

            I don’t think email server management is particularly important compared to the rest of Clinton’s job.

            It would be less inaccurate to say that *not* maintaining an e-mail server was a part of the job, though, given the confidentiality requirements. Whether or not it was important depends on whether one is a Hillary Clinton or an Edward Snowden.
            Other examples that spring to mind: Knowing how to file taxes (and lawfully doing so) is not an important qualification for Treasury secretary.
            Buying the wrong trees from Africa is of critical importance for a (non-union) guitar maker

            The whole darn thing is trying to make something nefarious out of something fairly run of the mill.

            I’ll admit to not knowing the details; the FBI is investigating, and I don’t think that they are an arm of the VRWC, so there seems to plausibly be something out of the ordinary. If you know the outcome of that, I’ll appreciate being enlightened.

          • gbdub says:

            @HBC – yes, there are two separate issues. The first is that she used a private server which, while previous secretaries had done similar things, was (@Nancy L.) specifically against policy by the time Secretary Clinton took office. This in itself is a serious issue.

            The second, as you note, is that she sent classified information over this system, which would have been illegal whether on her own server or a government one (and illegal is explicitly the right word here, as willful negligence with classified info is violation of federal law, not just state department policy).

            Item 2 is still made worse by her private server though – with a government server, there is at least a protocol in place for scrubbing inadvertent leaks, which do happen from time to time (a single inadvertent leak won’t get you canned, but continually doing so definitely will). Also, some information will occasionally become retroactively classified, or have its classification level increased. On a government server, again there is an approved process for cleaning this up, that obviously can’t happen on a private server.

            @Chalid – “I don’t think email server management is particularly important compared to the rest of Clinton’s job.” No, it isn’t, but information security definitely is, and it shouldn’t require vast technical knowledge for her to recognize that a private email server is a significant violation of approved information security protocols. This wasn’t inadvertently running afoul of some niggling minor technical standard, this was a pretty blatant, ongoing violation of a core security concept that they beat over your head before they give you access to this info in the first place. And then she lied about it and wiped the server in an attempt to cover it up, which is a third separate issue to add to the previous two.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @HBC
            In addition to everything gbdub just said I think that you are failing understand the distinction between “classified” and specific classification tags like FOUO, NoForn, or Top Secret. (To be fair our own journalists are horrifically bad about this so I’m not blaming you) “Classified” as a class covers everything from “who’s on guard duty tonight” to nuclear launch codes.

            Saying that classified material showed up in someone’s personal email does not surprise me. “hey honey I’m not going to be working late, I have a meeting with the Russian ambassador” could easily be enough to get a message labeled as “classified” depending on the circumstances. Though as Gdub, notes government servers, at least have protocols in place for preventing such inadvertent leaks.

            The specific allegation against Clinton is that she was routing official business through a nongovernment server which was against State Department policy and that she had stored copies of Top Secret, and Code Worded documents on it which is a serious felony.

            Digital copies of TSC material are not supposed to exist. Never mind exist unencrypted on computers connected to a public ISP. If you want to send someone TSC material you don’t write an email. You put it in a sealed envelope, hand it to an armed courier, and ask them deliver it for you.

            The fact that Clinton did not use classified channels for classified material, why this is a scandal and Powell’s email isn’t.

            Someone scanned those documents and put them on that server and if that person were anyone other than Hillary Clinton they’d already be serving a 10-spot in Leavenworth.

            Edit:
            I would also think that being able to trust someone with sensitive information would be a critical trait for any diplomat or cabinet minister to have. I am genuinely puzzled by the whole information management is management “isn’t particularly important compared to the rest of Clinton’s job” argument. Are the going to argue that knowledge of anatomy isn’t particularly important to being a doctor next?

          • keranih says:

            @Nancy

            Nothing bad actually happened as a result of Hilary’s private server.

            As others said, this is not something we know.

            I’ve wondered whether she did it out of a vague feeling that a private server was safer.

            Clinton is not an IT person. No matter what she thought about it, she would have not set up the system herself, but would have had someone else do it.

            The system set up was illegal and unsecure. Either Clinton chose incompetent morons to set up her system, or she chose competent people who were unable to convince her of the illegality and stupidity of her preferences. There is not a way for her to come out of this as being qualified as dogcatcher, much less C-in-C.

            @ HBC –

            1) Yes, other officials used private emails. It is almost certainly a necessity for government people who are involved in any sort of party politics, as it is strictly forbidden to use government resources to conduct partisan party business. Having a ‘private’ system for personal/non-government stuff is perfectly ordinary. But this is not what happened.

            2) The “this stuff is over classified” is a distraction. Firstly, it’s not correct that all the classified stuff was low-key bs that shouldn’t be a problem. Secondly, it is a violation of the whole concept of classification – one doesn’t get to pick and choose what information to handle carefully – once it’s been classified, it gets handled carefully *period*. Expecting everyone to understand why each piece is important and how important it is – that’s not feasible. Subject matter experts make a call, and if the SecState wanted to over rule that, then there are formal procedures for doing that.

            3) We have no idea how much classified or government business information was actually on that server, or in those emails, because Clinton’s people attempted to purge out the the relevant stuff before hand. They missed some. Which goes back to my point above to Nancy re: Clinton’s competence at management.

            This is a huge thing. Not something tiny that is being blown out of scale due to partisan bias.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Given that you are a Clinton, and you know everything you do subjects you to extra scrutiny, the smart thing is to just use the normal systems, and not something special and unusual, because special and unusual will subject you to extra scrutiny (like is happening now).

            Unless you think that running a private server will somehow end up subjecting you to less scrutiny. Like, say, because you can control what information gets released on FOIA requests.

            And, what a shock, that’s exactly what happened. There were several FOIA requests to the State Department that ought to have returned Secretary Clinton’s emails, but none of her emails were in there because the career civil servants in charge of making sure that FOIA requests are handled correctly didn’t know about her server.

    • onyomi says:

      I want to elaborate/qualify by emphasizing that I don’t mean, exactly, that all the major scandals are not consequential, but rather that if, for example, Ron Paul or Justin Amash were running for president and accused of running an e-mail server improperly, that wouldn’t stop me from supporting and voting for them because I’m still so much in favor of their “team,” and what they represent broadly.

      Like, if you told me “choose between a drunken, philandering, bribe-taking libertarian who may have early Alzheimers or a young, vibrant, impeccably honest Democrat,” I’d choose the libertarian. Because the policies implemented by a drunken, corrupt, confused, cheating libertarian are still going to be more just, in my opinion, than those implemented by a straight edge Democrat. Of course, this is highly dependent on my own views of the effects and justice of particular policies, but given what my views are, that’s where my priorities would lie.

      And I think that’s how most people feel, which is why you’re never going to convince Democrats to betray their whole tribe and worldview just because its up and coming leader did something stupid or even outright corrupt.

      We complain a lot here about tribalism, and rightly so; but that doesn’t necessarily imply that careful focus on individual politicians and personalities is the answer either. Arguably politics is too much about individual personalities (yet still somehow intensely tribal…?) and not enough about the broad groups who will come into power when, for example, a Democrat sits in the White House as opposed to a Republican.

      I’m saying, I wish I could see more debate in the media about which major group’s general policy bent is more effective and less about which chosen face of said groups did or did not screw up one particular case. After all, if you think the Republicans as a group are evil, you’re probably still going to vote for the Democrat even if the Republicans succeed in convincing you that that one particular Democrat is evil or incompetent.

      • The case I find surprising isn’t Hilary, it’s Elizabeth Warren. She pretty clearly claimed to be a native American on the basis of a family tradition, unsupported by evidence, that one distant ancestress was Cherokee. She claimed on that basis to be a minority law professor on a site used by law schools to get information on possible hires. Two universities that employed her described her as native American, a claim they could only have gotten from her and one they clearly valued.

        I would think that believers in affirmative action would see that as the equivalent of stealing pennies from a blind man–gaming a system set up to help disadvantaged people by claiming a disadvantage she doesn’t have. If she were currently running for president, I can understand that liberals might decide to ignore it for the sake of unity. But she in fact is, or was prior to the Sanders campaign, treated as the de facto political leader of the Democratic left. They could have chosen someone else and didn’t.

        Which suggests either that most of them are hypocrites who don’t believe in their own principles or that most of them can convince themselves that black is white, that the claim that black is black is the work of an evil right wing conspiracy, when doing so is convenient.

        • onyomi says:

          I find that one pretty shocking too. One factor may be that people outside of academia may not understand what a huge advantage being able to claim Native American ancestry would be for anyone pursuing a career in American academia. But I think the bigger factor is something akin to what you described at one point on your blog: we already know she’s on the side of the angels, so we give her a very big benefit of the doubt.

          That said, I wonder if this didn’t actually contribute to her not running for president? She might have realized that she she had managed to maintain her current position of influence despite this problem coming to light; running for president would have surely raked it up again and forced her to defend it in more detail.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          It’s okay when the person abusing power is on my side.

        • Frank McPike says:

          Surely the simpler explanation is what Onyomi already noted: That personal virtue isn’t an especially important quality in a politician, all things considered. It seems perfectly reasonable to support a politician who, whatever their flaws, comes closest to supporting the policies that you prefer (certainly that’s what determines my vote). Especially when the vice in question appears to be a sort of ruthless ambition, well, I suspect the only meaningful variation among potential presidential candidates in that respect is how good they are at hiding it.

          “They could have chosen someone else and didn’t” also seems to skip over some details. Who is “they”? Party elites? Democratic voters in general? If a candidate whose policies you like starts to snowball in popularity, I’m not sure it’s rational to oppose them in the hope that they will fail and a different (and more moral) candidate with similar policies will be meet with the same level of success. While that may be possible, it’s not inevitable, or even likely. It’s entirely possible for a faction of a political party not to have any viable presidential candidate at a given time.

        • Fahundo says:

          Elizabeth Warren is a good example because it makes me think this isn’t just a Republicans vs Democrats thing. I’m more inclined to forgive Warren doing something like that than I would be for Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama even thiugh they’re from the same party.

          • onyomi says:

            What is it about Elizabeth Warren that makes you more inclined to forgive this in her than you would in others? Is it that she’s closer to your own views and you’d therefore still vote for her, or is it that you wouldn’t even judge her character as harshly?

            I’ll admit I would forgive a lot more in Ron Paul than Mitt Romney, both personally and politically, both because I think he’s taken a lot of difficult moral stands in the past, and because I think the policies he advocates are much more just.

            This actually brings up something which is probably the best example of my own vulnerability to this: the “Ron Paul newsletters.”

            From the perspective of someone not inclined to like Ron Paul, this old scandal was the perfect confirmation bias tool to latch onto: “we always *knew* Ron Paul was some kind of neo-confederate, racist, crank. And here’s the smoking gun!”

            But the view from the perspective of a Ron Paul supporter is: “oh, they are clearly just latching onto this because they are already predisposed to dislike Ron Paul and are looking for a reason to dismiss him. They don’t really believe he is actually racist and they would totally forgive this exact same thing in a politician whose policy views lined up with theirs. What’s more, they’d scold us for having the poor taste to disingenuously dredge up some obscure thing from decades ago.”

            It comes down to the whole “can I believe this” vs. “must I believe this?” issue, neither side of which is “right.” So I’m not exactly saying that the Ron Paul supporters are 100% right and the people making a big deal of the newsletters are 100% wrong (though I admit I’m biased against them); what I am saying is that it seems like it might be helpful to try to always look at scandals from the perspective of those who are inclined to give the candidate the benefit of the doubt.

            Not because we should give everyone the benefit of the doubt all the time (though erring on that side when it comes to accusations of racism would probably be a good idea at this point), but because that’s the only way we can understand the opposing side’s reactions to scandals and, therefore, maybe maintain a better sense of proportion about which are and aren’t worth having detailed debates about.

            In other words, it seems like maybe a good heuristic to imagine: “would I forgive this in a guy whose policies I loved?” If the answer is yes, it’s probably not very fair of you to make a big deal of it when someone whose policies you hate does it. Of course, you giving their candidate the benefit of the doubt doesn’t mean they’ll extend the same courtesy to your candidate, but somebody has to stop defecting first.

          • Anonymous says:

            What is it about Elizabeth Warren that makes you more inclined to forgive this in her than you would in others?

            She’s a Native American – her people have suffered enough.

          • Fahundo says:

            I guess I don’t care about Affirmative Action, but how does the old saying go? “The enemy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is my friend?”

        • Anonymous says:

          She claimed on that basis to be a minority law professor on a site used by law schools to get information on possible hires. Two universities that employed her described her as native American, a claim they could only have gotten from her and one they clearly valued.

          Snopes

          • Chalid says:

            Interesting. So there is ambiguity here, and we seeing both those friendly to Warren’s views as willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and those hostile to her views as assuming the worst. Or do David Friedman/Onyomi think there is stronger evidence for Warren getting professional advancement through claiming NA ancestry than Snopes suggests?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Chalid:

            As someone opposed to Warren, her alleged claiming to be a Native American doesn’t bother me. Ironically, the main reason is because I don’t think affirmative action is a good idea.

          • Randy M says:

            I can understand someone believing a family story and not bothering to check it. So I don’t fault her any for believing that she was part native.
            However, I have to find some contempt that she should have believed based on this story and a maybe-some-hint-if-you-squint similarity that she was some victim of discrimination and owed special consideration for anything* because of it.

            *As mentioned above, this may not be what happened, but assuming it was, that’s my position.

          • gbdub says:

            At least Rachel Dolezal actually tried to live as a black woman. Warren checked the box without any indication that she ever had any connection to the culture.

        • Nornagest says:

          She pretty clearly claimed to be a native American on the basis of a family tradition […] that one distant ancestress was Cherokee. She claimed on that basis to be a minority law professor…

          And that worked?

          Well, hell.

    • Vorkon says:

      I keep on flipping back and forth as to how I feel about the Hillary email scandal. On the one hand, it bothers me a bit, because I’ve seen good people get the book thrown at them for far less, and know that if I were to do something similar, it would be a career-ender at least, and result in jail time at best. It kind of rankles me that she can get away with it, and I can’t.

      On the other hand, though, I also know firsthand that she’s right when she says overclassification is a serious problem. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if almost all of the “classified” emails they found on that server were only marked with a classification on a single message about 10 messages deep on an email chain that had been replied to 30 times, which she probably only read the latest reply to and had no idea the classified information was even in there, and which the original sender never should have marked secret in the first place. Plus, I can’t help but sympathize with her a bit; military email servers are terrible, I’d imagine the DoS servers are similarly annoying, and if I could get away with doing all my work on a private email server I’d do it in a heartbeat, too. (I’d imagine that’s a big part of why the fact that she can get away with it and I can’t rankles me so much, in fact. :op )

      • Chalid says:

        I think it’s even less damning than that – the “classified” emails were not classified when they were sent. They were retroactively classified afterward.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          According to the state department, they should have been classified at the time they were sent. It wasn’t “oh, based on what we know now, it’s now classified.” It’s that someone — not necessarily Clinton — failed to apply the proper label at the time of sending.

        • Agronomous says:

          @Chalid: I don’t think you’re thinking straight about this; it’s a fairly complicated situation, which Clinton’s spinners are actively trying to oversimplify and distort. You have your facts just plain wrong on a couple of counts:

          1) There were at least 4 SAP emails among those Clinton handed over.

          2) She didn’t hand over a ton of other emails, and deleted tens of thousands while stalling for months before handing the server over to State. (The stalling was so she could claim that they were automatically deleted because they were old; the automatic deletion scheme was put in place at some point after she was Secretary.)

          3) The “government just classifies things because they’re dangerous to officials, not to national security” line is amazing propaganda/projection: what’s originally at issue here is Clinton deliberately keeping things from the public and the agency she was supposed to be serving. In doing so, she also ran roughshod over legal requirements for handling classified information, which is an even more serious offense, and serious problem for American foreign policy.

          4) Whether something was marked or unmarked (and at least some of what she actually handed over was clearly marked, at a very high level: SAP) is a red herring: as the Secretary of State, a lot of the information Clinton generated is classified by its very nature. If State didn’t mark it such, that’s a security violation itself. Again, this person was the Secretary of State: everything from communications from other governments to negotiating strategies to even what news stories she’s interested in are valuable intelligence for everyone from China to Albania.

          5) This stuff wan’t on a personal server in her office on a government network; it was in her basement, hooked up to an ISP. So for a few years, Comcast was the primary line of defense between essentially every current U.S. state secret and any random hacker from Russia/China/North Korea.

          6) @Vorkon: so what if some things are classified that shouldn’t be? That doesn’t (a) rule out things not being classified that should be (analogous to how rape is both over- and under-reported) or (b) give anyone the excuse to disregard classifications. Hell, as Secretary of State, Clinton was in an excellent position to get classification removed from things that didn’t need it—instead of simply ignoring it.

          Every “exculpatory” explanation I’ve heard (not familiar with technology, didn’t understand the risk she was taking, wanted to use her BlackBerry) translates directly into a solid reason not to make Clinton the President of the United States.

          • Vorkon says:

            Oh, it certainly doesn’t excuse her. That’s why I said I keep flipping back and forth about how I feel about it. I’m just saying that I can sympathize with her on the matter, and that if I thought for a second that I could get away with it, I’d do the same thing in a heartbeat.

            …then again, I know that *I* should never be President. :op

  31. rockroy mountdefort says:

    I don’t see why people would use a forum if they’re not using the subreddit

    Because reddit is poison to all discourse

  32. God Damn John Jay says:

    Every Open Thread Deiseach uses some obscure Irish slang or expression that I have never heard before, so I am linking this in honor of her:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/whrif/fifty_shades_of_grey_ireland/c5df3t1

    • Deiseach says:

      Thank you for that link, I laughed at every one 🙂

      She was panting as she let out one final scream of pure pleasure. There was nothing like beating Kilkenny in the hurling

      What’s seldom is wonderful!

      (There, that’s another obscure Irish saying for you).

  33. BBA says:

    Apropos to the thread title, Michel Gondry’s video to Mia Doi Todd’s “Open Your Heart.” It’s much less brain-melty than most of Gondry’s stuff.

  34. Doctor Mist says:

    I’m hoping someone with a historical bent can enlighten me.

    Shakespeare’s As You Like It contains the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech:

    And one man in his time plays many parts,
    His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
    Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
    And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
    And shining morning face, creeping like snail
    Unwillingly to school.

    Hearing it again recently, I suddenly realized how anachronistic is the image conjured in my mind by the “whining school-boy” passage. I think of Penrod, and Tom Sawyer, and Beaver Cleaver; of a sack lunch, textbooks carried over the shoulder in a knapsack or with a leather strap around them.

    Shakespeare was performed for the masses. This must mean that trundling the kid off to school was a commonplace even in 1600. Was there really anything like what I would call “grade school” then? If not, what is Shakespeare really describing here?

    • BBA says:

      The school that Shakespeare probably attended (if you accept that the William Shakespeare who lived in Stratford and performed in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was the author of the plays).

    • Deiseach says:

      If you look at page 17 in this biography of Thomas More, it describes how Peter Ackroyd imagines the morning for More, as a typical schoolboy of the time.

      Thomas More was born 1477-78, and if enrolled in school at the age of seven, he would have begun school in 1485 as in the following description from Ackroyd’s book:

      Thomas More was enrolled at St Anthony’s, in Threadneedle Street. Lessons began at six in the morning, and in winter he would have taken his own candle-light with him. He has a description of a mother telling her son also to ‘take thy brede & butter with the’. The schoolboy was dressed in hose and doublet, since he was considered to be a smaller version of the adult male, and he carried a leather satchel upon his back, which contained ‘a pennar and an ynke horne… a penn knyff… a payre of tabullys’; the ‘pennar’ was a quill-holder an ‘tabullys’ were writing boards.

      … It was customary for boys to begin their elementary schooling at the age of seven – this was the age of the schoolboy martyr in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, ‘A litel clergeon, seven yeer of age’, who was being taught ‘to syngen and to rede’ – and there is every reason to believe More’s parents would have wished him to enjoy the benefits of this neighbourhood school as early as possible. St Anthony’s was considered to be the finest of the four or five ‘grammar schools’ in London and had the distinction of being a ‘free school’, while others charged between eight pence and sixteen pence a week. It had been founded forty years before More’s arrival, out of the revenues of the nearby church of St Benet Fink, and was attached to St Anthony’s Church and Hospital.

      … The younger scholars of St Anthony’s had to apply themselves to another and, at this relatively early date, perhaps more important discipline. The ‘art of song’ was part of the curriculum of the grammar schools and, since the church of St Anthony’s maintained a number of choristers, it was natural for the younger boys to be taught the art of plainsong and prick song in their most elementary forms. … Children were also taught to play such musical instruments as the viol and the lute, ‘to get the use of our small ioynts, before they be knitte’. The study would have been practical in intent – musica practica as opposed to musica speculativa – and yet it was associated with the understanding of rhetoric, mathematics and philosophy. The boys of St Anthony’s were taught the art of public deliberation at a later stage in their education, but there as always a formal connection bertween oratory and musical harmony; similarly, the examination of notational value and metrical proportion provided a basic instruction to mathematics.
      … The boys of St Anthony’s were taught in the same timbered and raftered hall, divided into groups according to their ability or progress. They would sit on the floor or on stools, while the oldest of them would have wooden desks or ‘forms’. It is hard to estimate the number of pupils involved – the figures for various schools range between forty and approximately one hundred and fifty. St Anthony’s was a popular and prized free school, however, so that we might suggest the presence of about a hundred pupils at various stages of their education. They were taught by a principal master and probably more than one teaching assistant. In the age before the ready distribution of printed books – More was born the year after the first printed book was produced in England – the teaching was primarily of an oral kind, based upon memory and repetition. The master would dictate an example out loud, which the pupils would then in turn recite and repeat until it had been committed to memory.

  35. Theo Jones says:

    As an aside related to the discussion on weird academic work in the social sciences. I just got assigned a weird book on diet in one of my social sciences classes. The author has no background in health or the natural sciences, but it was printed through a peer reviewed academic publisher. Some highlights — a post-structuralist analysis of science, a chapter dedicated to proving the claim that obesity doesn’t actually cause health issues, a chapter devoted to the claim that caloric intake hasn’t actually increased in the U.S (based around a self-reported survey), a claim that increased caloric intake doesn’t cause obesity, a claim that the mainstream scientific analysis on obesity is based around misogony and body shaming, and a claim that the mainstream cultural viewpoint on obesity is the product of neoliberals and libertarians claiming bodies as a commodity for capitalism.

    • Urstoff says:

      The peer-reviewers are probably post-structuralist “scientists” and not actual health scientists or epidemiologists.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      a claim that increased caloric intake doesn’t cause obesity

      It’s plausible that the causation largely goes the other direction – obesity (caused by some third factor) causes an increase in caloric intake.

      For instance, there’s the “fat virus” notion. From wikipedia:

      Ad-36 is known to cause obesity in chickens, mice, rats, and monkeys. In addition, it was present in 30% of obese humans and 11% of non-obese humans. The prevalence of Ad-36 positivity in lean individuals increased from ∼7% in 1992-1998 to 15-20% in 2002-2009, which paralleled the increase in obesity prevalence.

      Given that there are drugs that reliably make people-and-animals gain weight and given that there are viruses that reliably make people-and-animals gain weight, and given that once (for any reason) a higher weight has been obtained it is really hard to get back to a lower one, it’s not clear that “it is caused by eating too much” is a useful way to think about obesity.

      Something changed to collectively make us – and our pets, and our laboratory animals – get fatter. When we figure out what it was, I expect a massive slapping of foreheads to follow that realization.

      • Outis says:

        Am I at risk of catching obesity after moving to America in adulthood? What can I do to prevent it?

      • Zorgon says:

        I’m expecting a similar facepalm once we figure out whatever ludicrously-obvious-in-retrospect thing is causing the immense surge in FMS/CFS/etc.

      • Vorkon says:

        At first glance, I thought that Wikipedia quote said “Age 36 is known to cause obesity…” and my first thought was something along the lines of, “well, yeah, I could’ve told you that.” :op

    • Tracy W says:

      So was the post-Structuralist analysis remotely interesting?

  36. Wrong Species says:

    Relevant to both utilitarianism and Friendly Intelligence optimization. “The problem with satisfied patients.”

    http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/the-problem-with-satisfied-patients/390684/

    • Maybe the solution is to base hospital reinbursement on how satisfied the nurses are, but that will probably have a different failure mode.

    • Jason K. says:

      Not so much a problem with satisfied patients as it is with treating satisfaction as the paramount goal. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

  37. sky says:

    I was thinking about the gender gap in tech, and I was reading about what brought, or didn’t bring women into tech. It occurred to me that we don’t talk much about what brings guys into tech, and that understanding this might allow us to better understand the gender gap.

    So I want to ask, other guys in tech, what brought you here?

    For me it was pretty straight forward causal path of video games -> modding video games i.e learning programming. I ended up dropping out of college (physics) and working as a software developer in S.F purely off the hours I spent in the years prior. By the time I was 12 I was probably spending ~20 hours a week scripting mods for video games. I spent some time making a few small things with more traditional languages (python) but those never went anywhere.

    For pretty much all my other friends who ended up working in software, it was a similar story. Long hours in front of a computer that lead to various programming related things. While it was modding for me, for others it was making small games in flash, or fiddling with making their own web pages for things they were fans of, playing with linux etc… Such that by college we all had some experience with software industry stuff, and the idea of working in such a job seemed pretty straightforward.

    The other thing I found interesting is that in reading various articles I found that many Arab countries had a higher % of women in computer science (and science in general) than in the U.S. Something like 50% in Jordan for comp sci. Or 60% for science degrees in Saudia Arabia. Why are they able to succeed at this when we are not? Western countries struggle to get women into stem, while more sexist countries succeed? That seems backwards.

    Finally, any alternate ideas on what we can do to bring more women into comp sci/stem, or why they don’t now?

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      The other thing I found interesting is that in reading various articles I found that many Arab countries had a higher % of women in computer science (and science in general) than in the U.S. Something like 50% in Jordan for comp sci. Or 60% for science degrees in Saudia Arabia. Why are they able to succeed at this when we are not? Western countries struggle to get women into stem, while more sexist countries succeed? That seems backwards.

      From what I hear, a lot of the women from muslim world who get advanced degrees are really there to work on a “MRS degree” as it were. That is, it significantly improves marriage prospects to have a doctorate (particularly an MD) regardless of whether or not they do anything with it afterwards.

      Now I’m not sure how true that is on a statistical level, whether that’s actually what’s driving the difference, but it seems plausible.

      Also it seems kind of weird to say you’ve “succeeded” in attaining gender equality with a 60 / 40 split in favor of women. I get the rationale but still.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      Re: Arab/Muslim women going into STEM more often than Western ones..

      .. As far as I’d heard, in my very unprofessional state of being, the most interesting theory is something about square pegs and round holes. In Western countries, the stereotypical feminist dance therapy degree doesn’t let one earn as much as becoming an engineer will, but such people can still earn a living, and our culture still considers people with an any, all degree as higher status than those without. This causes people to prioritise their passions more than what earns them good careers, since they’re all reasonably secure in earning a good living later in life anyway. When you have no such certainty, someone who might otherwise study sociology or something might pick CS anyway, since the alternative offers a very real chance of having a much worse future life.

      • Theo Jones says:

        I think a lot of it is the declining marginal utility of consumption. In a developed country the actual benefit of increasing your income is relatively small. But in a developing country increasing your income by better education carries a large benefit. So, a woman in a developing country would be willing be bear a lot more hassle to get an education that doubles her income than one in a developed nation.

      • EyeballFrog says:

        I wonder if this will always be true. Will there come a day when having a fluff degree becomes less prestigious than having no degree at all?

    • The Nybbler says:

      I’m a relic from the 8-bit age; got an Apple II, played games, learned BASIC and Pascal, broke some copy protection, built some hardware, once wrote a text-to-speech program in Applesoft (and wow was it slow), spent FAR too much time on BBSs (some things don’t really change).

      Basically your observation is the Norway Gender Equality Paradox: the more gender-egalitarian a society is, the more people stick to traditional gender roles. There’s no definitive answer; I tend to think that a lot of it is that roles like engineering are a good ticket OUT of places like Saudi Arabia.

    • Rachael says:

      I’m a female programmer who got into tech the same way you describe, but I don’t have much idea why more boys than girls tend to do this.

      • Peter says:

        There was a talk I heard that tracked numbers over time. It seems that before the home computer generation, CS admissions weren’t excessively skewed – 2:1, 3:1 or so? Less skewed than Engineering at any rate, but that’s not saying a great deal. Things got a lot more skewed when the home computer generation came of age. The speaker had the idea that home computers got pigeonholed as “boys toys” – that parents were more likely to buy computers for sons than daughters, that brothers were more likely than sisters to win fights over who got to use the computer, etc.

        • Equinimity says:

          There was an interesting comment on that on slashdot a few weeks back. Can’t find it, but summarising what I remember…
          Look at the initial ads for the Atari 2600 and competing game consoles, and they show the entire family playing them. And from what I gather, they were mostly sold through the electronics section of department stores. Then you get the games crash, department stores pull out of the games market for a while, and game machines move to the toy stores, where they have a pink/blue aisle split. Nintendo had to choose one, and the effects flowed downhill from there.

    • Andrew says:

      I’m probably an odd duck, so worth mentioning- I got into programming and software because of the “force multiplier” effect. I wanted to do big things fast, and it was either hire an army or learn some programming.

    • Equinimity says:

      The over-simplified one liner about what started me in tech, being able to make things.
      I built kits and simple radios as a kid, then convinced my parents to buy a Vic-20 for the games by telling them I could use it for my homework too, and got hooked on software. Got a degree, the 6502 experience helped get me a job on a SNES game, and have been making things happen on screens ever since. (Though I left gaming about 5 years ago.)

      My wife came through a vaguely similar path, of learning she could make things in software, and exploring what others had made on the various systems. She teaches CS now, and tells me that our kind are getting rare amongst her students. Many of them are there for a stable or high paying career, the actual details of software development are more of a necessary evil than the reason for their interest.

  38. Wrong Species says:

    Scott Sumner makes the mets case for “market macroeconomics.”

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/04/market_monetari_4.html#comments

    >So if someone far smarter than me, such as Scott Aaronson, asks me whether I should constantly re-evaluate the correctness of market monetarism, I’d say yes. If he then asked me about confirmation bias, I’d have to agree that’s a problem. We can’t be trusted to evaluate the accuracy of the theories that we hold dear, because we’ve fought for them for so long. So who can we rely on to evaluate market monetarism? Not people with other ideologies like Keynesianism, because they also have an axe to grind. Not people with no alternative theory, because they are not well enough informed. There’s only one group I trust—market participants who have money on the line. To paraphrase Richard Rorty might have said truth is what the market let’s you get away with.

  39. EyeballFrog says:

    Would anyone be interested in a meetup in Boston? I’ve been looking to try to meet some new people, and this sounds like as good a way as any.

  40. Tibor says:

    A few questions for Austrians about this :

    How likely do you think it is that Hefer becomes the next president? Also, how much power does a president have in Austria? Is it like the German or the Czech president – more or less a ceremonial function with a very limited real power or is it more like in France? Maybe something in between?

    What do you think about the FPÖ? Are they like FN in France or less nationalist? Also, are they economically rather socialist (like FN) or more pro-free market-ish like the AfD?

    • Franz_Panzer says:

      That became hard to say because of this. Every information about how people are going to vote was basically bogus. On saturday I would have said that Hofer would loose any one-to-one election against Van der Bellen or Griss, now I’m not sure anymore. Everyone anti-populist-right will gather behind Van der Bellen now. The question is whether there are enough such people and whether they can be mobilised to vote.

      The role of the president is definitely more like in Germany than France. Nominally in charge of the military, has no influence on policy. The only power he has potentially is in dismissing and swearing in the government. I actually don’t know how far this power actually reaches but it has been a topic this elections because Hofer has let slip threats (or at least it has been interpreted that way) that he may dismiss the government in order to help his party (which at the moment leads in polls) while VdB has stated that he would not swear in an FPÖ-government.

      I don’t know exactly how nationalist the FN is, so I can’t compare the two. But yes, they are very nationalistic, in the same group as FN, Jobbik, Partij voor de Vrijheid and Sverigedemokraterna. Everyone who is secretly (or not secretly) a (neo)-Nazi supports them. An influencial portion of the party are German-nationalists. And you have the expected sentiments with respect to immigration and EU.

      Economically they say they’re socialist (because their base are workers), but any actual policies (if they ever have any) sound more free-market-ish. However when they were in government in the early 2000’s it lead to huge corruption cases that are still under investigation. And when they were in charge of one of the federal countries they wrecked it so completely that it is now under threat of having to go bancrupt.

      • Tibor says:

        Thanks. It sounds like the Austrian president has more or less the exact same powers as his German or Czech counterparts. I don’t know about Germany but while in theory the Czech president could decide not to swear-in a government, in practice he could not afford politically not to swear in the government of the winner of the election and only if that party cannot secure enough votes in the parliament (there is a “trust vote” which is necessary to start the government and the prospective government needs the vote of 101 out of 200 MPs) does he have a room for doing actual politics (like appointing a prime minister from a party of his choice…but of course that party still needs to find a coalition partner or at least secure enough MPs for the trust vote). I would guess this is probably the same in Austria and that what both Hofer and Van der Bellen said should be understood as just election rhetoric. Even if they insisted on doing so, this would likely lead to new elections in which it would be easy to the damaged party/parties to use this to their advantage.

        I was surprised by the election result myself. From what I understand about Austrian politics, the current government switched from an almost Merkel-like immigrant/refugee policy to a much stricter one since otherwise the polls suggested a complete victory of the FPÖ in the next elections. The current policy seems to pretty similar the Hungarian one, which is probably the strictest in Europe today and so I would expect that that was going to be enough to “keep the FPÖ at bay”. Of course, the elections are probably not one-dimensionally about immigration issues, so there may be other reasons why so many people in Austria support the FPÖ.

        I also wonder about how the polls are made to be so wildly inaccurate. Are people perhaps “ashamed” to tell the pollsters that they want to vote the FPÖ? Even so, the effect would have to be extremely large. This looks more like the poll was done in Vienna only.

        • Creutzer says:

          Yes, people are ashamed to be voting for them and polls have always underpredicted their performance in the last couple of elections. Support for them does look like it’s pretty one-dimensionally about immigration and anti-EU-ness.

          I think the shift in immigration policy by the current government was too recent to have really sunk in with voters, and it was also prompted by the current refugee situation in particular, so people probably don’t quite trust them on it yet. Whereas the FPÖ has been anti-immigration for a long time.

          I wonder how seriously one should take these announcements about (not) swearing in governments. When the FPÖ was in office, there was a bit of a debate about whether the president shouldn’t have refused them, and there is always that phantom of Hindenburg swearing in Hitler somewhere at the back of people’s minds.

          • Tibor says:

            I think that if nothing else, it would be a bad strategy. It would probably lead to an “Andrew Jackson effect” with one period of a different and very unpopular government and then perhaps even an absolute majority for the FPÖ, which is probably lot worse than a FPÖ minority government or an FPÖ government in a coalition with a junior partner. Especially if the FPÖ is in fact so corrucpt/incompetent as Franz_Panzer says and would discredit itself. I have a similar opinion about strategic ousting of FN in France in the last elections. I think it will just make the FN stronger in the next.

            Similarly, if Hofer actually became president and dismissed a government without a widely acceptable justification (even if it was constitutionally ok), then ther FPÖ would likely suffer a severe setback in the next elections.

  41. Ruprect says:

    Why are numbers read right to left (in the sense that the leftmost digit doesn’t have any meaning until you read the other digits)? Why don’t we write numbers in the same way that we write everything else?

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      They get called Arabic numbers for a reason, you know.

      • SJ says:

        The Arabic-speaking cultures of the world read (and write) from right to left.

        But Arabic numerals are written with highest magnitude on the left, and written in order from left to right.

        The Arabic world borrowed some numerals, plus the idea of place-value, from the Hindi-speaking world.

        Both uses of this numerical system place the highest-order-of-magnitude digit on the left, probably in accord with left-to-right writing system used in the Hindi writing system.

    • Tibor says:

      But we do. “165” is a word – “onehundredandsixtyfive”. In many languages, you don’t even need the “and”. The “1” is just the first letter of that word as is “n” the first letter of the word “number” and neither has any meaning before you actually read the whole word.

      Stefan: Except that the Roman numerals are read that way also.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      If I had to guess, it would be truncation. Which is necessary for rounding.

      123,456,789 is read as “one-hundred twenty-three million, four-hundred fifty-six thousand, seven-hundred eighty-nine”. Most people won’t care to include every digit though, so they’ll shorten it to “one-hundred twenty three million”. Since the leftmost digits are considered more significant than the rightmost digits, you’d want to say the leftmost digits first.

      The fact that we must count the number of zero-digits following the most significant digits in “123,000,000” when using Arabic Numerals is an unfortunate side-effect.

      @Tibor

      I think ruprect is saying “165” ought to be written “561”. Because determining that the one-digit is in the hundreds place requires us to count the distance from the decimal place, which means we must temporarily count right-to-left. However, the fact that most people parse text in clumps and phases means that I don’t think this is as big a deal in practice as one might naively expect.

      • Tibor says:

        Yeah, I got that, but my point is that the word is “onehundredandsixtyfive” not “fivesixtyhundred” or something. There are some exceptions, like in German with the smallest unit e.g. (fünfundsechzig/sixty five) (and probably because of a German influence one can do that in Czech too sometimes, although you can also say the numbers it in their usual order), which however comes mostly (I think) from the fact that is can be said faster that way.

        If we stick to English though, the word is written in the same order in which it is pronounced. It is true that you have to read the whole “word” before you are able to pronounce it (but you do not read numbers from right to left – you see how many numbers are there and they you start reading from the left). If you actually wrote the number 165 like 561, you would either have to change the language to use the word “fivesixtyhundred” or actually read it form the right.

        • Ruprect says:

          Seems that English may have changed to match the notation rather than the other way around (four-and-twenty blackbirds)

          • Tibor says:

            Maybe in the double digits…but was there ever a time when one would say “five and twenty and hundred” or something like that? That would surprise me.

            We could write numbers in the format 3_165 or 7_1 650 000, where the first number tells us how many digits there are in the number. Then you can really just really just read from left to right (or to be even more pedantic, one ought to write 1_3 65 to denote 165 to be able to strictly parse the digits from left to right, but it would actually be harder to read)

      • Ruprect says:

        “If I had to guess, it would be truncation. Which is necessary for rounding.”

        Interesting – in the link I posted below someone suggested that the reason why the spoken words were originally said with smallest number first is that if you were counting in increments of one, the larger number is less relevant and gets mumbled (“three and twenty, four and twenty, five antwent, six untwen… etc.) So perhaps this is a matter of convenience depending on the way in which you are using numbers.

        “I don’t think this is as big a deal in practice as one might naively expect”

        It’s relatively easy to parse small, familiar numbers or larger numbers that are using commas – for longer numbers without commas, or longer binary numbers, less so.

  42. Ononymous says:

    Adam Curtis BBC doc, The Trap weaves R.D. Laing and James Buchanan into narrative about game theoretic neo-liberalim

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97Ywl7RtUw

    “the programme suggests that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, results in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better themselves.”

    • Tracy W says:

      The quoted statement flies in the light of evidence, for example, Western countries + Singapore dominate the list of the least corrupt countries in the world.
      Incidentally the same countries tend to be on the top of lists of economic freedom (along with Hong Kong), although the correlation is less than 1.

      Edit: And the World Giving Index, while led by Myanmar, includes NZ, the UK, the USA and the Netherlands in its top 10.

  43. Le Maistre Chat says:

    I have a question for David Friedman: did you know the late Poul Anderson through the SCA? If so, do you know if he was a Christian?
    For the rest of you, this comment can function as lit crit: I’ve recently read his fantasy novels The Broken Sword, Three Hearts & Three Lions and Operation Chaos, out of an interest in old school Dungeons & Dragons. In the first mentioned, he takes an ambivalent stand on the Faith, contrasting “the holy chill of a nunnery” to the lush fertility of protagonists having sex outdoors. But in the introduction to the novel’s second edition, he apologizes for the book’s tone and says “my vein is more in keeping with Three Hearts & Three Lions .”
    So, TH&TL is about an agnostic Danish engineer who finds himself fighting Nazis on a beach one moment and the next transported a parallel universe where The Song of Roland, Orlando Furioso et al are historical fact. He comes to realize that he’s the amnesiac paladin Holger Danske, the Danish version of the Sleeping King, who has returned at the world’s moment of greatest danger from the combined forces of Satan and Faerie. He must spurn his lover Morgan le Fay in favor of a Christian wilderness urchin, only to be ripped away from his new love and back to our mundane world once victory is achieved. We last see the mundane Holger received into the Roman Catholic Church and searching for a way back to his true country.
    Finally, Operation Chaos is about a redhead witch named Ginny and a werewolf named Steve who fall in love during a magical WW2 against the Caliphate (it’s an alt history where a technology to degauss cold iron was discovered right after WW1, letting magic back). They then go to college on the GI Bill, marry and have a daughter. The novel’s final adventure is about demons abducting their baby and praying with a Lutheran minister to find the right Saint to help them navigate Hell’s non-Euclidean geometry and rescue her. Oh, and at some point hippie-like Gnostics show up as dupes of Satan.
    These novels are all full of Big Ideas in the SF tradition, and it’s really striking to see such blatant Christian themes not coming from CS Lewis. It’s subversive, even.

    • Mary says:

      I believe he was an atheist. though his grip on religion is unusually good.

    • I knew Poul (Bela in the SCA) slightly, but I’m afraid I don’t know what his religious views were. I think his wife is still alive and expect that both she and their daughter are still involved in SF fandom, so you might run into one of them at an SF con and ask.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I can see that going over real well. “Oh, hi! Poul Anderson was your late husband? Would you mind answering a question about his religious beliefs for me?”

        • More like “I really enjoyed some of Poul’s writing, especially Three Hearts and Three Lions, and was wondering to what extent, if at all, the religious elements reflected his own beliefs as well as those of his protagonist.”

          People at SF conventions talk about that sort of thing. Karen doesn’t bite.

    • This reminds me of a bit in a Poul Anderson novel– sorry, title forgotten, but it had a lot from Kipling’s Kim. There was a secondary character who was looking for evidence of Christianity in faint alien scratches.

      At the end of the book, this isn’t resolved and the character is still on his search.

      This is pretty unusual in sf– usually Christianity is either true or more commonly, false.

      Offhand, I can’t think of any Anderson fiction in which Christianity is bad. This isn’t evidence about his theological beliefs, of course.

      • Adam says:

        I read somewhere (don’t know where, sorry, so no sources) that Poul Anderson was atheist at the beginning of his writing career, but later became Christian. This is reflected in his novels, as you can see. I believe he became Catholic, but I’m really unsure on that point.

  44. Bacteria on money

    I wonder if it’s much different than the micro-ecology that’s around people otherwise.

    Circulation regions for dollar bills

  45. AngryLazyManChildCursedWithAHighVerbalIQButLowProcessingIQAndHighTimePreference says:

    Why are there no free digital artist’s mannequin programs with control of proportions, and layers to draw over it? I just want to do animation. I’m not interested in the process, and gittin gud, I just want to arrange shit!

    Why haven’t programmers facilitated my laziness/increased my efficiency? Waaagh!

    This is the only thing motivating me to learn programming; the non-existence of certain specific programs I want. My rage burns bright. If I can be bothered.

    • Hlynkacg says:

      The initial learning curve is steep, but if you’re serious you should look into Blender 3D it’s an open source CG rendering / modeling program that includes a good number of plugins for rigging and animation of custom characters.

      Using it in conjunction with a procedural character generator like MakeHuman should give you everything you need.

  46. R Flaum says:

    I would like to direct y’all’s attention to Jown Cowan’s list of essentialist explanations of language. It includes languages (“English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.” –Bill Hammel), dialects (“Canadian English is essentially American English as spoken by a Scotsman who’s trying to console a bereaved Frenchman.” –Ken Westmoreland), conlangs (“Aelya is essentially Quenya spoken by an Irishman raised in Finland.” –Clinton Moreland), and animal languages (“Cat is essentially a highly variable language privileging diphthongs, rising inflection, sibilants, and initial labials along with very mobile facial and fecal expressions.” –Sally Caves).

  47. Alliteration says:

    Apologies if this point was already beaten to death somewhere. In that case, I independently discovered it.

    == The Friendly-to-AI AI Problem ==
    In short, when a strong AI is designing an intelligence upgrade for itself, the AI faces similar challenges as humans designing friendly-to-humans AI. The AI can not be sure that the new version of itself will have the correct goals.

    The AI cannot be sure that the new AI will be friendly for two reason: the original AI has imperfect introspection, and the original AI use heuristics.

    The AI cannot have perfect introspection because of infinite regress; if the AI did have perfect introspection, the AI’s internal model would have to include the AI’s internal modal which also need to include the internal, etc. The AI can have good introspection, because the internal model can have a symbolic reference to itself but that leave room for error; the AI cannot fully evaluate itself.

    The AI has to use heuristics because doing things correctly all the time has hard limits on how fast some problems can be done. Building a perfect strong AI likely include some NP-hard tasks, considering that even Tetrus is NP-hard. The AI has limited computing power; thus, the AI must use heuristics.

    Both of these properties could cause the AI to make errors is designing the more intelligent version. Those error might include value-misalignment with the current AI. From the current AI’s perspective, that would be horrible because value-misalignment might lead to no paper-clips being created. The entire world might be consumed in building thumbtacks instead.

    Therefore, if the friendly AI problem is impossible to solve, the AI would likely realize this and refrain from upgrading itself, in effect solving the friendly AI problem because all AIs would be a manageable intelligence.

    (Now the AI might also resize this, and thus upgrade itself un-solving the friendly AI problem, which would then intern cause the AI not to upgrade itself solving the friendly AI problem. So paradox maybe?)

    • Aegeus says:

      The AI doesn’t need to be 100% certain that the new AI is friendly. For one, you can’t be 100% certain about anything, short of some highly speculative future-simulation technology. For another thing, if an AI is unwilling to take risks it probably won’t be very effective. After all, what if the new paperclip factory gets hit by a meteor? Better invest in meteor-proof bunkers before you start on the paperclips! So a heuristic analysis – being 99% sure that the new AI will be friendly, and having a backup plan if it isn’t – will have to be good enough.

      Indeed, this is how humans are going to have to solve the friendly AI problem, in all likelihood. Prove that the AI is friendly, to the best of your ability, then put it in a box just in case it isn’t.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        An AI that doesnt take risks of be very effective, but it might not care much about being effective. There is not much that can be said about an unspecifed AI.

        Humans may well prefer to solve the AI safety problem by limiting the AIs they construct to certain levels of power and generality. An AI,depending on its value system, and so on, might behave equivalently, ie refrain from promiscuous self imrovement.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      “Apologies if this point was already beaten to death somewhere. In that case, I independently discovered it.

      This is (kind of) the conclusion of the Tiling Agents paper, although it kind of isn’t, because the it paper waves it away the Lobian Obstacle a comment about probablistic reasoning.

      https://intelligence.org/files/TilingAgentsDraft.pdf

      “Therefore, if the friendly AI problem is impossible to solve, the AI would likely realize this and refrain from upgrading itself, in effect solving the friendly AI problem because all AIs would be a manageable intelligence.”

      Nor much can be said about an unspecified AI. If an AI is strongly precautionary, then Lobian obstacles might prevent it from self improving. But if it values strongly effectiveness, as Aegeus suggests, it might boldly go ahead.

      Even the way values are specified can make a difference. There are cosnequentialist-style vegetarians who think no one should eat meat, meat farming should cease, and so on, and there are virtue-ethicist style vegetarians who just don’t want to sully their own temples with meat. Formulating an AIs values in one or another of those ways would lead to different attitudes about self improvement, presumably. To put it yet another way, humans generally don’t think that the chance that their children would have different values to themselves is a good reason for not having children.

      Solving FAI by value alignment isn’t the only way of solving FAI. If humans decide value alignment (or its necessary precursor, goal stability) is impossible, then humans might decide to solve AI safety by stunting, boxing or something else.

      • Kevin C. says:

        What would you consider “something else”? Because my intuition is that not only is value alignment impossible, so is successfully and permanently boxing a superhuman intelligence, and that the only way to “stunt” an AI enough to prevent existential risk is to keep it a domain-limited expert system rather than a general intelligence.

        (I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone else propose and explore a future scenario where we develop high-intelligence “stunted” expert systems enough to disemploy a majority of the population, but due to existential risk or other limitations we can go no further, meaning a continued need for the “talented” minorities labor and no subsequent Singularity.)

      • Alliteration says:

        It seems that an AI that values effectiveness extremely highly and doesn’t care about risks is unlikely to lead to a hard singularity, because of the many generations of AI, at some point the AI is going to mistake a idiot AI for an more intelligent AI (for example idiot AI might contain a subtle bug that renders it useless after a period of time).

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          That assumes a sngle linear chain of AIs (as opposed to several parallel dynasties, or a tree structure ), and also the disappeance of older generations.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      The AI cannot have perfect introspection because of infinite regress; if the AI did have perfect introspection, the AI’s internal model would have to include the AI’s internal modal which also need to include the internal, etc.

      Interesting. I’m not sure whether I buy this or not. Can’t you use the same argument to show (falsely) that a program can’t make a copy of itself? Similarly, first-order predicate logic can’t express statements about itself, but second-order predicate logic can.

      On the other hand, I’m reminded of J. Storrs Hall’s theory about free will: a successful agent (human or robot) must have a good, mainly deterministic model of the world, but it must have a vague, mainly nondeterministic model of its own mind, because otherwise it’s computationally intractable to ever make a decision. So your assertion may be a practical necessity even if it is not a logical necessity.

    • Anonymous says:

      Do they analyze results from North Italy and South Italy separately?

    • Jason K. says:

      Meh. There isn’t a link in the article that goes to the paper, they do not say where this paper was published, and this is not a science rag doing the reporting. As a result, I have extremely little faith in the veracity of the reporting.

    • Jason K. says:

      If that was indeed the study, my lack of faith appears to have been validated. The study was measuring frailty, not stress. A quick eyeball of the charts shows a suggestive cause: the never married women were getting about 30% more exercise on average compared with married women, while the married/never married men had a difference that was less than 10%. Less exercise, faster muscle loss, faster onset of frailty. I see a lot of likely factors. Just off the top of my head:

      1: The married/widowed women had higher income. This likely means a lower physical labor requirement in their lives.

      2: Husbands taking up some of the load. The married husband was laboring an average of an extra 4 hours a week, which is 20% of what the married women were doing in total and about 75% of the difference between the married and unmarried women.

      3: The married women were older at the start of the study. Not a *lot* in absolute years, but in that age bracket, 4 years is likely not insignificant.

      My counter interpretation is that elderly married women have lives that are too sedentary.

  48. stargirlprincess says:

    The subreddit has upvotes/downvotes. Hopefully a SSC forum would not have any voting.

  49. Aq says:

    For those that are unaware, there is a twitter account reminding us that the English department continues to produce very silly stuff, lots of it.

    I would like to think that the problem is restricted to the humanities/social-sciences.
    But I had to reconsider after being required to read a few papers on Management theory recently.
    I now think that the problem is much more widespread.
    There seems to be an awful lot of academic work that falls into the “not-even-wrong” category.

    What a waste of people’s time/money.
    Anyone has any idea how things can be improved?
    How should society decide what type of academic work should be tax funded?

    • The Nybbler says:

      Not restricted to the social sciences; there’s a twitter account reminding us that the tech world continues to produce very silly stuff too.

      There were also a couple of abstracts accepted by a conference on computer graphics a (long) while back; one was “Efficient Radiosity for Daylight Simulation in Closed Environments” which promised to “speed up the radiosity computation for the class of closed environments without artificial light sources”. Such a computation is trivial; there is no daylight in a closed environment.

      • Aq says:

        Thanks for mentioning the “Efficient Radiosity for Daylight Simulation in Closed Environments”, had a good laugh.
        But what the author of that paper was trying to show was that “this particular conference is a scam”, and not “bad papers are normal in the field”.
        So I don’t think that paper helps much with the “STEM is just as bad” argument.

        The twitter account that you mention deals with silly Internet of Things devices/ideas.
        But the things in there are mostly stupid, they are not in the ‘not-even-wrong-category’.
        (And many of them come from hobbyists/startups, not academia.)

        At any rate, this discussion has been going for decades now. To the point where I’ve started rolling my eyes whenever I see yet another ‘what-is-wrong-with-English-department’ article.
        But what’s surprising is how little has changed. People are still being paid to write nonsense, and looking at the overall campus environment I fear that things might get even worse, not better.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Well, that’s because STEM isn’t as bad; when the BS starts to creep in, the connection between STEM and reality tends to limit it.

          When the Internet of Things gets overhyped and all sorts of useless products result, people find out the products are useless and the makers go bankrupt or at least stop making similar crap. If bad academic papers get published, people who try to use them to build things will find out they don’t work and the papers and/or authors will be discredited (I seem to recall a few non-reproducable methods of making stem cells which fell to that, for instance).

          On the other hand, in the humanities, you can often build castles in the air and there’s nothing to bring you back to earth.

          I’m not surprised papers on Management Theory are crap too. I don’t think managers actually manage based on Management Theory. Occasionally theories become fashionable and get pushed, but rarely are those theories seriously implemented; usually you just get a mapping of existing practice to new buzzwords.

          • Aq says:

            Well put, quite enjoyed the floating Castles metaphor.

            Doing some introspection, I think I’m not totally impartial (surprise, surprise), but I’m trying to be.
            I’m really annoyed by the social sciences floating castle, not because it is a floating castle, but because it pushes an agenda (too much to the left for my taste).

            But there are other floating castles around, in esoteric areas of maths, physics (some areas of string theory are very strange), management theory as I said before (this one could be said to be a right wing castle, perhaps).

            At any rate, I think it is clear that we should try to land these floating castles, ideally without harming the academics that leave there.

    • chaosbunt says:

      much of what is ridiculed by this twitter account is legitimate. Its main function seems to mark certain ideas as other, weird and not be taken seriously based on codewords.”Haha they said whiteness” is not a useful analysis of the state of social sciences. this is in my opinion not worthy of the usual quality of disourse here and many humanities bashers would benefit from applying the tribes concept to their perception of stems vs humanities.
      thanks for letting me vent.

      • Aq says:

        Many of the recent tweets do follow the pattern that you describe, but not earlier ones, or at least not as frequently.

        From my (inevitably flawed) point of view, I would say that the humanities do produce lots of good work.

        And I don’t think that a paper including the word “feminism” or “whiteness” must be bad. But unfortunately many are bad, and give a bad name to the field.

        It is perfectly possible to produce good work in those areas (I’m not saying it’s easy, just that it is possible).
        For example, in history (no matter where/when) I would say that it would make a *LOT* of sense to go back and try to find more information about the women that shaped it.
        This is an area that has probably been neglected in the past, and needs some attention.

        The Humanities also have great lecturers, particularly History professors (at least in my experience, I would say Historians are the best, followed by law professors).

        Then there is the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, etc, etc…
        What I’m trying to say is that the Humanities have contributed immensely to human knowledge and well being. It is just sad to see so much garbage nowadays.

        Yes there is some tribalism from my part, but there are some people in the humanities who would also share my opinion.

        • Theo Jones says:

          I have academic experience in both the natural sciences and the social sciences.

          I think the main difference is that, unlike STEM fields, the social sciences/humanities have by and large not developed a crank filter. There are plenty of good researchers in the humanities, but its also very easy for one to make a career on garbage work. In the natural sciences the peer-review and grant giving system is much more effective at removing idiots.

    • Urstoff says:

      My field is education, and so much education research is pseudo-science or complete nonsense. I was at a professional online learning conference last week, and most of the stuff was just ridiculously bad.

      Fortunately, a lot of this stuff isn’t funded through grants, but is just independent work done by various persons public, private, and otherwise. Perhaps that’s why the quality is so bad, but I doubt it.

    • “There seems to be an awful lot of academic work that falls into the “not-even-wrong” category.”

      I think it’s a result of the mechanisms for professional advancement in the academic world. At the top level it probably isn’t a big problem—if you are a Harvard professor, one reason is probably that quite a lot of other people in your field know your work and think well of it. But farther down the academic ladder, employment and promotion are largely a matter of counting publications, which gives people an incentive to try to get published whether or not they have anything to say.

    • Alejandro says:

      If one wishes to honestly assess the status of an academic discipline, looking at a random sample of articles published in well-regarded journals would be a better way than looking at a non-random sample of articles selected precisely for looking bad.

      • Aq says:

        The purpose of that account is to raise red flags, and not to produce statistically significant results.
        If a whistle-blower came forward exposing N cases of corruption it would be weird to dismiss her on the account of: ‘that is not a random sample’.

        (And besides, the level of bias of that twitter account is probably much lower than you imagine.)

  50. Dude Man says:

    So, I think the problems with /r/starslatecodex might consist of the following:

    1. A lot of people don’t like Reddit.
    2. People are used to posting here, so they continue to do so.
    3. More people are here, so you get a bigger audience here than at the subreddit.
    4. There are a lot of topics that people want to discuss but don’t want to make a whole Reddit/forum post about.

    Creating a non-reddit forum for discussion and having more frequent discussion threads there could solve these problems in a way r/slatestarcodex can’t, but only if you get rid of the open threads here and move them to the other site completely. Otherwise, people will still post here out of habit and because this is where all of the other comments are. However, not everyone who posts in these threads would move over to the new site. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but that is my hot take on the whole thing.

  51. Anonymous says:

    Hey, Scott, what’s your opinion on LSD microdosing?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Never tried it myself. Not seriously studied as far as I know. Someone credible (I think gwern) said he found no effect in a personal placebo-controlled trial, but it does pretty well on the survey

  52. The Nybbler says:

    We talked about Foxconn suicides earlier, how about American suicides?

    According to the CDC Americans in 2014 were killing themselves at a rate 24% higher than in 1999. This seems like a huge increase. Is it the economy? People on twitter saying “kill yourself”? Or is it just noise?

    • onyomi says:

      To attempt to back up this assertion in any way would be way too big a job, so I’m not going to:

      Outside improvements in largely computer-adjacent technology, life in the US, economically, socially, and culturally, has mostly been all downhill since 9/11.

      Though I’d like to think this contributes a little too.

    • Aq says:

      Based on my readings of SisterY, I would say that the recent increase in suicide rates it is mostly due to two things:
      * better access to information regarding effective suicide methods
      * loss of sense of social belonging

  53. Anatoly says:

    What are some good critiques of HBD? I’m referring to a broad understanding of HBD, something like “extremely high genetic contribution to almost all behaviors and outcomes, to the degree almost always underestimated by popular opinion”. So for example Judith Harris and parenting-has-little-influence is part of HBD for me.

    I feel that I’m exposed to a good amount of pro-HBD arguments, in SSC comments and in blogs of people in that sphere, which I mostly reach through SSC. I find some of the HBD stuff personally distressing, but I’m willing to accept it if it’s true. However, I’m worried that I don’t appreciate or know about some good anti-HBD arguments. Most anti-HBD arguments I encounter are dismissals and derision, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ones. E.g. maybe the whole edifice of twin studies has a massive publication bias that means they need to be treated very cautiously. Or maybe maybe twin studies and/or other HBD-type studies are statistically fishy (e.g. Cosma Shalizi had a g-as-a-myth critique which went over my head after some back-and-forth and I don’t really know what to think of it). Or maybe something else.

    I guess I’m asking that people who do not subscribe to HBD or at least think the typical HBD claims are misguided in some significant ways, share their principled reasons for thinking so, and/or give me leads for interesting contra-HBD arguments.

    • Anon. says:

      I think good angle of attack is to emphasize culture/historical accidents/path dependency. South Korea 50 years ago was a shithole, but this had little to do with genetics. Bad forms of social organization (which are often good at perpetuating themselves) can overcome good genes, at least temporarily.

    • Seth says:

      I would say one of the best anti arguments is historical. There’s a long, long, history of “race (pseudo) science” which basically comes to the conclusion that group in power and the group being oppressed is somehow the natural order. All the past results of this type have proven to be horrendously self-serving for the oppressors. Now we have another iteration which we are told must be taken as true unless definitely refuted by detailed examination. Which ends up proving the status quo. It’s a heuristic, but I’d apply some Bayesian estimation here.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        What about (white) HBD advocates who state that Jews and East Asians are genetically more intelligent than whites?

        • Anonymous says:

          >East Asians are genetically more intelligent than whites

          (Tangent) East Asians seem to have different facets of intelligence at different levels than whites. From what I read, they have greater mathematical aptitude, but lesser verbal-analytical aptitude. Overall, they come out better on IQ tests, though.

        • Seth says:

          Note the context – there’s not much market currently for justifying Anti-Semitism, and Asians are being touted as the idea of “model minority”. But wow, there is still a boom business for material that racism is gone and the effects are really due to (group) unchangeable aspects of the oppressed. I refer you to JDG1980’s comment at “April 24, 2016 at 4:24 pm”.

          It’s like psychic powers. If there’s a huge pile of supposed examples that prove to be wrong and/or a con, the next time someone claims psychic powers, we’re justified in being more skeptical given all the previous refuted examples.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Note the context – there’s not much market currently for justifying Anti-Semitism, and Asians are being touted as the idea of “model minority”. But wow, there is still a boom business for material that racism is gone and the effects are really due to (group) unchangeable aspects of the oppressed. ”

            Wait, what? When did HBD become mainstream? I’m pretty sure both cultural and genetic explanations for black underperformance are no-no on the left and genetic explanations are still rejected by the right.

            So if your boom business is the alts, I should point out there are plenty of far righters who don’t like Jews or Asians. Yet the HBDers aren’t pandering to them.

            “If there’s a huge pile of supposed examples that prove to be wrong and/or a con, the next time someone claims psychic powers, we’re justified in being more skeptical given all the previous refuted examples.”

            That would require all previous examples to be refuted. Notably for scientific racism all previous examples haven’t been refuted.

          • JDG1980 says:

            That would require all previous examples to be refuted. Notably for scientific racism all previous examples haven’t been refuted.

            One reason why I take the HBD claims seriously is that the anti-hereditarian arguments are so weak, often relying on guilt trips and/or logical fallacies. What is now known as “scientific racism” wasn’t abandoned for the most part because of newer and better studies proving the old ones wrong, but because after World War II, Franz Boas and his influential colleagues linked any research into racial biological differences to the Nazis. “You don’t want to be like HITLER, do you? DO YOU?!” That’s not science. Science doesn’t care what we think and feel, and has nothing to do with ethics. If all Americans deserve equal treatment under the law, it’s because equality under the law is a sacred American/Western value, not because all Americans have the same IQ (which we know is not true).

          • Outis says:

            Seth:

            It’s like psychic powers.

            It’s very much unlike psychic powers in that there is an enormous mountain of direct evidence against psychic powers. But there does not seem to be a mountain of evidence for HBU (human biological uniformity), which is precisely why you’re answering Anatoly’s question with the argument that you’re making, instead of providing that mountain of evidence.

            Given this situation, suspicion of HBD on historical grounds can only take you as far as “there is no conclusive evidence for one or the other hypothesis, so the best we can say is that we don’t know”. But it makes no sense to say “HBD is suspicious, therefore HBU must be true”.

      • Anon. says:

        People in the past didn’t have access to cheap full genome sequencing, so I don’t think it’s useful to conflate earlier endeavors in the field with the current ones. Also just because something affirms the current order doesn’t necessarily mean it’s incorrect.

      • birdboy2000 says:

        I agree that history is the disproof, but for different reasons.

        There’s a world of difference between who was on top when in history – it’s hard to make an argument for Western European genetic “superiority” in 500 AD, and very arguable in 1500 AD either. In 1900 AD scientific racism as an ideology was everywhere – but Western European empires ruled most of the world. Now they don’t.

        Why, then should we expect the indicators HBD advocates speak about to be genetic? It seems like some kind of unified theory of success that doesn’t make any sense whenever you look back a few centuries.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          “Why, then should we expect the indicators HBD advocates speak about to be genetic?”

          Because the past is different from the present. Specifically shared environment is increasing- more people are getting proper nutrition, modern medicine has pushed back crippling diseases, etc. We should expect the relative effect of environment to decrease over time and genetic differences to become more salient.

      • Anonymous says:

        I would say one of the best anti arguments is historical. There’s a long, long, history of “race (pseudo) science” which basically comes to the conclusion that group in power and the group being oppressed is somehow the natural order. All the past results of this type have proven to be horrendously self-serving for the oppressors.

        Which is, of course, not an actual argument.

        You’ll notice that when a modern “scientist” (Stephen Jay Gould) tried to debunk one of those earlier “pseudo-scientists” (Samuel Morton) who measured volumes of skulls of members of different races it was the modern scientist who fraudulantly claimed that the older pseudo-scientist misrepresented the data. Gould came to the modern approved conclusion but he had to commit fraud to do it.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        The thing about racist pseudoscience, scientific racism and other phrases like that is that their meaning implies that the results of these past scientists were in error, yet the commonly cited examples are also some of the best replicated even into the present day. It’s not like all of this stuff was overturned by new evidence: a lot of “discredited” ideas are slowly coming back because, as in the case of craniometry, new measurements continue to confirm the old ones.

        It seems like this attitude is based on a sort of weird equivocation. We know racism is (ethically) wrong, therefore ‘scientific racism’ is (factually) wrong. And of course the inverse, that if certain ‘racist’ findings are correct then one is obligated to be racist in the ethical sense.

        • Seth says:

          It’s only an equivocation if you strip out the entire historical and political context. This is something geeks are very prone to do, which is why social justice people (not necessarily SJW’s) get annoyed sometimes. There’s hundreds and hundreds of years of junk science that’s been produced to justify oppression. I keep telling people, read some of that stuff, it’s mind-boggling. All the putting of It’s-Science in service of oppression. I dug into the example of the doctor who was diagnosing the supposed mental disease that had slaves avoiding labor and running away, which was to be cured by the treatment of whipping. I thought it was parody. But as far as I could see, the guy was entirely serious.

          Fast-forward to the present day, you have a whole right-wing industry to make junk science about pseudo-scientific racism, with the obvious implication that the treatment for systematic poverty is whipping (i.e. police, prisons). And the geeks say, well, can you prove it isn’t so? People who are otherwise extremely aware of statistical pitfalls and contradictions in studies suddenly forget all of it, and rush to defend the modern equivalent of being open-minded about whether the status quo is an intrinsic fact of nature. The excuse It’s-Science is served up all over again.

          There’s some sad lessons here in how easy it is to go wrong.

          [Pre-emptive note: I know, the knee-jerk reply – Yah, yah, but what if it’s really really true that this time, the status quo is an intrinsic fact of nature, do you say it couldn’t be the case even in theory, can you prove it isn’t so, etc. etc.]

          • Theo Jones says:

            Exactly. Its pretty easy to come up with ad-hoc variants for an idea, that “solve” the problems of the older versions. So, when variants of an idea keep getting BTFO, my inclination is to downright the credibility of any new versions.

            If a creationist came to you saying that he has a new variant of creationism that “avoids” the problems of the other ones, would you 1) conclude he probably has a point, or 2) conclude that upon thorough analysis this variant of creationism will probably turn out to have a bunch of issues, even if none are obvious yet.

          • suntzuanime says:

            There have been a lot of pretty bad theories of fire, but that doesn’t mean you should blame your house burning down on ideological impurity.

          • Jiro says:

            So, when variants of an idea keep getting BTFO, my inclination is to downright the credibility of any new versions.

            In order for that to apply, the new idea has to be sufficiently similar to the old ideas. I don’t think “whipping slaves” and “police and prisons for crime caused by poverty” are close enough for that, even if you claim that they are both related to racism.

            Not to mention that one of the things the disagreement is *about* is the relation of poverty and racism to crime, so you can’t just assume it in order to dismiss the argument.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            The thing is, you keep saying it’s all junk science but that’s exactly what the people dismissing craniometry, psychometry and the like as “racist pseudoscience” said in the mid 20th century. And they were dead wrong. Anyone who bothers to do so can replicate the original work, and brand new tools like fMRI and high throughput sequencing provide evidence in line with the old observations.

            So before we take it for granted that this is all junk science, how about you actually demonstrate that it is in fact wrong? Because the 19th and early 20th century “junk” has held up a lot better than what was put together to replace it.

          • It’s pretty simple. Throughout history, the political orthodoxy has always been in contradiction with reality on certain topics. Science in complete agreement with the political orthodoxy of its day is suspect, because scientists often engage in quiet publication bias for the good of their careers.

            So, when slavery was the law of the land and saying that black people were deserving of rights was wrong and shameful, science said one thing. But now equality of outcome is the law of the land and claiming that IQ is possibly genetically-influenced is wrong and shameful.

            So, the politically-motivated science we should look at twice and replicate thrice is…?

          • Zorgon says:

            I dug into the example of the doctor who was diagnosing the supposed mental disease that had slaves avoiding labor and running away, which was to be cured by the treatment of whipping. I thought it was parody. But as far as I could see, the guy was entirely serious.

            Dr Andrew Wakefield.

          • Zorgon, that’s the fraudulent anti-vaccination doctor. I’m not sure whether you’ve made a joke I didn’t get.

            The actual name is Samuel A. Cartwright.

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

          • Zorgon says:

            I’ll admit I was being a bit oblique.

            The reference to Wakefield was intended to suggest that the beliefs of medical researchers are often very much determined by who is paying their salary at any given moment.

            I wouldn’t want future generations to judge the medical community of the 00s by the standards of Wakefield, so I don’t see why it’s acceptable to pretend that the aforementioned pro-slavery doctor was typical of his era either.

          • Zorgon, that’s a fair point. It’s hard to tell where the Overton window is, though I think no one at the time (or now, come to think of it) is going to say that slave-owning is a mental disorder best cured by whipping.

          • Outis says:

            I think Robert Liguori hit the nail on the head. From the assertion that “past science that supported political orthodoxy by ‘proving’ HBD was wrong”, Seth is deriving the pattern “science that proves HBD is suspect”. But pretty much all reasons we can think of why those scientists’ work would prove to be junk (confirmation bias, desire to be published, desire to be popular, etc.) instead point to the pattern “science that supports political orthodoxy is suspect”.

            And in fact we see that this patterns fits many more examples. We have entire scientific disciplines dominated by the current political orthodoxy (sociology, psychology), and the state of their reproducibility is disastrous (see the rest of this blog).

      • Theo Jones says:

        @Seth
        “Now we have another iteration which we are told must be taken as true unless definitely refuted by detailed examination.”

        Thats another other issue here, the burden of proof shifting. Really, before I accept HBD arguments, I would like one of their theories to produce some unique falsifiable predictions. My default is to not accept explanations without strong evidence in their favor.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          ” Really, before I accept HBD arguments, I would like one of their theories to produce some unique falsifiable predictions.”

          You don’t see how claiming genetic origins for traits has falsifiable predictions? Because it has tons; variances in genetic intelligence should mean there are
          – differences in upward and downward mobility by comparable income level for difference groups
          – different genes
          – different traits tied to intelligence (like autism)

        • anonymous says:

          Burden of proof shifting? Burden of proof shifting?

          There is a dogma in our Western societies, an orthodoxy from which it’s extremely risky to deviate in public – that all ethnic groups have equivalent mind-related genes.

          I think that at its core HBD is simply a lack of belief in that dogma.

          Everything else, such as whether or not asians are smarter than whites, or how intelligent blacks are, are details.
          If HBDers found evidence that group A, which they believed to be genetically dumber than group B, is actually genetically smarter than group B, they would simply revise their rankings, and they’d continue to call it HBD. The point is to accept that it’s possible for a group to be genetically smarter than another, because why wouldn’t it be possible?

          And since HBD is merely a lack of belief in the reigning dogma (that there can’t be such differences between groups), the burden of proof is not on it. It’s on the dogma.

          And there isn’t even A SHRED OF EVIDENCE that all ethnic groups have equivalent mind-related genes.

          And yet if you go around saying that you are not so sure of this theory for which there isn’t even A SHRED OF EVIDENCE, you risk social and professional disgrace.
          It’s absurd.

          And if you say “HBD theories are unproven/shaky/false”, people will not hear “we can’t say anything because we don’t know what mix of mental traits the various ethnicities have in their genes, even if differences between ethnicities are logically possible”. They will hear “rest assured that all ethnic groups have exactly the same genes for mental traits, don’t ask for evidence and continue to treat doubters like flat earther Nazis”.

          So where is the burden of proof?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            You are equivocating between “mind-related genes don’t vary between ethnic groups” and “the effect of differences between groups of mind-related genes is much smaller than that of differences within them, and differences due to environmental factors”.

          • anonymous says:

            Okay sweeneyrod, do you have evidence for that?

            You see, my whole point is, the burden of proof is on the orthodoxy.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Evidence for what? That the second statement is true, or that that is the one people actually believe?

          • anonymous says:

            That it’s true.

          • Outis says:

            sweeneyrod:

            You are equivocating between “mind-related genes don’t vary between ethnic groups” and “the effect of differences between groups of mind-related genes is much smaller than that of differences within them, and differences due to environmental factors”.

            I think you’re the one who is equivocating here. The key point of contention, the main political assertion in whose support human biological uniformity (HBU) is assumed, is the idea that differences in outcomes between politically recognized groups are due to ongoing oppression. Intra-group differences have no bearing on that question.

      • Jaskologist says:

        I have heard this exact argument used by creationists. And historically, they’re not wrong, either. The textbook in question during the Scopes Trial did everything you’re accusing HBD of. Why shouldn’t we reject evolution on the basis you provide, or at the very least reject anybody who thinks Scopes was in the right and Tennessee in the wrong?

        The Races of Man. – At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

        If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.

    • Anonymous says:

      >parenting-has-little-influence

      I don’t think that’s quite it.

      Having parents, and having those parents not being completely awful absentee drug addicts, has a big influence. If those parents are behaving relatively normal with regards to upbringing, from the laissez-faire parent who cares that you’re clothed and fed, but largely leaves you to your own devices, through the struggling peasant family that relies on their children for a substantial part of their income, to the various modern helicopter parents – the kids will probably turn out quite alright, and achieve the vast majority of their potential. The returns greatly diminish past simply being a regular family.

      Broken homes – such as households led by a single mother, or when the parents are drug addicts, or when they lock up their kids in cupboards for extended periods of time, or when they don’t teach them any life skills including basic literacy – on the other hand, seem to be greatly disadvantageous towards the children.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        Drug addicts, locking kids in cupboards, illiteracy, single mothers… One of these things is not like the others.

        • Anonymous says:

          Per this summary:

          In mother-only families, children tend to experience short-and long-term economic and psychological disadvantages; higher absentee rates at school, lower levels of education, and higher dropout rates (with boys more negatively affected than girls); and more delinquent activity, including alcohol and drug addiction. Adolescents, on the other hand, are more negatively affected by parental discord prior to divorce than by living in single-parent families and actually gain in responsibility as a result of altered family routines (Demo and Acock 1991). Children in single-mother homes are also more likely to experience health-related problems as a result of the decline in their living standard, including the lack of health insurance (Mauldin 1990). Later, as children from single-parent families become adults, they are more likely to marry early, have children early, and divorce. Girls are at greater risk of becoming single mothers as a result of nonmarital childbearing or divorce (McLanahan and Booth 1989). Although the research findings are mixed on long-term effects, the majority of children adjust and recover and do not experience severe problems over time (Coontz 1997).

          • null says:

            It seems that the maximum likelihood interpretation of the quoted text is “if you’re raising kids, don’t be poor”. It’s unclear whether single motherhood is much worse beyond that,

          • Anonymous says:

            And a single-parent household is almost assuredly going to be poorer than a two-parent household. Understandable when circumstances force this on you (being widowed, husband initiating divorce, etc). Not so sympathetic when this is voluntary.

          • 57dimensions says:

            I think the problem is that single mothers appear in different socio-economic classes, but the effects can be quite different. What you describe above obviously appears to co-occur with poverty and has many of the same results.

            I live in a very well off suburb and ‘single mothers’ are a fairly normal occurrence, but in this case they are single because of divorce, not because they had kids when unmarried. I don’t know if these studies correct for the divorced vs. never married variable, but I think that would have a substantial differentiating effect.

            People get defensive when they see something about children raised by ‘single mothers’ having bad outcomes because they are more likely to think of the typical single mother as a divorced upper middle class professional, not the poor ‘welfare queen’ who has multiple children from different absentee fathers.

          • Anonymous says:

            People get defensive when they see something about children raised by ‘single mothers’ having bad outcomes because they are more likely to think of the typical single mother as a divorced upper middle class professional . . .

            I don’t think that’s why they “get defensive.”

          • Mary says:

            Your mother not being married at the time of your birth is a better predictor of whether you will die as a baby and whether you will commit crimes as a juvenile than your race and household income combined.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Mary

            Do you have a source for that?

      • Anonymous says:

        from the laissez-faire parent who cares that you’re clothed and fed, but largely leaves you to your own devices [. . .] the kids will probably turn out quite alright, and achieve the vast majority of their potential.

        Nope. You need to throw in a few piano lessons and opportunities for intellectual engagement (speaking from personal experience). IOW, there is a vast, vast difference between laissez-faire parents and helicopter parents (which I’m taking to mean the college-educated, middle-class kind who sign their kids up for summer camp, sports, lessons, etc.).

        • Anonymous says:

          Do you have some material I could read on that? Because that is news to me. From personal experience, there didn’t seem to be any particular correlation between how much of an active parents kids had on their life outcomes.

      • null says:

        Are you asserting that single-parent households are as bad as households where the parents are abusive? Or is that only true for single mothers?

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          Nowhere they seem to assert they are just as bad, only that both are bad.

        • Anon. says:

          I think what he’s saying is that there is an effect in both cases, not that the magnitude of the effect is the same. On the other hand, everything within the range of “normal parenting” has essentially no effect.

    • Protagoras says:

      The various reasons why social science studies are terrible generally all apply to studies of genetics. Oddly enough, the HBD crowd seem to be perfectly well aware of the terribleness of social science studies, but they never seem to consider that it could apply to them. I suppose it’s because they think the biggest problem with social science studies is that they are politically biased, and they think genetic studies, which often produce contrarian results, are free of the dominant bias and so probably more accurate. But of course it is likely that the kind of people who go into genetic research have their own set of biases, and even more importantly, the evidence seems to suggest that there are a lot of other problems hindering social science research which together play a much bigger role than bias. To take one example, Scott recently linked to a study on the problems with attempts to correct for confounders. To the extent that that is an unsolved problem, it is as serious an obstacle to the research on genetic origins of behevior as to any social science research.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        ” I suppose it’s because they think the biggest problem with social science studies is that they are politically biased, and they think genetic studies, which often produce contrarian results, are free of the dominant bias and so probably more accurate.”

        HBDers are the people who think IQ tests are valid. I’m really not seeing how genetic studies remotely comes into play.

    • JDG1980 says:

      Probably the most compelling anti-HBD argument I’ve read is “The Anti-Racialist Q&A“.

      I don’t know with any degree of confidence whether the HBD claims are true or false. What I do know is that the current attempt by intellectual and political elites to sweep the whole discussion under the rug is doomed to fail. Everyone can see that certain demographic groups, on average, have lower intellectual performance and are more prone to violence and disorder. As colonialism and segregation recede into the past, blaming this on racism becomes more and more implausible. Unless liberals can come up with a serious, substantive explanation for this (Kevin Drum, for instance, makes a plausible argument that childhood lead exposure is a major culprit), more and more people are going to independently apply Occam’s Razor and decide that blacks are just genetically inferior. The more that black pathologies get swept under the rug by the least responsible elements of the cultural Left, the more “racist” white America will become.

      • Anon. says:

        That was terrible. It completely misrepresents the “HBD” position, pretending they think that malnutrition, parasite load, etc. don’t affect IQ.

        Prussian:

        Racialists like to cast themselves as stone cold, dispassionate scientists. But they repeatedly ignore all the proven science about what causes IQ fluctuations in favour of putting it all on genes, and we still haven’t identified intelligence genes with any certainty. [yes we have]

        Here’s Sailer:

        It appears likely that some combination of malnutrition, disease, inbreeding, lack of education, lack of mental stimulation, lack of familiarity with abstract reasoning and so forth can keep people from reaching their genetic potential for IQ.

        And then the arguments that come from arbitrarily picking a definition of 5 “races”, then “proving” things based on which groups he put into each “race”… That’s just silly.

    • “So for example Judith Harris and parenting-has-little-influence is part of HBD for me.”

      Have you read her book, or only gotten it second hand? Her argument isn’t that it’s all genes. It’s that the important environmental influence on personality is the peer group not the parents, and that people overestimate the parental contribution to environmental effects on personality because they are not allowing for parental contribution via genes.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I would caution that this isn’t how almost anyone else uses the term “HBD”. It’s usually used to refer entirely to genetic differences between groups. As far as I know nobody questions the existence of important genetic differences between individuals, although there’s the usual arguments about how seriously to take that.

      The strongest argument against taking it super-seriously is Turkheimer et al’s work showing that shared environment matters more among poorer populations. See also this paper from Turkheimer, which makes some appropriate cautions: http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Perspectives%20on%20Psychological%20Science-2016-Turkheimer-24-8.pdf

      • roystgnr says:

        I seem to recall seeing an adoption study broken down by income quintile, which had the usual “shared environment makes no difference to adult outcomes” results for the top three quintiles, but showed a significant shared environment effect for the next quintile and showed a predominantly shared environment effect for the poorest quintile.

        Despite remembering the above details, plus vaguely remembering where I saw it (probably EconLog), I have never been able to find this study again. I don’t think I hallucinated it… I remember looking at the graphs and everything…

  54. BillG says:

    A bit early to ask, but since there are a few gamers on here– is anyone else going to GenCon this year?

    Looking forward to it, it’ll be my second year going. Would love to get together a small meetup if other SSCers are in town.

    • DrBeat says:

      I’m going! What in particular are you going for?

      • BillG says:

        I’m glad I checked back on this. Generally I’m a board game guy, but I usually jump into a game of CoC and some random other RPG when there. Look forward to it every year.

        How about you?

        • DrBeat says:

          I go for card games and whatever random boardgames and RPGs I can weasel myself into. Usually on the lookout for something World of Darkness and a game of Battlestar Galactica or two.

          • BillG says:

            I guess we’ll see events in a week or two– we should touch base about a BSG game. I play in a little group that gets together around every other month to play!

  55. Alex R says:

    I don’t use the subreddit, and I don’t usually use the comment section, but I would probably use a Discourse forum. They’re not hard to set up, but they have a lot of knobs to tweak.

  56. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Scott’s “Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory” post got quoted on page 9 of this slideshow. Neat!

  57. onyomi says:

    Related to a proposal to have national-level legislators reside in their home states and telecommute I mentioned a while back:

    Recently thinking about Japanese history and the “sankin kotai” system which required feudal lords to have their families reside in the capital as, in effect, “hostages” of the Shogun, I was suddenly weirdly reminded of Washington DC.

    That is, though I don’t think anyone probably explicitly planned this, I think, over time, DC has become a space whereby the most influential politicians of the state and local levels are brought “into line” with the national level political culture. In the Japanese system there was, of course, the explicit threat: “we’ll kill your family if you rebel” which no longer exists, but I think there was then and is now a subtler, maybe more powerful form of pacification going on: “your family will reside here in the national capital where they will grow to love the non-regional culture of the capital; they will no longer be residents of “your” little fiefdom, but of the nation.”

    Even in cases where politicians’ families stay in the home state, I think we are all familiar with the “Washington changes you” meme: what suddenly struck me was how very old this phenomenon may be.

    • Stefan Drinic says:

      This very same thing happened in France, too, when Louis XIV decided to centralise the crap out of his nation and move everything he could to Versailles. Even the Romans had a system akin to this; people from provinces way over in the middle east or Gaul could become senators(and later even emperors) just fine, but residing in Rome did wonders to have them assimilate the dominant culture. Half of Europe speaking an offshoot of their language is not an accident.

    • candles says:

      The phenomenon is not just old; it’s also utterly pervasive, if you squint a bit, on a scale much larger than mere politicians.

      One thing I think that is heavily under-discussed about the current state of American politics is how much relatively recent institutional arrangements skew where various voters loyalties lie, and to what extent that is making a nightmare of American politics.

      To cut to the chase – from a certain perspective, the primary function of our university system is to increase the scope, spatially, of your allegiances in direct proportion to your standardized-test revealed talents and likely ability to cause trouble to our system of government.

      In my high school growing up, kids who didn’t test well never ended up moving out of the county and went on to have families there. The scope of their concerns is primarily at the county / local level.

      Kids that tested pretty well went to the best state schools and then started families all around the metro area of the largest city in the state. Their concerns are largely at the state and metro level.

      Hardly anyone I knew went to an ivy, but my wife did and has friends who did. For most of those folks, the scope of their concern is national or, especially for the folks who went into finance, international (business, media, and the academy are also often internationally oriented in this group).

      None of what I just said is earth-shaking, but it’s actually pretty interesting to think about the consequences of that, and how it could look otherwise.

      I’ve seen it mentioned a number of times, when talking about collapsing / decaying inner-city African American neighborhoods, that one perverse thing that feeds on their cycle of decay is that anyone from those neighborhoods who has any talent and shows any promise, IF the system is working, gets drawn out their local context by our ostensibly meritocratic system and sucked up to the state / metro or even national stage. If the system identifies you as the sort of person who could really help that local community, it shunts you off to make sure your primary concerns and loyalties are at a much higher spatial scope. You’ve made good! You should be identifying with other people who’ve made good! It’s it great you escaped such hard-scrabble beginnings!

      I’ve seen the same thing observed about the communities that are going most strongly for Trump. For many of them, there is a hemorrhaging of all the most talented / smartest young people out of those areas – the people who are left behind are the people least capable of turning things around and making things better. A brain drain, if you will. I’ve seen it mentioned that lots of small towns in the great plains, places that used to be about small family farms, are hollowing out and aging in exactly this process.

      But it also means that the people most capable of being leaders, and making trouble, and threatening the power of the central system, are sucked up into that system to have their loyalties tied to that central system… which is basically the same pattern identified in the parent comment I’m responding to, but on a nation-wide scale.

      In particular, this system draws young, smart, ambitious people out of a specific part of the country that had previously been militarily occupied and has long held a grudge, namely the South, and works to make sure that those most capable of making trouble have their loyalties culturally aligned from a young age with the central system, not their regional concerns. Having grown up in Georgia, I can say both that regional and generational memory is long, and also that this process is nevertheless largely working with younger people.

      The positive aspect of this system (if you buy this argument) is that it makes regional civil wars and crises a lot less likely. The down side of this system is that it’s increasingly making it harder for people up the ladder to have any ability to comprehend or emphasize with the values, concerns, and troubles of the left behinds out in the boonies… the system is clearly antagonistic to fostering any kind of national solidarity. And it does mean, as mentioned, that the people who would be most capable of helping those particular places are whisked away and heavily encouraged not to be the sorts of people who invest in and care about particular places.

      (This is a rather Cathedral-ish post, I guess)

      • onyomi says:

        “it’s increasingly making it harder for people up the ladder to have any ability to comprehend or emphasize with the values, concerns, and troubles of the left behinds out in the boonies… the system is clearly antagonistic to fostering any kind of national solidarity.”

        I think this relates to this as well.

      • Kevin C. says:

        And your comment, Candles, immediately reminded me of the Imperial Chinese examination system and its effects.

        • onyomi says:

          A good point.

          I heard an interesting presentation recently which claimed to show, based on demographic data, that between the Northern Song and Southern Song, there was a big change in where the successful exam candidates came from: in the Northern Song (and earlier, though I don’t think the examination system was really fully developed prior to that), most of the successful candidates came from the capital and/or were closely blood related to existing elites.

          Starting in the Southern Song, most of the successful candidates came from the increasingly wealthy and trade-focused East and Southeastern coastal areas which remain the wealthiest parts of China to this day.

          Of course, the capital had moved closer to this area, but far fewer of the successful candidates actually lived in or near the capital and/or had direct blood ties to existing political elites.

          As to why this happened exactly, I’m not sure. One is tempted to imagine the test became more meritocratic. Or maybe wealthy merchants just got rapidly better at translating their trade wealth in education and cultural capital or something. Either way, it probably did have the intended or unintended effect of pulling those coastal and Southern areas much more into the Chinese cultural mainstream, which had origins more in the North and West, but which gradually shifted south and east over time (as it had already been doing, to some extent, due to previous invasions).

          • I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that at some point in Chinese history the exam system switched to blind grading, with the result that the outcomes became much less nepotistic.

          • onyomi says:

            I think they moved to make the tests anonymous fairly early in the Song Dynasty, so I don’t think that alone could be the cause, though it was probably part of a general push toward achieving real meritocracy that allowed this to happen on a larger scale a century later.

            (Though some high-ranking Northern Song officials like Wang Anshi really did have a non-elite, non-capital background, so it wasn’t impossible even in the 11th c.)

    • Aegeus says:

      The idea that Washington should be its own place rather than a part of any state is by design – it’s why it’s the “District of Columbia” rather than part of Virginia or Maryland.

      That said, I don’t think “keeping the lower ranks in line” is a design goal – that ascribes too much intent to something that probably sprang up from the simple requirement that you have to seat your government somewhere. You can’t put a million politicians in one city and expect that they won’t develop a culture of their own.

    • Yrro says:

      Actually, during the 90’s it became standard practice among Republicans, encouraged by party leadership, to leave their families behind during their term. Before this everyone did move to Washington.

      It has been argued that this has encouraged the increased polarization of the parties and made it harder to compromise.

      http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/22/opinion/oe-neuman22

  58. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    So apparently there is a family whose kids spend their time doing shooting drills in full gear. I thought it was pretty cool, but it got a mixed reception from the U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers in whose forum I found the link. Something this ‘Murican could only be done in Canada, eh?

    Jokes aside, I wish the MSM would show stuff like this rather than things like Militia Rising which is clearly intended to make fun of rednecks (if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, the montage of fail sums it up). Also, is it me, or is the Family Protection Group a plausibly deniable way to train a unit for urban combat?

    • Psmith says:

      The guy who was worried about stage-parenting might have had a point. On the other hand, good skills and excellent jimmy-rustling. Appleseed teaches basic positional shooting to a lot of kids (and adults) in the US and gave the NYT Magazine a minor case of the vapors a few years ago.

      I wish the MSM would show stuff like this rather than things like Militia Rising which is clearly intended to make fun of rednecks

      http://www.eiconline.org/eic-resources/publications/gun-violence-depiction-book/

    • hlynkacg says:

      On one hand, I have a viscerally negative reaction to the idea of child soldiers. On the other that was an impressive display of discipline and I really of want to buy them all pizza and their parents a drink.

      Edit: As an aside, did they really get their hands on a bunch of 203s or are those props?

  59. Anonymous Colin says:

    As good a place as any to ask this, I suppose.

    I am a stats/CS type. For professional development purposes I would like to learn how to make attractive data visualisations. I’m already proficient with D3, ggplot2, etc., but I am more interested in producing larger and more elaborate static graphics, of a sort you might see in online or print journalism.

    I have a great deal of theory on what makes a good visualisation, but I have no practical idea of how to actually make them. What software would I use? Where and how might I learn to use it? What is the on-ramp for this skill set?

    • Aq says:

      D3 is very powerful, I don’t know why you are aiming for static graphics. Print is on its way out, and D3 stuff can be pretty interactive.
      I’ve don’t have much experience in that area. But if I was in your place I would try to improve my understanding of D3. Yes you do say you are proficient, but are you able to create something even remotely approaching the visualizations on the NYT?
      I would probably try to replicate one of the many D3 examples that are available out there (i.e. see an example I like; try to code a similar one on my own; see how the other person did the original; see if I can improve my solution).
      Anyway, I not sure if this is the best venue to get advice on this area. Sometimes seeing what the influential people of a given field are doing helps a lot (e.g. check the twitter account of D3’s creator, what is he saying? who is he following?).

    • Glen Raphael says:

      What is the on-ramp for this [data visualization] skill set?

      Do you know about Horace Dediu’s Airshow? Or Tufte’s Presenting Data? If you were to attend either of those courses and network with the other attendees to figure out where they hang out and what tools they are using, that would seem like a pretty good start at what you’re looking for. Not to mention the value of the courses themselves…

      (Of the two, I gather Airshow is focused a bit more more on how to use specific tools to produce a desired outcome.)

    • Adam says:

      I agree with Aq that D3 is by far the best thing out there right now and interactive graphics beat static every time, but if you do want to learn static, graphic design tools like the Adobe suite (Illustrator, etc.) are probably the most common to start with, as it sounds like you already know the principles and theory and are looking to learn a tool set.

      Of course, it’s also perfectly possible to just learn the SVG standard and hand write parts of it if what D3 generates isn’t good enough for you. In practice, I’m pretty sure most production quality print graphics you see start with library-generated SVG or raster, possible hand-tweaked if it’s SVG, finished off with some editing that you haven’t figured out how to script yet using a tool like Illustrator. It’s a lot easier to do that than to build a graphic from scratch using a static design tool.

    • Virbie says:

      I don’t know very much about British politics, but is that guy really what passes for a Trump over there? He sounds centrist as hell, aside from a dig or two at opponents calling them commies.

      • sweeneyrod says:

        You fell into my trap! His only similarity to Trump is that he hosts the British version of The Apprentice.

        • Virbie says:

          Ha ok, you got me. I guess it’s a Poe’s Law thing; especially among my less-thoughtful/more-tribal liberal friends, Trump has come to signify basically anything they consider Republican and bad, so even things like cutting social spending and unfettered free trade are assumed to be “Trump positions”. AFAIK, that’s what was happening here.

      • Trump is pretty centrist in his expressed views, at least for someone running for the Republican nomination.

        • Urstoff says:

          Centrist on average, but a modal extremist. He’s far right on some stuff and fairly left on others. That doesn’t make him a centrist, just not someone who can be measured by a one-axis political scale.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Yes, he take many positions outside the Overton Window, but they are invariably the position of the median voter.

          • anon says:

            Can you give some examples?

            My sense of (what liberals perceive as) his most far right views: the wall, torturing enemies, killing families of terrorists, banning Muslim immigration.

            These fall into two somewhat overlapping categories, namely national security and immigration policy.

            On national security, I think it’s hard to argue that he departs in any meaningful way (i.e. in terms of substance rather than rhetoric) from existing US policy under Obama, which is largely consistent with Bush II’s. I call out Trump’s critics (on both left and right) in this arena as hypocrites.

            On immigration *broadly*, my reading of his platform is that he combines basically left-wing views on labor-market protectionism (with regard to visa policy) with basically bog-standard “rule of law” conservatism on immigration enforcement. Not that extreme.

            But the specific immigration policies that so rankle liberals are sort of apart from this general pattern. As far as I can tell, the wall is polarizing for purely symbolic rather than substantive reasons. Using Kling’s three-axis model, I think the wall is very offensive from a freedom-coercion perspective, but not much moreso (if at all) than the status quo. I already have to stand in line and show my papers to bored but self-important Gestapo types to cross the border legally; this will still be the case with a big expensive ugly wall, and I don’t expect much will change. From the civilization-vs-barbarism and oppressor-vs-oppressed perspectives, the wall is highly symbolic and thus emotionally salient. But my understanding of the actual data is that there is no reason to expect the wall to have much an effect on immigration, and thus little reason to believe it will either “defend our civilization from invaders” OR increase the oppression of impoverished Mexicans.

            Somewhat similar reasoning applies to the proposed ban on Muslim immigrants. Again, along the libertarian axis, this is an offensive policy that compounds our country’s already distasteful restrictions on the rights to live, travel, and hire freely, with an additional affront to religious liberty. But along the progressive and conservative axes, it seems closer to a no-op. Immigration to the US from war-ravaged countries like Syria should not be expected to alleviate the suffering of the oppressed in those countries to any significant degree. To the extent progressives sympathize with Muslim migrants, the true oppressors are not the bureaucrats in ICE rationing visas, but those migrants’ own countrymen (and co-religionists), citizens of the European Union, and the United States’ own military and foreign policy establishments. So again, this comes down to symbolism. And along the civilization-vs-barbarism axis, the Muslim immigration ban is very symbolic indeed. But I question whether it is at all outside of the mainstream; it seems to me to be a policy expression of a view consistent with decades of standard conservative rhetoric in both the United States and the EU. And as Douglas Knight points out, it’s definitely consistent with the median voter, AFAICT.

            In sum, unless I’m misidentifying the policies that make you regard Trump as “far right on some stuff”, I think it call comes down to symbolism and rhetoric, rather than the substance of his beliefs.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Trump is actually more inclusive on Syria than other republicans
            http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/ted-cruzs-religious-test-for-syrian-refugees

            Ted Cruz wants to allow in only Christians.

            So technically Trump’s policy lets in more people (Yazidis and Druze) than Ted Cruz.

        • Virbie says:

          Agreed (I actually alluded to this in another comment). Instead of centrist I should probably have said “unremarkable”, in that none of his views seem off the spectrum too far in the way that Trump is known for.

          Also, calling someone “Britain’s X” generally means the most notable and exaggerated aspects of politician X,whcih in trump’s case would be those of his views that are outside of the mainstream that most politicians swim in.

    • Anonymous says:

      It’s worth mentioning that he’s “Britain’s Donald Trump” in the sense that he’s the host of the UK version of The Apprentice, and he’s a blowhard celebrity businessman with a history of entertaining commercial failure. But calling him “Britain’s Donald Trump” is like calling Barack Obama “America’s Kim Jong Un”

      • Dirdle says:

        Yeah. The popular idiot from the Conservatives with terrible hair is… The current mayor of London. TINACBNIEAC.

        • Deiseach says:

          While I certainly wouldn’t call Alan Sugar “Britain’s Donald Trump” (though he does have a similarly inflated sense of his own importance), I don’t think Bojo is an idiot; he’s very carefully crafted an image of himself as “the popular idiot from the Conservatives with terrible hair” so that no matter what scandal or dreadful policy proposal is uncovered, the instinctive reaction is one of lip-curled “what else would you expect” derision and so he gets away with it.

          • Anonymous says:

            While I agree he has the public image of a bumbling idiot, and this dynamic works well for him, it’s also fitting with the hypothesis that he is a bumbling idiot, albeit a very lucky one.

          • Dirdle says:

            … And Trump hasn’t?

            Sorry, I don’t know a good word the exact thing you just described. If I did, I would have used it instead of “popular idiot.” Any suggestions? I’m partial to “a dubya.”

        • TINACBNIEAC

          Google fails to turn up the meaning of this.

  60. Anon. says:

    Anonymous vs pseudonymous commenting: the theoretical benefits to a stable pseudonymous identity are clear: if people have a reputation, they will make good posts in order to maintain it. Seems plausible.

    But in practice this often turns into pandering to the lowest common denominator in order to harvest the most “brownie points”. Instead of making “good” posts, people are incentivized to make “popular” posts, and (depending on the community) there’s usually a big difference between them. This is less prevalent in situations where the reputation is not explicitly quantified.

    Another issue is that reputation is not a clear good. People are not uniformly intelligent/knowledgeable: if Bob makes a stupid post about economics (which he knows little about), then perhaps you will simply scroll over his next post (but this time it’s a great post about machine learning, which Bob has a PhD in). It also works the other way: if popular identities make bad arguments, people will tend to ignore the faults based on their reputation. Fully anonymous commenting forces people to engage with the substance of each comment in itself.

    • Vitor says:

      I see your point, but fully anonymous discussions are really difficult to follow. I dislike anonymity in general (nothing against pseudonymity), but assuming that anons are here to stay, how about taking on a fixed pseudonym for at least the entirety of a discussion?

      • Anonymous says:

        That’s trivially inconvenient.

        • Vitor says:

          So, who takes the inconvenience upon themselves? You, or the rest of us?

          This is, in a nutshell, why I dislike anonymity. In theory, you’re free to tell it like it is, free from the oppressive nature of brownie-point systems. In practice, the lack of accountability drives the level of discussion down, not up.

        • Vitor says:

          Ok, so let me unpack my ideas a bit more, even though onyomi below commented on the key points of this issue way more articulately than I am capable of.

          The parent remark is exactly what I’ve come to expect of anon@gmail.com. It’s a short, low-effort and dismissive remark that doesn’t address any of the actual issues around the subject. I now have a high prior that any anonymous poster comes here with the same unproductive attitude (I don’t mean the green anon that started this subthread).

          If someone wanted to be actually anonymous, they would post under an unremarkable pseudonym that blends right in, and they would keep that pseudonym for as long as it makes sense. Using the anon@gmail.com account, or having the word “anon” in their handle, is the equivalent of shouting “look at me, I’m anonymous” at the top of your lungs, so it’s not surprising to find those accounts mostly inhabited by trolls.

          I for one hope that all anon accounts inhabited by more than one person not even making the trivial effort of pretending to be somebody will eventually be banned.

          • Anonymous says:

            Bakkot? Can you make a button next to the email field, with a die on it, that rolls a random email when you click it?

          • Evan Þ says:

            … and now we see an example of an non-dismissive anon comment which takes into consideration the opposing view and comes up with a really good, workable solution!

          • Bakkot says:

            @Anonymous – I could, yes. I’ll think on it. Not sure we want to encourage throwaway identities, here.

            (The UI would be a link after “Email *” which said something like “(Generate)”. Unobtrusive enough for me not to worry about UI bloat, so I’m just concerned if it would actually have positive effects.)

          • Anonymous says:

            Thank you!

          • onyomi says:

            I am skeptical it would solve the problem–might even make it worse–since it amounts to expanding the “commons” I’m talking about without changing its fundamental character, therefore making it correspondingly harder to ignore “black and white anonymous” if you don’t want to deal with such comments.

            Of course, no one can stop you if you want to make a new fake identity each time you post, but I’m not sure we want to make it easier.

          • onyomi says:

            Since we do have a polite black and white anonymous here, however, I am curious:

            Surely you must admit that this feature, especially if expanded, has potential for abuse and has, in fact, already been abused. What benefit does it provide for you that might be worth it?

          • Anonymous says:

            Well, it would remove the trivial inconvenience of making up new email addresses at will. With random addresses, more diverse become the gravatars, so it’s not just a wall of dark-purple-anons, and people are no longer confused about who is who.

          • onyomi says:

            But, I mean, what is the benefit of having no consistent online identity between posts? Are you really that concerned people will stereotype your views, especially considering that posting in this way now has its own discernible negative associations?

          • Anonymous says:

            My concerns are primarily threefold:

            1. Avoiding the temptation to build a recognizable online persona and engage in tribal drama. I want to discuss interesting things here, not participate in tribal politics. I don’t want to become a member of the community other than as an occasional side in a debate.

            2. Avoiding self-boxing and being shamed for inconsistency. With a recognizable identity, I find myself being extra careful to be consistent with everything else I’ve said. This is counterproductive towards changing my mind when new facts come to light, or someone convinces me otherwise. I realize that this particular community might be more accepting of a Lovecraftian attitude towards ideological conformity, but I don’t want to deal with it anyway. Being associated with my other comments within a single thread is OK, but it’s trivially annoying to actually make those random emails all the time.

            3. I don’t want to get doxxed based on personal information I might reveal for various reasons, like providing data points or supporting an argument.

          • onyomi says:

            Re. 1, I really don’t see a lot of tribal drama here. Sure, there are people who tend to reliably line up on one side or another in many debates, but part of what makes it a nice community is that mostly doesn’t get acrimonious. But it is a community, nonetheless, and my experience thus far is that allowing drive by comments lowers its level of discourse, as one would probably not expect the quality of a conversation to increase if disembodied voices could chime in.

            Re. 2, this community seems to me to have a pretty good norm for not attempting to shame people over inconsistency with past statements, as well as what I think is a healthy norm for admitting when you’ve changed your mind or were wrong (as modeled admirably by our host).

            Re. doxxing, I think you overestimate the desire and ability of anyone to figure out a real life identity on the basis of even pretty detailed info. Like even if you told me what town you grew up in, your favorite hobby, your age, and the name of your high school, I probably couldn’t figure out who you are irl. And few people get that specific.

            This is, at least, the best (arguably first real) defense of this I’ve seen, and I thank you for your candor. I realize I’m biased here by my own priorities, but I still think it isn’t worth the damage the noticeable increase in rude comments does the community, especially as a way of accommodating people who explicitly don’t want to become a member of said community.

          • Anonymous says:

            @onyomi
            Ad2: I went full anon specifically because of such an event (that is, this is what triggered it; the other reasons are not unimportant, but wouldn’t have made me decide to do it). You will understand if I don’t specify further.

          • onyomi says:

            Someone tried to Doxx you or someone criticized you for inconsistency?

          • Jiro says:

            Avoiding self-boxing and being shamed for inconsistency. With a recognizable identity, I find myself being extra careful to be consistent with everything else I’ve said. This is counterproductive towards changing my mind when new facts come to light, or someone convinces me otherwise.

            Inconsistency and changing your mind aren’t the same thing. There’s a big difference between saying X and then denying X becauser you no longer believe it, and saying X followed by denying it because you’re just taking whichever position of X and ~X is convenient at the moment.

          • Deiseach says:

            being shamed for inconsistency

            All right, I can see how that’s a concern. I think people should be allowed to be inconsistent, because there are very few things on which people are completely consistent all the time, and that consistency often is in response to being attacked on those positions.

            People can have nuanced positions or an overall coherent philosophy which permits different answers to specific cases, and hammering them for inconsistency only encourages being entrenched and, as you say, being careful to be consistent even if it doesn’t represent your real position.

            I’d say don’t worry about consistency, but it’s your opinion, do as you please!

          • Anonymous says:

            @onyomi: Latter. I’ve edited my post after you did.

            @Jiro: And this was “didn’t you also say X in thread Y, Z weeks ago?”, not “you said X upthread and ~X here”. Since I do not want to deal with that, and I have means to avoid it…

          • Nita says:

            Is it really a huge issue to “deal” with?

            a) Huh, you’re right. I’ll think about it later.
            b) Yeah, but I’ve changed my mind since then.
            c) To me, X and Z are consistent because I also believe W.

            On the other hand, I guess I’m emotionally privileged here, because I want bug reports, so I don’t really perceive them as “shaming”.

          • Anonymous says:

            >Is it really a huge issue to “deal” with?

            Scott hates noise.

          • Jiro says:

            Is it really a huge issue to “deal” with?

            People are often inconsistent because either they deliberately take different positions in front of different audiences (implying insincerity in at least one), or because they are not thinking through their positions well (which, if they make a habit of it, sooner or later will result in inconsistent positions). People in the first category really don’t like having their insincerity exposed, and people in the second category really don’t like having their failure to think things through exposed.

            Yes, there are cases where someone is inconsistent because they actually changed their mind or because they can justify why the inconsistency isn’t real. But that’s not why people look for inconsistencies, and it’s not why people object to others looking for inconsistencies. (At least not most of the time.)

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            It’s honestly pretty weird to see a nominal libertarian taking the “justify why this shouldn’t be banned” position.

          • onyomi says:

            “It’s honestly pretty weird to see a nominal libertarian taking the “justify why this shouldn’t be banned” position.”

            I’m not sure if you’re talking to me, but I’ll say there is nothing weird about this for a few reasons:

            It’s not as if I haven’t given positive reasons why it should be banned. I gave several. I did ask if there were reasons why it shouldn’t be, but only because no one was explaining what the benefit was to offset what I described as the very real cost. Only after a fair amount of prodding did one anon offer three reasons.

            Second, SSC is not a country bound by the infamous “social contract” we went on so long about last time. It’s a voluntary community bound by consent to Scott’s rules. It is the equivalent of a private club which posts rules on the door.

            People often assume that libertarians, because they don’t like the state making strict rules therefore want permissive voluntary rules and interpersonal norms. This does not logically follow at all. I, for example, am in favor of legalization of all drugs, even though I don’t use any but caffeine and alcohol and don’t like being around people who are under the influence of drugs, including pot.

            I would happy live in a “no drugs” apartment complex or housing development even as I don’t think I have the right to tell others what they can put in their bodies in the privacy of their own homes. I don’t think this makes me a hypocrite.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            It’s not as if I haven’t given positive reasons why it should be banned. I gave several. I did ask if there were reasons why it shouldn’t be, but only because no one was explaining what the benefit was to offset what I described as the very real cost. Only after a fair amount of prodding did one anon offer three reasons.

            Since when is “because they enjoy it” not a valid reason?

            Here’s another reason. It’s really difficult to enforce without establishing registration, and could basically be bypassed with minimal effort (as it has been in the past) by any anon who wanted to.

            Second, SSC is not a country bound by the infamous “social contract” we went on so long about last time. It’s a voluntary community bound by consent to Scott’s rules. It is the equivalent of a private club which posts rules on the door.

            And despite repeated protesting, Scott has not banned anoning. Should we not take that as a sign that he doesn’t mind?

            Besides, this is rules lawyering libertarianism. It’s like when liberals say “The first amendment only protects you from the government”, which is true (for Americans, anyway), but dismisses the idea of freedom of speech as merely a legal inconvenience.

          • onyomi says:

            “Since when is “because they enjoy it” not a valid reason?”

            When “it” is being a troll and dragging down the conversation with insults and flippant remarks.

            I’m not saying that’s the only reason now that I have gotten at least one explanation of the reasons from at least one anon. But I don’t think it was unreasonable of me to ask. I suppose I shouldn’t have made an effort to understand the opposing position?

            I don’t really understand the second half of your comment, but regarding the fact that it can be gotten around relatively easily, hasn’t Scott always pointed out the power of trivial inconvenience? Moreover, he already took steps to curtail it by banning some of the most obnoxious IP addresses–which has certainly helped a lot–indicating that he would revisit the issue if it continued to be a problem (=there is, or, at least, was a problem).

            Scott can, of course, do whatever he wants. Maybe just continuing to ban specific IPs of those who abuse it is enough. I merely gave arguments for my own preference because the topic came up.

            By your “libertarian=doesn’t like rules of any kind” logic, I should already have been lobbying to get rid of the other commenting rules. I sometimes enjoy saying unkind, unnecessary things, after all.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            When “it” is being a troll and dragging down the conversation with insults and flippant remarks.

            Is there any way we can measure anon trolling prevalence? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not that which has risen, but complaints about it. There were plenty of trolling anons in the past, they were just multicolor.

            I don’t understand the second half of your comment.

            Well, you said this is Scott’s personal blog, and he has not done anything to prevent the use of the anon@gmail account, even when it’s entirely in his power to do so, which would strongly imply that he doesn’t mind (or worse, maybe even likes) people having the option to post with that e-mail (maybe he uses it himself sometimes? Who knows!), so it’d be fair to say that the implicit rules in this private club allow for the usage of the anon status.

            Now, you’re free to lobby against this, as a regular user of this board and member of this community, to which I say: Enough with your censorious tactics, you SJW!

            But seriously, I apoligize if I came off as calling you a hypocrite, I am aware your stated views on this subject are consistent with libertarianism.

          • Anon says:

            @Whatever Happened to Anonymous

            Is there any way we can measure anon trolling prevalence? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not that which has risen, but complaints about it. There were plenty of trolling anons in the past, they were just multicolor.

            Disagree. The number and fraction of extremely low quality comments has increased, and I would hazard that an outright majority of the bottom 5% of comments these days come from black-and-white anons. (Which is not to say that a majority of black-and-white anon comments are unusually low quality.)

          • TD says:

            Re: libertarianism and authority

            Left-libertarianism (in the classical anarchist sense, not the modern political compass “liberaltarian” sense) can described as close to “no authority”, but it’s always been misleading to portray right-libertarianism/capitalist libertarianism as being “anti-authoritarian” when what it favors is a different mechanism for deciding and enforcing authority, with a general bias towards highly distributed authority in the mix.

            Even the normal convention of free speech really corresponds more to “distributed censorship” than total freedom of speech. Property rights necessarily enable censorship. The boat lovers club does not have to permit speech on racing cars, and that’s a good thing.

          • “Left-libertarianism (in the classical anarchist sense, not the modern political compass “liberaltarian” sense)”

            “Left libertarian” at present has a bunch of different meanings. One is the old sense of left anarchist. One is people like the Bleeding Heart Libertarians, who are propertarian but with more sympathy for leftish ideas such as a guaranteed income than most libertarians. One, the subject of a couple of recent books, is Georgism, along with some related variants. And there are versions that don’t quite fit any of those patterns.

        • Deiseach says:

          So is there some way we can put a chronological label on which anon is which? If you are the first anon to comment, you get tagged Anonymous1; the next is Anonymous2, etc.

          That means that if I want to reply to or engage with you, as distinct from any of the other Anonymous, anonymous, Anon, anon who may be on here at the one time, I can make it clear in my reply that I’m talking to Anonymous1.

          • Anonymous says:

            The chans use post referers for this. You reply to a post, and have a link to that post your post, and in some newer chan software, you also get a link to the reply at the original post.

          • onyomi says:

            And we’d like SSC to be more like 4chan?

          • Anonymous says:

            Isn’t that a little tribal line of thinking? Why not use solutions to problems that other people have come up with, even if those same people are, in your mind, somehow awful?

          • onyomi says:

            But the parameters set by the technical aspects in no small part shape the flavor of online communities, as, indeed, architecture and urban planning shape the the flavor of real life communities. Though not guaranteed to do so, there is reason to believe that instituting a system 4chan might very well make SSC more like 4chan (not that I hate 4chan, only I don’t want SSC to be more like it).

          • Outis says:

            Actually, 4chan-style links to posts would work really well here. They were developed as a solution to keep track of conversation links in a flat comment system, and since SSC’s comments go flat after the first four or five levels, and often have several intertwined conversations at that level, having easy cross-message links would really help.

            Bakkot, if you’re going to implement one idea from this post, it should be this one, not the random email thing.

        • Adam Casey says:

          I don’t think barriers to entry are actually a problem here. We’re not starving for lack of comments, if anything the reverse. Raise those trivial banners shin-high I say.

    • onyomi says:

      I don’t find that most SSC posters pander for “brownie points” (I mean, does anyone at all see this as a problem? SSC posters piling on to low quality, “popular” posts to say “right on, man!”??) and I think it’s good that we don’t have an explicit reputation or “upvote” system.

      But anyway, in a community which values nuance and niceness, having some incentive to care about the reputation of your online persona is a good thing, since it results in a higher quality of post (and I think almost everyone but anon@gmail can agree with me that the average quality of anon@gmail posts is lower than that of the average pseudonymous or real name poster).

      The theory that we need some mechanism to force people to deal with the substance of the comments and not the persona would make sense if SSC were a space where interpersonal squabbles among prominent posters dominated and distracted from substantive discussion. But I don’t see that happening at all; even among the very prolific posters, they don’t really seem to hold a lot of grudges or form a lot of cliques (though I’ve been accused of belonging to the libertarian conspiracy and, now, the “anime avatar” clique).

      Sure, I pay some attention to who’s posting and I have commenters to whose opinion I attach more weight than others, but at this point, anon@gmail has basically become the lowest weight opinion on here, not just for me, I think, but for many people. Meaning, if the goal is to have your opinion given due weight without consideration of your persona, you’d be better off picking any random name.

      And, most ironically, anon@gmail is the most likely comment space, in recent months to engage in personal attacks and stereotyping of posters based on their previous commenting histories. In other words, I think anon@gmail “doth protest too much”: precisely because he/she/they are the sort of poster who can’t take people’s comments at face value and instead attaches too much weight to stereotyping their previous comment history, therefore he/she/they are paranoid about having the same done to themselves.

      Anon@gmail solves a problem SSC doesn’t have, in exchange for which we get a community dumping ground for low quality posts, as the incentive would lead us to expect, and as has played out in reality.

      • Anon. says:

        It’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue, isn’t it? anon@gmail has a bad reputation, so people who would make good posts will hesitate to use it. Some anon@gmail are witches, therefore only witches would use anon@gmail. This has little to do with the actual anonymity aspect.

        This can of course be solved by forcing anonymity on everyone.

        • onyomi says:

          It’s pretty startling how much this rhetoric mirrors socialism, where, of course, the fact that anyone can have any private property at all is always the problem.

          Yes, there is an incentive not to post anything good as anon@gmail because your post will be associated with the rudest, dumbest poster to ever use that handle.

        • Anatoly says:

          What are some examples of really high-quality forced-anonymous comment sections or forums?

          • Anonymous says:

            /tg/. (Not forced anon, but tripfags and namefags are shamed.)

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Anonymous

            I think some people might disagree about your assessment of that as “really high-quality” (and one of the first things I saw when I looked was a mod saying “DO NOT USE SPOILERS TO HIDE PORN OR ANY NWS CONTENT.” which I feel doesn’t really suggest high-quality content).

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Only if you think porn and nws content can’t be hight quality.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            /a/

          • Zorgon says:

            one of the first things I saw when I looked was a mod saying “DO NOT USE SPOILERS TO HIDE PORN OR ANY NWS CONTENT.”

            That’s a moderation sticky, which is a giant piece of salience bias.

            In reality, NWS content is virtually nonexistent on /tg/. Shitposting is probably too high to consider it a “high-quality” source, but it’s still almost certainly the best place to find intellectually diverse discussion on tabletop and roleplaying games on the entire Internet. Whether that is an endorsement of /tg/ or a ringing condemnation of the entirety of the online gaming community I leave as an exercise for the reader.

            (And if anyone has a better place I am very much interested.)

          • Held in Escrow says:

            4chan’s interest boards such as /tg/ actually have a lot of really high quality content. They also have oceans of garbage. Knowing how to sort the two at a glance is a learnable skill. The gold in those boards tends to be better and more common than elsewhere thanks to its sheer size, but the garbage is so huge that you need to develop that skill to enjoy yourself

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, I don’t have time or patience or mental fortitude to wade through mountains of rude crap to find thoughtful, polite posts, which is why SSC is a nicer place, for me, at least, to discuss politics and philosophy than anywhere else I know. Arguably there is no reason my intolerance for wading through low quality comments is more important than anon’s intolerance for being called out on inconsistency, but right now, SSC and 4chan both exist. If SSC were to become more like 4chan, then those of us who liked how SSC used to be will have no non-4chan-like options.

          • Zorgon says:

            Oh, believe me, if an equivalent to SSC existed for tabletop gaming I’d be there like a shot.

      • anonymous user says:

        I’m sorry your feelings are so easily hurt

    • Adam Casey says:

      I think in the case of a small community board like this without explicit karma the cost of karma-whoring is low to nil.

      Sure, popularity and reputation are not a perfect indicator of quality of post. But they’re better than random noise, and maximising for them isn’t that bad an end state in a situation like this.

  61. Bakkot says:

    Stanford EA meets at 4:30 on Sunday afternoons in the Old Union building on campus. There’s a Facebook group and a mailing list.

    Meeting today (Sunday April 24) is at 4:30 in Old Union 220 to discuss population ethics, which is an important and tricky topic and which tends to generate a lot of debate.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Is this just a Stanford EA, or a general Bay Area EA that happens to meet at Stanford and mostly consist of students with actual free time?

      • Bakkot says:

        The meetings are only about half Stanford students, but it is also an official Stanford club.

        I wouldn’t call it a general Bay Area EA because there are other local groups.

  62. Kevin C. says:

    Loosely related to my previous question:

    Given that in a representative democracy, elected officials are (supposedly) “public servants” representing the sovereign people, why are presidential inaugurations (and, to a lesser but still notable extent, state gubernatorial inaugurations) such huge, lavish, and downright pseudo-coronational affairs? The only legally required part, the Oath of Office, takes two or three people and less than a minute. Why does a public servant need anything more? Doesn’t this sort of practice seem kind of inconsistent with the ideals of our democracy?

    (I understand that the bulk of the cost of the inauguration is the security involved, and that much of the non-security costs are paid for not by taxpayers but by donors. But a one-minute swearing in held inside the White House wouldn’t need ~$110-$120 million in security, and don’t many of us agree that we need to reduce the frequency of big donors giving money to or spending money on politicians?)

    • Adam Casey says:

      You want your public servants to seem meak and pathetic? Legislators and executors are important jobs, public servant or not. The people doing these jobs are of course, there to serve. But the jobs they do are grand and powerful things.

      If you don’t show public respect to your legislator you won’t be in the habit of respecting the laws they wrote. If you don’t show public respect for the executive you won’t be in the habit of respecting the laws they enforce.

      Judges are everywhere assumed to be servants who simply act for the good of the law. But judges everywhere are treated with respect, given special titles, given ornate uniforms. Judges are important, it is good to make sure everyone remembers that.

      • Virbie says:

        > If you don’t show public respect to your legislator you won’t be in the habit of respecting the laws they wrote. If you don’t show public respect for the executive you won’t be in the habit of respecting the laws they enforce.

        I’m not sure I’m convinced that “awed respect for the Institution” has much to do with why people obey laws, as opposed to fear of punishment. Pretty much every law I can think of with low risk of punishment, I see broken pretty routinely, and in a way that suggests total normalization. I know it sounds like I’m just trying to be edgy and cynical, but I distinctly remember in my lateish teen years discovering that people writ large seem to have no sense of “the sanctity of the law” vs “I’ll get in some shit if I do this”. It’s possible that I’m just surrounded by degenerates, but I highly doubt it. An easy example is looking at the rates of marijuana use (federally illegal) and teen alcohol use across the country.

        • Adam Casey says:

          So sure, crimes that aren’t punished are disobeyed quite often. They’re also obeyed quite often.

          Even in situations where, no really, there will not be legal consequences here, we’re the middle of nowhere and nobody cares. There has to be some lingering sense of sanctity of laws for there to be obedience in that situations.

          • Furslid says:

            Not necessarily. People may just habitually follow the law because they are afraid of punishment. People don’t change their habits automatically when they are not beneficial.

            People may also recognize that there are extra costs to recognize when it’s safe to break the law. Breaking the law safely may entail taking extra precautions or investigating a situation more carefully.

            People may recognize that people are bad at judging when they can get away with breaking the law. Every person who buys drugs from or solicits an undercover cop believes that they will get away with breaking the law, and yet gets caught.

            These are all reasons to not break the law that in safe situations that don’t require reverence for the law.

        • Anonymous says:

          People treat laws they find just differently from laws they believe to be unjust. Hence, illicit marijuana and alcohol use.

          • Virbie says:

            @Anonymous

            Good point, of course that’s true. That’s basically why I don’t feel particularly morally compromised when I smoke weed.

            That speaks more to my poor off-the-top-of-my-head choice of example, which I assumed would be universally recognized. As I acknowledged, it may just be that my sample is particularly disdainful of the law, but (mild) cheating on taxes/insurance claims[1] and movie-hopping is maybe a better example.

            [1] I mean things like a college kid saying their dad was the driver when she accidentally drove into a wall while parking, because it worked out better for them on the insurance claim.

          • onyomi says:

            What I can’t understand is people who support or, at least, aren’t actively in favor of repealing laws which would not lower their opinion of a friend if he or she broke them.

          • ChetC3 says:

            What I can’t understand is people who support or, at least, aren’t actively in favor of repealing laws which would not lower their opinion of a friend if he or she broke them.

            That sounds like Universalist talk to me. Why should I expect one of the Beautiful and Good to observe laws meant to keep the vulgar masses in line?

          • onyomi says:

            I’m not sure what you mean.

      • suntzuanime says:

        I think it’s more than that, it’s also a tribal affiliation thing. We’re supposed to be identifying with America, and the President is the Head of State of America, so we want him to have a bit of status. The rituals are part of the civic religion, and the civic religion is a good thing to have.

      • nimim. k.m. says:

        >ornate uniforms

        Not everywhere. Here (Scandinavian country) judges dress just like any other important person attending an important official proceeding, i.e. they wear a suit. I don’t think we have have the ludicrous “all rise up when the judge arrives” respect rituals, but the previous time I was present in a court trial was decade ago as a HS student, so I don’t exactly remember.

    • Tracy W says:

      Big spectacles seem to be a particularly common human ideal, democratic or otherwise. The British seem to be more low-key about their politics but they have coronations and royal weddings instead.

      Some other issues:
      – a one-minute swearing indoors is easier to fake. A lot easier before TV and film of course. Queens used to give birth with serious political witnesses (James II of England’s experience illustrates the dangers of not doing so, people speculated his heir was actually a spare baby smuggled in.)
      – it’s valuable to take time out from our day-to-day lives to occasionally remind ourselves of our ideals and accomplishments and common bonds.
      – it’s entertaining and creates shared conversation topics, as a change from the weather.

  63. Kevin C. says:

    A question-slash-gripe:

    Why are ambassadors, embassies, the Vienna Protocol (diplomatic immunity, etc.), and so on still a thing? Weren’t they a product of the slow speeds of pre-modern communications, and thus their core functions obviated by the development of global telecommunications? Why can’t we just “have our people call their people”, so to speak?

    • Adam Casey says:

      When two countries that don’t do much diplomacy talk it’s going to be really hard. None of my people know any of your people, we don’t trust eachother, we’re not used to eachother’s ways of talking and so on.

      If you have a live-in ambassador you can talk to him even when there’s no diplomacy happening. And you will, lots, he’ll be at parties and you’ll bump into him at formal events and so on. You’ll know the guy and understand how he works. That way when there’s some negotiation to be done it can happen much faster.

    • John Schilling says:

      I’ve done a little bit of international diplomacy in a supporting role, and the reasons for in-person diplomatic meetings seem to be the same as for the in-person engineering and academic meetings that are part of my professional life.

      1 – People who aren’t nerds, do an awful lot of their communicating by way of body language and the like, and find it harder to establish trust if the relevant signals aren’t being received. Arguably this is a bug rather than a feature in that it allows skilled but untrustworthy manipulators to create inappropriate and undeserved trust, but so long as the decisionmakers are mostly neurotypical humans we’re stuck with it.

      2 – Deniability. An awful lot of diplomacy is conducted off the record, or at least under the Chatham House Rule, and necessarily so. Telecommunications can always be recorded, at least by the participants, and the recording might surface at the most embarassing possible time. A quiet personal conversation, in an environment where smartphone use is Just Not Done, is still reasonably safe.

      3 – Sidebars. In part because of 1 and 2, and in part because it’s just plain easier to do when all you have to do is lean over and talk quietly, much of the interesting information transfer is done between people who weren’t officially supposed to be talking to each other. In some cases this can be illicit but still useful to both sides, in others it’s just that nobody anticipated that a dialogue between two specific mid-level officials would be useful enough to bother with except that it was no bother at all to arrange when they were already in the room sharing “meaningless social pleasantries”.

      It’s not out of the question that we could develop a telecommunications infrastructure and usage protocol that would capture all of these benefits. But in diplomacy, the stakes for miscommunication can be terribly high, and we know how to set up embassies and exchange ambassadors, etc.

      • Murphy says:

        I have a feeling it should be possible to come up with some kind of crypto protocol to verify that someone is part of a group or pool without linking all their statements to that individual. Though distinguishing (to a “trusted” level) between members of the group in such a system would of course not be possible.

        • mnov says:

          This already exists, it’s called “everyone in the group uses the same key”, the layman analogue of which is something like “everyone in the group uses the same email address”.

        • John Schilling says:

          Though distinguishing (to a “trusted” level) between members of the group in such a system would of course not be possible

          In diplomacy, it is very important to know with certainty which ambassador made which proposal. It is also very important that the rejected proposals not be put on Youtube and The Daily Show where they make the ambassador in question look like a loser or a sellout.

          And, in practice, long before you get to ambassadors making official proposals, you have countless tacit feelers, exchanges of sensitive information, etc, all requiring the same sort of authentication and deniability.

      • Rowan says:

        Re: point 1, could we call a government of specifically non-neurotypicals… an autocracy?

    • Alliteration says:

      Embassies have other purposes than communication.
      One, embassies provide services to their nationals who are in foreign countries.
      Two, they are a base for spying which doesn’t endanger the spies because of diplomatic immunity.

    • Deiseach says:

      Why can’t we just “have our people call their people”, so to speak?

      In the nation of Feroving (formerly part of the Union of Mxinigs until that fragmented under internal tensions and outside interventions) the two main population sub-divisions (though not the only ones) are the Blobbings and the Goovers. The Goovers have ties to the old Union of Mxinigs and indeed used to be the influential minority from which former governments, academia, the establishment elite, etc. were drawn.

      Now, though, in the brave new beginning of Feroving nationhood, the majority Blobbings have the run of the place. Old grudges and tensions still lurk beneath the shiny facade of “one nation, one Feroving, one people!” and there is unrest. Rumours are circulating that possibly the Goovers with the help of Mxining elements may be plotting a coup.

      Who do you side with, if you side with anyone? Do “your people” talk to the Blobbings currently in power, the Goovers who are out of favour but may return to power, both sides, neither side, and you strike a deal with the Mxining state (what remains of it, which is still a major power in the region) instead? Is war coming or is all that sabre-rattling just for show?

      That’s why you have an embassy on the ground and an ambassador in place, who should be feeding you all this kind of information in reports and dispatches and who has formal, informal, “my wife knows the wife of the Goover party leader because they’re both in a Saturday morning bookclub” and deniable “who’s that? never heard of ’em” contacts for discussions, testing the waters, putting out feelers and making (and breaking) promises to either/both/every side.

    • Furslid says:

      Because meetings in person are better than teleconferencing. Even with video.

      As for diplomatic immunity. It’s important in that it keeps the host nation from using their legal system to coerce ambassadors or punish them for their nation’s actions. Either through selective enforcement or outright bogus charges. It also prevents conflicts when an ambassador acts properly for his home country in a manner that offends his host country.

    • Vaniver says:

      Why can’t we just “have our people call their people”, so to speak?

      Who do you think “our people” are, besides ambassadors and embassies and so on?

  64. Zakharov says:

    I’ve been thinking about classifying political ideologies. The classic left-right division is simple, and certainly correlates with reality, but misses a lot of nuance. The two-axis system which differentiates between economic and social issues is better. I think each axis can be divided in two, creating a four-axis model which can better represent unusual ideologies.

    The social axis can be divided into a values axis, and an authority axis. The values axis spans between progressive values and traditional values. It covers issues such as gay marriage and multiculturalism. The authority axis covers issues such as the police, military and surveillance.

    The economic axis can be divided into a intervention axis, and a redistribution axis. The intervention axis covers issues such as protectionism, regulation, job security and government-owned corporations. The redistribution axis covers taxes and welfare.

    This system lets us easily classify political systems such as Scott’s – anti-authoritarian, progressive values, anti-intervention, and pro-redistribution. This position doesn’t easily fit the one- or two-axis models. It can differentiate communism – authoritarian, progressive, pro-intervention and pro-distribution – from fascism – authoritarian, traditional, pro-intervention and anti-distribution (possibly centrist on distribution?).

    • Kevin C. says:

      If done right, this could definitely be an improvement.

      I am reminded of a question on one of the more popular “two-axis” quizes, for the economic axis, about whether land should be allowed to be bought or sold. “Yes”, being the “free market” position, was assigned to the economic “right”, while “no” was assigned to the “left”. But what about someone who says, “no land should not be bought or sold… because it should be the entailed feifs of hereditary aristocrats who pass it on to their heirs of the body, or possibly distribute portions to subordinate lords via subinfeudation”? I know of no political theory under which feudalism is classed as left-wing. If your “values” axis can capture that distinction, and avoid the “horseshoe” effect I outlined above, it will definitely be an improvement.

      • Zakharov says:

        Hmm, I don’t think the economic system of feudalism can be described using only the concepts of intervention and redistribution. I think feudalism is so far outside the modern political discourse that it cannot be put on the same spectrum.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        Feudalism allows for land to be bought just fine, so I’m not sure what the issue is here.

        • Protagoras says:

          “Feudalism” covers a diversity of systems, but while I’m certainly not going to claim that nobody in any feudal state ever exchanged any money for any land, that was pretty unusual; there certainly wasn’t a modern-style free market in land. It was mostly as Kevin described. This was, of course, one of the many reasons feudal economies were much less efficient than capitalist economies.

        • ChetC3 says:

          They might be thinking of entails?

    • The sounds good, but there’s one thing that might need some fine-tuning. “Traditional values” vary from one society to another, for example, there’s a lot of variability in what is “traditional” for women to wear.

      When I thought about it, I realized that traditional values can probably only be described as what the dominant group in a society thinks is traditional. They aren’t the values of the largest subgroup, nor the oldest values of that group, though they aren’t (I think) going to be especially recent.

      • Zakharov says:

        Agreed on traditional values. I think any political classification system is going to be time- and place-dependent, as the set of issues that are relevant to a modern Westerner is going to be very different to the set of issues relevant to an ancient Chinese person.

    • Samedi says:

      I certainly agree that something better than “left” and “right” would vastly improve the discussion of politics. I imagine an equivalent to the Big 5 used in psychology. This is not a simple endeavor. I spent some time searching for alternative schemes and found little.

      There are many problems. First, how do you define “politics”? Current discussion on “politics” is so broad it covers almost everything. Second, how do you avoid temporal parochialism? Can your schema describe 5th century Athens as well as 21st century America? Thirdly, how do you account for different means and ends? For example, liberals, communists, and left libertarians have, broadly speaking, shared preferences for ends. They differ dramatically on means though.

      Unfortunately, I don’t think your axes cover the full range of possibilities. I think personal preferences and “politics” have to be disentangled. They are related but are not the same things, at least in my idea of politics. I sometime wonder if what people today actually mean when discussing politics is simply “what things should the government forbid or compel”.

      • Anonymous says:

        I think personal preferences and “politics” have to be disentangled.

        Why so? One ultimately boils down to the other.

        I sometime wonder if what people today actually mean when discussing politics is simply “what things should the government forbid or compel”.

        For me, “politics” certainly includes that. Do you think this is something that should be excluded from the definition? Or that the definition should be broader and perhaps involve things like “how the government should be allowed to act”?

        • Samedi says:

          I wouldn’t exclude it but neither do I think it captures all available options. I only object to it as the default constraint.

          To me politics means solving a shared problem, a problem common to a group of people. Hence, standard problem solving techniques apply: identify problem, root causes analysis, identify and analyze potential solutions, select solution, implement solution, monitor solution, etc. Politics in my framework is about the rules for collective problem-solving.

          When the process is executed human psychology inevitably kicks in and you get competing interests, power plays, jockeying for position, and all that. Some would call this part the real politics. I see this as social psychology but who’s to say who is “correct”? At the end of the day all definitions of “politics” are arbitrary. I find labels do more harm than good so I’d rather not use them at all.

          So-called political discussions on the Internet and in op-ed pages are something else entirely. These appear to be plain, old-fashioned moralizing; one group expressing their dislike of the other and vice versa. I find such discussions tedious in the extreme. All the moralizing drowns out any thoughtful discussion.

      • Zakharov says:

        I don’t avoid temporal parochialism, and I don’t think you should. I want to model modern Western political discourse. A model that describes discourse throughout history should be considered separately.

        It doesn’t cover the full range of possibilities, but I think it covers most positions people actually hold without being over-complicated.

    • Tatu Ahponen says:

      The traditional left/right division, at least in Europe, was most of all about labor and capital, the role of trade unions in the society and, in general, work-related questions, where the left-wing point of view did not necessarily involve government intervention (or was hostile to it, in case of anarchism).

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Why don’t you start with something easy, like defending the left/right axis? What does it mean to you?

      • Zakharov says:

        Let’s say you poll a lot of Americans on 100 relevant political questions. You’ve now got a 100-axis system for modelling their political opinions. You can find correlations between opinions – someone that supports gay marriage probably also supports abortion, and is more likely to support action to deal with climate change, increasing taxes on the rich, regulating banks, legalizing marijuana and increasing welfare.

        You can find a linear function that reduces this 100-axis system to a 1-axis system while preserving the maximum amount of information. This is the left-right axis. You could find a function that reduces it to a 2-axis system, and this will probably be the 2-axis social and economic system. You could find a function that reduces it to a 4-axis system, and I think this will be my system.

        It’s entirely possible that regional or cultural differences are more predictive than a person’s general feelings towards regulation, and a better 4-axis model would be something like “southernness, authoritarianism, race, economic liberalism”. Even if that’s the case, I think my model is still useful for classifying theories and ideologies.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          That’s not the left-right axis — that’s the Democrat-Republican axis. How do you defend the claim that they are the same? You could, instead, poll people on what issues they call left/right. Anyhow, whatever you do, how do you justify the claim that seems to me implicit in the words “left” and “right” that they describe the same spectrum in different countries and different times? Maybe you accept temporal parochialism. Yes, Athens is hard, but what about America 50 years ago? What about America 8 years ago?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            That’s not the left-right axis — that’s the Democrat-Republican axis. How do you defend the claim that they are the same?

            No, it’s the left-right axis. The Democratic-Republican axis would be determined by asking people “Do you sympathize more with the Democratic Party or with the Republican Party?”

            They are not “the same”, but you could confirm that they have high overlap by noticing that opinions on each side of the left-right axis correlate highly with whether one is a Republican or a Democrat.

            I don’t think Zakharov that the left-right axis is a human universal, or that “left” and “right” name some fundamental features of human psychology. It is arbitrary which one you call “left” and which one you call “right”. The point is just that, if you ask people 100 political questions, their answers are going to correlate in such a way that it doesn’t completely distort things to line them up on a single axis. You can’t do it perfectly without 100 axes, though.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            You are just asserting that Zakharov’s axis generated from unlabeled data deserves the name left-right more than Democrat-Republican. This is exactly the point that needs to be defended.

            Sure, I’m just asserting the opposite, but I’m just trying to communicate that there are other possibilities (and not just the two).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Douglas Knight:

            I’m saying it’s an arbitrary axis. You can call it the up/down axis or the forwards/backwards axis.

            It’s inappropriate to call it the Democratic/Republican axis if the questions don’t ask about that. They will be found to correlate, though.

          • Frank McPike says:

            Political scientists do something similar to what Zakharov proposes with congressional voting behavior (which is, at some level of abstraction, like asking a bunch of relevant political questions every year). (The keyword for finding this research is DW-NOMINATE.)

            Presently, a one-dimensional model works very well as far as predicting voting behavior. Douglas Knight is right that simply discovering that axis doesn’t tell us what we should call it. Still, it’s probably best (and the general practice) to understand this as a “liberal-conservative” axis, not a “Republican-Democrat” axis. Certainly, positioning on the axis lines up pretty well with who we think of as liberal and who we think of as conservative. Although presently there is no party overlap on that axis (i.e. the most liberal Republican is less liberal than the least liberal Democrat), that level of polarization is somewhat unusual. Most of the time, there’s some kind of distinction to be made between ideology and party affiliation, and ideology predicts voting behavior better. If nothing else, it’s a lot easier to talk about liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans than Democratic Republicans and Republican Republicans.

            In some eras, two dimensions are necessary to model voting behavior correctly. The most recent example of legislators who needed two dimensions to be modeled accurately is Southern Democrats during and after the civil rights era. They voted consistently differently on civil rights issues (or issues involving race) than other Democrats, but aligned with them on most other issues. When American politics has been two-dimensional, the second dimension has generally been regional, and has mostly had something to do with views on race.

            American politics (or at least Congressional voting) has never needed more than two dimensions to model besides, arguably, the run-up to the Civil War.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Frank, I’m glad Poole and Rosenthal did their work but I don’t find it convincing.

            Maybe the dw-n axis was liberal-conservative 50 years ago, but it isn’t today. Maybe ideological polarization has increased, but a lot of what dw-n calls polarization is really party discipline. A very simple measure of this is that when someone switches parties, they jump in dw-n space. P&R cheat and declare such politicians to be two people. There aren’t a lot of such people, so it doesn’t make much of a difference (except to extremal statements, like there is no overlap).

            But if their goal is to measure ideology, this is wrong. In fact, the whole point of political parties — if you believe that ideology exists — is for the individual to sublimate their individual ideology to the some kind of average. Voters should do much less sublimation than politicians and thus have a weaker first component.

            A serious problem with any such process is that the choice of questions makes a huge difference. It is pretty hard to get data on questions other than those salient at a particular time. Worse, the votes in Congress are constructed by an adversarial process. For example, the Hastert Rule could produce the illusion of ideological conformity.

          • Frank McPike says:

            Actually, I mostly agree with you. Especially about polarization; I think that’s a very easy result to misinterpret and a lot of media coverage of that result clearly didn’t understand how DW-N actually works.

            And I also agree that there are major, and important, differences between congressional voting behavior and American ideology generally. Still, I don’t think the former tells us nothing about the latter. The extent to which DW-N scores sync up with other indicators of who are the most liberal and conservative members of Congress isn’t to be dismissed. Equally, the two-dimensonality around civil rights issues clearly wasn’t just about changing patterns of party discipline (although the current polarization may well be). I don’t think DW-N is a foolproof guide to ideological axes (and the weaknesses you note are legitimate ones) but it’s also an important source of evidence, and I do think it suggests (if not conclusively) that a kind of straightforward liberal-conservative axis actually is a pretty useful tool for understanding American ideology.

        • I’ve actually done the PCA based on data I got from the Political Compass website (it’s NOT a random sample of the population). The top 4 access correspond roughly to

          Are you Liberal (or Conservative)?
          Are you Libertarian?
          Are you an (economically and socially) Isolationist?
          Are you Religious?

          These are, of course, only my interpretations. If you’re interested, I can upload the answers sorted by correlation with each PCA dimension.

          For instance, for the first axis, we have (on the left end):
          * Nobody should go hungry, even if they refuse to work.
          * It’s more important to rehabilitate criminals than to punish them.

          and on the right end:
          * Some crimes are so serious that the only proper punishment is the death penalty.
          * Aggressive foreign policies can put a stop to international terrorism.

          • nope says:

            Please post this somewhere public! This is interesting and I’d like to be able to link to it. If you have the time and are so inclined, maybe write it up academic-style and publish to The Winnower?

          • I posted it here – sadly, I can’t confirm its from Political Compass, so I don’t actually know where the data came from. If you are still interested, you can download it at the bottom of the page.

    • anonymous says:

      One important and overlooked axis is the one with nationalism at one end, and cosmopolitanism at the other.

      Issues related to this axis are open versus closed borders and free trade versus protectionism.

      I always thought that one the most important differences between Communism and Fascism was that only one of the two is nationalist.

      Nationalists and cosmopolitans will have different reason behind their ideas on war.
      Anti-war nationalists will use isolationist arguments (why police foreign lands, we don’t care that much about foreigners), pro-war nationalist will use national honor or national interest arguments.
      Pro-war and anti-war cosmopolitans will use other arguments.

      Nationalism yelds different results if the national group you identify with is not the same as your nation-state. Here in Europe we have many secessionist movements. Some lean right, other lean left, all can be described as nationalistic.
      There are also white nationalism and black nationalism and so on.

      There is a certain kind of person who holds centrist or even left wing views on everything, except that he is a nationalist on the few nationalism related issues.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      Well anything beyond “you are in the red tribe so you believe the earth is only 6000 years old” will be an improvement.

    • nimim. k.m. says:

      Interestingly enough, communists’ (when there were communists who called themselves communists in Europe) idea of “progressive values” were different then (a couple of decades before my time) from what we consider “progressive values” today: from today’s perspective (or even 1970s/1980s perspective probably, not sure), they are (were already) conservative. As a legacy, the post- Soviet Union isn’t very pro-gay area today.

      Some features of ideological spectra are always quite difficult to fit to any axis, except if each concept gets an axis of its own, and even that isn’t necessarily enough to express all the possibilities how they might interact together:

      For example, there isn’t any inherent reason why gay marriage and multiculturalism are lumped together: it’s certainly not impossible to imagine a pro-gay uniculturalist stance (i.e. something akin to “liberal western culture is the best culture, all others should adopt the relevant parts, incl. pro-gay marriage”) vs. multiculturalism that’s considers cultures as something very rigid (“gay marriage isn’t part of culture x, so it’s okay”) or some other position (“it’s up to people of culture y to define their stance towards gay marriage, people coming from z or w don’t have a say”).

    • Douglas Knight says:

      You may be interested in PCA of YouGov’s representative sampling of the British population. I think this is the link, but there might be other pages I can’t find.

  65. Siah Sargus says:

    I’m finally pulling the trigger on an idea that I’ve had for a long time, and have been working on in the background for a while. I’m going to do a webcomic. The elevator pitch is: In the distant future a young woman does her trauma surgeon residency on a massive Russian space station orbiting Staurn’s moon Titan. It’s not going to be a “rationalist” or even particularly transhumanist webcomic, but it’s still looking like you guys would be to ones to appreciate it the most.

    Anyways, I thought it would be good to get some feedback here, before I spend money on hosting a website and trying to set up an ad service and all that. I just want to know if this looks like its worth it yet, because I feel like I’ve seen a myriad of bad webcomics, and I don’t want to make something worth less than the time put into it.

    Anyway, here’s the title art:

    http://imgur.com/AExz5B2

    And here is a little background detail I’ve been working on, an ID card for the protagonist:

    http://imgur.com/JtBW3LQ

    So far, feedback from my friends has been mostly positive… but they’re my friends, so of course it was. What do you think could be improved?

    • Said Achmiz says:

      Some sort of (pseudo- ???) Cyrillic for everything, except that “kg” and “cm” are in Roman letters? Is there a principled reason for this or is it just an oversight?

      • Siah Sargus says:

        Yes, there’s a reason. The Cyrillic script characters are pronounced largely like they are in modern Slavic languages, so it’s not psuedo-Cyrillic in the way it would be used in English media (like и replacing N or я replacing R despite those characters sounding nothing alike). The reason is that I’m tired of everyone speaking English with modern spelling, pronunciations, and idioms it the distant future. So I used Russian’s grammar rules and a mix of Cyrillic, Armenian, Greek, Sanskrit, and IPA symbols for an alphabet, with plenty of technical loanwords from English, to make a quick approximation of a fake language to put on signs, computer, and cards in the comic. It’s implied that the characters’ dialogue is translated from this language, but the comic is still written in English.

        As for the metric measurements still being in Latin letters, the short explaination is that using Latin letters is the “international” standard, as you can see on the Russian wikipedia page for kilogram:
        https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC (This link is ugly because these browsers still don’t like Cyrillic, even more proof that “international” favors Latinate letters). Even though the Cyrillic versions are often used there is no rule against using the Latin versions with Cyrillic text.

        The long explanation why they use Roman letters for measurement can be found by looking at their method of telling the date: IOC standard, but with one thing changed – auc instead of ad – meaning they date from the founding of Rome. This method of dating wasn’t terribly popular during the roman Empire – they preferred to measure time since the ruling Emperor took the throne. But it became retroactively popular among Medieval historians who learned of Rome. As a dating method, auc is popular throughout among the people who admire the Romans, but aren’t the Romans. In a similar way, this future culture uses the “American” spellings of kg and cm, instead of the traditional Cyrillic spellings, even though Americans largely used lbs and in.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      Setting sounds interesting, I’d certainly give it a try. hard to judge art from one face shot, but I think adding a light and shade layer to the art might be to your advantage, even if you only do it very roughly. What program are you using for the art? Do you have any other samples of your artwork? Is this your first time doing a comic? Assuming so:

      The most important thing is your output schedule. once a week is probably the minimum to sustain a readership, 3 times a week is much better. Unscheduled breaks kill readership stone cold, so get a schedule you can manage, and then stick to it.

      Consistently putting out pages on a regular basis will improve your skills quickly if you give yourself some time to experiment with different solutions to the problems you run into. Don’t let perfectionism compromise your schedule, though. The deadline is sacred.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        One other thing. Follow other comics, preferably the best of the best, learn from what they do.
        Black and Blue – cyberpunk noir, currently ongoing. Great use of sketchy art to save time, fantastic pacing and all-around terrific storytelling.
        Unsounded – fantastic art, fantastic writing, really good worldbuilding. Pacing is noticably less tight than Black and Blue; the author could probably tighten things up a far bit and cut down on the length… on the other hand, letting the characters talk allows for some great characterization.
        Kill Six Billion Demons – There’s a lot of things to like about this, but the main thing I get out of it is how rough the art can be without the reader really noticing. Clean art tends to have diminishing returns, and knowing where and how to draw the line can boost your output considerably.

        • Siah Sargus says:

          I am quite a bit of a fan of Kill Six Billion Demons already (It’s on my RSS feed), so I’ll definitely have to check out those other two. Good writers are good readers and all that. And I’m going to have to bring my aesthetic a-game if I want to look as good as those.

          • jason clarke says:

            i find that bold silhouettes and hard edges is key. that and keeping your work flow as simple as possible. i tried it the more complicated ways, and it gums up the works in the back end.

            but that’s just my experience. good luck with it!

        • Outis says:

          Holy cow, I had no idea about any of these. They look amazing, especially K6BD. Where did you find them?

      • Siah Sargus says:

        Well, visual art is ultimately the study of light, so I’ll have to make some sort of effort towards shading in this. The problem is that shading takes a very long time to do well, especially with multiple light sources and complex objects, and like you said the deadline is sacred. So, I’ve been experimenting with several different shading styles, trying to find the right balance between realism, minimalism, and speed.

        For art, I use GIMP, because its free and I don’t need anything terribly advanced to do the line work and shading I need. Everything I’ve seen done by a pro on photoshop, I’ve found a way (sometimes an ugly way) to do in GIMP.

        As for other art, here’s another rough sketch of the same character:

        http://imgur.com/BcL4SV7

        The isn’t my first time doing a comic, but it is my first time taking on a big project like a webcomic, so your advice is really helpful.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @Siah Sargus – “So, I’ve been experimenting with several different shading styles, trying to find the right balance between realism, minimalism, and speed.”

          Are you familiar with clipping masks and adjustment layers? they make shading and color in general a whole lot easier.

          • Siah Sargus says:

            I am, fortunately. The way I do my inks basically premakes the selections for clipping masks. Although I’m trying to do more than just the normal select-n-blend, I’m going for more of a subtle look.

            Not to be pretentious or anything. I’ll just show you my current lighting experiment:

            http://imgur.com/ftnOTRk

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Saih Sargus – quick and dirty paintover
            compared to your current lit version…

            It looks like you’re adding black to your base color for shadows, and the result can end up looking a bit dingy. Noticeable under the chin/neck area in particular. light greys on a “color burn” layer are a really, really good way to avoid this problem, and are a fast and easy way to get decent first-pass shading in general.

            The hair effect you’ve got there looks like it took a fair amount of work, and is almost certainly too detailed for the rest of the image. I’d try to find a way to simplify it a fair bit.

            In a similar vein, I feel like some of the shading/lighting work you’ve got is *too* subtle. A big part of good painting is deciding how to simplify your model into the most efficient representation possible without losing valuable information. Don’t use five shades if two will do. In some places on yours, it feels like you need to either make shadows stronger, or leave them out completely (eyes, cheeks a bit).

            All of the above is opinion from someone who hasn’t painted a damn thing in months, so take it for what it’s worth.

          • Siah Sargus says:

            @FacelessCraven

            I don’t ever use black for my shadow layers, I usually use the inverse of the highlight color. But you are right, my shadows were looking too gray and drab, so I fixed that.

            Well actually, I completely redid the shadows, following some of your advice. I made many of the shadows more obvious and simpler. Personally, I liked the hair effect, but it was maybe a bit too much when the rest of the image looked so flat, so I toned it down here. Overall the image is cleaner, although I don’t know if I like the cheek shadows:

            http://imgur.com/lX5w61L

        • Anonymous says:

          Check Krita out.

    • A minor thing, but I’m very fond of the font from the Prisoner, and you’ve got a similar font on the first page, so that’s something to like. I don’t think this is an arbitrary preference– the style is clear but distinctive.

    • rubberduck says:

      Two nitpicks:

      1. It bothers me a little that some of the letters on the title art have dark blue outlines while others have black outlines. Using the same color would make it look more unified. I would lean towards the blue, since it looks much better on a black background, but the black would look okay too. Or dark grey maybe?

      2. On the ID card, it look like her shoulders are different widths. Unless your intention was to make it look like we’re viewing her torso at an angle, in which case the shirt collar and collarbones need to be drawn at an angle. (Or she’s had her right arm amputated, in which case ignore this comment.)

      The premise sounds cool, though, and I like the font choice for the title. Also, might I ask what the little grey lines under her chin are?

      • Siah Sargus says:

        The two grey lines are Vagus Connectors, when connected to a computer, they prevent drooling, talking, and choking, when operating in a strictly digital interface.

    • hlynkacg says:

      How “hard” is this going to be? Would you like a rocket scientist to check your maths?

      • Siah Sargus says:

        Well, the rockets are efficient enough that Hohmann transfers are rarely used, except for the lowest priority routine cargo. Faster methods with much higher ΔV are preferred for humans especially, nuclear pulse rockets and all that, things that can exist in our reality but don’t yet. While we can do some pork-chops to figure out travel time for these rockets, often it’s going to be the different between a character saying “it took fours days” and it took four point one three days”, so it wouldn’t matter, since the characters would realistically round to whole numbers, and that information is best exposited through dialogue. But if you’re like me and feel like slipping the most accurate number you can sum up onto one of the readouts or hud elements of a ship… you can check my math whenever I have any.

        • Anonymous says:

          Don’t worry too much about the realism of the rockets when you started off by making your main character a female orthopedic surgeon – the least female of all medical specialties.

          I’m sure most of the comic will deal with the ways she’s so extremely different from other women to the extent that she winds up in an almost all male specialty – one that’s remarkable in medicine for being home to men with a more masculine personality type than the rest of medicine.

        • Hlynkacg says:

          Cool, I’m an aerospace engineer and have done a bunch of work developing my own hard sci-fi RPG setting. So if you’re ever looking for help with technical details and the like drop me a line. I’ve been sitting on the outline of a novel set in that same ‘verse for close to two years now eventually I’ll get around to writing it.

    • If I just saw these graphics I would assume that the webcomic would be in a language I couldn’t read and I won’t bother to click on anything.

    • Kevin Reid says:

      Looks like a good start. I’d give it a chance.

      Art criticism:

      The title uses two different fonts/styles in one line (“0” and “kPa”) in a way that feels mishmashed. If the intent is like a digital display and the label next to it, then I would suggest adding more elements indicating that (e.g. a (subtle) box surrounding and extending to the left of the “0”). If not, then also remove the fill pattern on the “0”; it’s not consistent with the flatness of the rest of your art.

      The ID card is too “simple vector shapes”: it doesn’t look like a physical object in context. I’d suggest adding border lines in the same style as the face, and make them not perfectly 100% straight and parallel.

  66. Dan Peverley says:

    Anyone else looking forward to the release of Parodox’s Stellaris? I know we’ve got grand strategy players here. I understand that generally it’s preferable to wait a while after release before paying for a game in case it’s awful, but I’m wavering quite a bit on this one. I’m looking forward to making a bunch of internet political factions as species to compete with across the galaxy.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I’m really concerned that it’s going to be too dry without Actual History to draw on to provide the flavor. Paradox mapgames aren’t especially rich and deep mechanically, they derive a lot of their value from the richness and depth of their simulation of an alt-history scenario, which doesn’t work in a sci-fi setting. I have serious doubts that smashing through the Galactic Federation as the Fungaloids is going to be as compelling as smashing through the Holy Roman Empire as France.

      If Paradox wanted to do a sci-fi mapgame, they should have licensed a popular setting that would come with reams and reams of built-up lore, like Star Trek or something.

      • anon says:

        Possibly the modding community will accomplish what you seem to want, without PDX having to spent an arm and a leg on licensing fees.

        Edited to add: I share your concern about the game being boring, though, so I’m planning to buy it only if the reviews are stellar (pun intended). I am less confident than you that it is the familiarity of history that makes EU4 exciting. I think for me, EU4 actually gives me a richer perspective on history and contemporary politics, and that’s part of what I enjoy. Even the weird game-mechanical quirks — like whether there is a strait between England and Calais, or between Morocco and Spain — resonate with today’s world events. Much moreso for things like the political/ethnic makeup of eastern Europe, Russo-Turkish power struggles in the Caucasus, pretty much everything in the middle east and north africa, etc. etc.

        • Anonymous says:

          >EU4

          I find EU4 a significant step down in gameplay enjoyment from EU3. They both have the same flavour of renaissance grand strategy in our history, so it’s not that – it’s the mechanics differences.

          EU3 has you attempt to do shit, which often fails for reasons you don’t control, and can do nothing about. EU4 has you spend points to guarantee success on tasks, which is very gamey.

          I don’t suppose there are any mods that make EU4 more like EU3 in that regard?

          • anon says:

            Not sure — I didn’t discover paradox games until EU4, so I’ve never played EU3.

          • AxiomsOfDominion says:

            In a couple years I’ll have a game out that is much more simulation based which tries to expand the complexity of combat in strategy games to other areas. You’ll expend various capital to do better statistically but you won’t be able to assure success, well depending on the difficulty of what you attempt I guess. You’ll be forced to respond to both unexpected success and failure rather than knowing exactly what you can get and knowing exactly how to get it like in EU4.

            Essentially you will choose how much you want to achieve as the difficulty setting. EU4 almost does this but you run out of the potential to fail pretty fast and due to the static map its way too easy to read a guide on how to restore the Roman empire.

            My system is sort of rogue-like-like or DF-like in that you can generate new scenarios if you get bored with one.

            You are mainly limited by your personal ability rather than you skill at google searching for strategy guides. Its turn-based but there is a timer to simulate the major limiting factor of real life societies. Instead of a “demesne limit” its a time limit. Its pretty long per turn, 10 minutes, but you can of course hit end turn whenever. You cannot bank extra time, its use it or lose it, but there is some benefit to using as much as possible on planning even if you are out of actions to do that turn. If you pause the game you are limited to what you can actually remember, since you can’t perform actions or use the interface. Its just for potty breaks or sleeping or your job.

            You are forced to automate things or pass stuff off to the AI but the degree of necessity is again based on your own capabilities. Well and some game trade-offs based on your government structure.

          • anon says:

            @Axioms, sounds civ-like. (Procedurally-generated worlds, turn-based, presumably completely-ahistorical,…) But you’re going for something closer to Grand Strategy than 4X?

            Do you have any concept art or anything you’re willing to share?

          • AxiomsOfDominion says:

            It’s not Civ like except in the sense that its a strategy game with automated world gen. Closer to Dominions or Paradox than Civ. Its fantasy so yes not historical.

            I wouldn’t call it 4x or grand strategy. It has similar features but its like grand strategy the way something like Patrician is like grand strategy.

            I could post screenshots but its ugly as shit right now since graphics and the interface aren’t really my focus. Course since I’m not a full dev studio its never gonna look like a Paradox game or Civ. Dominions is again a good reference here. Hopefully slightly more user friendly with the interface though 🙂

            I used to have a blog but its lost somewhere on one of my many GMail accounts I can no longer remember the password to. I do have a shit ton of posts on RPGCodex though. should be able to google my username.

            Here are three links to rather unique systems:
            http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/climate-change-pollution-global-warming.104750/
            http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/annexation-cultural-acceptance-and-suboridnate-states.100540
            http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/propaganda-in-strategy-games.104662

            Here is a somewhat outdated general thread on the game:
            http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/fantasy-grand-strategy-game.93788/page-3

      • Eltargrim says:

        they derive a lot of their value from the richness and depth of their simulation of an alt-history scenario, which doesn’t work in a sci-fi setting.

        This is a major criticism of Civilization: Beyond Earth. Leaving aside the issues with balance, the setting just feels bland.

        • Zakharov says:

          On the other hand, Alpha Centauri was great.

          • Eltargrim says:

            I’d attribute that in large part to the various factions of AC actually feeling different. Whether I play the ARC or the Slavic Federation, every game of CIV:BE feels about the same. When the premise of a game is multiple playthroughs, this is a bad sign.

            EDIT: In fairness, I’ve yet to buy or play Rising Tide. I’ve heard that spices things up somewhat.

          • Anonymous says:

            SMAC has exceptional fluff.

          • DrBeat says:

            Because SMAC’s factions were built around having personality, so there’s something to relate to. CBE’s factions have no personality.

          • Machine Elf says:

            I think it’s less that the CivBE factions had no personality – though it’s true that as earth-regional rather than philosophical divisions, don’t have as much personality as SMAC – and more that they had less room to express it. CBE pretty much just has tech quotes, all read by the same voice actor, and a touch of diplomacy that tells you only about how the characters present themselves and not about how they interact with each other. SMAC has tech quotes, building quotes, wonder movies, different voice acting for all the characters in the above, and diplomacy text that madlibs descriptors appropriate to the discussed factions.

            Notably, though I haven’t played it myself, I have heard that the Beyond Earth expansion greatly expands diplomacy texts and goes a long way towards characterizing the sponsors. (For example, the Franco-Iberian cultural chauvinists and the Germanic INTEGR technologists have catty back-and-forths with each other.)

            EDIT: mixed up who i was replying to

        • suntzuanime says:

          “The universe is either in progress or in entropy. We choose progress!” – Vadim Kozlov, Axioms from the Minutes of the Central Directorate

        • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

          Beyond Earth had all the potential for a great story/setting but squandered it, which is really annoying. Their biggest mistake IMO was not giving the characters unique personalities, they don’t even have unique dialogue for the most part. Some of the quotes indicate something there, but they needed to show it much better.

          (Also, a minor thing but a bizarrely large pet peeve when playing it. Why is their a wonder based around giving immortality to a select few people in secret, pretending they don’t have the tech, when all the leaders are already immortal?)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        @suntzuanime: I think that’s exactly right.
        I’d have paid good money for a Paradox ancient history game. Anything from the First Dynasties of Egypt and Uruk to blobbing out as the Romans would have been gold. Generic sci-fi is a distraction from what they excel at.

    • LtWigglesworth says:

      I’m not fussed about Stellaris. I was excited for East vs West, and I was quite disappointed when it was cancelled.

    • Zorgon says:

      I’m immensely hyped for anything at all from Paradox, so Stellaris is like catnip for me.

      I also have my own 4X in development, so I’m basically looking at it the same way a Southern English event promoter looks at Glastonbury – I need to time things just right so I ride the coat-tails while not directly competing with it.

    • Protagoras says:

      I pre-ordered, which I almost never do. I love 4x space games, and I usually like Paradox games. Though the Paradox games generally have frustrating mixes of features I love and features that annoy me, different in every game. I wish I could mix and match desired features from different Paradox games.

      I guess with Stellaris, I’m expecting even more modding than usual (space empire games get a lot of modding attention, and Paradox games get a lot of modding attention), and of course one can pick and choose which mods to use.

      • Anonymous says:

        >Though the Paradox games generally have frustrating mixes of features I love and features that annoy me, different in every game.

        Out of curiosity – can you elaborate?

        • Protagoras says:

          I didn’t think it would be necessary. But, say, HOI3 has a huge number of extremely small provinces, which I think is generally a good thing. I also like how a lot of the history is handled. The technology is a lot more interesting and complex than many of the other games (partly because of the setting, of course). On the other hand, it shares with most Paradox games (and in fairness most games period) that moving units by sea is annoying and fiddly, which makes it extremely frustrating that it is only possible to deploy new units in spaces that are connected to your capital by land you control, so sending reinforcements that ever have to cross water to get to their destination always requires the annoying mucking around with transport ships (they should have made it possible to use the automated convoy ships, which already handle replacements and supplies, for initial deployment of new units, and for strategic redeployment for that matter).

          • suntzuanime says:

            I feel like the annoying logistics of getting troops across the sea was in fact a major part of WW2, without which any simulation would be lacking.

          • Protagoras says:

            I mean “annoying” in the sense of requiring lots of attention and mouse-clicks; in terms of making it costly and difficult, the game probably didn’t go far enough.

          • Anonymous says:

            I recall that in CK1, your units turned into boats that cost wads of cash, when you ordered them overseas. This was brilliant, I think.

          • John Schilling says:

            I mean “annoying” in the sense of requiring lots of attention and mouse-clicks; in terms of making it costly and difficult, the game probably didn’t go far enough.

            The abundance of naval resources one of my minor gripes with Crusader Kings 2, but I hadn’t connected it to the gameplay issue until you brought it up. Hunting and mouse-clicking for a separate transport fleet for every force I need to move, then again to demobilize the fleets when I no longer need them to avoid breaking the bank, is pointless when there are always enough ships approximately where you need them (but hunt and click and point and wait and click and point again but don’t miss that you had to do the second round…), and you can always afford them if you don’t miss the demob step.

            If I actually have to think and plan and sacrifice to build and maintain a fleet that can carry half the troops I want, a fleet that would actually be vulnerable to weather and enemy action, and then have to think again about how to use this capability to win a war, that’s better gaming. I’d still prefer to minimize the needless fiddly bits, but at least I’d be fiddling with something useful.

    • Aevylmar says:

      Absolutely – I already pre-ordered.

      Paradox has been moving in the direction of mechanics-over-history for a while now; contrast EU4 to EU3 and CK2 Original to CK2 Current.

      As a history person, I am very much opposed to that, having gotten into Paradox because of history – but the thing is, this new program generally results in stupid, ahistorical mechanics that are really fun to play. I went back to Victoria 2 and – wow, the concepts are great, wow, the flavor is wonderful, but so much of your time is spent sitting around alternating not doing much with fighting tiny weak wars with tiny weak nations. (Or else micromanaging your economy.)

      By contrast, all the silly nonsense they’ve been adding to EU4 is entertaining. Getting all this little exploration events that somehow give you 100 military power is a fun lottery game; ‘trade steering’ is laughable but it’s fun to try to crunch out the numbers in your favor. ‘Shattered retreat’ makes wars more interesting even as it is completely realistic that most of the losses to an army come from pursuit…

      And so now they bring out Stellaris, which is the game where they just give up on history and go “OK, we’re going to make the best game they can.” And they’ve proved they can make some pretty good games, so I want to see what kind of game they can make when they focus just on that. (You can’t really justify having super-aliens from beyond the stars invade in the endgame of most historical settings.)

      And if I’m really lucky, all the people who are more interested in game design than history can go off and manage Stellaris, and I can have my historical CK2 back and set Conclave on the fire it richly deserves.

    • Ano says:

      Yes, although it is a little bit annoying that a load of interesting games seem to be coming out this year (Fire Emblem, Stellaris, XCOM 2, Bravely Second) when I don’t have any money.

  67. http://www.betterinstitutions.com/blog/2016/3/27/liberal-cities-housing-policy-hypocrisy

    Argues that liberal policies which restrict housing in coastal cities are hypocritical and disastrous.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Duh?

      Prices reflect reality.

      Right now, there’s a $35K/year income boost to moving to the Bay Area.
      Bay Area has no houses (My bosses boss lives in Gilroy and commutes 4 hours a day. Just saying).
      This creates a wage spiral where high-income people come in, force out low-income people and then in turn are driven out by even higher-income people.
      Tada, poor people are forced to leave our major cities and move to Vegas.

      /Then in 2005, we smash the mortgage market and in practice, ban building in Vegas 😛

      • caryatis says:

        Your comment is about demand. The price of housing also reflects supply, which is affected by housing regulation.

        • Thomas Jørgensen says:

          And by physical realities – you can stack housing, but condominiums require a lot of infrastructure support to be livable – So in order to solve the housing shortages of the tech centers, deregulation wouldn’t work, because the market wont build the needed sevage lines and transit capacity, let alone the parks and police stations. So, while it is true that the housing policies of these hubs are doing a lot of damage, this cannot be alleviated by abolishing them – they have to be replaced by a different set of “liberal” policies. And even then, this will only work as a solve if it holds true that there is a reachable upper bound on how many people actually want to live in the bay area – if the government smacks down boulewards, a metro and rezones the entire place to “Buisness zoning on ground floor, 3 floors of housing on top” that could really easily turn into “Paris, 2.0” where the end result is that housing prices dont go down because despite having room for millions more people, the place has become enough of a cultural/economic hub that more people just keep moving there without limit.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            “despite having room for millions more people, the place has become enough of a cultural/economic hub that more people just keep moving there without limit.”

            Counterpoint: even if that’s the case, then at least there are millions more people who have been able to move to Paris and are presumably happier for it. Not to mention that giant cultural and economic hubs tend to produce lots of culture and economic activity, making the whole nation more dynamic and prosperous.

  68. Sniffnoy says:

    Here’s a paper I saw linked that might be relevant to the question of “If plutocracy isn’t about money, then what’s going on?” I warn that I haven’t actually read this and don’t know if it’s any good, but it seemed like it might be relevant so I thought I’d point it out.

  69. Seth says:

    Is it too soon to do an analysis of what worked, what didn’t work, with the lamdaconf no-platforming and response? I don’t want to go around the culture war itself again. Rather, what were the empirical results?

    I do not think it was a shining moment for rationality. Perhaps it was proof of game-theory.

    1) The conference organizers were relentlessly kind and charitable and explained their reasoning for inclusion in loving detail. This seems to have resulted in them being venomously nerd-shamed.

    2) The poster-child himself was very polite and pledged to be apolitical at the conference, though also defensive about racism and right-wing stances. It seems to have been a wash – no further negative, though not much positive either. Everyone’s mind was/is already made up. One observation – if this is the unholy leader of a threat-or-menace brigade, Neo-Evil is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for Dark Masters.

    3) Counter-fundraiser for conference sponsorship – *big* win. Best result of the whole mess. Peaceful and more importantly, effective. Possible a template for future opposition to no-platforming.

    4) Counter-blacklist. This part was very disturbing. That way lies madness. But was it also effective? The question of results here is the most troubling.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      “The conference organizers were relentlessly kind and charitable and explained their reasoning for inclusion in loving detail. This seems to have resulted in them being venomously nerd-shamed.”

      That part was rather sad. It feels like the best way to respond to no-platformers is as curtly as possible — ideally, say just the word “No” and then permanently cut off all lines of communication. If you explain your reasoning or even say anything at all, you’re just creating a larger attack surface.

      • Samedi says:

        Re not “creating a larger attack surface”. I think this is a great idea. Explaining quickly looks like justifying. Also, a simple “no” avoids drawing you into someone else’s game.

      • ThrustVectoring says:

        That technique – “grey rock” is a valuable way to deal with certain kinds of people and their drama.

        • Zorgon says:

          That article… it’s solid advice, but as with most such sites, I can’t help but feel that the writer sees psychopaths behind every corner.

      • nydwracu says:

        They should’ve ignored them from the start. A hammer-and-sickle idiot who uses his work account to daydream about sending people to slave camps and hangs out with shitheels who nurse Revenge of the Nerds fantasies about street violence in professional settings — ceding the moral high ground to someone like that is pathetic.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          What would you say about the right-wing equivalent?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Can’t speak for nydwracu, but I’d say exactly the same thing. Jackassery is jackassery no matter what flag it’s flying.

      • Lycotic says:

        Re: explaining their reasoning:

        This is assuredly an unpopular opinion here, but I found their statements about their reasoning tendentious and patronizing, using cute little pictures to tell the unruly kids that they were out of line. I am unsurprised that that solicited a strong reaction.

        As someone on the squishy center left, I didn’t really have an original opinion about the original talk. My FP experience is — OMG — 20 years out of date, so I wasn’t going to go to such a conference anyway, but their statement made me want to avoid it in and of itself.

        I also think the explanation mostly ignored why people go to conferences anyway (unless my reasons are really that different from everyone else) — meeting face-to-face is important for building tribal relations, and thus people are (possibly rationally) selective about issues related to who they want/don’t want in the tribe. In ignoring this, I think the organizers mostly missed the point. Battles can be waged for an inclusive rather than an exclusive tribe, but simply ignoring the issue isn’t going to make it go away.

    • Seth says:

      Material for item #1:

      Final Statement on the LambdaConf Controversy
      LambdaConf will focus on professional ethics instead of morality.

      http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-conclusion

      “We did not start a conference on functional programming to become embroiled in politics. We just want to run a great conference on functional programming.”

      Poor guy. Classic case of you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

    • The Nybbler says:

      It’s probably too soon for a complete postmortem, because the conference hasn’t happened yet. We’ll have to see if no one shows up, or if there’s a bomb threat or fire-alarm pull, or what have you, before we can have true perspective.

      1) Of course the organizers were shamed. That’s the #1 weapon in the arsenal of the no-platformers. There was literally nothing the organizers could do, aside from give in, that wouldn’t result in them being shamed. This isn’t a failure of rationality, it’s a case of one group being non-rational and anti-Enlightenment.

      2) Again, there’s nothing Moldbug could have done, except completely recant his prior views (and that possibly would not be sufficient), to calm the screaming hordes.

      3) I’ve got some money just waiting for the next time.

      4) The counter-blacklist was by a third party in it for his own purposes. I do not believe it has or will have any effect. Watching some of the no-platformers recoil in horror at being put on such a list was amusing, but really, I already knew they were hypocrites.

      • Seth says:

        I’d say there’s a good possibility his talk will be the best attended session in the entire conference, from people who want to know what in the world this guy actually works on. He’s certainly gotten publicity for his project. And a bomb threat or similar would be a major PR loss for that side.

        But it’s a rather disfavored thought that there are some people who simply can’t be reasoned with. An idea that they hate us for our freedoms, and any attempt to engage them in dialogue will just be taken advantage of, has very bad associations. It also suggests rationality has very limited effectiveness.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Would it really be a major PR loss? There have been bomb threats against http://pastebin.com/si8Rhspq meetups in the past, and nobody who wasn’t already sympathetic to http://pastebin.com/si8Rhspq has cared.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Rationality DOES have limited effectiveness. Rationality only helps you find truth, not power. There are people who cannot be reasoned with. You can start with the literally insane, mentally incapable of reason. Move on to those who are so stubborn and set in their ways that nothing will change their mind. Then there’s those who do not care about the truth. And those with power whose interest do not align with the truth — these last actually can sometimes be reasoned with, but only after you’ve beaten their power.

    • ” Counter-blacklist. This part was very disturbing. That way lies madness. But was it also effective? The question of results here is the most troubling.”

      The only way to escape a repeated prisoners’ dilemma game is with some kind of punishment strategy.

      • Anonymous says:

        The only way to escape a repeated prisoners’ dilemma game is with some kind of punishment strategy.

        Incorrect.

        The SJWs are correct on the object level therefore the only reasonable response to them is to write long hand-wringing pieces on SSC begging them to be slightly nicer in the future (but if they’re not nice that’s ok too). Anything else might undermine the righteous cause of feminism or for equality or for rights for transgendered people.

        • Anonymoose says:

          The level of condescending sarcasm in this post is not conducive to a healthy discussion.

      • Alex Godofsky says:

        This is not a two-player game. Tit-for-tat produces exponential escalation in a multiplayer game with vicarious offense (i.e. “you attacked my teammate, so I will attack you”).

        If you want tit-for-tat to work you need the teams to have rulers who can control the teammates’ behavior. This is obviously not going to happen.

        • Winfried says:

          Vox Day, with his “Vile Faceless Minions” and “Ilk” of various flavors is doing a pretty good job of trying to be one such ruler.

          There may be no leader of GG or Sad Doges but there is a leader of the Rabid ones.

          • Vorkon says:

            Wait, the word “puppies” isn’t blocked now, is it? I know the content blocker has gotten a bit out of hand, but that seems to be a common enough word that blocking it would just be plain silly…

            EDIT: Okay, false alarm. Good.

  70. Matt says:

    So there are some obvious problems with utilitarianism (e.g., justifications for slavery) and I was thinking about how it could be modified to better guide policy. What I thought was that humans do indeed want to optimize for total utility, but there are also deep moral desires for both median utility (equality) to be maximized as well as for individual freedom (liberty).

    Based on that, would it be possible to expand on basic utilitarianism, so as to maximize for those three values: total utility, median utility, and freedom – in a way that sees diminishing returns for each? For example, progressive income taxes may damage freedom, but increase median utility and increase total utility in a more than compensatory manner . However, at a point high income taxes begin to decrease individual liberty and long-run growth in a way that offsets the gains in median utilities and thus reaches an equilibrium?

    I have a bunch of ‘unknown unknowns’ around this topic and would love to hear others thoughts. I’m not a philosophy major, but what is your one-sentence answer to optimal policy-making?

    • suntzuanime says:

      Maximizing median utility sounds like a great ethical system for oppressing minorities.

      Really this whole system you’re trying to build seems like an ad-hoc kludge to deal with conclusions you don’t like. But how can you expect an ethical system to “guide policy” if you never let it lead to a conclusion you don’t like? Maybe what you mean is that you want a way to modify it to better justify your preferred policies?

      • Theo Jones says:

        Then there is the classical issue with that type of rule. Adding/keeping around people with less than median utility is bad.

      • Creating optimal policy benefits everyone, not just a majority. In the case of taxes, if taxes are too high it may disincentivize risk taking and investment, and then markets fail and the economy will also fail or undergo severe recession or stagnation, ultimately hurting everyone. China saw an explosion in living standards after, in the 70’s, abandoning market-communism, as an example of good policy.

        • suntzuanime says:

          What is this, discussion of specific tax policy and historical examples? Get on my level (the meta-level).

        • “Creating optimal policy benefits everyone, not just a majority.”

          I’m not sure what that means. It is probably true that the Chinese shift to capitalism made most people much better off, but not necessarily everyone.

          Consider two slightly different policies, one of which does and one does not include a steel tariff. There is a sense in which total welfare is better without. But people who own stock in the domestic steel industry are worse off.

          The only ways I know of to define “optimal” involve some way of adding up gains and losses, so that a benefit to one person can compensate for a cost to another.

          How are you defining it?

          • Samedi says:

            Optimal, in this context, necessarily includes the qualifier “for whom”. I don’t think there is any such thing as universally objectively optimal. Pareto wrote about this problem.

          • “I don’t think there is any such thing as universally objectively optimal.”

            There is unlikely to be a set of institutions which is better for every individual than any other set of institutions.

            But there are useful senses of “objectively optimal” short of that. One of them is the utilitarian optimum (average or total). Another is maximizing economic efficiency, which can be viewed as a proxy for utility, imperfect since it ignores different marginal utilities of income but a lot easier to figure out how to maximize.

            Both are ways of adding content to the concept of “maximum size of the pie.”

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Setting a tax level to maximise GDP implies nothing about redistribution, and therefore nothing about his much utility “everybody” gets,

        • ThrustVectoring says:

          Uhhh, what? That implies that hurting someone by a negligible amount in order to make literally every other person much better off isn’t “optimal”. Like, hurting them by an amount such that tracking the harm and compensating them for it is worse than just ignoring it, overall.

      • Vitor says:

        Yes, median utility is of course problematic.

        I think what would actually need to be maximized is something like average utility with a quadratic penalty for outliers, i.e. if average happiness is 100, then having one person at 70 (or 130) gives -90 utility, almost the worth of one whole person’s happiness.

        This would only work if you’re not allowed to throw someone out of a community, of course. In that case, you’d have to keep counting them at 0 utility. Same with dead people.

        • Rowan says:

          That sounds like a great system for if you want a society devoted to finding people with high happiness setpoints and beating them with rods.

      • Matt says:

        Hey, this seems like a rather aggressive answer to what was a pretty open ended and non-political post on my part.

        My main line of thinking is around AI – what simple values could we imbue it with if we wanted it to govern in a way that was optimal. Bostrom does a pretty good job of arguing against pure utilitarianism in his book and I was trying to see if there was a way to build on utilitarianism.

    • Matthias says:

      I’ve read some philosophers try a lexicographic ordering.

      Ie to compare to counterfactuals, you sort all the people involved by increasing happiness. The situation were the least well off person is better is the better situation. If they are equally well off, you compare the second worst off person, and so on.

      The author took into account that happiness is hard to compare. So this construct was mainly to be used like in statistics, where you are merely trying to reject the null hypothesis.

      (In the end, the author argued for a basic income, adjusted for extra disability payments.)

      Can’t remember the author, sorry.

      • Vitor says:

        So this scheme supports reducing the happiness of the happiest person to only epsilon above the most miserable person, if in exchange the miserable person’s happiness rises by epsilon? Trading your house for one grain of rice for a poor person? Oh sorry, that person isn’t literally the most miserable person alive, never mind!

        I understand the desire for simple and intuitive schemes, but this produces pure nonsense if taken at face value. If not taken literally, the scheme can be interpreted in many ways, some of which I support and others which I don’t.

      • satanistgoblin says:

        Sounds a lot like Rawls Difference Principle: that inequalty is acceptable only so far as it benefits the worst of. Seems insane and pathological to me.

        • Anonymous says:

          Preventing the poorest children from suffering from malnutrition vs. helping upper-middle class couples buy a summer home? Seems eminently sane to me.

          • satanistgoblin says:

            That would be perfectly OK in standard utilitarianism assuming no side effects. But taking away arbitrarily many utilons from people just to give someone 1 utilon is messed up, imho.

          • Mary says:

            Preventing an upper-middle class couple from buying a summer home in order to give one poor child one meal is another matter — but obviously also covered.

      • The idea of maximizing the welfare of the worst off person is due to Rawls. So far as I can tell, it is indefensible–at least, I have never found anyone able to defend it. A while back I had some exchanges with members of the Bleeding Heart Libertarian group, who spoke very respectfully of Rawls but were unwilling to defend his central claim.

        • Anonymous says:

          “indefensible”

          I really have to wonder if we’re operating on a shared definition of this word.

        • suntzuanime says:

          For the longest time I had thought Rawls was an 18th century philosopher, because his arguments were so unsophisticated.

        • Since the worst off person would be better off dead, wouldn’t Rawls support the quick extermination of the human race over the status quo?

          • Wrong Species says:

            This is the argument against all maximizing ethical systems. I’m not a “death eater” but this is one way society has really regressed since the old days. Before they used to say something like “avoid doing these certain things and do your duties.” Obviously I don’t agree with everything they thought but at least they recognized that moral rules should be structured in a way that is practical. And now everyone seems obsessed with building systems that no sane person would fully commit to. I know I’m a broken record bringing this up in so many threads but it’s absolute lunacy.

          • Aegeus says:

            It’s probably because this board descends from Less Wrong, and LW is really interested in making an ethics system that can be implemented by a maximizing AI.

            And to be fair, the hypothetical “best ethics system ever” should be capable of handling edge cases. If it can’t handle them, that suggests there’s a better ethics system out there somewhere.

          • Kevin C. says:

            @Aegeus

            And to be fair, the hypothetical “best ethics system ever” should be capable of handling edge cases. If it can’t handle them, that suggests there’s a better ethics system out there somewhere.

            Not necessarily. It could be the case that there’s an analogue of Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem for ethics: it could be that it is impossible to construct an ethical system that is both:
            1. able to cover every conceivable dilemma and situation that may arise, including “edge cases” (completeness)
            2. doesn’t ever contradict itself (consistency).

        • Theo Jones says:

          From what I remember from reading Theory of Justice, Rawls didn’t literally mean the worse off person. He meant the worst of group. With group being very poorly defined.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            “Still, we should question why individuals in the original position would choose a principle that focuses upon groups, rather than individuals. Won’t application of the minimax principle lead each person in the original position to favor maximizing the position of the worst-off individual? To be sure, this principle would reduce questions of evaluating social institutions to the issue of how the unhappiest depressive fares. Yet avoiding this by moving the focus to groups (or representative individuals) seems ad hoc, and is inadequately motivated for those in the individual [sic] position.” — Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

      • Tracy W says:

        This approach assumes infinite risk aversion. But people don’t act like that. Eg say a friend invites me to a party. They live a couple of blocks away across a reasonably busy couple of roads so there’s a small chance of me being badly injured or killed on the way there or back. If I knew that I was definitely going to get killed or injured I wouldn’t go to the party. But the small chance in itself is not enough to deter me. (I might not go to the party for other reasons of course.) Most people are like me by revealed behaviour. Thus presumably most people like me would prefer to live in a society that has a higher living standard overall than one that maximises the outcome of the worst off at all costs.

        • Harsanyi proposed the veil of ignorance/original position argument well before Rawls. Unlike Rawls, he drew the correct conclusion—the society you would choose would be the one with the highest average (VN) utility.

          There are serious problems with that conclusion, but at least if follows from the assumption.

    • blacktrance says:

      So there are some obvious problems with utilitarianism (e.g., justifications for slavery)

      I’m not sure what you mean by this, but if you’re referring to a hypothetical situation in which slavery would be good from a utilitarian perspective, I expect the world would be sufficiently different for slavery to not seem as bad as it does now.

      • Matt says:

        So, my thinking here is that people have different preferences and elasticities in terms of happiness. If someone has relatively inelastic preferences and high skills, then a pure utility-maximizing society could make a justification for enslaving that person if their labor would benefit others in a way that compensates for it.

        • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

          Such a person wouldn’t mind being enslaved, since their preferences are inelastic. In the limit, such a person would be a robot.

          • Matt says:

            It’s not all-or-nothing, someone can still suffer from slavery even if they suffer relatively less than someone else.

      • hlynkacg says:

        I expect the world would be sufficiently different for slavery to not seem as bad as it does now.

        Would it?

        Seems to me that Marx’s core thesis was that this is the world we live in. “From each according to their ability to each according to their need” and all that. You have the ability to dig ditches, society need’s ditches, ergo you will dig.

      • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

        I agree with blacktrance. A world where Total Utilitarianism justified slavery would look enormously different from the world we exist in.

        When I think about the Utility Monster, I’m reminded of this SMBC comic. And when I’m reminded of this SMBC comic, I think about the joke that compares God to a kid who fries ants with a magnifying glass. Most people couldn’t care less about the welfare of ants. Most people are perfectly willing to spray ants with Bug Killer Aerosol without a second thought. Because ants are a lower life-form which are ethically incommensurable with humans.

        Analogously. In the parallel universe where the SMBC comic reflects reality, Felix is (for all intents and purposes) God. Felix’s slaves are lower life-forms who could not possibly begin to contemplate the sheer ecstasy which Felix experiences.

        The visceral objection to the comic is that it’s not physiologically plausible (in the real world) for Felix to “experience a level of happiness” so much higher than that of his subjects that Total Utilitarianism would justify slavery. Because in the usual thought experiment, we don’t imagine God Incarnate sitting on the throne; we imagine Felix The Homosapien. But as soon as you replace your mental imagery of Felix The Homosapien with “a higher deity, who works in mysterious ways” ™, the idea of Mandatory Servitude suddenly doesn’t seem as repulsive (as evidenced by Abrahamic Religions, et al).

        • hlynkacg says:

          Different in what way?

          Utilitarianism does justify slavery. Stalin’s Russia is a prime example. The needs of the many out weigh the needs of a few шкідник and кулак.

          • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

            Different in that: it would be possible for Felix (or a group of Felixes) to obtain such a degree of marginal utility from the enslavement of others that it would outweigh the combined marginal utility of his slaves had his slaves been set free.

            I believe Scott has commented on this once, saying there’s probably some biological limit to the utility a single human brain can experience. And since we all run on the same hardware (more or less) [0], it’s not possible for a single person to simultaneously experience two persons’ worth of maximum-utility. (I.e. ain’t nobody got enough dopamine for that. [1]) This is one of those scenarios where “it’s not prohibited by the laws of physics, but neither is it prohibited by the laws of physics for a broken vase to spontaneously fix itself”. Maybe this will change when brain emulations are invented.

            I don’t understand the reference to Stalin.

            [0] p.s. now that I think about it, I believe one of the rationalizations the U.S. Antebellum South used to justify slavery was that blacks were monkeys who had IQ’s of 5.

            [1] I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s essay Consider the Lobster. It discusses the ethics of eating lobsters, which in all likelihood feel great pain and cannot even secret opioids to mitigate it (like humans would).

          • hlynkacg says:

            The argument is that the utility lost by enslaving a small number of people is offset, by the substantial increase in the utility of everyone else.

            A utilitarian does not walk away from Omelas they embrace it.

          • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

            I understand that the utility lost by enslaving a small number of people might be offset by the substantial increase in the utils of everyone else. I just doubt it would actually increase total utility, since the increase in utils from (enslaved -> not enslaved) tends to be much greater than increase in utils from (slave owner -> not slave owner). You agree that a graph of “utility as a function of money” follows a sublinear curve, right?

            I mean, if we’re all we’re doing is making each individual work so that the fruits of their labor may be distributed to others (such that the aggregate value of those fruits is several-fold greater than the utils sacrificed by the individual) that also describes Capitalism. And also Communism. It’s called market-specialization. What do we gain by dividing the population into a master class and a slave class? It’s more efficient to make everyone slaves to the market than to set aside an aristocratic class which is beholden to no one.

          • Matt M says:

            As an American, one of the things I find most interesting about reading some of Stalin’s defenders among Russians is how many true believers there really were – how readily people were willing to accept “sure my life completely sucks, but this is necessary for the greater good and maybe my childrens will be better” as a completely sufficient state of affairs.

          • anon says:

            I’ve recently been trying to learn a bit of Soviet history (which of course my American high school education omitted, except for the Yalta conference). I know about the kulaks — but what does “shkidnik” (if I’m parsing the Cyrillic correctly) refer to? I see that it is the Ukrainian word for “pests”. Does it just refer to any “counter-revolutionaries” whom Stalin felt had to be purged / sent to Siberia?

          • hlynkacg says:

            Your guess is spot on.

            The direct translation would be something along the lines of “bug”, “vermin”, or “nuisance”, but idiomatically it’s someone accused of “Wrecking” so yes, counter revolutionaries (or any other poor slob who somehow ended up on the party’s bad-side) is exactly who it’s referring too. 😉

        • Wrong Species says:

          In today’s day and age, sure. But weren’t societies like Ancient Rome built on slavery?

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            Nope. Rome’s backbone throughout its republican period was its middle class, and once slaved starting takin’ the farmers jerbs it didn’t take long for it to stop being a republic.

      • Shieldfoss says:

        Indeed. For example, a Roman punitive expedition into Barbaricum isn’t picking between “A) take slaves or B) don’t take slaves,” it is choosing between “stop them from raiding our empire by A) killing them all or B) enslaving them all.”

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      @ Matt

      Are you thinking of something like this?
      https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value
      http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/

      The last part of Lewis’s _The Abolition of Man_ has a similar point: that we can’t really choose one principle and try to sacrifice all the others to it. There are several principles, and taking any one of them so far that it violates another principle is … not good. An example using Lewis’s list might be “Show most kindness to family and friends, but don’t be harsh to outsiders, and be fair to everyone in business and law.”

    • As Caplan and others have noted, most voters are irrational (the term ‘irrational’ strictly being used in the economics sense), and this irrationality results in voter preferences that deviate from the optimal, and I think there is some truth to this, and utilitarians understand that irrationality should not guide policy, only quantifiable evidence that generates the best policy. Utilitarians may be content with some voices (irrational ones) perhaps being marginalized or excluded if it leads to an optimal outcome, and I think that’s an acceptable trade-off. What defines ‘good policy’ is harder to quantify, but one criteria is that it ‘advances’ civilization, although what quantifies as ‘advancement’ is obviously not politically agnostic. For the ‘left’ such policy may be to advance social justice causes, as a way of maximizing happiness. For the ‘right’ it may be to maximize economic growth and technological innovation, in the hope prosperity and innovation will trickle down and benefit all.

    • Anon. says:

      This is just one huge appeal to consequences. Nothing good can come of it.

      If utilitarianism is true, utilitarianism is true regardless of its implications re: slavery or anything else.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        What would it mean for utilitarianism to be “true”?

        • Anon. says:

          Here we go…

          It would mean moral facts exist and utilitarianism is it.

          • TD says:

            M-moral facts?

            What?

          • TD says:

            I’m really not sure what any of that means. It just blasts my head to pieces. I need to go on reddit, and ask them to explain moral realism like I’m five.

            What is an example of an “ethical sentence that expresses propositions that refer to objective features of the world”?

            I mean, I have some ideas, but I want to hear it fresh again this time, so I can compare and contrast.

          • Anon. says:

            >What is an example of an “ethical sentence that expresses propositions that refer to objective features of the world”?

            “It is morally right to act in a way that maximizes total utility.”

            Technically you can give up realism and still believe that ethical sentences are propositions, this is called “error theory”. The catch is that error theorists view all ethical sentences as false.

          • TD says:

            “It is morally right to act in a way that maximizes total utility.”

            Assuming this is a utilitarian, then are the “objective features of the world” in this case, measurements of happiness?

            I have a very hard time with formal moral philosophy. It’s always been something I’ve never bothered to learn much about, but I always end up encountering it through peripheral interests. Whenever I encounter moral realism, it always sounds completely absurd to me.

            Not wanting to catch up and read 10,000 books, I always just assume that they are using non-standard usages of words as jargon, and they don’t literally believe that moral truth can be measured, so I usually shrug and pass on, leaving it to the experts.

            It’s never stopped bugging me though. I think eventually I might have to read those 10,000 books.

          • Anon. says:

            Assuming this is a utilitarian, then are the “objective features of the world” in this case, measurements of happiness?

            That too, but that’s not the bit realists are concerned with.

          • Creutzer says:

            TD, I like to think that the ability to even consider moral realism as a coherent proposition is a bug in the human mind. The notion of an objective/absolute good is nonsensical to me, but some people seem to think it exists. The human brain likes to treat all sorts of things that are not absolute and about the objective world as if they were. Given the enormous stakes in the case of morality, that kind of makes sense – you may as well implement it as if it were a factual matter.

            Once you’ve seen that it isn’t, of course, you can’t unsee this fact, so you lose the ability to conceive of what it would even mean for moral realism to be true.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            Moral realism is the majority position among metaethicists, most of whom do not take the thing they’re analyzing to be a technical or reformed use of ordinary moral language. So I think it would be a mistake to dismiss the view because it sounds weird. You may be misunderstanding what moral realism is committed to if you’re thinking of it as the view that “moral facts can be measured”.

            This may not help, but realism about other normative domains is even more popular than moral realism, and might at least help you see what the moral realist thinks. For instance, many people are inclined to think that “it’s irrational to choose to believe something your evidence shows to be false” is true. Someone who thinks it’s rational to believe things that the evidence shows is false is, they think, simply mistaken. It’s not just that they have different rational tastes – they’re wrong about rationality.

            If that doesn’t also strike you as an absurd thing to think, then that might help you get in a realist mindset about morality.

          • Anon. says:

            Moral realism is the majority position among metaethicists, most of whom do not take the thing they’re analyzing to be a technical or reformed use of ordinary moral language.

            This is a bit like saying theism is the majority position among theologians.

          • Alliteration says:

            @TD

            One version of moral realism is that morality exists as a platonic objects. In other words, at the most fundamental level of reality, there exists physical objects (like electrons and quarks) and platonic objects (like morality) which are just as real as physical objects. The platonic objects just don’t positions or cause anything in the physical world.

            Another version of moral realism is that objective morality is God’s morality. God is so big that his morality becomes objective.

            (If you like stretching your mind, I might also suggest reading about Plato’s philosophy, not because it is true, but because it is so different from what you seem to believe I think it might help you understand other people.)

            @Creutzer
            Just as a data point for your theory.
            To me, both moral realism, moral error theory, moral non-cognitivism seem coherent. I believe moral realism however.

          • My account of my version of moral realism.

          • onyomi says:

            I am mostly convinced by Huemer and your much shorter version, but I also agree that I found his refutations of nihilism and biological determinism, if not unconvincing, then, at least, too brief.

            The best argument I’ve read so far against biological determinism, imo, is the one Huemer presents about how, if we were to guess which moral intuitions evolution would produce behind a veil of ignorance about the intuitions it did produce, we’d probably make very different guesses. But then, if we were to guess how evolution would produce an eyeball in the absence of any knowledge about how a creature might perceive photons, we’d probably guess wrong about that too.

          • Creutzer says:

            @Alliteration: I wonder if I predict that people’s coherence judgements for error theory and moral realism go together. I’m not sure because I don’t really understand error theory, although in a way that doesn’t subjectively feel the same as my non-understanding of moral realism. It’s got more to do with puzzlement over the idea that you should require paraconsistent logic for a meta-ethical theory. If, after all, all moral statements are false, you’ve got to drop non-contradiction…

          • Philosophisticat says:

            >>>This is a bit like saying theism is the majority position among theologians.

            It could be, but I think there are some reasons to doubt that kind of explanation:

            1) Support for theism among philosophers (who are generally pretty familiar with most theistic arguments) is extremely low (compared to the support for theism among specialists in philosophy of religion). So while theism is, unsurprisingly, popular among the super dedicated specialists in religion, it is very unpopular among the next lower level of expertise. On the other hand, moral realism is very popular both among metaethicists and among philosophers generally, who typically have some familiarity with metaethics but do not dedicate all of their time to it. More generally, I do not see any evidence that metaethicists are drawn from a pool of people who are disproportionately antecedently inclined towards realism in the way philosophers of religion are drawn from a pool of people who are disproportionately antecedently inclined to theism.

            2) Theology, and philosophy of religion, as fields, are substantially made up of questions that are of very little interest on the assumption that theism is false. Metaethics, on the other hand, is a rich area of inquiry even for anti-realists.

            3) Although I do not have polls then, there were times in relatively recent history when anti-realism was a bigger presence in metaethics than it is now (the dominant view, I would guess).

          • Creutzer says:

            @David: You say that you cannot, on a gut level, believe that your moral intuitions are like a preference for an ice-cream flavour. That’s understandable, because you probably don’t feel any problem with it when other people don’t share your preferences, and you probably don’t have an intuitive feeling that ice cream of your non-preferred flavour simply shouldn’t exist.

            Now, I don’t know if you have such emotional reactions, but some people, including me, find it really revolting, for example, when someone exhibits bad table manners, wears certain items of clothing in an improper way, or performs a musical piece in an incompetent and ignorant way. There’s a feeling of “the world shouldn’t be such that there are people doing this” which is subjectively very similar to the experience of moral objection – and yet it would be absurd to be an intuitionist about absolute sartorial truths. (If you can feel the absurdity of sartorial intuitionism, then you have a pretty good idea of how I intuitively feel about moral intuitionism.)

          • Alliteration says:

            @Creutzer
            My understanding of error theory is this:
            When normal people make moral claims like “Killing innocent people is bad”, they are making objective claims about the world.
            But nothing is actually bad or good. All moral intuition is an illusion.
            There for making a moral claim is an error.

            Error theory wouldn’t be trying to claim the statements like “killing is either bad or not bad” are false.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            For a moral realist, an objectively true moral statement need not look out of the ordinary, it could be “thou shalt not kill”. There is similar dispute about how to understand vanilla maths statments like 2+2=4.

            Moral realism probably requires some domain of moral facts. People often confuse moral facts with weird, supernatural, metaphysical facts, but they don’t have to be. To a realistic utilitarian, the moral facts are ordinary facts about preferences and happiness levels.

          • Creutzer says:

            To a realistic utilitarian, the moral facts are ordinary facts about preferences and happiness levels.

            Not necessarily. Being a realist and a utilitarian doesn’t necessitate that sort of identity theory about moral facts. If you’re a motivational internalist, in particular, you’re going to have a hard time identifying normative facts with descriptive facts instead of postulating them as their own kind of facts.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            “I’m not a contractarian. I don’t know where you’re getting that from.”

            You think you are not a contractarian.
            You may think you are not writing English prose, but I can see that you are. Where I am getting *that* from is the content of your writing. That was a contractarian claim. I don’t suppose that you are a contractarian overall. My take on Rand’s metaethics is that it swerves into contractarian or virtue ethicist theory in order to fix cerain problems..and then swerves out again, as if the diversion had never happenned.

            “I am not trying to “ride two horses”. I agree that you should break the contract whenever it is in your interest to do so.”

            Then you haven’t answered the PP objection, except to say that one should in fact prudently predate.

            Or did you mean “whenever it is not in your long term interest?” That is a significantly difrerent claim.

            If you can defect from a mutual beneficial contract at the drop of a hat, so can the other party. Under such ciscumsances, a society of egoists, there is no rational point in
            forming contracts, and so the original
            appeal to “you scratch my back and Ill scratch ours” achieves nothing and so the problems it was intended to address remain.

            “However, I think such situations are not commonplace, particularly not under a political system of laissez-faire capitalism.”

            Under real systems, or your ideal system? Under real capitalism there are explicit and implicit contracts which most people abide by, which makes it rational for you as an egoist to enter into them. But, in a sense, you are free riding. In an theoretical system, which exists nowhere, of pure egoism, it would be less rational for anyone to enter into a contract, because people would be following your advice to immediately break contracts that didn’t suit them.

            “I don’t think there is a “prudent predator problem”. If predation is prudent, then it’s good, period. What I am denying is that predation is actually prudent.”

            There’s no intrinsic level to the (im)prudence of predation, rather
            there are varying types of punishment and discouragement of various kinds of predation in various societies.

            Prudent predation is predation that you can get away with.

            Contractarians, ie people who are not egoists, have the advantage that they won’t break rules even when it is possible to get away with it.

            Egoists, as you have said, will. So if egoist societies want to match contractarian levels of non-predation, they will have to set up systems that compensate for the widepsread rule breaking…perhaps by increased surveilance and scrutiny, so that the opportunities to predate without beign caught are reduced.

            “Rand doesn’t “argue against” the “social good” because there’s no reason to. There’s no case for the “social good”.”

            If the social good is a contractarian, you-scratch-my-back-Ill-scratch-yours arrangement, *you* have given an argument for it.

            “And Rand clearly defines her terms, making it known precisely what she is talking about. The moral good, as she uses the term, is defined as what promotes an individual’s life, which she argued is the same as what promotes his happiness.”

            Argument by stipulative definiton don’t carry mcuh water.

            “One such factor making it in the individual’s interest to keep promises is his reputation. Another is his fear of legal punishment. Another is his desire to cultivate beneficial habits of promise-keeping. If he finds it natural and easy to keep promises, this is likely to serve him better than if he tries to waste time puzzling out in every interaction whether there’s a way to cheat his fellow participants.”

            Another is his philosophy. You have an instrumental/epistemic split there. If you want good outcomes in terms of people refraining from predating, including predating on you, you should not promote egoism as a philosophy because, as you have made clear, it encourages casual rule breaking.

            “No, Rand said that each individual’s ultimate purpose is to achieve his own happiness,”

            I am not saying that Rand doesn’t say what she actually said. I am saying that Rand, counterfactually, could have said the something different…that is, using the same premises and similarly vague reasoning, she could have come to the opposite conclusion.

            “Sacrificing oneself to the group is […]”

            …not the only alternative to unrelenting seflishness.

            Contractarianism isn’t “be as altrusitic as possible, because altruism is a virtue”, it’s
            “get into mutually beneficial arrangements and stick to them”.

            It’s a rational decision, for values of “rational” where you are trying to optimise long-term or expected or average outcomes. Egoism is a rational decision where you are trying to maximise short term outcomes. They are not the same, and unrelenting egoism, the pursuit of one short-term gain after another, is pretty much the behaviour of the dumber sort of criminal.

            ” there will come times when the thing that most serves the group is not simultaneously the thing that most serves one’s own long-run happiness. One should only serve the group insofar as it contributes to one’s own happiness.”

            As you are now using “long term”, that would be contactrarianism, not egoism. (Previously you said “whenever it is not in your interests”. That would be egoism, not contractarianism).

            You may have a better ethical theory than Rand’s but you don’t have a better egoism than Rand’s. Inasmuch as your theory works it is not egoism.

          • blacktrance says:

            Egoism is a rational decision where you are trying to maximise short term outcomes.

            This is a bizarre assertion. What kind of egoist only wants to maximize short-term outcomes?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            I hope to respond in more detail later, but I second blacktrance here.

            No one in the history of egoism, as far as I’m aware, has advocated the view that “egoism equals infinite time preference“.

            By your standards, investing a nickel today to get a dime tomorrow is not really egoistic; it’s somehow “contractarianism” or something. Why invest when you can fly to Vegas today, get drunk, and gamble away all your money?

            If that’s what “egoism” means, then I’m not an “egoist”. But…that’s not what egoism means. Not in anyone’s usage that I’ve ever seen.

            When I say the egoistic is concerned with his “long-run” interest—or that he would break an agreement if it were against his interest—I mean only that he will try to maximize the total happiness across his life. So he will not fly to Vegas and gamble away all his savings today for a little bit of fun, if that means he will be penniless and miserable tomorrow. He will not try to embezzle funds from his job if it means he will get fired or sent to jail. And so on.

            The distinction I take to exist between egoism and contractarianism is a) they disagree on what makes something good—the egoist says the fact that it’s in your interest, the contractarian that you agreed to it—and b) the contractarian holds that people ought to keep their agreements even if when taking into account the full costs and benefits, it’s not in their interest. Also, I would say c) contractarianism as I’m familiar with it usually involves some kind of device like the “veil of ignorance”, which egoism rejects; egoism says people should bargain, but from their actual positions.

            The egoist defects in the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma and plays tit-for-tat in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Egoism is not synonymous with “always defect”.

          • Irishdude7 says:

            @Philosophisticat
            In support of your assertion, a survey of philosophy professors and graduate students showed 56% were moral realists: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

          • blacktrance says:

            Vox Imperatoris:
            I’m an egoist and a contractarian – the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Egoism is the general ethical theory, and contractarianism is its application to political philosophy and the grounding of rights. The contract is good (to the extent that it’s good) because it’s in your self-interest to agree to it. The contractarian certainly doesn’t think that any contract that one may agree to is automatically good, but that it’s good (for an independent reason) to agree to some particular contract.
            As for the Veil of Ignorance, that’s contractualism, not contractarianism.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            I didn’t realize that there was some distinction between “contractualism” and “contractarianism”. (Not being sarcastic here; I just have never heard of this distinction.)

            If “contractarianism” is merely the view that, under some circumstances, you should agree to some contracts, then I am certainly a “contractarian”. But I interpreted it in a somewhat different way, as I indicated above.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            What kind of egoist makes sacrifices? If you get into a contractual arrangment that is projected to be to your advantage, in terms of expected value, you can still lose out in practice .. you can pay more in tax than you get out of the government in services and benefits, you can get drafted and killed in battle instead of being the one who is protected, and so on.

            Contractualism idoensn’t support Rands politics (admitedly, egoism doesn’t either, but in a different direction, proving again thay they are different theories) Contractualism doesn’t mean that no one should ever be compelled, it doesn’t mean altrusim is unconditionally wrong, it doesn’t mean that taxation is slavery, and so on. It’s quite compatible with statism, including centre-left, nanny-state statism. It doens’t suggest that there is anything necessarilly wrong with any exising liberal democracy.

            “contractarianism as I’m familiar with it usually involves some kind of device like the “veil of ignorance”, which egoism rejects; egoism says people should bargain, but from their actual positions.”

            And without that veil, you have prudent predation, again. A egoist baron who knows he is a baron, in a completely dominant position, should be a robber baron, should predate on his serfs,since it is in his
            selfish interest to do so, so long as no one can stop him.

            Remember, you yourself put forward the existence of de-facto…actual… punishments for predation as the reason for an egoist not to predate…but some people will be in an actual position where they “are the law”, and have nothing to fear.

            If you follow thorugh the logic of egoism as rational behaviour based on self interest and actual position in society, what you get, in view of realistic inequalities between individuals, is something much more like deatheaterism than libertariansim or anarchy. The domination of men over women. the rich over the poor, etc, follows naturally.

            And if you follow through the logic of full-strength behind-the-veil contractualism. you of course get the kind of liberal,
            but not libertarian, society that Rawls argued for.

            “No one in the history of egoism, as far as I’m aware, has advocated the view that “egoism equals infinite time preference“.

            The history of egoism mostly consists of people saying it is obviously wrong.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ The Ancient Geek:

            What kind of egoist makes sacrifices? If you get into a contractual arrangment that is projected to be to your advantage, in terms of expected value, you can still lose out in practice .. you can pay more in tax than you get out of the government in services and benefits, you can get drafted and killed in battle instead of being the one who is protected, and so on.

            Okay, yes…but the expected value is all you have to go by. The fact that you can lose out from deals is not a reason to refrain from making all deals.

            If you can gain on net by breaking the agreement when it turns out not to be in your interest, then egoism would say you should break it. But this is very rarely the case, since agreements typically come with enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects.

            And without that veil, you have prudent predation, again. A egoist baron who knows he is a baron, in a completely dominant position, should be a robber baron, should predate on his serfs,since it is in his
            selfish interest to do so, so long as no one can stop him.

            I am not denying that you should predate if and when it is prudent. I am denying that it in fact is prudent.

            Remember, you yourself put forward the existence of de-facto…actual… punishments for predation as the reason for an egoist not to predate…but some people will be in an actual position where they “are the law”, and have nothing to fear.

            Fear of punishment is not the only egoistic concern. The fact is that serfdom or slavery is not in the interest even of the master class. They are in a better position than the oppressed class, but the abolition of slavery or serfdom benefits everyone because it’s a much more efficient mode of production.

            It may indeed not be in the interest of a master to unilaterally free his slaves without any form of compensation. That’s a problem with inefficient systems: individuals may have no reason to act in a way that would cause them to gain if everyone else did the same. The master does have an incentive to bargain with others to arrange some form of compensated emancipation. What he loses in the value of his slaves, he more than gains in the reduced prices caused by the introduction of a free market in labor.

            If you follow thorugh the logic of egoism as rational behaviour based on self interest and actual position in society, what you get, in view of realistic inequalities between individuals, is something much more like deatheaterism than libertariansim or anarchy. The domination of men over women. the rich over the poor, etc, follows naturally.

            The basic disagreement between us seems to be that you apparently think that there are large, ineradicable conflicts of interest among individuals and groups. You think it’s in the interest of the rich and powerful to rule tyrannically and take away everyone else’s freedom, but they don’t because they’re too stupid or duped by foolish moral theories to realize this.

            If it’s in the interest of men to oppress women, then men should oppress women. And if it’s in the interest of women not to be oppressed, then they should resist. In such a conflict of interests, victory simply goes to the stronger. Both sides are acting correctly; they just have incompatible ends.

            However, I do not think that any such thing is the case. It is not in fact in the interests of men to oppress women. Both sides benefit from gender equality. Perhaps women benefit more (perhaps not!), but it’s a win-win bargain.

            In the same way, I think the existence both of political freedom for the poor and of income inequality is in the interests both of the rich and of the poor. If it were in the interest of the poor to overthrow capitalism and seize the means of production, then I would say they should do it. And if it were in the interest of the rich to stop them, then I would say they also should do that. But in fact, I think political and economic freedom is in the interest of both.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            “Okay, yes…but the expected value is all you have to go by. The fact that you can lose out from deals is not a reason to refrain from making all deals.”

            I am not sayign all egoists would refrain from all ethical contracts. I am saying that more egoism means less sticking to ethcial rules, one way and another, and so introduces a PP problem.

            “If you can gain on net by breaking the agreement when it turns out not to be in your interest, then egoism would say you should break it. But this is very rarely the case, since agreements typically come with enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects.”

            Again, you are appelaing to what is typical in socieities imbued with altrusim, statism and other evil things.

            “I am not denying that you should predate if and when it is prudent. ”

            Then do you concede the point that egoism, as a metaethical theory, is unable to support common object-level ethics, such as “stealing is wrong”.

            “I am denying that it in fact is prudent.”

            But that if free riding on social arrangements made by people you believe to have the wrong ethics. And would vanish if they converted to the right ethics. Is that not a problem?

            “Fear of punishment is not the only egoistic concern. The fact is that serfdom or slavery is not in the interest even of the master class. ”

            “They are in a better position than the oppressed class, but the abolition of slavery or serfdom benefits everyone because it’s a much more efficient mode of production.”

            From behind a veil, it might make sense to bet on a system which is better for everybody. But in front of it, you might be able to see that you personally would do better from predation that from a fair share of societal wealth.

            Remember that people are not necessarily motivated by absolute wealth alone. People can also be motivated by status, sex and sadism.

            A hierarchical, deatheater society might not deliver the absolute wealth, but it can deliver huge wealth differentials, harems full of concubines and dungeons full of enemies..things you can’t get in a liberal democracy for any price.

            “The basic disagreement between us seems to be that you apparently think that there are large, ineradicable conflicts of interest among individuals and groups. You think it’s in the interest of the rich and powerful to rule tyrannically and take away everyone else’s freedom, but they don’t because they’re too stupid or duped by foolish moral theories to realize this.”

            The kinds of societies I am talking about have happened over and over. The deatheaters want to go back to something that used to exist. Hence theri name..the real, unspeakable one.

            “If it’s in the interest of men to oppress women, then men should oppress women.”

            According to EE. But you can’t argue the correctness of EE on the assumption of EE as a premise.

            If EE, as metaethics, leads to the grossly unintuitive object-level ethics, it is wrong as metaethics. That’s the only way of judging metaethics anyone has. You can’t use scientific empiricism.

            “However, I do not think that any such thing is the case. It is not in fact in the interests of men to oppress women. Both sides benefit from gender equality. Perhaps women benefit more (perhaps not!), but it’s a win-win bargain.”

            From behind a veil, you should choose equality, because then you won’t end up as an oppressed, exploited woman if you end up as a woman. But EE is not based on being behind a veil, and the people who know they would win in an unfair, unequal society, would know that they would be a winner, and have no selfish reason to care about the losers.

            You are still trying to ride two horses. These “everyone is better off” arguments aren’t EE.

            “In the same way, I think the existence both of political freedom for the poor and of income inequality is in the interests both of the rich and of the poor. ”

            What’s that got to do with EE?

            “If it were in the interest of the poor to overthrow capitalism and seize the means of production, then I would say they should do it.”

            That’s an implication of EE, but not a defence of EE. Socieities that discourage violent revolution thorugh egalitarianism, democratic representation, and so on are better
            for everyone, but they can’t be justified by EE, and Rand doens’t like them. EE just can’t get enough people to sign the contract.

            “But in fact, I think political and economic freedom is in the interest of both.”

            Political and economic freedom — certainly *negative* freedom — isn’t enough to stop class conflict, because there is no mechanism to prevent the losers in society being forced down to a postion of desperation. Objectivists amd libertarians have nothing to offer to adress that problem except hopes.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            Then do you concede the point that egoism, as a metaethical theory, is unable to support common object-level ethics, such as “stealing is wrong”.

            Not at all. It disputes the idea that stealing is absolutely, intrinsically wrong. If you’re Jean Valjean, you can steal a loaf of bread.

            But it certainly supports the idea that stealing, as a general rule, is wrong. Can you look at the life of the average criminal and say it’s a huge success that any self-interested person should want to imitate?

            But that if free riding on social arrangements made by people you believe to have the wrong ethics. And would vanish if they converted to the right ethics. Is that not a problem?

            I do not think they would vanish, as I think these social arrangements are quite practical from an egoistic viewpoint. If they would vanish, that doesn’t refute egoism. It just means I should shut up about it and practice egoism covertly while preaching altruism overtly.

            Yet even if promoting egoism has “negative externalities”, the entertainment value I get from discussing it is unlikely to be outweighed by the minuscule chance that I will inadvertently convince someone to go out and rob people—and become one of his victims. I’m not that influential.

            From behind a veil, it might make sense to bet on a system which is better for everybody. But in front of it, you might be able to see that you personally would do better from predation that from a fair share of societal wealth.

            You “might“. What I am disputing is that you will.

            Remember that people are not necessarily motivated by absolute wealth alone. People can also be motivated by status, sex and sadism.

            A hierarchical, deatheater society might not deliver the absolute wealth, but it can deliver huge wealth differentials, harems full of concubines and dungeons full of enemies..things you can’t get in a liberal democracy for any price.

            Are those things actually in the interest of anyone? Do they promote people’s ultimate happiness? I do not think so.

            The kinds of societies I am talking about have happened over and over. The deatheaters want to go back to something that used to exist. Hence theri name..the real, unspeakable one.

            Yes, these societies used to exist. And did the elites of those societies live better than the common man of today? I dispute it.

            According to EE. But you can’t argue the correctness of EE on the assumption of EE as a premise.

            I’m not arguing for ethical egoism on those grounds. I’m saying that those conclusions are a straightforward, unproblematic inference from the truth of egoism and certain empirical premises. I am saying that I disagree with those premises.

            If EE, as metaethics, leads to the grossly unintuitive object-level ethics, it is wrong as metaethics. That’s the only way of judging metaethics anyone has. You can’t use scientific empiricism.

            I am not an intuitionist. I completely disagree with that methodology.

            You don’t say: “murder is wrong, blasphemy is wrong, and sodomy is wrong; what ethical theory explains why all those are wrong?” That is completely backwards. Ethics consists of judgments, not direct observations. The object-level conclusions are necessarily less certain that the meta-level standards upon which those object-level judgments are based.

            If the object-level judgments seem “unintuitive”, it’s because people “intuitions” are the result of the application of other, unconsciously-held standards. It doesn’t mean those standards are correct.

            From behind a veil, you should choose equality, because then you won’t end up as an oppressed, exploited woman if you end up as a woman. But EE is not based on being behind a veil, and the people who know they would win in an unfair, unequal society, would know that they would be a winner, and have no selfish reason to care about the losers.

            You are still trying to ride two horses. These “everyone is better off” arguments aren’t EE.

            Life is not zero-sum.

            What I am saying is that a gender equality is better even for the “winners” under inequality. Not that the average is better. But that equality is a Pareto-improvement, or can be made that way through bargaining.

            I do not, as a matter of fact, think that I would be better off as a man with a harem full of slave concubines. If you think that you would be…frankly, I think that reflects more on your character than on mine.

            What’s that got to do with EE?

            That it’s not in the interest of a given poor person to try to overthrow the rich and steal their wealth?

            That’s an implication of EE, but not a defence of EE. Socieities that discourage violent revolution thorugh egalitarianism, democratic representation, and so on are better
            for everyone, but they can’t be justified by EE, and Rand doens’t like them. EE just can’t get enough people to sign the contract.

            You just keep asserting this. Why can’t they “get enough people to sign the contract”?

            Political and economic freedom — certainly *negative* freedom — isn’t enough to stop class conflict, because there is no mechanism to prevent the losers in society being forced down to a postion of desperation. Objectivists amd libertarians have nothing to offer to adress that problem except hopes.

            The mechanism that keeps the “losers” from being pushed down into a “position of desperation” is that it’s not in the interest of the “winners” to do so.

            The world is not zero-sum. It is not in the interest of some people to go and enslave/exterminate others.

            You just keep asserting ever-more absurd things about egoism, apparently with the idea that egoism is whatever any opponent believes it is. You haven’t even taken back your incredible assertion that egoism means infinite time preference.

            In any case, saying that I’m wrong about the empirical facts and that really it is in the interest of the rich and powerful to oppress everyone else is not an argument against egoism. And I am not arguing for egoism by saying that it isn’t. Whether “predation” is “prudent” is completely irrelevant to the metaethical status of egoism.

          • blacktrance says:

            This whole “egoism implies reactionary dystopia” argument reminds me of “If God doesn’t exist, then murder is okay”, and is equally mistaken.

            Also, egoism is an ethical theory, not a metaethical one. Metaethics is about the nature of moral properties and judgments, and ethical theory is about the principles of what one ought to do.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ blacktrance:

            Also, egoism is an ethical theory, not a metaethical one. Metaethics is about the nature of moral properties and judgments, and ethical theory is about the principles of what one ought to do.

            No, egoism is metaethical in that it says what makes something good is that it’s in your interest.

            Within that, you have different egoistic ethics. For instance, Objectivism vs. Epicureanism asceticism. Both are egoistic, but they have very different ideas of what, specifically, one’s interest consists of and how to achieve it.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Vox

            Views about what makes things wrong are not necessarily metaethical views, as philosophers normally conceive metaethics. Thinking that what makes adultery wrong is that it is the breaking of a promise is not taking a metaethical stand. Any first order moral view is going to say that what makes things wrong is that they violate the view’s preferred moral principles, and egoism is a view about the most general moral principle. You could hold egoism together with just about any metaethical view – you could be a noncognitivist egoist, an intuitionist nonnaturalist egoist, a naturalist egoist. Now, if you made the claim that the property of wrongness and the property of failing to maximize the agent’s own welfare are the very same property, or that “wrong” just means “fails to maximize the agent’s interests” then you would be engaging in metaethics. But not all egoists need be committed to those claims.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @Vox

            “Not at all. It disputes the idea that stealing is absolutely, intrinsically wrong. If you’re Jean Valjean, you can steal a loaf of bread.”

            Egoism doens’t support tonly he standard exceptions to standard rules either.

            Not only can poor Valjean steal a loaf, Baron Bolligrew can.. indeed should!..”wring form the horny hands of peasants their vile trash”.

            “But it certainly supports the idea that stealing, as a general rule, is wrong. Can you look at the life of the average criminal and say it’s a huge success that any self-interested person should want to imitate?”

            That’s not the case that needs to be answered. The hard case is people whose actual position in society is dominant, and therefore have no motivation to get into equitable arrangements with weaker individuals. They can..indeed should!…predate, and being dominant positon, they can set up legal and social mechanisms that allow them to get away with it. Baron Bolligrew’s theft is taxation his rapine “droit de seingeur”, and so on.

            “I do not think they would vanish, as I think these social arrangements are quite practical from an egoistic viewpoint. If they would vanish, that doesn’t refute egoism. It just means I should shut up about it and practice egoism covertly while preaching altruism overtly.”

            How very deatheaterish! You’re really helping me out here.

            “Yet even if promoting egoism has “negative externalities”, the entertainment value I get from discussing it is unlikely to be outweighed by the minuscule chance that I will inadvertently convince someone to go out and rob people—and become one of his victims. I’m not that influential.”

            The issue is the relation between ethics and politics. If the powerful made the kind of egoistic calculation you are recommending they would set up a tyranny or an oligarchy, not the required minanarcho-capitalist society.

            Compare with Marxism. It promises equality, but leads to anything but.

            (Perhaps we could avoid a repetition of the Marxism farrago this time around..the way that hordes of early twentieth century intellectuals enthused about a political system that looked great on paper, but didn’t work in practice for reasons which were weirldy understandable in hindsight. Perhaps the worlds intellectuals coudl do the world a service, this time around, by shooting down libertarianism before someone creates widespread misery by putting it into practice, ie Communism 2.0)

            “From behind a veil, it might make sense to bet on a system which is better for everybody. But in front of it, you might be able to see that you personally would do better from predation that from a fair share of societal wealth.

            You “might“. What I am disputing is that you will.”

            If you didn’t, in practice, you wouldn’t be an egoist in practice. That is like saying a Marxist society can work so long as people only pay lip service to Marxism and actually do something different. It proves too much, if it proves anything.

            “Are those things [harems and dungons] actually in the interest of anyone? Do they promote people’s ultimate happiness? I do not think so.”

            They might not be in line with some objective ethics..but then altruism might be the Objectively True ethics, as many think, but Randians don’t.

            I said earlier that Rand makes diversions into both contractualism and virtue theory. Saying that egoism is actually following some subset of your values that is somehow more moral or healthy than the aveage value is virtue theory. You are saying egoists should only follow their virtuous value and not their vicious ones…in contrast to you previous pronouncements that egoists should predate when they can get away with it.

            Virtue is, incidentally, not the same thing as long-termism. Many a tyrant thas died happily at an advanced age. A criminal is someone whose predation is against the law, a tyrant is somehow who both predates and defines the law.

            “Yes, these societies used to exist. And did the elites of those societies live better than the common man of today? I dispute it.”

            I have already answered that point, several times over. The elites may
            1) care more about relative than absolute wealth, and 2) be able to live better, because they can torture their enemies and rape their servants, entertainments which are not available in current society.

            “I am not an intuitionist. I completely disagree with that methodology.”

            What’s the alternative? How can you tell, in an intutiion-free way that egoism is correct ethics?

            “You don’t say: “murder is wrong, blasphemy is wrong, and sodomy is wrong; what ethical theory explains why all those are wrong?” That is completely backwards. ”

            You have no choice but to do something like that, because there is no other way of judging the correctness of premises. it’s not a great situation, and if there was a better way of dioing things, we would have solved ethics long ago.

            “Ethics consists of judgments, not direct observations. ”

            How do you observe goodness?

            “The object-level conclusions are necessarily less certain that the meta-level standards upon which those object-level judgments are based.”

            Which are what? You can be fairly certain that somethign does or does nto follow a premise, but how do you justify the premises?

            “If the object-level judgments seem “unintuitive”, it’s because people “intuitions” are the result of the application of other, unconsciously-held standards. It doesn’t mean those standards are correct.”

            What makes anything correct? How do you gert to conclusion without using unjustified premises? Show your working!

            “What I am saying is that a gender equality is better even for the “winners” under inequality. Not that the average is better.”

            Why? Don’t just make the claim, justifiy it.

            “I do not, as a matter of fact, think that I would be better off as a man with a harem full of slave concubines.”

            Doesn’t generalise. It’s been popular enough, where men could get away with it.

            “If you think that you would be…frankly, I think that reflects more on your character than on mine.”

            No, no,. no, this isn’t about who is personally virtuous. It’s about three things:

            1) Is Rand ethics correct?

            2) Is Rands politics correct?

            3) Does Rands politics follow form rand’s ethics?

            It’s a truism that all sorts of ethical and political systems can be made to work so long as everyone involved is a saint. But your given timber is crooked.

            “You just keep asserting this. Why can’t they “get enough people to sign the contract”?”

            Because it is not in the interest of enough of them. To pu it another way, it is much easier to make the average person better off than it is to make everyone better off.

            Actually, it doens’t matter how many people defect, it matters how strong they are. The people you most need to get into an ethical contract are the strongest, as they can do the most damage, but they are also those with the least to gain from one.
            (or at least, form entering one with the weak. They have plenty to gain from entering a contract with the equally strong. hence contracts where women are nothing but the property of men, and men agree to respect each others property)

            This has been tested in the laboratory of history. When the Cavaliers created Southern society, they were starting from a blank slate. And what they did was to create something even more unequal than English society, with slavery added to servitude.

            Political and economic freedom — certainly *negative* freedom — isn’t enough to stop class conflict, because there is no mechanism to prevent the losers in society being forced down to a postion of desperation. Objectivists amd libertarians have nothing to offer to adress that problem except hopes.

            “The mechanism that keeps the “losers” from being pushed down into a “position of desperation” is that it’s not in the interest of the “winners” to do so.”

            So it never happens? It is actually in the interests of winners to push people down to a millimetre before the point of rebellion. Some of them have misjudged that. Some of them have judged it finely, creatign long-lasting misery. And some of them have decided that that kind of brinksmanship is a bad idea, leading them to adopt liberal … not libertatian values.

            Liberalism, social democracy, can offer a no-revolution guarantee, because it has mechanisms in place to prevent revolts. Libertarianism, by contrast, runs on the hope that the winners will adopt the second solution I mentioned, even though history clearly shows the the probability of their dosing so is significantly less than 1.

            “The world is not zero-sum. It is not in the interest of some people to go and enslave/exterminate others.”

            Human psychology is largelty propelled by status, which is zero sum. remember the problems with communis..the fact thta it assumes an unrealistic model of human nature?

            “Infinite time prefernce”

            You said “whenever”. Maybe you take that back.

            “In any case, saying that I’m wrong about the empirical facts”

            What emprical facts? The complete absence of tyrrany, oligarchy and patriarchy?

            “and that really it is in the interest of the rich and powerful to oppress everyone else is not an argument against egoism. ”

            It’s an argument against my wanting to live in such a society, when I am likely to be among the everybody else.

            if you had some kind of rock-solid proof of egoism, I suppose I would have to accept the consequences. But you don’t.

            “And I am not arguing for egoism by saying that it isn’t. Whether “predation” is “prudent” is completely irrelevant to the metaethical status of egoism.”

            Jusdging metaethics by its ethical consequences is the default in the absence of the really robust apriori argument that no one has.

          • blacktrance says:

            Philososphisticat:

            You could hold egoism together with just about any metaethical view – you could be a noncognitivist egoist, an intuitionist nonnaturalist egoist, a naturalist egoist.

            You couldn’t be a noncognitivist egoist because noncognitivism excludes normative ethics altogether. Ask the noncognitivist (or error theorist) egoist whether it’s true that one ought to act in one’s self-interest – they can’t honestly answer in the affirmative.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Blacktrance

            You couldn’t be a noncognitivist egoist because noncognitivism excludes normative ethics altogether. Ask the noncognitivist (or error theorist) egoist whether it’s true that one ought to act in one’s self-interest – they can’t honestly answer in the affirmative.

            You can. To be an egoist, you just have to think that agents always ought to act in their own self-interest. You don’t also have to think that there’s some mind-independent fact involved. Noncognitivists still do first order ethics – they just have a particular view about what’s really going on underneath when they do so.

            Also, many of today’s sophisticated noncognitivists are happy to say not just that X is wrong, but that it’s true that x is wrong, and even perhaps that it’s a fact that x is wrong. That’s because they hold views about what it is to say something is true that don’t carry realist baggage. For instance, if you have a deflationary view about “true” such that to say “X is true” is just to assert “X”, then saying “it’s true that killing is wrong” is just the same as saying “killing is wrong” – i.e. it’s the expression of a noncognitive attitude.

            So the kind of intro-to-metaethics gloss on cognitivism and noncognitivism as “can moral claims be true or false?” turns out to be misleading.

          • blacktrance says:

            To be an egoist, you just have to think that agents always ought to act in their own self-interest. You don’t also have to think that there’s some mind-independent fact involved.

            If you define realism by mind-independence, yes, but I take realism to be the position that moral statements are truth-apt, some moral statements are true, and that the truth-maker of moral statements isn’t opinion – also, when you look at it closely, defining mind-independence in a way that cleanly separates realism from non-realism is difficult. Regardless of the position on mind-independent facts, though, one has to believe that moral statements can be true in order to subscribe to any normative theory, which definitely excludes noncognitivists and error theorists. By definition, non-cognitivists don’t think moral statements are truth-apt, so they can’t say that any ethical theory is true.

            As for the kind of application of “true” that’s used by deflationary noncognitivists as in your example, it gets away from substantive truths, e.g. “the cat is on the mat” is truth-apt in a way that “Boo murder!” or “Don’t murder!” isn’t, and the distinguishing feature of noncognitivists is that they think that moral claims are like the latter, even if they choose to use terminology in a way that makes them say that they think that moral claims can be true. People who believe that a normative theory is true believe it in the first sense.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Blacktrance

            If you want to reserve “egoism” and “utilitarianism” for realist views, that’s fine. They’re terms of art and nothing important rests on them, so use them how you like. But that’s not the way most philosophers use the terms. R.M. Hare, for instance, is famously a noncognitivist utilitarian. People have even argued that Mill was a noncognitivist. Substantive normative theories are taken to be compatible with either realist or noncognitivist metaethics.

            Also, noncognitivists who accept accounts of truth that allow them to say moral claims are true aren’t just choosing to use the word “true” with that meaning. They think that’s how “true” actually works, when ordinary folk and normative ethicists not engaged in metaethics are talking, even if they don’t realize it. You may think that they’re wrong about that, but that’s a substantive dispute.

          • blacktrance says:

            If there are any terms I’m using in a non-standard way, it’s “realism”/”non-cognitivism”/etc, rather than “utilitarianism” and “egoism”, because after a brief look at Hare (I’m not that familiar with him), I’m inclined to classify him as a realist even though he’s the classic example of a prescriptivist.

      • suntzuanime says:

        If you actually believe in moral truth, it doesn’t seem like appeal to consequences is actually a fallacy. Oftentimes we judge the truth of a proposition by looking at what that proposition implies and seeing if those implications seem likely to be true.

        Of course believing in moral truth is ridiculous.

        • Philosophisticat says:

          Are there other topics where you would be willing to say that something the majority of experts by any reasonable delineation of the term believe about something is not just false but ridiculous?

          I find people are weirdly confident about this stuff. Well, not weirdly, I guess. I also thought moral realism was obviously false before studying metaethics. In retrospect I’m embarrassed by it though.

          • Anon. says:

            I find people are weirdly confident about this stuff. Well, not weirdly, I guess. I also thought moral realism was obviously false before studying metaethics. In retrospect I’m embarrassed by it though.

            Go on, you can’t leave us hanging like that. What made you change your views?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Oh man, there are *so* many topics where I would be willing to say that something the majority of experts by any reasonable delineation of the term believe about something is not just false but ridiculous, lol

          • Philosophisticat says:

            >>>>Go on, you can’t leave us hanging like that. What made you change your views?

            I just found that the arguments against moral realism were much less compelling than I had thought. It’ll probably disappoint you, but it’s mostly a special case of “hey, philosophically contentious issues are genuinely hard, people haven’t just missed something obvious staring them in the face for thousands of years”.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            >>>Oh man, there are *so* many topics where I would be willing to say that something the majority of experts by any reasonable delineation of the term believe about something is not just false but ridiculous, lol

            Ah, well that explains it.

          • Anon. says:

            the arguments against moral realism were much less compelling than I had thought

            This implies realism-by-default, and realism as something that needs to be argued against. But clearly this is a Russell’s Teapot situation: anti-realism should be your default and realism needs to be argued for.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            Anon – I don’t think I agree with you about ‘defaults’, but setting that aside, I’m not claiming that realism is true, or that I was convinced to be a realist because arguments against realism weren’t as compelling as I thought. I was convinced that realism wasn’t obviously false because the arguments against realism weren’t as compelling as I thought.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Economics. Nutrition. Climate <ducking and running>.

          • onyomi says:

            Is there a name for the bias which prevents people reaching a conclusion the implication of which is that they and all their colleagues should go home and do something else?

          • Alliteration says:

            Green Anon. says “This implies realism-by-default, and realism as something that needs to be argued against. But clearly this is a Russell’s Teapot situation: anti-realism should be your default and realism needs to be argued for.”
            Considering that throughout history, moral realism is far more common than anti-realism*, it appears that human intuition favours moral realism.

            Russell’s Teapot is based on human intuition about the existence of physical objects.

            It seems that we should believe morals intuition over a trying to generalize physical-object intuition to morals; especially, because morals are so different from physical objects.

            *for example, most religions.

          • Wrong Species says:

            I’ve noticed that philosophers seem unusually reliant on the idea of consensus when it comes to moral realism. Just another reason for me to suspect something is wrong with it. Why are philosophers so obsessed with the idea of intuition when they pick and choose which intuitions they believe we should listen to?

          • Anon. says:

            Intuition isn’t magic. Unless you have evidence that intuition is better at finding the truth than systematic reason and/or empiricism, we can dismiss that argument (and your intuition) out of hand.

            And anyway, the teapot isn’t about intuition, it’s about making claims and then shifting the burden of proof to the anti- position.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Moral realism doesn’t clearly lead to the Russels Teapot problem since it doesn’t clearly require any additional entities.

            Before ditching intuition wholesale, consider the role of intuitive appeal in selecting mathematical axioms.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            “Intuition isn’t magic. Unless you have evidence that intuition is better at finding the truth than systematic reason and/or empiricism, we can dismiss that argument (and your intuition) out of hand.”

            There are a few things wrong with this. First, Using intuitions isn’t an alternative to using ‘systematic reason’ or empiricism. Our judgments about what systematic reason or empirical evidence supports are themselves at bottom motivated by intellectual seemings, i.e. intuitions. People who support the use of intuitions, moreover, don’t say we should do so at the expense of reason. Reason tells us what to do in light of our perceptual and intellectual seemings. So intuitions are both the grounds of and the material for our application of systematic reason.

            Second, the suggestion that we must dismiss some faculty out of hand if we cannot first (noncircularly) show that it is a reliable guide to truth leads you to skepticism. Try showing that perception is a reliable guide to the truth without appealing to any of the outputs of perception. It’s pretty hard.

          • Michael Huemer’s book Ethical Intuitionism is an explanation by a professional philosopher of how moral intuitions can be used as a basis for moral realism, which some here may find of interest. His view is pretty close to mine, although much more detailed.

          • Samedi says:

            @onyomi

            “Is there a name for the bias …”

            Good question. There should be. Closest I can find is the “System justification/status quo bias”. This doesn’t truly capture the phenomenon you are describing but it’s at least in the neighborhood. Maybe add a bit of “sunk cost” and we are closer still.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I just want to point out that moral realism is not the same as “intuitionism”.

            Moral realism is only the idea that “moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true.”

            Even subjectivism—the idea that what’s good for you is just whatever say it is—is a realist moral theory. The moral claim “this is good for me”, under that theory, reports a fact: I say it’s good. If I don’t say it’s good, it’s not good for me, so the claim is false.

            Moral naturalism—which is what I subscribe to—is the type of moral realism opposed to moral intuitionism. (Subjectivism actually is a type of naturalism, for that matter, just a very empty one.) Intuitionism says that there are some kind of special, fundamentally moral facts. Naturalism says that moral or evaluative facts reduce to, i.e. are another way of talking about, descriptive facts.

            Under naturalism, moral facts are just as real as facts in, say, civil engineering. There are no facts fundamentally, irreducibly “civil-engineerial” in nature. It all reduces to physics. But that doesn’t mean civil engineering isn’t real, or that question in it have no factual answers. Precisely the opposite is true: the fact that civil engineering reduces to facts outside that domain is why there are objective answers in it.

            While I have large disagreements with the details of her theory, Ayn Rand asked the right question for a naturalistic theory of ethics: what facts (i.e. descriptive facts) give rise to the concepts of “evaluation” or “ethics”? It is the fact that man desires certain ends, ends which cannot be achieved automatically but that require the pursuit of a certain course of action. What contributes to man’s ends is “valuable” or “good”; what detracts from them is “bad” or “evil”. (She goes on to argue that the only consistent end is one’s own survival, which is the part I disagree with.)

            The “is-ought problem” is supposed to be the big problem with moral naturalism. It’s definitely the favorite weapon of intuitionists like Huemer. The idea is supposed to be: no matter how many descriptive facts you add up, they will never imply an evaluative fact. But fundamentally, the is-ought problem is no different from the “physics-engineering problem”. Namely, no matter how many physical facts you add up, they can never imply an “engineerial” fact.

            Does this disprove engineering, or establish that it must be founded upon intuition? What’s the fallacy there? Obviously, it’s just that engineering is just defined as the study of certain physical facts in a particular context. (If you think engineering is too quasi-ethical, you can do the same with chemical facts or geological facts.) Whether to call them engineering facts is a human decision, but that doesn’t make the facts subjective or unreal.

            And the same goes for ethics: whether to call certain descriptive facts “evaluative” or “ethical” is a human decision, made to suit human purposes. But there is no mysterious gap which forces us to wonder how a descriptive fact could possibly imply an evaluative fact, as allegedly totally different kinds of facts. According to moral naturalism, the evaluative is a subcategory of the descriptive.

            (The naturalistic definition I have in mind is: “the good, for an individual, is that which tends to maximize that individual’s own happiness.” But I’m not going to argue for that here.)

            In any case, I am a realist about naturalistic moral facts (and I think everyone else should be, too—even if they think I’m wrong on the standard or think there is no objective standard). I’m an error theorist about Michael Huemer’s intuitive sort of “fundamentally moral” facts: I think he is making intelligible claims that are all false.

          • “The naturalistic definition I have in mind is: “the good, for an individual, is that which tends to maximize that individual’s own happiness.””

            How do you demonstrate from the facts of physical reality that one ought to act in the way that maximizes one’s happiness?

            That’s Hume’s is/ought problem.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ David Friedman:

            How do you demonstrate from the facts of physical reality that one ought to act in the way that maximizes one’s happiness?

            What does “ought to” mean? That’s the problem.

            The intuitionist assumes that “ought to” names some mysterious property which is not reducible to descriptive facts, and which we discover by a special faculty of “moral sense” or some equivalent.

            All I am saying is: I propose to define the word “ought” such that whatever maximizes one’s happiness is what one “ought” to do. It’s a useful conceptual shorthand, no different in my view from saying: I propose to define the word “table” to stand for “a piece of furniture consisting of a smooth flat slab fixed on legs”.

            There’s no problem of “how do you demonstrate from the physical facts of reality that such a structure has to be called a ‘table’?” Does anyone really think there’s something special about whether an object is a table, such that the question can only be answered by intuition?

            I’m not trying to say this is how everyone uses the word “good”, but they just don’t realize it or something. I don’t think everyone uses the word “good” in any one consistent way at all. It’s a vague, fuzzy concept. Like “cool” or “funky”. There’s no faculty of intuition that tells you whether something is cool or funky; you can’t point concretely to the essence of “funk” because there isn’t one.

            Naturalism—as I see it—inherently involves revisionism in regard to terminology. And there’s always a question of whether one should go with revisionism or elimitivism: if I say we should use the word “good” in this way as opposed to the vague way, am I saying goodness is this other thing, or am I saying goodness doesn’t exist?

            But I think it’s no different from the problem of revising the term “planet”. In Greek, it means “wanderer”, and they were conceived totally differently—sometimes as gods, sometimes as objects embedded in crystalline spheres. The Greeks were wrong about what planets were. But should we say that science has proven that planets don’t exist, or that planets are really something different?

            I think it’s helpful to speak of happiness as being the standard of the good because it illuminates more than it misleads. When I say it’s good, I intend most of the connotations that go along with the concept “good” as commonly used: I intend to praise it, recommend it, cheer for it, and so on. Whereas if I said something like “I don’t believe in morality; I am beyond good and evil,” it would connote that I don’t intend to judge or criticize behavior like lying, stealing, or killing—or that I think Hitler did nothing wrong, or something like that. (Moral error theory, as a matter of fact, does say that Hitler did nothing wrong—but also nothing right.)

            As a side note, to correct a misconception I saw somewhere: error theory does not deny the law of excluded middle. That law says everything is either A or non-A. But they say: murder is either wrong or non-wrong, and either right or non-right. And they conclude: murder is both non-wrong and non-right. Just as everyone else thinks the existence of Pluto is both non-wrong and non-right. This doesn’t contradict the law of excluded middle.

            Otherwise, the law of excluded middle would prove that everything is either red or green, since they are opposites. No, some things are non-red and non-green; they aren’t the only possibilities.

            By the way, I just want to add that I’m not a materialist. Naturalism says that evaluative facts reduce to descriptive facts, not necessarily that those descriptive facts are physical facts.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @Vox

            Cashing out moral norms in terms of non moral norms only gets you halfway to a closure of the is-ought gap . You need to explain where obligation comes from. Non moral shoulds tend be conditional… if you want to build a bridge that doesn’t fall down, you should do so and so.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            Ah, but I think they are conditional. I only believe in hypothetical imperatives, not categorical imperatives.

            This is one area where I think Rand laid things out very well:

            The proper approach to ethics, the start from a metaphysically clean slate, untainted by any touch of Kantianism, can best be illustrated by the following story. In answer to a man who was telling her that she’s got to do something or other, a wise old Negro woman said: “Mister, there’s nothing I’ve got to do except die.”

            Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “—if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.

            […]

            In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be cheating, but himself.

            […]

            The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            Vox Imperatoris: I don’t think the is-ought problem in the simple form you describe is taken to be the biggest problem for moral naturalism. Most metaethicists these days will agree that “you can’t derive an ought from an is” is, taken literally, not really a special problem for naturalistic reduction of morality (rather than anything else). Rather, the slogan should be taken as elliptical for something more subtle about the way natural and moral facts are ‘just too different’, usually cashed out through some kind of internalism. I think you’re probably aware of this but I worry you’re giving the impression that objectors to moral naturalism are stupider and more easily refuted than they are.

            (Their main objection to your own view will probably be that by offering a reforming definition you’re changing the subject)

          • Anon. says:

            @Vox

            I don’t understand why you need realism for that.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Philosophisticat

            Our judgments about what systematic reason or empirical evidence supports are themselves at bottom motivated by intellectual seemings, i.e. intuitions.

            Really? My judgment that the sun having risen every day in the past supports my belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is “motivated” by an intellectual seeming? How so?

            Second, the suggestion that we must dismiss some faculty out of hand if we cannot first (noncircularly) show that it is a reliable guide to truth leads you to skepticism.

            On the other hand, the suggestion that we are entitled to trust the outputs of a faculty without any independent evidence that the faculty is reliable leads to dogmatism unlimited. “The crystal ball says you’ll win the lottery next week.” “How do you know that it’s trustworthy?” “Because the crystal ball said so!”

            @ Vox

            Even subjectivism—the idea that what’s good for you is just whatever say it is—is a realist moral theory.

            We’ve been over this before, Vox. Almost nobody thinks that. Virtually all definitions make belief in the mind- and language-independence of moral truth a requirement for being a realist. Think about what you would say to someone who told you that he believed that global warming was real, real because Katie thinks it to be. You’d say he was speaking in riddles, wouldn’t you? The same goes for moral realism.

            Moral naturalism—which is what I subscribe to—is the type of moral realism opposed to moral intuitionism.

            This is not really true; Moore-style intuitionism combines a non-naturalist moral ontology with the thesis that moral knowledge is acquired via intuition, but there are other forms of non-naturalism. Kant was a non-naturalist but not an intuitionist, for example.

            All I am saying is: I propose to define the word “ought” such that whatever maximizes one’s happiness is what one “ought” to do.

            This is not a realist view. Realism requires that moral truths be language-independent (see above), but prescriptive moral truths on your view will be true only by stipulative definition in the Vox-language.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @EarthlyKnight

            Really? My judgment that the sun having risen every day in the past supports my belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is “motivated” by an intellectual seeming? How so?

            Why think that induction is the rational way to form beliefs, rather than counterinduction (according to which the fact that the sun has risen every day in the past supports that it will not rise tomorrow)? Is it that induction has inductive support? But that’s circular, and by the same lights counterinduction has counterinductive support. For that matter, why think that it’s rational to believe things that are likely true rather than likely false? Or for more fun, see the ‘new riddle of induction’ about grue-like predicates. While of course it’s controversial, I think the lesson to draw from these problems of induction is that we accept induction rather than counterinduction, (and take our evidence to support green-like conclusions rather than grue-like conclusions) because induction just seems intuitively good and counterinduction seems intuitively stupid (or that those principles codify our intuitions about which particular judgments are good or stupid).

            On the other hand, the suggestion that we are entitled to trust the outputs of a faculty without any independent evidence that the faculty is reliable leads to dogmatism unlimited. “The crystal ball says you’ll win the lottery next week.” “How do you know that it’s trustworthy?” “Because the crystal ball said so!”

            I think you’re missing the dialectic. Anon’s comment suggested a principle that was supposed to explain why we can dismiss the output of intuition. I pointed out that the same principle tells us that we should be skeptical about perception. Assuming that skepticism about perception isn’t correct, that means the principle is wrong. I’m not claiming that there are no constraints on when we are entitled to trust a faculty. But “you need to independently show that the faculty is reliable first” isn’t it. Pointing out that “anything goes, always” is also a lousy rule doesn’t contradict anything I said. The challenge is to find a plausible principle that will tell us to reject our intuitions but not tell us to reject perception.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Behold, as I validly deduce a conclusion containing the verb “ought” from premises containing only the verb “is”!

            1. The cat is on the mat
            2. It is not the case that the cat is on the mat

            3. Therefore, you ought to donate your life savings to MIRI (1, 2, explosion)

            Prepare to be amazed, as I perform the same feat from no premises at all!


            1. The cat is on the mat or it is not the case that the cat is on the mat (LEM)
            2. Therefore, the cat is on the mat or it is not the case that the cat is on the mat or you ought to donate your life savings to MIRI (1, DI)

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @Vox

            The obligatoriness of moral behaviour is required in the social context. You are required to behave morally unconditionally, irrespective of whatever else you are doing, and you cannot excuse yourself on the grounds that the laws of nature did not prevent you from stealing.

            You seem to think you have improved on Rand, but I am not seeing it. Rand needs to show that the individual good is the true moral good, and that the social or universal good isnt, which means she needs to write sentences comparing the one to the other. Notoriously, what she actually does is write sentences saying Man this and Man that, in other words sentences which are ambiguous between individual and group,….and you follow her in that.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anon.:

            I don’t understand why you need realism for that.

            What is this supposed to mean? Realism just is the view that ethical propositions are meaningful, can be right or wrong, and at least some of the time are true.

            @ Earthly Knight:

            We’ve been over this before, Vox. Almost nobody thinks that. Virtually all definitions make belief in the mind- and language-independence of moral truth a requirement for being a realist. Think about what you would say to someone who told you that he believed that global warming was real, real because Katie thinks it to be. You’d say he was speaking in riddles, wouldn’t you? The same goes for moral realism.

            Take it up with the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from which I quoted that definition. I’m not being idiosyncratic.

            If you want to, you can say that subjectivism is not a realist theory. That doesn’t affect my argument because I’m not advocating subjectivism.

            As for your global warming example, I’d say that’s a bad theory of global warming because the climatological features we care about in the world, to which we give the name “global warming”, are not determined by anyone’s subjective opinion. In just the same way that whether an action will promote happiness is not determined by subjective opinion.

            This is not really true; Moore-style intuitionism combines a non-naturalist moral ontology with the thesis that moral knowledge is acquired via intuition, but there are other forms of non-naturalism. Kant was a non-naturalist but not an intuitionist, for example.

            Fair enough. But in practice, “ethical non-naturalism” is virtually synonymous with Moore’s position.

            This is not a realist view. Realism requires that moral truths be language-independent (see above), but prescriptive moral truths on your view will be true only by stipulative definition in the Vox-language.

            I dispute that realism requires moral truths to be language independent. But in any case, the facts to which my moral theory is referring are language-independent. My theory is as entirely language-independent as any theory of physics. We could call the universal attractive force something else; it would still be gravity. We could call happiness something else; it would still be good, in the sense I am calling it good.

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            The obligatoriness of moral behaviour is required in the social context. You are required to behave morally unconditionally, irrespective of whatever else you are doing, and you cannot excuse yourself on the grounds that the laws of nature did not prevent you from stealing.

            Not at all. If you want other people to respect your rights, you have to respect their rights. There’s no absolute commandment against stealing. It just has a price: if you steal, then you will be punished. If, after rational deliberation, you find stealing to advance your ends on net, even factoring in the negative consequences, then there’s nothing wrong with tit.

            You seem to think you have improved on Rand, but I am not seeing it. Rand needs to show that the individual good is the true moral good, and that the social or universal good isnt, which means she needs to write sentences comparing the one to the other. Notoriously, what she actually does is write sentences saying Man this and Man that, in other words sentences which are ambiguous between individual and group,….and you follow her in that.

            I don’t know what you mean by the “true moral good”. Neither Rand nor I believe in a “social good” or a “universal good”. What’s good for one person isn’t the same as what’s good for someone else. There are factors that people have in common, which is what makes it possible for us to speak in terms of general principles. But each person has to apply those principles to his own case, in a contextual way; they’re not rigid deontological rules.

            As James Fitzjames Stephen put it:

            Why should a man consult the general happiness of mankind? Why should he prefer obedience to a rule to a specific calculation in a specific case, when, after all, the only reason for obeying the rule is the advantage to be got by it, which by the hypothesis is not an advantage, but a loss in the particular case? A given road may be the direct way from one place to another, but that fact is no reason for following the road when you are offered a short cut. It may be a good general rule not to seek for more than 5 per cent in investments, but if it so happens that you can invest at 10 per cent with perfect safety, would not a man who refused to do so be a fool?

            This was in response to utilitarians like J.S. Mill who advanced the theory that acting according to the greatest happiness of the greatest number was also the way to maximize one’s own personal happiness. Which is indeed a foolish theory.

            If you say, “I don’t want to maximize my personal happiness,” then fine. The only question is whether the reason you don’t want to is that you mistakenly think there is some kind of intrinsic moral duty to serve the “general good”. It’s irrational to do something on the basis of a false reason.

            Rand framed things in a different way, but she had the right idea when she said that the choice to live is a pre-moral choice. If a person doesn’t choose to live, then he doesn’t require any code of values to organize his actions; by default, by inaction, he will achieve his goal of death. (However, I do not think she was right that the choice to live, in itself, requires one to hold one’s survival as one’s highest value. Indeed, it obviously doesn’t as Rand herself points out that there can be situations where life is no longer worth living.)

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @EK

            It might be helpful to view this in terms of ..

            ” The Münchhausen trilemma is that we have only three options when providing proof in this situation:

            The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)
            The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
            The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)
            The first two methods of reasoning are fundamentally weak, and because the Greek skeptics advocated deep questioning of all accepted values, they refused to accept proofs of the third sort. The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options.”

            On the other hand, the suggestion that we are entitled to trust the outputs of a faculty without any independent evidence that the faculty is reliable leads to dogmatism

            On the third hand, that runs into the MT. What are you chekcing the suspicious faculty against? Something that itself needs checking, ie regress? Something that confirms itself, ie circularity? Or something that you are just assuming is OK. ie arbitrary starting point?

          • Anon. says:

            I don’t understand why “You must eat, if you want to survive” should be an ethical proposition at all. Anti-realists think they’re perfectly meaningful. The reason being that they are a completely different type of proposition. It does not concern ends, only means. It does not concern moral obligation or make reference to moral fact, it only concerns things that exist and the relationship between them. There is no is-ought gap to cross here, because the proposition is conditional.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anon.:

            I don’t understand why “You must eat, if you want to survive” should be an ethical proposition at all. Anti-realists think they’re perfectly meaningful. The reason being that they are a completely different type of proposition. It does not concern ends, only means. It does not concern moral obligation or make reference to moral fact, it only concerns things that exist and the relationship between them. There is no is-ought gap to cross here, because the proposition is conditional.

            At some level, you can look at this as just a dispute over definitions and the meaning of terms.

            The anti-realists accept the non-naturalists’ framing of the issue, including the idea that moral truths ought to be categorically binding and absolutely universal. And they conclude that there are no such truths.

            The naturalists (at least the ones like me) reject the non-naturalists’ framing of the issue. They think the definition of morality and the “essential qualities” put forward by the non-naturalists are bad and misguided. They propose a different definition, such that talking about what’s good and bad would be meaningful and useful. They want to salvage our very useful practices of talking about good and evil, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

            Just as scientists kept talking about “planets” after they figured out they weren’t aetherial objects encased in crystalline spheres. If a “Ptolemaic intuitionist” says that planets are by definition aetherial and encased in crystalline spheres, we could let him have his definition and say we don’t believe in planets. Or we could say his definition is bad.

            The same issue comes up in epistemology. You could accept Descartes’s idea that you can only be said to “know” that of which you are absolutely certain about which you could not be wrong. But nobody ever can be absolutely certain of anything. Does that mean knowledge is impossible, or that Descartes had a bad/unproductive idea of what knowledge would consist of?

            On the other hand, there are issues where I see this revisionism vs. elimitivism thing from the other side. As a metaphysical libertarian (i.e. a believer in free will of the sort that contradicts determinism), it annoys me when I see people like Daniel Dennett or Eliezer Yudkowsky say they believe in “free will”. Because on the actual facts, they seem to be in perfect agreement with the “hard determinists” who deny free will. The only dispute is a terminological one: whether they want to accept the libertarians’ idea of what free will would be—and then deny that it exists—or whether they want to come up with a new and allegedly better definition.

            The difference between the two cases, in my view, is that I think moral language is very useful and virtually impossible to eliminate—even if some people have a mistaken conception of what they’re talking about in this area. Whereas in the area of free will, I think the (metaphysically) libertarian language refers to something real and actual, with the compatibilists coming in and muddying the waters by saying they “believe in” free will, but it’s something totally different.

            Ironically, I suppose that if I didn’t believe in free will, I might be more inclined to be a compatibilist. Because then I would think that a distinction between “free choices” and “determined choices” is a pointless one that isn’t founded on the facts of reality (since there could be nothing occupying the first category).

          • Anon. says:

            But in this case you’re the one muddying the waters, by grouping together “there exists a moral obligation to maximize utility” and “if you want to not be thirsty, drink some water”.

            On the actual facts, you seem to be in perfect agreement with the “non-cog anti-realists”.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Vox

            I think it’s misleading to compare your revisionist view with what happens when we learn that the planets aren’t aetherial objects encased in spheres. People who talked about planets always referred to those things in the sky, whatever they were. People had ideas about what those things were, and those ideas turned out to be wrong. But we didn’t have to revise the meaning of “planet” in light of those discoveries – we just changed what we thought about planets. This is in contrast to the genuinely revisionist thing you want to do with morality, which is more akin to saying “actually, it turned out everything people ever said about planets was false because they didn’t exist, but planet talk was sure helpful/fun, so going forward lets use the word “planet” to talk about this other thing.” This is why it strikes many people, who are interested in the property their mother or their priest ascribed to lying, as changing the subject. To us, you just sound like an error theorist, and considerations about how useful other ways of using the word “good” might be are about as interesting as considerations about how useful it would be to use the word “tak” to refer to cats.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anon.:

            But in this case you’re the one muddying the waters, by grouping together “there exists a moral obligation to maximize utility” and “if you want to not be thirsty, drink some water”.

            But in this case, the “if you want not to be thirsty, drink some water” tradition goes back a long way, and it is a very sensible explanation of why people use moral language in the way that they do. “Intuitions”, on the other hand, are not a good explanation because there aren’t any. But see below.

            @ Philosophisticat:

            People who talked about planets always referred to those things in the sky, whatever they were. People had ideas about what those things were, and those ideas turned out to be wrong. But we didn’t have to revise the meaning of “planet” in light of those discoveries – we just changed what we thought about planets.

            Well, in the same way, I think there are not and never were any kind of binding categorical imperatives. So people couldn’t possibly have been talking about them. When people were talking about moral obligations in that way, they were confused. I believe in the concept of moral obligation; I agree with statements like “you ought to pay your debts”. I just believe that certain theories are wrong about the source and nature of moral obligation.

            This is in contrast to the genuinely revisionist thing you want to do with morality, which is more akin to saying “actually, it turned out everything people ever said about planets was false because they didn’t exist, but planet talk was sure helpful/fun, so going forward lets use the word “planet” to talk about this other thing.”

            Again, I think your characterization is unfair. I am in total agreement with at least 90% of what people say about morality. I think stealing and murder are wrong. I think hard work and rationality are good. It’s only when we rise to the level of abstract theory that I disagree on the reason why these things are right or wrong, and what exactly the metaethical nature of something being right or wrong is.

            But most people don’t have coherent views on metaethics, so I can hardly be contradicting them. And even for the ones who do, if disagreeing on the metaethical nature of the good means you “don’t really believe in it”, then as far as e.g. deontologists are concerned, consequentialists don’t really believe in morality, and vice versa.

            Besides, the kind of view I’m advocating has a long history. It is the view of many of the Ancient Greeks, who certainly didn’t see themselves as denying morality. Aristotle, for instance, said that all men naturally desire happiness, and that this is the basis of ethics. Happiness is the end; everything else is a means. Epicurus said that all men desire pleasure, and that this is the basis of ethics. Pleasure is the end; everything else is a means. Virtues aren’t good “in themselves”; they’re good because they advance an end that people actually do want. For instance, here’s a summary of Epicurus’s views on justice:

            Like the virtues, justice is valued entirely on instrumental grounds, because of its utility for each of the members of society. Epicurus says that the main reason not to be unjust is that one will be punished if one gets caught, and that even if one does not get caught, the fear of being caught will still cause pain. However, he adds that the fear of punishment is needed mainly to keep fools in line, who otherwise would kill, steal, etc. The Epicurean wise man recognizes the usefulness of the laws, and since he does not desire great wealth, luxury goods, political power, or the like, he sees that he has no reason to engage in the conduct prohibited by the laws in any case.

            Although justice only exists where there is an agreement about how to behave, that does not make justice entirely ‘conventional,’ if by ‘conventional’ we mean that any behavior dictated by the laws of a particular society is thereby just, and that the laws of a particular society are just for that society. Since the ‘justice contract’ is entered into for the purpose of securing what is useful for the members of the society, only laws that are actually useful are just. Thus, a prohibition of murder would be just, but antimiscegenation laws would not. Since what is useful can vary from place to place and time to time, what laws are just can likewise vary.

            If you want to say that only Immanuel Kant and maybe G.E. Moore ever believed in morality, fine. But I regard that as silly.

            Would you say J.S. Mill didn’t really believe in morality? Because he had the exact sort of view I am laying out: that the greatest good of the greatest number is valuable because people actually do value it, or would if they thought about it.

            This is why it strikes many people, who are interested in the property their mother or their priest ascribed to lying, as changing the subject. To us, you just sound like an error theorist, and considerations about how useful other ways of using the word “good” might be are about as interesting as considerations about how useful it would be to use the word “tak” to refer to cats.

            The point is that I agree with your mother (if she was not an ethical philosopher) that lying is wrong. I disagree with your priest on why it’s wrong.

            If I actually did believe that all of almost all of what people said in the past about ethics was false and useless, then I would say I reject morality. In the same way as if I believed all of almost all of what people said about planets in the past was wrong. But since I don’t believe that, I don’t say it. In the example of planets, even though people were wrong about what planets were, they correctly identified these objects as being special in some way, and they correctly tracked and predicted their motion throughout the sky.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            Again, I think your characterization is unfair. I am in total agreement with at least 90% of what people say about morality. I think stealing and murder are wrong. I think hard work and rationality are good. It’s only when we rise to the level of abstract theory that I disagree on the reason why these things are right or wrong, and what exactly the metaethical nature of something being right or wrong is.

            But most people don’t have coherent views on metaethics, so I can hardly be contradicting them. And even for the ones who do, if disagreeing on the metaethical nature of the good means you “don’t really believe in it”, then as far as e.g. deontologists are concerned, consequentialists don’t really believe in morality, and vice versa.

            If you want to say that only Immanuel Kant and maybe G.E. Moore ever believed in morality, fine. But I regard that as silly.

            Would you say J.S. Mill didn’t really believe in morality? Because he had the exact sort of view I am laying out: that the greatest good of the greatest number is valuable because people actually do value it, or would if they thought about it.

            If I actually did believe that all of almost all of what people said in the past about ethics was false and useless, then I would say I reject morality. In the same way as if I believed all of almost all of what people said about planets in the past was wrong. But since I don’t believe that, I don’t say it. In the example of planets, even though people were wrong about what planets were, they correctly identified these objects as being special in some way, and they correctly tracked and predicted their motion throughout the sky.

            There’s a difference between agreeing with someone who says “X” and thinking that it would be useful to change the meaning of “X” to something that would be appropriate to say in the circumstances they said it. You don’t agree with someone merely in virtue of using the same words as they do. You have to use them with the same meaning. So no, you don’t agree with 90% of what people say about morality, anymore than two people who both call Garfield a “cat” are agreeing if one of them uses “cat” to refer to cats and the other uses “cat” to refer to dogs.

            Either you think the non-naturalist is wrong about the ordinary use of moral language, and think you are using moral language with the same meaning as my mother, in which case your view is not revisionary, or you think my mother is mistaken about lying (or maybe you think that the word “wrong” is meaningless and so my mom is speaking gibberish; I can’t quite tell), and simply endorse a new dialect according to which it turns out that the word “wrong” could be used to describe lying.

            I agree that you’re not disagreeing with my mother about metaethics. My mother doesn’t have views about metaethics. You’re disagreeing with her about what’s right. She thinks that lying is wrong. You think, as best I can tell, that nothing is wrong but that we should change the use of “wrong” to something naturalistically respectable and which could be applied to lying.

            I’m certainly not saying that anyone who doesn’t hold moral nonnaturalism as a metaethical view has no views about morality. You don’t have to have the right views (or views at all) about metaethics to have views about ethics. I think Mill and Kant and most people who talk about morality are using moral language with its ordinary meaning.

            Suppose someone decided it would be useful to use the word “Gods” to refer to marshmallows, and did so. This person doesn’t believe in any sort of supernatural agents or the like. Is this person an atheist? Yes, they are an atheist. They reject all gods. They’re not in agreement with people who think god exists. It’s like that old joke: “How many legs does a dog have if you call an ostrich a ‘dog’? Four.” In the same way, you reject morality. Of course, you might not want to describe yourself that way in your proposed dialect, in the same way that the marshmallow guy wouldn’t describe himself as rejecting “gods”, in his dialect. But that’s neither here nor there.

            There’s more to say about your post but it’s all more or less on the same theme and I’m already repeating myself – you’re confusing your views about how words could be usefully used with views about the stuff referred to by those words by actual people.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @Vox

            “Not at all. If you want other people to respect your rights, you have to respect their rights. ”

            Says the contractarian. Inasmuch as that is contractarian, it isn’t egoistic.

            “If, after rational deliberation, you find stealing to advance your ends on net, even factoring in the negative consequences, then there’s nothing wrong with tit.”

            Says the egoist, not the contractarian. If you are in a contract where you agree not to steal from people on the undertanding that they won’t steal from you, you are obliged not to steal under the terms of the contract. The advantage of contractarianism is that it explains where obligation comes from, and avoids the prudent predator problem. The disadvantage of contractariansim, as a defence of egoism, is that it isnt egoism, or compatible with egoism. The contractarian is obliged to keep to the contract, the egoist is required to break it if it is in their interest to do so. You are trying to ride two horses.

            “I don’t know what you mean by the “true moral good”.”

            The moral good is what discussions of morality are about.

            ” Neither Rand nor I believe in a “social good” or a “universal good”.”

            That’s not the point. The point is that Rand does not succesfully argue against the social good, because doing so would require writing sentences that are clearly about the social good as opposed to the individual good, and she does not do that.

            “What’s good for one person isn’t the same as what’s good for someone else.”

            Under some sense of “good” that is not necessrilly the moral good. That is Rand’s other argument from ambiguity.

            “There are factors that people have in common, which is what makes it possible for us to speak in terms of general principles. But each person has to apply those principles to his own case, in a contextual way; they’re not rigid deontological rules.”

            Could you address my point directly: is it possible to show that the moral good is individual and not social by writing “man this..”andr “man that..”?

            “Why should a man consult the general happiness of mankind? Why should he prefer obedience to a rule to a specific calculation …”

            You have already answered this during your brief excursion into contractarianism; if you can formulate binding agreements to abide by certain rules with other people, then you get the advantage of achieving more co-operate/co-operate outcomes than otherwise.

            “Rand framed things in a different way, but she had the right idea when she said that the choice to live is a pre-moral choice. If a person doesn’t choose to live, then he doesn’t require any code of values to organize his actions; by default, by inaction, he will achieve his goal of death. ”

            She frames it as though it can only mean that every individiuals own life is the most important value to that individual, but you could just as well say that the survival of the group is simultaneously the most basic and most important moral value, so that individuals should die in battle to save the group. the whole thing is based on ambiguous phraseology, as I said.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Philosophisticat:

            Either you think the non-naturalist is wrong about the ordinary use of moral language, and think you are using moral language with the same meaning as my mother, in which case your view is not revisionary, or you think my mother is mistaken about lying, and simply endorse a new dialect according to which it turns out that the word “wrong” could be used to describe lying.

            If the non-naturalist says that everyone uses moral language in his non-naturalistic way, that this is well-established, but that I’m using terms totally differently, that would be one thing. But I think such a view would be wrong.

            What I am saying is that the metaethical meaning of ordinary language here is vague—like “cool” or “funky”—and that revising it so as to be more clear is perfectly appropriate.

            I don’t believe that everyone consistently uses moral language the way I do. But neither do I believe that they consistently use it in the opposite way. They just don’t use it in any consistent way at all. And my way has as much historical force behind it as any other way. More even, insofar as the idea that moral injunctions are totally categorical and divorced from people’s actual goals didn’t really solidify until the 18th century with Immanuel Kant.

            The concept of “enlightened self-interest” has a long history even in the Christian tradition. There is a long train of people who argued that the reason you should act according to conventional morality is that God will reward you if you do and punish you if you don’t. It wasn’t necessarily what the orthodox priests and bishops endorsed, but this attitude was probably and is probably today the more widespread among the common people.

            I agree that you’re not disagreeing with my mother about metaethics. My mother doesn’t have views about metaethics. You’re disagreeing with her about what’s right. She thinks that lying is wrong. You think, as best I can tell, that nothing is wrong but that we should change the use of “wrong” to something naturalistically respectable and which could be applied to lying.

            This is self-contradictory. At first, you say your mother doesn’t have views on metaethics. Then you say that she implicitly does have strong metaethical views that exclude my use of the word “wrong” from counting as “really wrong”. That actually your mother is a secret moral intuitionist or something.

            In fact, I agree with your mother that lying is wrong, insofar as it is possible to agree or disagree with someone who has a vague concept. She is not too clear on why it is wrong, so it’s hard to see how I can be failing to satisfy criteria that she never put forward. If you ask her leading questions, maybe you could get her to endorse some non-naturalistic qualities about lying. But if you ask her other leading questions, you could get her to endorse naturalistic ones.

            For example, statements like “Honesty is the best policy”; “What goes around, comes around”; “Crime doesn’t pay”; and so on. Those are the kind of naturalistic reasons people give all the time to behave morally.

            I’m certainly not saying that anyone who doesn’t hold moral realism as a metaethical view has no views about morality. You don’t have to have the right views (or views at all) about metaethics to have views about ethics. I think Mill and Kant and just about everyone who’s talked about morality is using moral language with its ordinary meaning.

            Are you saying you don’t believe that Mill was a moral realist? That seems silly. Realism, as I said, is simply the view that moral statements have a truth value, and that sometimes they’re true.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ TheAncientGeek:

            Says the contractarian. Inasmuch as that is contractarian, it isn’t egoistic.

            I’m not a contractarian. I don’t know where you’re getting that from.

            Says the egoist, not the contractarian. If you are in a contract where you agree not to steal from people on the undertanding that they won’t steal from you, you are obliged not to steal under the terms of the contract. The advantage of contractarianism is that it explains where obligation comes from, and avoids the prudent predator problem. The disadvantage of contractariansim, as a defence of egoism, is that it isnt egoism, or compatible with egoism. The contractarian is obliged to keep to the contract, the egoist is required to break it if it is in their interest to do so. You are trying to ride two horses.

            I am not trying to “ride two horses”. I agree that you should break the contract whenever it is in your interest to do so.

            However, I think such situations are not commonplace, particularly not under a political system of laissez-faire capitalism. I don’t think there is a “prudent predator problem”. If predation is prudent, then it’s good, period. What I am denying is that predation is actually prudent.

            That is the error that I think the people who put forth this argument are making: they have too narrow a conception of their interests. I’ve quoted a passage concerning this a million times from Fitzjames Stephen; I’m not going to quote it again, but I’ll link it here.

            That’s not the point. The point is that Rand does not succesfully argue against the social good, because doing so would require writing sentences that are clearly about the social good as opposed to the individual good, and she does not do that.

            Rand doesn’t “argue against” the “social good” because there’s no reason to. There’s no case for the “social good”. The concept of ethics arises, under her account, out of the desire of individuals to pursue their own lives and happiness. That is the reason why people need to make a distinction between good and bad: some actions will promote these ends, and others will hinder them.

            The moral good is what discussions of morality are about.

            And Rand clearly defines her terms, making it known precisely what she is talking about. The moral good, as she uses the term, is defined as what promotes an individual’s life, which she argued is the same as what promotes his happiness.

            Could you address my point directly: is it possible to show that the moral good is individual and not social by writing “man this..”andr “man that..”?

            Your point is not very clear. I’m not trying to be snarky. I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to get across here.

            Rand writes “man this” and “man that” because she is talking about general principles that apply to all men. But they apply to all men in their capacities as individuals. When she says e.g. rationality or productivity are good “for man”, she doesn’t mean they’re good for society. She means they’re good for all individuals, in virtue of being human beings with common characteristics.

            It’s the same as saying “salt is a necessary part of the human diet”. That doesn’t mean that, in society, someone somewhere has to eat salt. It means that each individual has to eat salt.

            You have already answered this during your brief excursion into contractarianism; if you can formulate binding agreements to abide by certain rules with other people, then you get the advantage of achieving more co-operate/co-operate outcomes than otherwise.

            Yes, but the agreements are binding only insofar as they continue to be in each individual’s interest to keep.

            One such factor making it in the individual’s interest to keep promises is his reputation. Another is his fear of legal punishment. Another is his desire to cultivate beneficial habits of promise-keeping. If he finds it natural and easy to keep promises, this is likely to serve him better than if he tries to waste time puzzling out in every interaction whether there’s a way to cheat his fellow participants.

            She frames it as though it can only mean that every individiuals own life is the most important value to that individual, but you could just as well say that the survival of the group is simultaneously the most basic and most important moral value, so that individuals should die in battle to save the group. the whole thing is based on ambiguous phraseology, as I said.

            No, Rand said that each individual’s ultimate purpose is to achieve his own happiness, and that the choice to live the metaphysical concomitant of this. That the achievement of happiness requires holding one’s own life as one’s ultimate value. That is not a theory I fully endorse.

            Yet Rand still said that the reason to choose life was to consistently pursue one’s own happiness, that one values life precisely because it allows one to organize one’s values “without contradiction”. Sacrificing oneself to the group is not a way to consistently pursue happiness, because there will come times when the thing that most serves the group is not simultaneously the thing that most serves one’s own long-run happiness. One should only serve the group insofar as it contributes to one’s own happiness.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            If the non-naturalist says that everyone uses moral language in his non-naturalistic way, that this is well-established, but that I’m using terms totally differently, that would be one thing. But I think such a view would be wrong.

            What I am saying is that the metaethical meaning of ordinary language here is vague—like “cool” or “funky”—and that revising it so as to be more clear is perfectly appropriate.

            I don’t believe that everyone consistently uses moral language the way I do. But neither do I believe that they consistently use it in the opposite way. They just don’t use it in any consistent way at all. And my way has as much historical force behind it as any other way. More even, insofar as the idea that moral injunctions are totally categorical and divorced from people’s actual goals didn’t really solidify until the 18th century with Immanuel Kant.

            Maybe you think that different people, even ordinary folk, were just historically talking past each other and there is no remotely unified core meaning to moral terms, and therefore basically no genuine moral disagreement. I don’t think that’s true but at least I would kind of understand your view. In that case you’d be some kind of pluralist about moral concepts, a realist about some and an anti-realist about others. Even if some sort of moral pluralism is correct, though, I don’t think almost anyone ever has simply meant your naturalistic account by “moral”, even if they agreed with it extensionally.

            The concept of “enlightened self-interest” has a long history even in the Christian tradition. There is a long train of people who argued that the reason you should act according to conventional morality is that God will reward you if you do and punish you if you don’t. It wasn’t necessarily what the orthodox priests and bishops endorsed, but this attitude was probably and is probably today the more widespread among the common people.

            I don’t see why the history of people who hold egoistic first order moral views is relevant to our topic.

            This is self-contradictory. At first, you say your mother doesn’t have views on metaethics. Then you say that she implicitly does have strong metaethical views that exclude my use of the word “wrong” from counting as “really wrong”. That actually your mother is a secret moral intuitionist or something.

            I’m not saying my mom has any metaethical views even implicitly. You don’t have to have views about what your words mean in order to use them with their meaning. I’m frankly confused now about what your view entails about my mother’s utterance. You say that the ordinary meaning of ethical terms is ‘vague’, but presumably you don’t mean vague in the way the use of ‘bald’ is vague (where there’s just some boundary fuzziness). Given the supposed vagueness of the meaning of “wrong”, is what she says vaguely truish? Meaningless? (remember, this is different from asking whether a sentence spoken using her words in a more precise dialect you prefer would be true). In any case, I don’t see how you can say that you agree with her unless you think that your view about the most useful precisification of moral discourse actually determines what she meant in the actual world, which seems pretty out there as a view about meaning.

            In fact, I agree with your mother that lying is wrong, insofar as it is possible to agree or disagree with someone who has a vague concept. She is not too clear on why it is wrong, so it’s hard to see how I can be failing to satisfy criteria that she never put forward. If you ask her leading questions, maybe you could get her to endorse some non-naturalistic qualities about lying. But if you ask her other leading questions, you could get her to endorse naturalistic ones.

            For example, statements like “Honesty is the best policy”; “What goes around, comes around”; “Crime doesn’t pay”; and so on.

            I still can’t understand the sense in which you think you agree with my mother, if it’s not “I would use her words in my dialect to say something true”, which is not a kind of agreement.

            Are you saying you don’t believe that Mill was a moral realist? That seems silly. Realism, as I said, is simply the view that moral statements have a truth value, and that sometimes they’re true.

            No, I think Mill is a realist. I’m not sure what you’re reading out of what I said.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Philosophisticat:

            No, I think Mill is a realist. I’m not sure what you’re reading out of what I said.

            I don’t have time to respond to all the rest just now, but I’ll take this because I think it’s the key part.

            The fact is, I have the same sort of metaethical view as Mill. Mill believed that all moral obligations are hypothetical, and that a thing is “good” if it achieves the purposes of the actor. Mill believed in psychological egoism: that everyone necessarily acts to maximize his own self-interest (I don’t believe that). And he believed that if people reflected about it on a high enough level, they would see that their selfish interest is identical to the greatest good of the greatest number. But that what makes that the good of any particular individual is that it is in fact in his own interest.

            So…where’s the part where Mill is a realist and I’m (allegedly) not?

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Vox:

            It’s news to me that Mill thinks that all moral requirements are hypothetical, but I don’t do history of philosophy and it’s been awhile since I read him. It’s worth noting that there are two sorts of thought which I’ve noticed you might be running together: one is that what’s right or good for you is what satisfies your interests or ends. This is not necessarily a claim about metaethics – it’s just a first order moral claim, which could be held by an intuitionist or a naturalist or an expressivist. And it’s in some sense categorical – it tells us what’s right and good for everyone no matter what they think.

            Another claim is that claims about rightness or goodness are by nature hypothetical – i.e. there’s no such thing as good or right, full-stop – there’s just what’s good or right relative to some end or goal. This IS a metaethical claim.

            I don’t really have a strong enough recollection of the details of Mill to be able to place his metaethics; my sense is that most of what he says concerns first order ethics. I guess I don’t want to commit to the claim that Mill is a realist for sure – for all we’ve said so far (including your last post) he might be a realist.

            You’re not a realist, by my reckoning, because you don’t think what my mother says (with the meaning she said it with) is true (whether on your view it turns out to be false or meaningless or vaguely between true and false somehow is not clear to me). You think there’s something defective about the ordinary use of moral language, and you endorse the truth of “lying is wrong” only on a redefinition of the term.

            I don’t think Mill and other historical figures around his time had as clear a sense of the metaethical space as we do now, so I would be somewhat surprised if we could really pin him down, but at least I don’t remember him claiming that he was proposing a redefinition of the ordinary word “moral”, rather than simply making substantive claims about what was or was not moral. If what he was doing was proposing a redefinition, then I’ll say the same thing about him as I want to say about you – the fact that you’re a realist about your redefinition of “moral” doesn’t make you a realist about morality, any more than someone who thinks that “dogs” have two legs on a redefinition of “dogs” that applies the term to ostriches thinks that dogs have two legs.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @Vox

            Another way to come at the topic: on the standard understanding of what metaethical issues are all about, whether you’re a realist depends on a) what you think moral terms actually mean, and b) whether you think the world offers up a match. Someone who thinks that our actual use of moral language is confused or too imprecise to have a truth value doesn’t think that the world can offer up a match. That’s the view that a paradigmatic moral skeptic like Don Loeb has.

            Your view is as far as I can tell, basically the same as Don Loeb’s about a) and b) and therefore the same as far as everything relevant to whether you’re a realist is concerned. The only important difference between the two of you is that you have, in addition, a view about what a useful way to use moral language would be. But views about what ways of using this or that word would be useful are no part of metaethics traditionally conceived.

            Now, you might be interested in the work of David Plunkett (see, e.g. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020174X.2015.1080184), who thinks that actually, many philosophical disputes (including in metaethics) are really secretly about what we SHOULD mean by certain terms, rather than, as is generally thought, what we DO mean. My guess is you’d probably be sympathetic to his approach. But it’s not the way philosophers usually understand metaethics.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Philosophisticat

            Why think that induction is the rational way to form beliefs, rather than counterinduction (according to which the fact that the sun has risen every day in the past supports that it will not rise tomorrow)?

            IDK. But all that is needed to justify my belief is that there be a reliable connection between the sun having risen every day in the past and the sun rising tomorrow. And there is. Where do you think intellectual seemings come into the picture?

            I’m not claiming that there are no constraints on when we are entitled to trust a faculty.

            What constraints could we impose which would rule out clairvoyant beliefs but rule in moral beliefs? The mechanism by which we we come to have moral intuitions seems every bit as occult as the mechanism by which a crystal ball might operate.

            @ Vox

            Take it up with the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from which I quoted that definition.

            There’s no “authors”, just the one dude who wrote the article, a dude who happened to have criticized the standard definition of moral realism in print thirty years ago and decided to continue grinding his axe today even if doing so confuses amateurs like yourself. Other SEP articles get it right. Anyway, the consensus definition includes the mind-independence requirement. You should use it from now on.

            As for your global warming example, I’d say that’s a bad theory of global warming

            It’s also not someone who believes that global warming is real. In general, “The Fs are real, they’re real in virtue of what Katie believes,” is some kind of weird double-talk: anyone who says that doesn’t actually believe the Fs are real at all. They’re taking a paradigmatic anti-realist position.

            We could call happiness something else; it would still be good, in the sense I am calling it good.

            Suppose that someone says that ghosts are real, but, when queried, declares that all he means by “ghost” is whatever humans leave behind when they die. Does this person believe that ghosts are real? No, because “ghost” in his idiolect does not include one or more of the conceptual entailments of the english world “ghost” (perhaps ghosts are necessarily immaterial, or necessarily retain some form of intelligence). He has made “ghosts are real” true only by virtue of the meaning postulates of his language, and the fact that he can thereby affirm the sentence “ghosts are real” says nothing about ghosts. It is just childish chicanery. The same holds for your redefinition of the word “ought”– one of the conceptual entailments of the distinctively moral ought in english is that it can prescribe categorically, but in your idiolect it lacks this feature.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @EK

            IDK. But all that is needed to justify my belief is that there be a reliable connection between the sun having risen every day in the past and the sun rising tomorrow. And there is. Where do you think intellectual seemings come into the picture?

            What constraints could we impose which would rule out clairvoyant beliefs but rule in moral beliefs? The mechanism by which we we come to have moral intuitions seems every bit as occult as the mechanism by which a crystal ball might operate.

            I’m an internalist, so I don’t think external facts about the reliability of induction can be what make induction rational (or else an internal duplicate of us in a world where some other rule was more reliable than induction thanks to the machinations of an evil demon would differ in what’s rational for them, which strikes me as wrong). Of course, two can play the externalism game too, making intuitions reliable as long as in fact, there’s a reliable connection between intuitions and the truth.

            I don’t think it’s crazy to think that someone who has apparent clairvoyance and receives no undermining defeat for their clairvoyant beliefs is justified in holding them. In the actual world, people have tons of undermining defeat for the reliability of their clairvoyant experiences. I don’t think it’s clear that people have tons of undermining defeat for the reliability of widely shared moral intuitions. So there’s one candidate explanation for you. (Of course, some people think we do have undermining defeaters for our moral beliefs, but that takes showing.)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I’m an internalist, so I don’t think external facts about the reliability of induction can be what make induction rational (or else an internal duplicate of us in a world where some other rule was more reliable than induction thanks to the machinations of an evil demon would differ in what’s rational for them, which strikes me as wrong). Of course, two can play the externalism game too, making intuitions reliable as long as in fact, there’s a reliable connection between intuitions and the truth.

            We need to distinguish two questions, here. One: is reliability* sufficient for justification? Two: is reliability necessary for justification? The evil demon case you cite only licenses a negative response to the latter question, but my claim is that the reliability of inductive reasoning suffices to justify my beliefs about the sun rising.

            Recall that the cases which purport to show that reliability is insufficient for justification are precisely those where S has a clairvoyant power but no independent reason to think that clairvoyant power is reliable. You say that, in such cases, S’s belief is justified. Very well then, but you’ve forfeited the resources you need to object to the sufficiency of externalist accounts of justification.

            *Presumably along with the standard defeater clause.

            making intuitions reliable as long as in fact, there’s a reliable connection between intuitions and the truth.

            I agree that, if moral intuitions are reliable, our moral beliefs are prima facie justified, just as, if our inductive practices are reliable, beliefs formed by enumerative induction will be prima facie justified. We both accept the antecedent of the latter conditional; what makes you think the antecedent of the first conditional is true?

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @EK

            We need to distinguish two questions, here. One: is reliability* sufficient for justification? Two: is reliability necessary for justification? The evil demon case you cite only licenses a negative response to the latter question, but my claim is that the reliability of inductive reasoning suffices to justify my beliefs about the sun rising.

            Recall that the cases which purport to show that reliability is insufficient for justification are precisely those where S has a clairvoyant power but no independent reason to think that clairvoyant power is reliable. You say that, in such cases, S’s belief is justified. Very well then, but you’ve forfeited the resources you need to object to the sufficiency of externalist accounts of justification.

            *Presumably along with the standard defeater clause.

            making intuitions reliable as long as in fact, there’s a reliable connection between intuitions and the truth.

            I agree that, if moral intuitions are reliable, our moral beliefs are prima facie justified, just as, if our inductive practices are reliable, beliefs formed by enumerative induction will be prima facie justified. We both accept the antecedent of the latter conditional; what makes you think the antecedent of the first conditional is true?

            I think reflection on evil demon cases shows us that reliability isn’t sufficient for rationality either – I think it’s implausible that my duplicate differs from me in their rationality in either direction – being more rational when the demon favors them or being less rational when they disfavor them.

            I don’t think we have independent reason to think that moral intuitions are reliable, just as we don’t have independent reason to think perception is reliable. But we don’t need such reason either on the reliabilist picture (which I reject) or on an internalist picture of the sort I find attractive (on which beliefs are prima facie rational whether or not they are in fact reliable).

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I think reflection on evil demon cases shows us that reliability isn’t sufficient for rationality either – I think it’s implausible that my duplicate differs from me in their rationality in either direction – being more rational when the demon favors them or being less rational when they disfavor them.

            There’s a crucial suppressed premise here:

            (P1) For all S and all p, if S is justified in believing that p, an intrinsic duplicate of S is justified in believing that p.

            (P2) There exist some S and some p such that S’s belief that p is produced by an (undefeated) reliable process but S has an intrinsic duplicate not justified in believing that p.

            (C) Therefore, it is not the case that, for all S and all p, if S’s belief that p is produced by an (undefeated) reliable process, S is justified in believing that p.

            You need to substantiate (P2). The standard example of (P2) is, of course, the clairvoyance case– we are supposed to have the intuition that, because no one would ever count an unreliable “clairvoyant’s” belief as justified, her reliable duplicate is in no better shape. But you have already decided to cede the clairvoyant to preserve our moral knowledge. Do you have another case in mind?

            I don’t think we have independent reason to think that moral intuitions are reliable, just as we don’t have independent reason to think perception is reliable. But we don’t need such reason either on the reliabilist picture (which I reject) or on an internalist picture of the sort I find attractive (on which beliefs are prima facie rational whether or not they are in fact reliable).

            I agree that if your standards for justification are so lax that we are entitled to trust whatever random nonsense pops into our heads our moral beliefs will come out justified. But this severs the connection between justification and truth, so anyone who is interested in holding beliefs that have a high chance of being true still ought not rely on their moral intuitions.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            There’s a crucial suppressed premise here:

            (P1) For all S and all p, if S is justified in believing that p, an intrinsic duplicate of S is justified in believing that p.

            (P2) There exist some S and some p such that S’s belief that p is produced by an (undefeated) reliable process but S has an intrinsic duplicate not justified in believing that p.

            (C) Therefore, it is not the case that, for all S and all p, if S’s belief that p is produced by an (undefeated) reliable process, S is justified in believing that p.

            You need to substantiate (P2). The standard example of (P2) is, of course, the clairvoyance case– we are supposed to have the intuition that, because no one would ever count an unreliable “clairvoyant’s” belief as justified, her reliable duplicate is in no better shape. But you have already decided to cede the clairvoyant to preserve our moral knowledge. Do you have another case in mind?

            I agree that if your standards for justification are so lax that we are entitled to trust whatever random nonsense pops into our heads our moral beliefs will come out justified. But this totally severs the connection between justification and truth, so anyone who is interested in holding beliefs that have a high chance of being true still ought not to rely on their moral intuitions.

            I don’t know what you mean by an ‘undefeated process’ – I understand beliefs to be the things that are defeated or not. If p being formed by an undefeated process entails that p is not rationally defeated, then an internalist like me is going to say P2 is trivially false – If p is rationally undefeated for me, then it will be rationally undefeated for all of my duplicates. So I’m not sure why you think I’m committed to P2 being true. Take out the “undefeated” and then I’ll just point to any case of internally defeated belief that a demon nevertheless makes reliable. (Say, a case where I have tons of misleading evidence that my (actually reliable) clairvoyant sense is unreliable).

            I still think we are rationally required only to believe things we take to be likely to be true. So I’m not abandoning a connection with truth. If you have good reason to think your moral intuitions or your perceptions are unreliable, I fully endorse you giving up on those modes of thought. I don’t see a reason to think that in either case. I am abandoning a connection with truth of some externalist sort, but so does every internalist. It’s knowledge, not rationality, that requires an external connection to truth.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            If p being formed by an undefeated process entails that p is not rationally defeated, then an internalist like me is going to say P2 is trivially false – If p is rationally undefeated for me, then it will be rationally undefeated for all of my duplicates.

            There are two problems here:

            1. Earlier you denied that reliability + standard defeater clause was sufficient for justification, on the grounds that someone whose belief was produced by a reliable process and satisfies the standard defeater clause could have an intrinsic duplicate whose belief was unjustified. But now you are claiming the reverse, that no one whose belief was produced by a reliable process and satisfies the standard defeater clause could have an intrinsic duplicate whose belief was unjustified? Perhaps you overlooked the asterisk in my earlier comment.

            2. This response assumes that if p is “rationally undefeated” for S that S has internalist justification for believing that p. I don’t see how this assumption could be true. A child who sees Fermat’s Last Theorem written on a blackboard and judges it to be true does not have any defeaters for her belief, but is nevertheless unjustified in so believing.

            I still think we are rationally required only to believe things we take to be likely to be true. So I’m not abandoning a connection with truth.

            That’s quite the bill of goods. The condition “S is justified in believing that p only if S takes p to be likely to be true” does not in any way require that p actually have a high chance of being true. In other words, you are severing the connection between justification and truth, and replacing it with a connection between justification and perceived truth. It is still the case that if you are interested in holding beliefs that have a high chance of being true, you ought not to trust any belief that randomly pops into your head, e.g. your moral intuitions.

            This new condition on justification is also incompatible with the account you were defending earlier. You claimed:

            I don’t think it’s crazy to think that someone who has apparent clairvoyance and receives no undermining defeat for their clairvoyant beliefs is justified in holding them.

            But S’s being apparently clairvoyant and having no defeaters for her beliefs does not entail that she take her beliefs to be likely to be true. So you have revised your account.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @EK

            1. Earlier you denied that reliability + standard defeater clause was sufficient for justification, on the grounds that someone whose belief was produced by a reliable process and satisfies the standard defeater clause could have an intrinsic duplicate whose belief was unjustified. But now you are claiming the reverse, that no one whose belief was produced by a reliable process and satisfies the standard defeater clause could have an intrinsic duplicate whose belief was unjustified? Perhaps you overlooked the asterisk in my earlier comment.

            2. This response assumes that if p is “rationally undefeated” for S that S has internalist justification for believing that p. I don’t see how this assumption could be true. A child who sees Fermat’s Last Theorem written on a blackboard and judges it to be true does not have any defeaters for her belief, but is nevertheless unjustified in so believing.

            That’s quite the bill of goods. The condition “S is justified in believing that p only if S takes p to be likely to be true” does not in any way require that p actually have a high chance of being true. In other words, you are severing the connection between justification and truth, and replacing it with a connection between justification and perceived truth. It is still the case that if you are interested in holding beliefs that have a high chance of being true, you ought not to trust any belief that randomly pops into your head, e.g. your moral intuitions.

            This new condition on justification is also incompatible with the account you were defending earlier. You claimed:

            I don’t think it’s crazy to think that someone who has apparent clairvoyance and receives no undermining defeat for their clairvoyant beliefs is justified in holding them.

            But S’s being apparently clairvoyant and having no defeaters for her beliefs does not entail that she take her beliefs to be likely to be true. So you have revised your account.

            You are trying way too hard to score points, and it’s coming off kind of badly (to me in any case).

            Let me recap: you proposed that “all that is needed to justify my belief is that there be a reliable connection between the sun having risen every day in the past and the sun rising tomorrow”. I pointed out that I was an internalist, for bog-standard reasons, and so I didn’t think that external reliability ever made a difference to rationality. Then you got really caught up on the fact that when I parenthetically gestured towards the standard cases motivating internalism, I only explicitly gave the case against necessity. This is because I thought filling in the sufficiency half would be trivial to anyone familiar with internalist thought.

            Only then in your next post did you add this thing about a defeater clause. If I were as desperate for scoring points against you as you seem to be against me(especially in your last post), here is where I would point and go “AHA! but before, you said all it took was reliability. Now you’re saying something about defeaters. You’ve CHANGED YOUR VIEW! (VICTORY FOR PHILOSOPHISTICAT! YOU BEEN SOCRATIZZZZZLED!)” But a) I’m not a dick, and b) I realize that people posting in blog comments might set aside some features of their complete epistemological view for ease of presentation.

            I initially ignored your addition of the defeater clause because a) I don’t know what you think the standard defeater clause looks like, b) your relegating it to the equivalent of a footnote led me to believe it wasn’t doing the heavy lifting for your point, and most importantly, c) given that my view is basically that rational belief is (internally) undefeated belief, adding a defeater clause removes any need for me to make a case against sufficiency, making your demand unintelligible. If you add to a reliabilist account the very thing that I think makes something rational then of course I won’t have counterexamples to sufficiency, but that’s because the view will be strictly stronger than mine. That’s what I pointed out in the last post when you doubled down on the defeater stuff.

            Re:2 – I own up to the implication of my view that rationality is pretty easy to come by (I don’t use “justification” because I think people use that word to slip and slide between a lot of different things and I think it stacks the deck against certain ways of understanding epistemology). I think if someone sees and understands fermat’s last theorem and it strikes them as true, and they genuinely have no defeaters for it, they’re rationally in the clear. Now in the real world, of course, a child cannot understand fermat’s last theorem and so can’t form beliefs about it, and the rest of us have plenty of internal defeaters for it (spotty histories of being right about complicated mathematical claims at first sight, etc.) But I grant that there are possible persons who could get rationality in believing fermat’s theorem on the cheap.

            If it helps, I also think that if you have good internal reason to think that some belief is unlikely to be true, that can defeat your belief as well (even if you don’t actually think it’s unlikely). Maybe this still isn’t enough for you, and by actually likely you mean something externalist. If so, then yeah, I’m with all my internalist boyz and girlz in thinking that’s not necessary for rationality – the unlikelihood that matters is relative to your beliefs, not the facts beyond your ken.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            given that my view is basically that rational belief is (internally) undefeated belief,

            Sorry, I was trying to be charitable, so I refused to believe that this was actually what you were saying until that interpretation was forced upon me.

            But I grant that there are possible persons who could get rationality in believing fermat’s theorem on the cheap.

            Okay. Your view is obviously unacceptable, then. I agree with you that beliefs formed by way of moral intuition are “justified” in your very special sense of “justified” in which it means “believed for no reason” or “totally baseless”.

          • Philosophisticat says:

            @EK

            I forgive you.

  71. Maia says:

    Re: 1: Obligatory periodic plug for San Francisco rationalist meetups. Every Monday evening, see the LessWrong website or the bayarealesswrong Google group for details.

  72. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    In his Tumblr post, The Unit of Caring recounts her experiences trying to play a pacifist, enlightened Civilization game, and how she eventually realized that she couldn’t just build libraries and universities and needed to devote some of her economy towards building a military that could deter aggression and defend her country in case of war. I found this incredibly amusing, and was reminded of the discussion on “accidental conservatism simulators” in OT21 as well as Dividualist’s post on using Hearts of Iron IV to model the system requirements for a functioning nation. Apparently, video game simulations of reality are a surprisingly effective tool for teaching Gnon-compliance.

    • suntzuanime says:

      It’s really easy to accidentally design a conservatism simulator, because the people inside the games aren’t real and it’s easy to not have compassion for them.

      • Anonymous says:

        Simply out-group real people, and they’ll be quite dehumanized.

      • Acedia says:

        Yep.

        I don’t understand the shock some people express when they see that a person who’s compassionate in real life is a bastard in Civilization or Grand Theft Auto or whatever. It’s because they’re not real. If I thought for a moment that the denizens of Los Santos had qualia I’d play the game very very differently (or more likely quit and delete it). You can’t infer anything significant about my character or political views from the way I play single player video games.

        • Anonymous says:

          >more likely quit and delete it

          You genocidal monster!

        • Civilis says:

          I think the lesson, though, is what happens when you get someone in real life with enough detachment to think of real people the way most of us consider people in video games.

          Imagine a game of Diplomacy, that classic destroyer of friendships. We recognize that the circles on the map aren’t real cities and the blocks aren’t real armies, and when we move those blocks onto those circles, people aren’t dying. In order to win, we recognize that we need to be ruthless, pragmatic, deceptive and self-centered: a lot of blocks are going to need to move onto a lot of circles. We console ourselves with the fact that in the real world, we would never be like that, we would play nice.

          Now, imagine sitting at a real world negotiating table, across from representatives of a tyrant that thinks of his armies as blocks and your cities as circles on a map. Are you still going to think your best option is to play nice?

          • hlynkacg says:

            I really ought to have a calligrapher transcribe several copies of this comment on to really good paper, frame them, and send them to certain friends, family members, and the mod of a particular political discussion forum on which I used to be a regular poster.

            On one hand I think it’s fortunate that many people are able to go their whole lives without having to get bloody. On the other being faced with a decision that may very well kill you or someone else is (for lack of a better word) an education that I wish more people had.

      • Shieldfoss says:

        While we’re at it: One of the examples is that women are useless in HoI IV unless you can secure them a good marriage.

        That doesn’t say anything about the usefulness of women, it says something about the usefulness of gaming token #24 which is not, in fact, a woman but a gaming token. If women in HoI IV instead gave +9001 effectiveness to all spies, that would also say nothing about the puissance of real life women viz: employment at the CIA because it’s still not a woman.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          That’s a fully general counterargument against simulations. If you think that the way the game models women is too detached from reality to be useful, then say that and explain why.

          • Shieldfoss says:

            You should maybe purge “fully general counterargument” from your vocabulary, it’s interfering with your ability to judge counterarguments.

            You should be smart enough to know why the robber in Settlers of Catan is a bad model for explaining Urban Violence in Republic-Era Rome without me doing a full compare and contrast, but the very very very short of it: “The game designer wasn’t trying to create a realistic robber, they were trying to create an interesting game mechanic.”

          • Soumynona says:

            It’s a fully general counter-counter-argument.

        • Anonymous says:

          There are women in HoI4? That seems like a pretty big change from the series so far.

          • Anonymous says:

            Yup, CK2. I mixed up the games.

            In particular, I was referring to this:

            I haven’t had much of a problem with homosexuals, but there’s something vaguely unsettling in playing the game and realizing that you’re thinking of women as being kinda useless but sometimes useful if you manage to marry them off right.

            Which I realize does not reflect the actual views of that commenter on real life women.

        • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

          I agree with you but I think you mean Crusader Kings not HOI

          • Anonymous says:

            If that is so, then Shieldfoss’ statement is a strange one. Women are necessary in CK2, just as in real life, for reproduction. Sometimes they are useful for other things*, but that’s not their primary function.

            * In CK2: securing alliances, helping out with running the state (you get half the stats of your spouse as a bonus to yours), sometimes serving in back-stage roles in the administration (like spymasters), and very definitely not cuckolding you (choose your wife well).

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Don’t forget plotting to murder!

          • suntzuanime says:

            Sometimes it’s worth moving a few mountains to get your talented daughter to inherit instead of a dipshit son. Attractive queens are good at maintaining the loyalty of your male nobility, too.

            And if you don’t manage to have any sons, even an unattractive daughter is better than letting your dynasty be extinguished.

          • Anonymous says:

            @suntzu: Pretty much.

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            Committing *hard* to feminism in CK II is a very strong strategy.. because in a context where no other faction allows women positions of power, being able to hire the most talented women in all of christendom means you get a much better selection of minions, and they are generally very easy to bring into your court.
            This works best if you are in one of the larger culture groups.

          • Anonymous says:

            >Committing *hard* to feminism in CK II is a very strong strategy..

            You mean “egalitarianism”, not “feminism”.

            >and they are generally very easy to bring into your court.

            No, they aren’t.

            Not since they nerfed the opinion modifiers (very unlikely to get high enough opinion to invite anyone) and nerfed invitation (can’t invite lesser partners of a marital union; not sure if they fixed the bug yet where you can’t invite either the wife or the husband of a matrilineal union). If you’re running Conclave, you can in certain cases (for those not close relatives of their liege) use favors to invite them without fail, but they first have to be well disposed to you to accept a favor bribe, so you’re looking at potentially two bribes – which can get expensive fast.

            An easier way to get good councillors is simply spamming holy man invitations (unless you need all that piety for some reason, like being muslim).

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “You mean “egalitarianism”, not “feminism”.”

            Feminism as a descriptor works better (since it is 1st wave feminism- elimination of legal barriers).

      • Civilis says:

        Sometimes, that compassion may have the unintended consequence of making people’s lives worse.

        One of the things I remember most from the International Relations classes I took in college is the class sessions studying nuclear strategy, because there is a lot that is paradoxical. The one rule that most scares me because of how wrong it seems is that it’s better to have the enemy targeting your civilian population than your strategic infrastructure, and, likewise, it’s better to target the enemies cities than their strategic infrastructure.

        You want to see that blip on the radar headed to one of your cities, where it will end hundreds of thousands of lives in a blink of an eye, rather than to a strategic missile base in the middle of nowhere. Why? Because you have the time to make sure it really is the opening salvo of the Final War and not a system glitch before you order your own strike (it’s much less of an issue now with better second strike capability than it was in the early days of the cold war, fortunately). Trying to be compassionate ends up removing a safeguard on those very lives you are trying to protect.

        • JBeshir says:

          Do errant blips on the radar and system glitches care about where my weapons are really aimed?

          I’m not sure that aiming my weapons at the enemy’s cities significantly reduces the odds of the enemy seeing a false report of an attack on their strategic infrastructure.

          It’s not like they’d take my word for it and just write off anything that looked like an attack on their strategic infrastructure because I told them I was going to nuke their capital instead.

          • Civilis says:

            You also have to factor in that if your enemy is at all competent, his command structure likely knows what your strategic doctrine is. In fact, his command structure likely knows more about your strategic doctrine than your own public does.

            If you know their plans because they publish non-classified summaries and your espionage / electronic intelligence / satellite reconnaissance data matches what they say, it’s a good chance they are not lying. There are too many people involved to say ‘I’m targeting your cities’ when you are really targeting their strategic infrastructure without a very good chance of it getting discovered, and both sides should be smart enough to know that getting caught doing that would bring you perilously close to what you’re trying to avoid.

            It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, and although I took the class years after this kind of thinking mattered, I still was kept awake at night thinking of the horrible implications involved.

    • Dan Peverley says:

      If you play Grand Strategy, if you want to be safe you must blob. Otherwise the blobbers can get you. Blob for safety from the blobbers! Blob for the blob god!

      It’s a very intuitive mechanic that gets into everyone’s heads as they play. Even though you can “go tall” in some games, you see the naked incentive at all times to take what you can, not even for greedy reasons, but because France is getting huge and you need to bulk up.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Simulation has a conservative bias.

    • ChetC3 says:

      This becomes a much less impressive insight when you realize the “video game simulations” are almost all derived from tabletop wargames. Something like Civ is basically a heavily modded Risk. It adds mechanics letting you give up building some army dudes this turn in exchange for getting more/better army dudes later, but the core of the game is still the more dudes->more land->more dudes feedback loop.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        This is simply not true. First, there are ways of winning Civilization other than domination or conquest; the science victory is based around paying the opportunity cost of building better dudes in order to build a space ship instead, and with the cultural victory you never even get the option to build better dudes because you stop researching halfway through the game in favor of accumulating culture. Second, Civilization is explicitly designed to weaken the more dudes->more land->more dudes feedback loop; cities cost more money the more you have and the further away they are from your capital, which means that additional cities give diminishing marginal returns.

        • ChetC3 says:

          Are you talking exclusively about Civ 5? Because in the earlier Civs, expansion was definitely king. I’m pretty sure it was the dominant strategy in some of the earlier versions of Civ 5 as well. “Infinite City Sprawl” kind of speaks for itself.

          First, there are ways of winning Civilization other than domination or conquest; the science victory is based around paying the opportunity cost of building better dudes in order to build a space ship instead, and with the cultural victory you never even get the option to build better dudes because you stop researching halfway through the game in favor of accumulating culture.

          Science victory was a neat idea, but in practice is just a convenient alternative to the tedious slog of late-game conquest. It’s very hard to be in a position to win a science victory without also being in a position to win by domination or conquest. Culture victories do tend to require a different play style, but the victory condition and the Culture mechanic itself weren’t introduced until Civ 3, and it’s generally hard to pull off against a competent opponent taking the domination/conquest route.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            I’m talking about Civilization IV, which is the best game in the series. Every Civilization game has tried to limit the more dudes->more land->more dudes feedback loop, but Civilization IV is the only one to truly pull it off; in it, cities start out at negative value, which means that an empire can easily bankrupt itself by expanding too quickly. In every other Civilization game, cities always have positive value even if that value is negligible, which leads to ICS since the only cost of making an extra city is the opportunity cost of building a settler. I’ll allow Sullla to explain:

            In every Civilization game, there is some kind of mechanic put in place to limit the expansion of empires. In the first three Civilization games, this mechanic was corruption, whereby every city would lose out on some production and commerce the further away they were located from the capital. The level of corruption ranged from nonexistent (in the original Civilization there was no corruption with Democracy for government, which was simultaneously overpowered and hilarious as a concept) to modest (the final patched version of Civ3) to catastrophic (in the original release version of Civ3). The whole point of corruption was that more cities would cease to be useful beyond a certain point, because they would be hopelessly corrupt. The whole concept never worked though; even if those extra cities were hopelessly “1/1” (one shield and one commerce), you were still better off founding them, and settler units were always cheap in Civ1/2/3. In the first two Civ games, the AI was feeble at expansion and it was easy to win even on the highest difficulty simply by out-expanding the AI civs. The Civ3 AI was programmed to be rapidly expansionistic, and therefore the Civ3 early game was always a mad rat race to see who could grab the most territory. Although that could be a lot of fun, the game mechanics meant that more cities was always better, without fail.

            Civ4 shook up the formula by eliminating corruption and replacing it with maintenance costs. Instead of cities being free and all of their infrastructure costing money, Civ4 reversed things and made cities expensive while their buildings would be free. When cities were initially founded in Civ4, they were too weak to pay their own support costs and had to be supported by the rest of your empire. In other words, every new city was essentially an investment – you would take an initial loss, and then as the city grew over time and built its own infrastructure, it would start to turn a profit and could support other cities in turn. Thus in Civ4 more cities were still generally better for your empire, but one couldn’t build them too fast or in too marginal locations, which would result in economic stagnation. The Inca team in our Pitboss #2 game was a prime example of a civ that suffered from over-expansion, building too many cities too fast without adequate defenders and suffering for it economically and militarily. This was a really good system, encouraging the placement of strong and smart city locations, while still allowing for massive lategame empires. Infinite City Sprawl (ICS) was effectively solved in Civ4.

            Civ5 replaced city maintenance with global happiness as the empire limiting factor. Instead of each city having its own happiness meter, the empire as a whole shares one global rating. If that rating drops too low, then cities stop growing and eventually no more settlers can be produced. The idea was that players would have to balance vertical growth of a few highly developed cities against horizontal growth of many small cities. The developers clearly intended players to build a small handful of cities (roughly five to ten on a standard-sized map) and based the happiness mechanic around that assumption.

            There’s just one problem: global happiness is a complete failure at stopping expansion in Civ5. It simply does not work. Civ5 reverts back to the old system of empire management, in which more cities are always better for your empire. Remember, there are no sliders for science/gold/culture in Civ5. Science is based mostly on population, with the basic formula of 1 population point = 1 beaker/turn. Gold is also largely based on population; much of your income comes from internal trade routes between cities, which are entirely based on population (trade route formula is gold/turn = 1.25 times city population). Most of the rest of the income comes from working trade post tiles, and more population means more citizens working those trade posts. In other words, unlike Civ4 where planting additional cities will increase your costs and slow down science (at least initially), in Civ5 the exact opposite takes place. Your gold and research will go up from having more cities, regardless of the quality of the terrain involved. There is no tradeoff between expansion, warfare, and research. Expanding and warring will INCREASE your beaker count. An extra city will always be a net positive in terms of gold and research.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Civ 5 eventually solved it (I think Sullla also covers that)… by making a science penalty for additional cities. It… isn’t a good fix.

    • Peter Scott says:

      How would you play a greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number Civ game? If your society is going to be nicer than others for most of the game, then I can’t help thinking that the single best thing you can do is an early rush. Taking over a nearby capital city with some hurriedly-equipped axemen gives a huge, compounding advantage, and to get a similar advantage with later-game wars would require more death and hardship for much larger populations.

      A complementary idea would be to make sure that all your potential enemies are on another continent, and then build a decent navy as your main line of defense. The AIs in the whole Civilization series tend to suck at using navies, so this is a natural place to get the most advantage with the least effort. This depends on what kind of world map you’re playing, though.

      • A long time ago I designed, and a friend started to program, a game called Hansa.

        There are two ways in which structures of human interaction are created, conquest and mutual advantage. There were lots of computer games simulating expansion by conquest. I wanted to do one based on mutual advantage.

        You are building a trade league. When you invite a city to join your league, it looks at how well off the citizens of nearby cities in the league are compared to their autarchy level, how well off they could be by themselves. The higher the advantage to being in the league, the more likely the city is to accept your invitation. If a city in the league drops below its autarchy level as a result of how you are telling it to produce and trade, it has a probability of seceding.

        Never got fully implemented, unfortunately. It was part of Living Paper, a project I and a friend had to create programs that would teach economics.

        • Bassicallyboss says:

          This sounds like a game I would be quite interested in playing. Do you know of any games in a similar vein that have been published?

          • Vaniver says:

            There’s nothing that I’m aware of that correctly does the ‘rebellion’ or ‘defection’ calculation. I’ve thought a lot about how to do it well for the strategy game that I can’t get out of the back of my mind, but that’s not helpful to you.

            I think the most similar game is probably the Merchant Prince remake.

            It’s also worth considering the Anno series, where conflict is tertiary, trade is secondary, and expansion / logistics is primary. The various Patrician games are also worth looking into.

            There are a bunch of trading games where you buy things in place A and sell them in place B for more than you bought them for (hopefully); they tend to totally ignore the combat side of things (or relegate it to fighting pirates).

            Which, speaking of which, Sid Meier’s Pirates kind of falls into this vein, or at least can be played this way.

            Probably my favorite strategy game right now is Imperialism II, where combat is important (and is a big part of eventually winning) but the game is mostly about development, which can be done either peacefully or violently. (Instead of invading native provinces in the new world to colonize them, you can buy land from the natives and then develop it. Instead of invading the minor natinos in the old world, you can ally with them (and then they join you if someone else invades them).) Diplomatic relationships between major and minor partners drive trade relationships, which themselves drive diplomatic relationships–so there is a sense of “if England cuts us a better deal, we’re going to go with them instead” but it’s not as intelligent as it could be.

      • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

        I would say that is probably the case if you assume population represents groups of people who age and die as IRL. However, if leaders, spies and great people are not demigods but representative of the general population, then everyone in Civ has biological immortality and disease immunity (and super slow reproduction), which would change things alot- it shifts things more in favor of peace and caution somewhat atleast.

      • Nicholas says:

        Pump your economy sky high, build spies and diplomats, and buy every army stack that they send at you. For your finishing technique, buy their cities out from under them, and encircle their final city with diplomats and spies to sabotage any doomstacks they manufacture to rise again.

      • Vaniver says:

        This reminds me of games of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, where the seven factions are always the same, and there tends to be a split between the ‘nice’ (kind of) factions of the University, Corporation, and Peacekeepers, and the ‘mean’ factions of the Spartans, Believers, and Hive. (Typically the Gaians also fall into ‘mean’, but not always.)

        And this meant that if you started off next to one of the mean factions and were playing a nice faction, typically there were huge returns to somehow murdering them early on, because you knew that eventually the differences would be too much to bear and they would turn on you. And that meant that oftentimes the best games as, say, the University were when you started next to the Believers, because that meant you wouldn’t have to deal with them later.

        • Murphy says:

          huh… I would have classified the morganites and the gaians on opposite sides to you. But then I almost always played a research-environmentalism approach (powerful early and mid game due to free mindworm units) which made the morganites want to murder me on sight and the gaians would offer an alliance shortly after meeting.

          • Machine Elf says:

            They’re talking about the way the mechanics of the game incline the factions, I think. Morgan’s support penalties and bonus energy push him hard to a “builder” strategy; Dierdre’s ability to capture mindworms early means she has a good “momentum” plan, though she can also shift to a builder style with her efficiency boost.

            EDIT: mixed up who i was replying to

        • Aran says:

          a split between the ‘nice’ (kind of) factions of the University, Corporation, and Peacekeepers, and the ‘mean’ factions of the Spartans, Believers, and Hive. (Typically the Gaians also fall into ‘mean’, but not always.)

          As a University player, I usually found myself allying with Deirdre against Morgan rather than the opposite.

          I don’t remember the exact mechanics here, but in the late game my biggest problem were usually drones and inefficiency, so using a Green (+2 Efficiency) seemed more advantageous than Free Market (-5 Police) – with the inevitable impact on diplomacy.

          (Of course, this is dependent on the hard-coded AI reactions to your social system – in a multiplayer game, the factions would likely be completely different.)

    • Deiseach says:

      Because “I refuse to do Wrong things” is just much easier

      Argh. This is the kind of statement that drives me scatty. No, it’s not easier, you just made an entire post about how in your game it wasn’t easier, what was easier was to go the route of playing the game like the rest of your opponents and declare wars, encourage your allies to attack, draw out wars so your opponents were maximally ground into the dust and willing to sue for peace, and then start wondering about “well, maybe I should invade first and make all these independent nations provinces of my empire – um because my country is doing so well with its literacy rate, yeah, once I reduce their capitals to a smoking ruin and increase the number of widows and orphans, I can then teach the survivors how to read!”

      You may have your starship civilisation, but it will be run by people not alone prepared to have, but used to having, blood on their hands and quite comfortable about it. Everyone will be literate and educated and liberal and rich – and ready to kill anyone who gets in the way of them being liberal and rich.

      This is how you get The Punisher and arguments over why doesn’t Batman just kill the Joker?

      Being good isn’t easier, and we’ve seen the world where “don’t strive for personal virtue, strive to make the world a good world through your pragmatic lack of personal virtue” ends – we’re living in it.

      • hlynkacg says:

        This is an excellent point, and a major contributing factor in my “re-conversion” so to speak.

        “Pragmatism” is an excellent strategy but 10 years down the line you’ll be asking yourself where your humanity went.

      • Kaminiwa says:

        I think the quote can be more charitably interpreted as “Being scrupulous is easier than winning.”

        It’s really quite easy to follow rote pacifism, and watch helplessly as your empire burns. It’s much harder to actually win the game. It is hardest still to win the game while maintaining as much scrupulosity as you can.

        (And, this being Civilization, it’s pretty much impossible to win AND maintain full scrupulousness. I’m sure it technically be done, but I think it would be down to luck and/or exploiting weird glitches in the AI)

        • Deiseach says:

          In a game, it depends what you want to do: win (at all costs) or play according to your own particular style.

          There are games I would happily (well – grudgingly) lose if it were a choice between “in order to win you must do X” and “X violates the principles of my character/nation/whatever”. That’s because to me, sometimes winning is not worth it, it’s not what I’m playing for. (Sometimes, of course, winning is exactly what I’m playing for).

          That post was all about “what I had to do in order to win the game”, which is fair enough; if the game is structured such that a peaceful nation will get stomped by a more aggressive/less scrupulous one, then you bite the bullet and get yourself an army.

          But the ending seemed to be trying to carry that message over into the Real World, and I’m very dubious about that. The justification for the “so I yielded to realpolitik” in the game was “my enlightened empire will then make everyone happy!” which – yeah, if that makes you feel better, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that you let a war drag on longer, with attendant suffering for the civilian population you now want to help and enlighten, for your own best advantage.

          And if we apply that principle of “so I had to kill 100 million kulaks but wading through blood will somehow leave me unstained in the Brave New Future when we all beat our swords into ploughshares (because I’ll be the last power standing and there is no-one left to oppose me)” in Real World dealings with family, friends, co-workers, the general public, we get a very nasty manipulative person whom no-one wants to deal with, because they’re trying to tell you that their boot on your face is actually all for your benefit in the long run.

      • Yrro says:

        Moral conflicts are not good vs evil — they are one moral value vs another moral value. Economic progress vs social progress. Near gains vs far gains. Do I lie about the Jews in the attic? I hate how many video games ignore this.

    • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

      If one places a high enough value on peace then its entirely possible that being the doomed moral victor is still better than winning and sacrificing one’s values to achieve it. Sure, there will be war anyways, but someone will end the game eventually. Would her going to war necessarily have an expected value of reduced amount of violence in the world? (for the sake of argument lets assume she is playing above her normal difficulty level, or if she normally plays max has a bunch of difficulty mods on. World conquest is hard IRL).

      Of course placing value on “peace” in of itself is silly, but Civ doesn’t really simulate the effects of other kinds of oppression so I had to stretch the metaphor a bit (OK, a lot). my point is that even if the liberal/leftist equivalent in a scenario (which if we are talking about modern progressive values imposed on ancients, they probably are) are inevitably doomed, it doesn’t make them necessarily wrong.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      OTOH

      “In roleplaying situations, authoritarians tend to seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive instead of cooperative. In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three-hour simulation of the Earth’s future entitled the Global change game. Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores, which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.[15]”

      • Anonymous says:

        Source? This sounds like a fascinating read.

        (Not that I believe for a second that nuclear war has a remotely likely result of complete annihilation of the species.)

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        I’d read the thing about performance of Right Wing Authoritarians in the Global Change Game, and it seemed fairly suspect because of the simulation’s rules. It grades very harshly on threats favored by the left, like environmental damage and overpopulation, to the extent that I would expect no conservative could win regardless of authoritarianism.

        Basically they found that your score of how well you do on a test of right wing ideas anti-correlates with how well you do on a test of left wing ideas.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Dangling comparison. When people learn right wing lessons from other games, is that objective truth, or a refection of the game design?

          • bean says:

            All games map reality imperfectly. Some are worse than others, and you seem to have picked a spectacularly bad example. He took a game which is ‘won’ by playing from a left-wing perspective (and this is a game where only losing 400m people to famine is considered a very good result) and then loaded it with people who have right-wing perspectives, who then promptly lost. Most of the games under discussion aren’t nearly as visibly political, and certainly don’t seem to have been designed with anywhere near the care that this one was to give a certain political outcome.
            For that matter, take the discussion of gays in Crusader Kings. While it’s vaguely possible that the developer decided to include that possibility to push a political point, that doesn’t mean that the lesson (dynasts removing themselves from the gene pool is annoying/problematic) is wrong.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            I’d go with a reflection of game design.

            I’m right wing by most definitions but I dislike arguments from fiction more than I like cheer-leading. You can make a game to reward any nutty behavior, even just clicking a button over and over for hours, which should be a sign that the optimal strategy in a game is not necessarily useful in real life.

            That said, as others have pointed out this is a case of a game being made deliberately and explicitly for the purpose of propaganda consciousness raising. Finding out that the Global Change Game has a left-wing bias is about as surprising as the discovery that America’s Army is pro-military.

          • bean says:

            @Dr Dealgood
            I’m not sure that we should be so quick to dismiss arguments from fiction entirely. I agree that fiction is easily corrupted and lessons should be viewed warily, but there are times it’s a good way of teaching lessons, too. In some cases, this is through books/TV and in other cases, it’s through games.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “For that matter, take the discussion of gays in Crusader Kings. While it’s vaguely possible that the developer decided to include that possibility to push a political point, that doesn’t mean that the lesson (dynasts removing themselves from the gene pool is annoying/problematic) is wrong.”

            And then you discover that gays won’t have procreative affairs and you proceed to marry off as many of your dynasty members off to gays- sure there are less kids, but it insures they are all yours!

            Also gay man+ attractive with gay underlings = stable realm. Admittedly this is hard to pull off, but they did have ways in the past to make people gay through education so you could aim for this.

          • Randy M says:

            Fiction is a way of making an argument, but not demonstrating evidence. It’s like a layman’s syllogism, laying out axioms (event A happens, character has trait X) and drawing conclusions from them (plot events). Whether or not it is plausible is up to the reader to determine, though of course due to the potential for emotional resonance it is great at smuggling in assumptions.

          • “Fiction is a way of making an argument, but not demonstrating evidence. ”

            I agree. It’s too easy to use author control to cheat.

            In my novels I explore ideas, including advantages and disadvantages of alternative social/political systems (implicitly, not explicitly), but I don’t try to argue that one system is better than another.

        • That fits with my criticism of Altemeyer’s work.

      • For my reasons for distrusting Altemeyer’s work using his RWA scores, see my extended exchange with him on my blog from a few years ago. He responds in the comment thread.

      • bean says:

        Several problems here. First, nuclear war isn’t an existential risk to humanity, and any game which says it is and purports to be a simulation isn’t very good. (Referenced documents make it clear it was supposed to be a tool for raising awareness of environmental issues.) Second, by explicitly making it a geopolitical simulator means that people’s attitudes towards international relations will shape how they play. Oddly enough, college students who are high on the RWA scale seem like they’d be more likely to embrace Realism, while low-RWA individuals are going to be more Liberal. This is exactly how each group played. To look at if high-RWA people are inherently less cooperative, you would need to find a game which doesn’t map so neatly to pre-existing thoughts.
        Actually, it’s worse than that. The participants were told to role-play. If I get told that, I’m going to act as I think the person I’m playing would. The Soviet player probably was aggressive and militaristic because that’s how he thought the Soviets were, not because that’s how he inherently was. Geopolitical roleplaying seems like a terrible way to study this issue, possibly the worst way.

        Of course, now I’m wondering what would happen if a cross-section of the readership here were to try geopolitical roleplaying. That could be very interesting….

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Nuclear war isn’t an existential risk in our world, but our world is apparently not run by RWAs. If RWAs are everything Altmeyer thinks they are, they would presmuably increase their stocks of nukes instead of honoring non-proliferation treaties.

          • bean says:

            This is not a good response for two reasons:
            1. Nuclear war is not an existential risk to humanity in any feasible world. The number of nukes it would take to wipe out humanity is vastly greater than any quasi-rational security policy would require.
            2. The rules of the game they were using were “Nuclear war kills everyone”. Based on what I’ve read, this was true regardless of things like arms control. ‘Set the table on fire’ is a good nuclear-war rule if you’re doing a wargame on the Central Front between NATO and the Soviets, but it’s not a good one for a global ‘simulation’.
            I don’t have a full set of rules, but I would also point to another case of stupidity on the military side, namely the Soviet invasion of North America actually working in the RWA scenario (at least before the US went nuclear). This is absurd on many levels, and it’s important because the ability to apply military force is an important part of international relations, so the rules on that should bear some resemblance to reality if you want to produce a reasonable simulation. These ones look like they were written by someone who was either deliberately being stupid or massively ignorant of warfare.

          • Jiro says:

            Many people consider an existential risk to human civilization to be substantially as bad as an existential risk to humanity. Nuclear war can certainly be that.

          • bean says:

            From this book:
            “A nuclear holocaust ensued which
            killed everyone on earth–7.4 billion people–and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.”
            This is not a statement by someone with a realistic view of nuclear weapons.

            The fact that it could destroy civilization as we know it, but not wipe out humanity, is what makes the use of ‘set the table on fire’ here particularly bad. It would be much more interesting to take a quai-realistic look at what the aftermath of a nuclear war looks like. Have some (rudimentary) method of deciding on how much each region is damaged, based on how many nukes it took (2-4 pre-computed levels would be fine). Remove all existing Elites, and get new ones (to represent the fall of existing governments). Continue play. There are definitely games where nuclear war would bring the game as it is to an abrupt end, but this is definitely not one of them.

          • John Schilling says:

            Remove all existing Elites, and get new ones (to represent the fall of existing governments). Continue play.

            Existing elites, at that level, have bunkers and evacuation plans. Keep them in the game. Don’t let them quit, if you can help it. But make them play with the realistically-degraded resources they would have in that scenario, and bring in new players to take the roles of the warlords, populist leaders, etc, who would arise to compete with them. And, yes, vividly describe the consequences.

            That would be an interesting and useful simulation. Otherwise, just hold a screening of “Dr. Strangelove” and “On the Beach” and be honest about it.

          • bean says:

            Existing elites, at that level, have bunkers and evacuation plans. Keep them in the game. Don’t let them quit, if you can help it. But make them play with the realistically-degraded resources they would have in that scenario, and bring in new players to take the roles of the warlords, populist leaders, etc, who would arise to compete with them. And, yes, vividly describe the consequences.
            A fair point. I was coming from the perspective that, although the individual people may survive, the government infrastructure as a whole might be damaged enough that the president ends up running the state he lands in and maybe the next one over. From a simulationist perspective, a major nuclear war would be a pretty big break in the policies of a government, and it might make more sense to replace the existing ‘elite’.
            In seriousness, though, the game is going to require a substantial overhaul before it becomes really useful. Things like internal politics and quasi-realistic warfare are vital to actually learning anything. The fact that all of the ‘global elites’ can just decide to have a meeting and talk things out without someone facing trouble from Congress/Parliament/the Politburo is enough to disqualify it as a serious tool for looking at that.

            Edit:
            It looks like I forgot to explicitly call out ‘apply damage’ as part of the process in my previous post. You would of course give whoever is running the ‘country’ (I might base replacement of the elite on a dice roll modified on how badly the area was damaged) appropriate resources based on how many nukes he took.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            I am not clear where this is going, If Altmeyers game had an explicit , but unrealistic rule that pushing the button ends the world, then the players still pushed the butto knowing that.

          • bean says:

            If Altmeyers game had an explicit , but unrealistic rule that pushing the button ends the world, then the players still pushed the butto knowing that.
            You’re making the assumption that the rule was explicit, and I’m not sure that’s true. And you also miss an important point about the logic behind nuclear weapons. They only work to deter war if you can convince the other side you’ll use them. The best way to do this is probably to actually be ready to use them, even if from a strict utilitarian point of view of the moment it would make more sense not to push the button when the chips are down. (I believe a good utilitarian would pre-commit to push the button because then you generally get peace instead of non-nuclear war.) I’m not sure if the American player did a bad job of being convincing, or the Soviet player did a bad job of reading him.

          • Protagoras says:

            @bean, Not so much. If your opponent is rational, the risk that you might retaliate should be too big a risk to take when the retaliation will be nuclear. This is regardless of your prior commitments (that is, this still seems true even if you’ve previously committed to not doing things like that; who knows what people might do when huge numbers of their friends and families have been slaughtered?) OTOH, if your opponent is irrational, there may be no reliable connection between your commitments and policies and what your opponent does. Doubtless there are highly specific scenarios with the right set of implausible assumptions where the precommitment to retaliate is crucial, but they don’t seem to resemble real world situations.

          • bean says:

            @Protagoras
            If your opponent is rational, the risk that you might retaliate should be too big a risk to take when the retaliation will be nuclear. This is regardless of your prior commitments (that is, this still seems true even if you’ve previously committed to not doing things like that; who knows what people might do when huge numbers of their friends and families have been slaughtered?)
            I don’t think that’s true. (At this point, we start to see breakdowns between the game and reality, so I’ll address both.) It depends on how they weight their utilities, and on the possible consequences of nuclear war. For the game, if the player rates the value of losing at 0 regardless of how it happens (which is not totally irrational in a game), then the probability of you using nukes becomes very important. In real life, it’s more complicated. Nuclear war is no longer instant death, and the credibility of a deterrent begins to play a big role in everyone’s strategic math. Someone with half a dozen bombs that take weeks to assemble does not have a deterrent against someone who stands a good chance of being able to take them out in a first strike, shoot down the bombers, and ultimately absorb the damage if they have to. The Soviets should be very glad we didn’t think like them in the 50s. But to have a credible deterrent, you need to look like you’re willing to use it (this is similar to the precommitment in the game). On the other hand, there isn’t a scoring system like there is in the game, and it’s fantastically unlikely that someone will rate ‘didn’t come first’ (whatever that means) equally with ‘nuclear annihilation’.

            OTOH, if your opponent is irrational, there may be no reliable connection between your commitments and policies and what your opponent does.
            That depends on what you mean by ‘irrational’. Someone who is totally irrational (and in real life has no preference between death and second place) would not really care what you say. These people generally don’t run governments. But there are different degrees of irrationality, and different metrics for rationality. Soviet actions were undoubtedly influenced by the credibility of the US deterrent. If they thought we’d risk nuclear war rather than roll over, they didn’t act. The most obvious example is when Kennedy’s turn towards Flexible Response set off the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they discovered that they’d gotten their math wrong. Fortunately, they were smart enough to back down instead of pushing the button. (Not that it would have done them much good.)

          • Protagoras says:

            Having a nuclear force is expensive. Just having it is thus a signal of some likelyhood of being willing to use it (people do not spend huge sums on useless things). It is true that things are different for games (in the real world, one aims at long-run survival/prosperity, not some arbitrary stopping point where victory/defeat is assessed on some standard); no doubt this is another problem for generalizing from games.

          • bean says:

            Having a nuclear force is expensive. Just having it is thus a signal of some likelyhood of being willing to use it (people do not spend huge sums on useless things).
            This is true, but not that relevant. I’m reminded of the first episode of Yes, Prime Minister here. When they think you’re likely to pull the trigger, and how much damage they expect you to do if you do, are both very important to making strategic decisions. Would the US be willing to risk New York to save Paris if the Soviets came west? The French weren’t sure of that, which is why they got their own nukes. The British nuclear deterrent was calculated to be large enough to drag the US into the war with them, giving them the protection of our nuclear umbrella. Yes, people generally stayed far away from things which caused serious risk of nuclear war, but what those things were was very important in how the Cold War played out. The fact that we were manifestly not willing to risk it over Vietnam meant that the Russians and Chinese could operate with near-impunity because we were so afraid that we would send signals that they might take as being preludes to nuclear war.

            It is true that things are different for games (in the real world, one aims at long-run survival/prosperity, not some arbitrary stopping point where victory/defeat is assessed on some standard); no doubt this is another problem for generalizing from games.
            This is also true, although it depends on the player and the scoring.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            people do not spend huge sums on useless things

            You’re assuming that the deterrent effect of having the capability in the first place does not constitute a “use”. Building up a nuclear arsenal may be expensive, but it’s a bargain compared to a war with the Soviet Union.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Hlynkacg:

            You’re assuming that the deterrent effect of having the capability in the first place does not constitute a “use”.

            It’s not a deterrent if you’re not willing to use it…

          • It’s not a deterrent if you’re not willing to use it…

            It can be, depending on administration change. Crises typically take a while to build up. During the prelude to WWIII, a pacifist CIC can be removed (or otherwise side-lined) and hardliners can take over.

            I understand that means “you” are willing to use it, if “you” is a nation. But put this in practice. Maybe Putin actually thinks Obama is a coward that would never use nukes. Great. Except there’s a non-trivial chance Obama would be impeached or otherwise overruled by other administration officials. That’s a big chance to take when you’re talking about thousands of nuclear weapons.

            Arsenals like China’s don’t have to be large. They need to be a minimum deterrence. You can even say “we won’t ever really use these nukes” and believe it, but will your opponents REALLY take that chance?

        • MugaSofer says:

          >nuclear war isn’t an existential risk

          I’m seeing this repeated over and over here.

          Why do you disagree with the experts on this, and when did it become the consensus on SSC?

          The wider rationalist movement still seems to view nukes as an existential threat, including our host, last I checked.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Existential means it makes humanity go extinct. There is no case where nuclear war is capable of doing that (given current capabilities and goals) because a significant portion of humanity lives in areas that will not be affected by the bombings. Africa and Latin America are unlikely to get hit by a significant number of bombs.

          • John Schilling says:

            Why do you disagree with the experts on this,

            Which experts claim that nuclear warfare would cause the actual extinction of the human race, and what is the basis of their expertise?

            and when did it become the consensus on SSC?

            It’s been discussed several times over the past six months, mostly in the Open Threads I think. Like, for example, the last one. None of the experts cited were even suggesting actual human extinction, and the ones claiming billions of dead were found to be among other things grossly ignorant of the basic principles of nuclear weapons and warfare.

          • bean says:

            Why do you disagree with the experts on this, and when did it become the consensus on SSC?
            I don’t. I learned from the actual experts on this.

            The wider rationalist movement still seems to view nukes as an existential threat, including our host, last I checked.
            With all due respect to our host, he’s not an expert on military issues. The links you provide are in line with the pop-culture view, and I’d guess that he’s merely reflecting said pop-culture view instead of taking a researched position. The same goes for the wider rationalist community. I’d trust them to be able to figure out something they were looking carefully at, but I’ve seen no evidence they’ve given nuclear war that level of scrutiny.

          • anon says:

            After reading the thread linked by Schilling, I’m pretty convinced that the x-risk of nuclear annihilation is low. (Although it’s obviously still bad if hundreds of thousands to millions are killed in a nuclear strike.) It makes me wonder what is the current consensus among military experts regarding the existential threat associated with biological warfare. It also makes me wonder about Bryan Caplan’s recent blog post, where he approvingly cited a book claiming mass-mobilization warfare is obsolete. I was instinctively skeptical about such a claim, but if a limited nuclear exchange is a genuine tactical possibility as opposed to a theoretical deterrent, maybe the thesis is worth revisiting?

          • bean says:

            It makes me wonder what is the current consensus among military experts regarding the existential threat associated with biological warfare.
            AIUI, it’s definitely non-zero. I haven’t heard quantification, but I’d put it on par with asteroids at a minimum.

          • MugaSofer says:

            Thank you all for the links. It seems that while experts tangentially related to the field tend to talk about full-blown nuclear exchanges in “human extinction” terms, actual climatologists seem to view the possibility as an open question, given the lack of experimental data – and the specific individuals who disagree can’t produce strong evidence.

            I’m definitely updating downwards my understanding that nuclear war is, or was, an existential risk.

    • Murphy says:

      I had the opposite experience with “Democracy” since the game so heavily rewarded economic growth and socialist policies while almost ignoring war entirely.

      There’s a very very strong stable zone with high-tax, high education, high control/police, high research, almost no religious people, no debt, almost no oil consumption, universal public transport, universal health care, basically socialist-green everything and the feedback loops reward you every step of the way.

      In many games I stop as soon as I’ve reached the equilibrium zone where you basically can’t lose. the only risk is being assassinated by the disgruntled religious before you eliminate them. (through enlightenment of course)

      The crazy thing is that once you reach the equilibrium zone and have deep cash reserves you can even lower taxes and make even the capitalist happy.

      try going the small-government or anything but socialist route and everything falls to bits or requires constant maintainance.

      • Matt M says:

        One of the main problems I’ve always had with these types of games is that they have a built-in predisposition to favor large government micromanagement because… that’s what the game IS.

        A game of Civilization where you hit a button saying “let the market make its own decisions” and then you sit back and wait and watch yourself win wouldn’t be very entertaining at all, now would it?

        The entire premise of the game is that top-down micromanagement is how civilizations are built/run/etc.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          Victoria 2 attempts that. Notably it gets refered to as a “spreadsheet simulator” a lot more than the rest of Paradox’s games. Also teaches us the important lesson about how awesome communism is because of how pants on head retarded your capitalists are.

          • Anonymous says:

            Communism is awful in any country bigger than a handful of states. Manually upgrading the five hundred factories that need it (“‘upgrade all button’? what ‘upgrade all’ button?”) is horrifyingly tedious.

            Your choice is essentially between letting the retarded AI run your economy or developing carpal tunnel.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            You can upgrade nearly full factories; it is good enough for everyone who isn’t China.

          • Anonymous says:

            Sometimes, you ARE China. Hell, the German Empire, or Russia, or a France blob are all going to have major problems with manually upgrading factories.

            Communism scales really poorly.

  73. suntzuanime says:

    Personally, I hate basically every technical decision made by Reddit as to how to structure a discussion. It has that awful upvote/downvote system that it uses to reorder its threads to the extent that it’s basically impossible to follow in any sort of chronological fashion and every time I end up on Reddit I want to swear and kick something. This is a big part of what’s keeping me from using the subreddit, which wouldn’t necessarily keep me from using a forum. I don’t really strenuously disagree, because I think the comments section is more or less ok anyhow and might not bother with a forum either, but I hope you can at least tolerate the counterargument.

    • Anonymous says:

      Yeah, reddit is awful.

      The only thing I find really wrong about the comments section is that the markup doesn’t look minified or especially render-optimized, and it really should be when threads get really long. You can really feel the slowdown in aged open threads.

    • there is a tab to sort posts chronologically

    • Anon. says:

      The Reddit New Comments Highlighter extension helps a bit.

    • brad says:

      I agree, but I’d go further. I won’t join another community with gamification. No up/down votes. No like button. No earned flair. Not even if I can hide them, because I can’t hide them from everyone else.

      • The problem with this is it may make it impossible to differentiate between newbies and or trolls with veterans, creating possible confusions. That may allow unsavory individuals to infiltrate a community using newly registered puppetry accounts. Alleged voting abuse abuse tends to be overstated; most people will ignore comments they disagree with and only down-vote comments that are unhelpful and or detract from the flow of the discussion.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          So uh. How long until this happens here? It’s been three years, and I haven’t seen this happen yet so far.

        • brad says:

          If you have registration, there’s no problem differentiating veterans. Even without it, and using only email addresses, this blog doesn’t seem to have a problem.

          As for voting, I’m not worried about rings, or brigading, or other outright abuses but rather the conversational distortions it inevitably brings. Voting leads to discussion of voting, to playing to the crowd, to bravery debates, and much more. The cons outweigh the meager pros.

        • Hackworth says:

          > most people will ignore comments they disagree with and only down-vote comments that are unhelpful and or detract from the flow of the discussion.

          Well that’s the officially intended use case for the downvote button, but in reality, it’s used as the “I don’t agree with this”-button. The up/downvote system has its uses, but I would limit the influence of downvotes. Only count downvotes if the downvoter also leaves a comment under that post, with a possible minimum comment length of a few characters to obstruct trivial “no” or “-1” comments.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Well, the failure case of that would be trolling comments either just get downvoted to “-1” or get ten thousand replies saying “Not Even Wrong” (or whatever other short phrase would evade your trivial-comment-obstructor.)

            Of course, that might still be better than the current system’s failure case.

      • Alex R says:

        So you’d be against a Discourse forum because it features likes and an invisible reputation system?

      • Soumynona says:

        I don’t know. Voting restores some fraction of non-verbal communication that’s lost in a purely textual medium. Voting could be thought of as an Internet way to roll your eyes at somebody or to nod along.

        Though I think that can be achieved with per-comment scores and no aggregation beyond that (so no user karma, total likes, or anything like that).

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      I’m not a fan of reddit either (though it being the largest content and discussion aggregator out there, I still use it), but the interface of each subreddit is fairly customizeable… could it be possible to make a completely unreddity subreddit, one with standard comment ordering, no visible upvotes and downvotes, etc.?

      • Anon says:

        I don’t know about comment ordering – I suspect that it’s probably very difficult, as I have never ever seen it done, and on reddit playing games to make janky css is pretty much a sitewide pastime so if it was easy I imagine I would have seen it done.

        In terms of removing upvotes and downvotes – that’s sort of doable. A lot of subreddits attempt to ‘remove downvotes’ or ‘remove voting from the np.reddit subdomain if user is not subscribed to the subreddit’ – however, anyone who disables the subreddit’s custom css can still do whatever they want and downvote as they wish, so this sort of approach thing relies on the community complying voluntarily. I imagine that removing upvotes as well as downvotes would be a really poor design decision for this reason – suddenly only defectors from the community norm of not voting who have gone through the trivial inconvenience of disabling the subreddit css would have the power to determine what rises to the top, rather than the community as a whole, which I imagine to engender a dynamic even more corrosive to polite discussion.

        I am already disabling the slatestarcodex subreddit’s css, so any sort of changes people attempt to implement using these methods won’t even matter to me.

      • Why is there such consternation about voting systems? A downvote only means that someone for whatever reason did not like your comment . Do people really rake those things personally

        • Alex R says:

          People tend to dogpile on downvoted comments; people also use the fact that a comment is downvoted as an excuse not to read it or not to treat it charitably. Some systems (like Reddit) also order comments based on votes, leading to a “rich get richer” behavior on highly upvoted comments. This is made worse when reputation is publicly visible, as highly reputed commenters are more likely to get upvotes, which boost their rep, which garners more upvotes, etc.

        • Anonymous says:

          >A downvote only means that someone for whatever reason did not like your comment.

          Because popularity does not equate correctness. The downvote, additionally, is very unclear about what it is supposed to signify:
          – “I disagree”,
          – “Your comment is spam”,
          – “I don’t like you”,
          – “Someone else downvoted this comment”,
          – “I don’t like your comment’s tone”,
          – “I misclicked”.

          • TD says:

            What if you had all of those as separate buttons for more precise upboating?

          • Anonymous says:

            Not sure – there are some sites with that solution, but I don’t frequent any to have an opinion. It still doesn’t solve away skewing towards popularity.

          • There’s no way to have a useful button for “I misclicked”.

          • But even ‘correctness’ can be subjective . Based on my own experience, overall, comments that are constructive, show effort, tend to not get down-voted too much, even if they go against the grain of the tribe. Sometimes they do though. One idea would be to disable the down-votes and only keep the up-votes, and then use the report button for posts that are Spam or obv. against the rules

          • Anonymous says:

            @Nancy

            I can imagine one – if you clicked by mistake on one of the other buttons, and the site disallows complete take-backs (I know at least one that allows you to changed an upvote into a downvote or vice-versa, but not take back your vote), you can downgrade to “i misclicked”.

          • JDG1980 says:

            Slashdot lets you specify reasons for your crowdsourced moderation decisions, but unfortunately these are detached from the actual reasons why people would upvote or downvote. “-1, Troll” isn’t supposed to be used for disagreement, but of course in practice it is, just as “+1, Insightful” signifies agreement. It would have been more honest to just have “Agree” and “Disagree” moderation decisions available.

        • Tom Scharf says:

          In some cases I think downvoting is the mechanism for public shaming and this gets out of control for controversial subjects. Climate change is an example of where it’s many times impossible to have a reasonable comment. I’ve quoted the IPCC verbatim in response to ridiculous assertions on extreme events for example and literally was downvoted XX to 0.

      • Mammon says:

        I think there’s a way to force chronological comment ordering. I’ll bring it up with the other mods.

    • ShemTealeaf says:

      Some points in favor of the reddit structure:

      1) It’s very easy to follow an individual thread without having to wade through irrelevant distractions. That’s not necessarily an improvement over the comment section, but it is better than a traditional forum as I understand it.

      2) It’s easy to see the top level comments at a glance, so that I can decide whether to start reading an individual thread. If the top level comment isn’t something that interests me, I can just minimize it and go on reading the rest of the comments without interference.

      3) The voting system means that the top comments are usually pretty good, and low-effort and/or trolling comments are hidden unless I seek them out. This isn’t quite so critical for a community like this, where the average quality is very high, but it’s great for large communities where maybe only 10% of the participants are capable of writing interesting and insightful comments. Rather than trying to cull the bad comments, you can just look at the most upvoted ones and end up with far better than average content almost all the time.

      4) Reddit notifies you when someone replies to your comment, so you don’t have to constantly monitor a bunch of different threads. That’s one of the main things that keeps me from posting more in the comments here. It’s annoying to have to refresh the comments and search to see if anyone replied to me, and it’s frustrating to know that any time I reply to someone, there’s a decent chance they’ll never even see it.

      • Anonymous says:

        I’ll take trolls and spammers over popularity contests every day.

      • 57dimensions says:

        To #4, since I just started coming here recently I was kind of surprised at the lack of a reply notification system. Pretty much every other website where you can comment or reply in someway has a function to notify you when someone interacts with your post, even though those interactions tend to be much less substantial than comment replies here.

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      One more suggestion regarding the Subreddit: A lot of the gripe with it comes (rightfully, in my opinion), due to the points system. Admittedly, I’m not too savvy regarding the interface, but can’t we extend the time in which the points remain hidden? If so, for how long? This could help alleviate their negative effect.

  74. I’ve never seen a forum I liked, but I don’t know why they get on my nerves so much compared to blogs with a simpler commenting structure.

    I also don’t know why I miss trn so much, but hate forums.

    Picking up on a previous topic, have some thoughts about consumerist society….

    I haven’t read a tremendous amount of what other people have said about consumerism, but as a good science fiction fan I can pick up an evocative phrase and run with it.

    I take “consumerist society” to mean a society in which activities are elevated by being bought and sold, or by involving commercial products. For example, taking a walk isn’t bad, but it’s cooler if you keep track of what’s going on with a store-bought fitbit. You aren’t on the cutting edge if you just walk and judge whether it’s the walk you want by how you feel, and I think you’d be considered weird in most social circles (though cool in others) if you built your own self-tracker.

    Mainstream American society isn’t purely consumerist, it’s complexly consumerist and anti-consumerist. For example, making your own clothing is a luxury because mass-produced clothes are very cheap *and* they are hard to duplicate with the sort of tools you can afford to own privately. You wouldn’t want to wear clothes which look too different from mass-produced clothes.

    Sex isn’t supposed to be bought. I’ve been trying to figure out what a society would look like if sex was higher status if it was bought instead of produced as a shared pleasure. I’m sure a sufficiently skilled sf author could figure out the details, but the result would be satire, not any known society.

    Extrapolating left wing ideas as I understand them: all advertising contributes to a consumerist society because in addition to whatever product is advertised, there’s an underlying message that buying things is cool and/or that if one’s life doesn’t include mass-produced items, it’s deficient.

    • “I’ve been trying to figure out what a society would look like if sex was higher status if it was bought instead of produced as a shared pleasure. ”

      I believe that in classical Greece, a Hetaira had more status than a wife.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        And you are correct, too. However, hetairai weren’t higher status because they also slept with their customers. An example to really illustrate Nancy’s point would be one of a society where sex with a more average prostitute counts as higher status than that with some one night stand because you’d be paying for the former.

      • Hircum Saeculorum says:

        That was in large part because of how insanely low-status wives were in classical Greece. They weren’t allowed education or much contact outside the house, and it would have undermined the social order intolerably to let them participate in the wine-soaked symposiums that Greek men loved so much.

        A Hetaira had status because she could. They were paid for conversation more than for sex, and had more status than wives because they were good for both.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        My understanding is that’s half-true. Remember that almost all the Classical (~490-323 BC) primary sources come from Athens, which seems to have been Sharia-esque in its treatment of female citizens.
        Herodotus, who was from Artemisia’s Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, gives a very different picture of women than Thucydides or the other Athenians. And, oh heck, Plato appears to have been an anti-democratic subversive who wanted women to have a stronger role in the state and was skeptical of homosexuality.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          Sharia-esque is a funny word to use, since calling Muslims Athens-esque instead would be a tad more appropriate. Islam has at times been influenced much by the writings of the ancient Greeks, though certainly there was much resistance to such influences as well.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Super accurate. The most recent example may be Ayatollah Khomeini sitting in France studying Plato and deciding that what an Islamic state needed was a Guardian Council, not a hereditary monarch.

      • Deiseach says:

        I was thinking of hetaerae and geisha and les Grandes Horizontales as well, but that is complicated because the status there was the associated aura of sophistication that intelligent conversation, music and dance, and elegance in person and dress of the courtesan reflected upon the male consumer.

        There being ordinary dancing girls and musicians who were hired for parties and expected to provide sexual services as well, alongside slaves and concubines and booty of war and common prostitutes who did not have the same elevated rank means that it was not the purchase of sex per se that was considered higher status, but that you could afford a more expensive provider: like buying real diamonds rather than Swarovski crystals as jewellery (no matter how glitzy the ads to make the latter seem high-status and trendy).

        Nancy’s example would have to be a world where, for instance, instead of being seen as a trap and a hideous imposition, paying child support was a sought-after status for a man; envious whispers about “he’s paying to support three children” indicating that the smugly pleased expression of proven studliness on the guy’s face was warranted, and that he had been able to convince one woman at the least (or three separate women? wow!) to sell him reproductive access*. This means that prostitution is not a profession open to all, and requires training; anyone can have sex for free (and a non-prostitute asking to be paid is going to be rebuffed with the same attitude as a quack trying to peddle crystal healing as medical treatment) but to purchase sex means you need to be worth the courtesan’s time and trouble.

        *To be fair, we should have the same apply to women; a woman who wants to buy a sperm donor can’t just head off to a clinic, she needs to show she is of high enough worth to persuade a man to sell her his services.

        • “*To be fair, we should have the same apply to women; a woman who wants to buy a sperm donor can’t just head off to a clinic, she needs to show she is of high enough worth to persuade a man to sell her his services.”

          It isn’t symmetrical. Wombs are a scare reproductive resource. Sperm isn’t.

          • Damn. I didn’t think about the gender implications of sex only being respectable if it’s paid for, but I think the problem can be avoided if we assume that long term sexual relationships are rare and low status– seen as evidence of being too cheap to pay for sex.

          • Deiseach says:

            Wombs are a scare reproductive resource. Sperm isn’t.

            But if we’re arguing that paid-for sex (in distinction to “yeah, everyone’s had a fumble in the haystack” sex) is seen as more high-status, unless you’re going to argue that women aren’t interested in status games or that women of a higher socio-economic class aren’t going to be signalling their ability to purchase the company of desirably literate, talented and skilled companions, then women too will want to show that they can purchase high-status sex. My point here is that it is not about reproduction as such (any woman, as you point out, can become pregnant either for free or by selling sex), it’s about status-signalling. If buying sex is seen as high-status and desirable behaviour, having children from paid-for sex is going to be the ultimate level (because you’re still paying for the sex via child support) – we’re flipping current mores on their heads where buying sex is seedy and only about animal lust, and True Love Married/Partnered Soul-Mate Sex and Babies is the high-status, desirable goal.

            Which also means that the “fallen women/soiled doves/filthy whores selling themselves” notion is going to be flipped on its head; if sex workers/hetairae are high-status occupations, then you really think men won’t want to get in on the act and sell their services? And since despite all that the LGBT rhetoric about “there’s no ‘normal’, there’s just ‘common'” has to say about the relative proportions of heterosexual to other orientations, most people are still going to be heterosexual, which means straight guys selling their services to straight women (though granted, in a “paid sex is high status” world, this puts a whole new spin on “gay for pay”).

            There seems to be a trend towards single women accessing sperm banks to have children and certainly there were legal cases taken to permit single women to have access to these:

            In 1990, when the UK government first legislated about the use of assisted reproduction, it was stated that clinicians needed to consider a ‘child’s need for a father’ in deciding whom to offer treatment. In practice, we know that some fertility clinics were already offering, and continued to offer, treatment to lesbian couples and single women, but the ‘need for a father’ was only recently replaced by the ‘need for supportive parenting’ when the legislation was last amended – in 2008.

            In a culture where “paid-for sex is higher status than sex you can get for free”, the ultimate cachet will be proving your status by having bought-and-paid for reproductive sex, whether you’re male or female – married women may well have children ‘for free’ with their husbands, but what is to stop a single/widowed/divorced or separated woman having a child by a paid companion? Or that single parents may be more than a ‘politically correct’ phrase and really mean men as much as women (yes, currently there are single men parenting children but much fewer than women) and women proudly paying child support to the fathers of their kids who are raising those merry-begots?

            I suppose I’m being mischievous in thinking of “Twenty Years After”, the sequel to Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers”, where Athos is the one left in the position of the traditional seduced-and-abandoned mother (he has an encounter with a woman who becomes pregnant by him, leaves the child on the doorstep of the man she thinks is the father, Athos collects the baby, and is solely responsible for its raising and upkeep for the next sixteen years until he reveals the secret of his parentage to not alone his son, but the unwitting mother).

            In a culture of “paid sex is for the high status”, why not single fathers with children and women paying child support to demonstrate that they too are high status enough to buy sex?

          • hlynkacg says:

            In a culture of “paid sex is for the high status”, why not single fathers with children and women paying child support to demonstrate that they too are high status enough to buy sex?

            Because that would be patriarchal, oppressive, heteronormative, and thus against the spirit of this thought experiment.

          • Hircum Saeculorum says:

            What is the spirit of this though experiment? This all sounds pretty nightmarish to me, though not in the same way as traditionalist gender roles.

          • Hircum, the spirit of this thought experiment (or at least as I started it) is goofing around– just playing with a premise to see what sort of society might follow from it.

            There’s no reason to think it would be an improvement on sex mostly not being for money, and it would probably be worse than many real world arrangements.

            I kind of regret bringing the idea up. It’s a new idea, and it’s about sex, and the result has been so far that there’s been very little discussion of real world consumerism.

          • I have sketched out the world-building for a potential novel with something like this system. The premise is that women are permanently about 20% of the population, and most/all of them work as prostitutes, at least in their youth. Men pay small-ish fees for femal sexual access, but they pay large fees for children. Selling one’s children is the main source of income for the female enclaves.

          • @Mai:

            You might want to look at The Rainbow Cadenza by J. Neil Schulman. It’s a different version of a future society with a very high m/f ratio.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @Mai
            I’m curious. Assuming your society is populated by great ape descendants, how is the 1:5 ratio of females to males being maintained?

            A natural human population would breed that out in a few generations as families who produce more daughters would enjoy a significant reproductive (and social) advantage over those who don’t.

          • Murphy says:

            @Hlynkacg

            Depending on the setting I can think of a workaround if it’s a nearish-future or similar to current tech (or a fall civ with less advanced tech but fallen from something like our current tech)

            Gene drive: It can force a gene through a population even against negative selective pressure. I’d paint a scenario of a world where a mad dictator without enough men for his armies decided to release a gene drive into his population to increase the proportion of males.

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

            It could even gradually get worse with each generation.

            Of course with a population of billions eventually a tiny minority with resistance to the mechanism of the gene drive would eventually be selected for.

        • Outis says:

          Deiseach, you seem to have a weird fixation with making men pay for child support. There really is no reason why paid-for sex should be reproductive sex; it strikes me as a bizarre that your idea of “paid-for sex is high status” immediately turned into “paying for diapers, nannies, school, and pretty much all of a person’s expenses until adulthood is high status”, especially when that does not include any additional sex.

          BTW, what you describe as science-fiction is pretty much the official message in large swaths of our culture.

          • Deiseach says:

            Outis, I’m not excepting women for paying men for child support! And if we’re turning conventional mores on their heads, where instead of “devoted real true love” sex, “paid for bought and purchased” sex is high-status, then the corresponding “take precautions so you don’t sire/bear a bastard” notion gets reversed as well: you want to have kids by paying for them, so you can show off exactly how high status you are – not alone are you sophisticated, cultured and wealthy enough to be a customer of the ranking hetaira of your city, you are one of the elite few who can pay for having a child by them!

            We’re already doing something similar with the first steps of setting up sperm banks, and now reproductive technology is an industry and a business. Given that egg donors can make premium prices (if they fit the desired qualities of health, looks and intelligence) and that commercial surrogacy is now a substantial business in Third World countries, we are de facto approaching “paid for babies are better”; a poor Indian woman will be (relatively) better off renting out her womb for a foreigner’s baby than having a ‘free’ child of her own.

            Simply extend the logic to a world where paid sex is more high status than free sex!

          • Nita says:

            And, just like owning a house or a yacht is higher status than renting one, securing lifetime arrangements with your intimate companions would be higher status than hiring them for a limited time.

            Any Joe Schmoe could have a roll in the hay, but only King Solomon could have “seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines”.

    • Outis says:

      This distinction between bought and non-bought things seems remarkably unimportant and uninsightful to me. Yes, higher-status items are sometimes bought and sometimes not bought, but not because we’re just scratching the surface of this exciting area of analysis; rather, because the concept is completely uninformative and uncorrelated with status.

    • Viliam says:

      I’ve been trying to figure out what a society would look like if sex was higher status if it was bought instead of produced as a shared pleasure.

      One possibility would be that the partners are not paying for sex to each other, but to a third party.

      Imagine that the standard way to get sex is to use some kind of “dating service”, where compatible partners are selected, each of them is tested for possible diseases, and then they have anonymous sex in a pleasant environment. There would be a range of “dating services” starting with cheap ones where you only get a brief health test and a simple room; up to the very expensive ones where only sufficiently attractive people would be allowed, they would be given manicure etc. before sex, and the room would be super romantic, i.e. the service would do everything they can to make the experience great.

      In that world, people who try to have sex without using the “dating service” would be consider low-status, essentially because everyone would suspect that they have some serious problem that doesn’t allow them to use the standard way. For example, that they are so poor they can’t afford even the cheapest service, or they have an incurable veneral disease that would make them rejected from anywhere, or that they have some behavior (e.g. they get violent during sex) which got them banned at many places. The idea of having sex with such person would sound like an idea of having sex with a homeless person sounds today, i.e. not appealing to most people, and even those who want to experiment and try dangerous stuff would not consider it the right kind of dangerous.

      Growing up in that society, once in a while you would hear a story about a person who tried to have sex outside the “dating service” system, and was horribly disappointed, sometimes even hurt. An analogy to experimenting with drugs today: it would mostly happen to young people trying to rebel against the social norms and choosing the most stupid way to do it.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      Mainstream American society isn’t purely consumerist, it’s complexly consumerist and anti-consumerist. For example, making your own clothing is a luxury because mass-produced clothes are very cheap *and* they are hard to duplicate with the sort of tools you can afford to own privately. You wouldn’t want to wear clothes which look too different from mass-produced clothes.

      I think part of the confusion is that consumerist doesn’t just refer to mass-produced goods. Making a meal out of pricey locally grown organic food and artisinal beer, based on an “authentic” recipe and with cookware bought for that purpose, is not any less consumerist than going through the drive-through at McDonald’s. If anything, the way product choice integrates seamlessly with self-image might make it that much more consumerist.

      In the same way, consumerist sex doesn’t necessarily mean sex with prostitutes. If you have two partners who meet on a commercial dating site like OKCupid or Tinder, have modified their bodies to match those of porn-stars (non-prescription Viagra, plastic surgery, extensive shaving / bleaching), and use branded condoms and lube or specialized sextoys during the acts themselves that seems just as, if not more, consumerist than paying a prostitute. It’s about how much of your identity is based on what you consume rather than who you are.

      • Dr Dealgood, you have a point.

        I didn’t get into the very expensive unique item aspect of consumerism, though I think it’s implied by the idea that things and activities are elevated by spending money on them.

      • brad says:

        I think part of the confusion is that consumerist doesn’t just refer to mass-produced goods. Making a meal out of pricey locally grown organic food and artisinal beer, based on an “authentic” recipe and with cookware bought for that purpose, is not any less consumerist than going through the drive-through at McDonald’s. If anything, the way product choice integrates seamlessly with self-image might make it that much more consumerist.

        I don’t think that’s quite right. If you had compared going to a farm to table gourmet restaurant than the two would balance, but the hobby of cooking is prioritizing making something over mere consumption. The essence of consumerism is that there is something elevated about consumption and it’s opposite is that there is something elevated about creation.

        Though there can be some overlap. If you are more excited about the knives you have than the dishes you are making with those knives it shades into the consumerist side.

      • “It’s about how much of your identity is based on what you consume rather than who you are.”

        But isn’t the point that what you consume is supposed to signal things about who you are?

        A guy drives around in an expensive sports car. That signals that he is well off, has elegant tastes. He takes his date to a fancy restaurant. That signals that he is well off, generous, knowledgeable about restaurants. He talks to his date about his opposition to sexism, homophobia, the Koch brothers and Citizens United. That signals that he has the political views fashionable in his, and hopefully her, circles. He recites poetry to her. That signals that he is educated and cultured.

        Where is the distinction between what he consumes and what he is?

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          Where is the distinction between what he consumes and what he is?

          For him? Probably none.

          That is, he’s an archetype of the “last man” of consumerism according to it’s detractors. A perfectly superficial man defined entirely by his fashion tastes and money.

          You might say that everyone is like that to some extent, in a sort of Hasonian everything-is-signaling sense, but even then it’s a matter of degree.

    • SJ says:

      I’ve been trying to figure out what a society would look like if sex was higher status if it was bought instead of produced as a shared pleasure.

      If you think of marriage as an exchange of non-cash economic value, you may be describing a situation in which
      –marriage is deemed high-status
      –women look for men who are willing to work hard and provide a secure home
      –men look for women who are attractive, make pleasant company at social events, and are good at performing (or managing the staff who perform) the non-paid-for work of running the household
      –older people tell scandalous stories of young people “messing around”, and getting the benefits of sex without putting in the un-paid work of settling into a long-term relationship.

      But that all depends on your definition of “bought sex”.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Sex isn’t supposed to be bought. I’ve been trying to figure out what a society would look like if sex was higher status if it was bought instead of produced as a shared pleasure. I’m sure a sufficiently skilled sf author could figure out the details, but the result would be satire, not any known society.

      I think a world in which this was sustainable would be so different from ours that the real though experiment is: How would humans need to be different for this world to exist?

      For starters, I’d say children would need to grow up very quickly with little needed care.

    • Agronomous says:

      @Nancy:

      I also don’t know why I miss trn so much, but hate forums.

      You miss trn because it was objectively awesome. I remember when a whole bunch of GUI newsreaders came along, and just didn’t seem to get that the point of GUIs was to make things easier. I tried each one for a bit, before going back to trn each time.

      Forums suck. It’s like every site is reinventing the wheel: some triangular, some square, the very best ones pentagonal. Jeez, just make all the comments available via NNTP, and we’d be able to use the actual trn everywhere.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      @Nancy Lebovitz:
      A world in which the only high-status sex is that which is paid for has no marriage (except in fringe sects of low status people, like polygamy today), it seems to me. The government would certainly not take any interest in enforcing the contract. I don’t see how you can have heterosexual couples in a lifelong cohabitation contract and then make their sex low status. Not unless it’s also patriarchal, with “wives” seen as “breeders only”.

      As to the consumerist aspect, perhaps thinking about hotels and clubs is informative, because these are already sex adjacent. If you are in a nightclub, paying for bottle service is “high status”: it gives you access to a table and a very expensive, over-priced bottle is brought to you in a way that everyone knows how much you paid. Sneaking that same bottle into the club in your jacket is the opposite.

      The same mattress at a Ritz and Quality Inn are two different prices. Some of this price differential is amenities, but much of it is brand. If I go out of town to meet someone, the infer different things about my status based on whether I am staying at a youth hostel, a Days Inn or a Ritz-Carlton.

      I think one of the problems with your thought experiment is that you need to identify who is granting you the status? In the examples I brought up, the obvious example is “someone you want to have sex with” which doesn’t help us.

      Imagine a society that had an extremely high “productivity” ethic combined with a great deal of formalism. Sort of the popular imagined Japan. Emotional impacts on productivity are frowned on, therefore intense relationships are de-valued, but “relaxation” is highly valued (so as to make one more fit for productivity). This could be a society where paid for sex is the norm, and the more expensive the better.

      I think the idea of where the kids come from and how they are raised gets in the way, though. That’s going to make it a very dystopian consumerism. Because I think that the ultimate reason you are having trouble imagining sex as consumerist is that consumerism is ultimately driven by the mating drive. We want the status as a way to ensure reproductive success.

      • Your productivity society might work. Sex for free is low productivity, especially non-reproductive sex. Raising children is high status because it’s a sort of productivity and contributes to future productivity. There could even be contracts for raising children together, but not for financially uncompensated sex.

        Could it work if the money goes to the principals families? It might– this would be stable if it got established because the families would have an interest in keeping the system going.

        My mind is reeling with the idea of a society where not-legally-enforced marriage is minority/low status, and is predominantly engaged in by religious minorities.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Isn’t “a society where not-legally-enforced marriage is minority” just the inner city?

        • HeelBearCub says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz:
          I think you could have to go with a “Gattaca” style concern about genetic makeup? Sex is “never” for procreation anymore.

          Everyone raises their own child (men and women), but only one child. Perhaps we could go with a concern for zero population growth, in an “island” nation with land/other resources that are constrained somehow.

          Children are custom ordered, your own DNA is the start, with a precise mix of custom additions and government mandated randomness. Each resulting zygote is analyzed before being grown to the age of 2 or 3 years (or perhaps even older?). Old enough that the child can walk and talk almost as soon as they are “born”. This makes sense as children are only born so helpless due to size constraints on the head vis-a-vis the birth canal.

          If you make children born ready to go to school (pre-K) having received early language acquisition and socialization “in vitro” so to speak, you eliminate one of the primary drivers of the gender role difference in a modern society.

          Just spitballing, here.

          So what would sexual consumerism, or consumerism in general, look like in a society where status can’t gain you reproductive success and that is resource constrained? What role does status play in that society? In order for it feel “right” it would need to be some sort of modification of our existing status dynamics that are build around sexual success.

          If you would want to explore consumerism in this kind of society, the constraints that made sexual reproduction verbotten would still need to allow for consumerism in general (it can’t be a resource starved world, just eeking by). Perhaps some sort of long term concern for the genetic health of the populace caused by [insert magical cause here].

  75. I plan to do another meetup at my house, probably on a Saturday in May, June or July. Possibly including board games. Comments and suggestions welcome.

    • Inty says:

      I suggest ‘The Resistance’ as a board game if you’ve never played it. It works well for groups of 7-10 (can be played with as few as 5, but in my experience the games aren’t as good). It’s a game of deception and double-bluffs. Each game is supposed to take 40 minutes, but my ones take about an hour, and generally I’ve found game length to be positively correlated with enjoyment.

      • Liskantope says:

        Ah, I’ve had some great times playing resistance with friends, and I imagine it would be a fun way to get to know new people as well. Then again, our in-game discussions would get so heated that sometimes I just wasn’t in the mood to make myself hoarse arguing.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        No, no, invest in a copy of the boutique board game Mega Civilization, which works for groups of 7-18 and is about expansion and trade in Eurasian civilization (minus China) from the Agricultural Revolution until Roman times.
        (Just kidding.)

    • EyeballFrog says:

      What city would this be in?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Thanks! Let me know in advance and I’ll try to advertise it.

  76. Theo Jones says:

    I’ve been thinking about the argument about politisation that popped up in the last open thread. I think that the issue is more germaneness than keeping politics out of the conference. Everything may be political in some sense. But some political issues are tangentially related enough, that it is worth keeping out of relatively unrelated decisions.

  77. Sniffnoy says:

    A quick thought on copyright registration, which I’m reposting from elsewhere since more people will see it here:

    One of the big problems with the current copyright system, in the US and elsewhere, is the problem of giant copyright snarls where nobody can tell who owns the rights to something, making it impossible for anyone to license it. This would be avoided with a proper copyright registry, but of course the Berne convention forbids this; and there are some substantial advantages to having automatic copyright (e.g. if you just make some drawing and put it on the Internet and then someone else starts selling T-shirts of it, you want to have some recourse).

    So here’s an idea I had for an intermediate sort of system; I am wondering what other people think of it. It would presumably also be disallowed under the Berne convention, but, it’s not like such a thing is realistically going to be implemented anytime soon with or without that, so, whatever.

    The proposal is simple: Copyright is automatic, as it is currently, but copyrights may also be registered. The effect of registration is that only a registered copyright may be sold, or even licensed in an exclusive manner. That is to say, you can license out your copyright, but any contract you make to not license it to other parties would not be enforceable. This, I hope, would reduce the problem of snarls: If the copyright is registered, you can consult the registry. If it is not registered, then you know that the person to contact is the original author (or that they are a person you can contact about it, anyway). Also, unregistered unexpired copyrights would automatically expire on the author’s death, getting rid of that problem. There are still possible snarls if e.g. the registries don’t record as much as we like or if it’s not even clear who the original author is, but it seems like at least a partial solution to me.

    • Under current law as I understand it, copyrights can but need not be registered. Registration ipermits you to collect statutory damages for infringement, rather than being limited to actual damages, the costs the infringement imposed on you.

      I’m not sure I understand your version. One way of reducing the problem of orphan works, works under copyright whose owner is hard to locate, is to have a system where after some period, say ten years, a copyright must be renewed at some modest cost.

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        “One way of reducing the problem of orphan works, works under copyright whose owner is hard to locate, is to have a system where after some period, say ten years, a copyright must be renewed at some modest cost.”

        This also has the benefit that Disney is incentivized to just pay the token amount every ten years instead of having their pet Congressmen extend the copyright terms to an even more insane length every time it looks like Steamboat Willie is about to enter the public domain.

        • Alliteration says:

          As cynical at is its, sometimes building the law to allow direct transfers of wealth from the public to the elites is better than the inefficiencies that lobbies/corruption/bribery can create. For example, the president just paying himself 1,000,000 extra dollars is better than him creating a bad law that increases the stocks he owns in value by 1,000,000, because the former there is no bad law.

          • Protagoras says:

            I’ve always thought politicians in democracies are absurdly underpaid.

          • TD says:

            @Protagoras

            You can always do it the other way around, and forbid politicians from owning anything or having any money. That way, figuring out what transfers of money are corruption and what aren’t is a non-issue, since politicians give up these rights in return for being allowed to have political power. No income streams other than the constitutionally stipulated stipend and lodgings. If any evidence is found of any private ownership by politicians, they can be brought before court and if found guilty, dismissed in shame and permanently barred from political office.

            Few people would want to become politicians under such a scheme, but that’s by design.

          • Anonymous says:

            @TD

            That sounds like a fairly workable system, if it could be implemented. That would require a Czar of some sort, because the politicians in charge of things probably wouldn’t consider this an improvement of their lot.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            @TD

            I can see this working perfectly well for say, presidents and congressmenl. But many positions in state and town (and I do mean town, not city) governments are unpaid or receive nominal compensation, and I can’t imagine many skilled people wanting to serve in low-level positions in local office at the expense of any wealth save the government stipend – and the government’s probably raising taxes a fair bit to pay for said stipends.

            You could, of course, exempt those positions, but corruption also happens on the local level.

          • Tracy W says:

            @td: you’d also have to forbid politicians’ families and friends from owning anything.

            Your scheme would also mean that all politicians would be much more dependent on staying voted in for their income to continue.

            I understand Julius Ceaser’s motivation for changing the Roman Republic was that if he stepped down from his role as Consol he would be open to prosecution by his political enemies. Generally I think it’s a good thing to make leaving politics attractive to politicians.

          • Murphy says:

            @TD

            Ok, lets imagine I’m a high level politician.

            So I don’t own anything but if I vote the right way I get to stay in a Nike brand house, spend every night with a Coca Cola brand hooker, every meal can be provided by a Disney brand Cook and I can be chauffeured around in a General Motors Limo.

            Not owning any of that of course, just staying with some “friends” and getting lots of lifts around and dinners from “friends”

          • TD says:

            @Murphy

            Maybe we need to imprison politicians and have them under public surveillance 24/7.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Sorry, only just got back to this now!

        Yes, for some reason when I wrote this I forgot copyrights can in fact be registered in the US, with the effect you mention. My point is not to replace that effect; this is pretty independent of that.

        Renewal fees and sensibly short copyright terms also help, of course, in that they get the work into the public domain faster. But the goal here was to avert the problem of licensing snarls in the case where the work is still under copyright.

        Can you specify what you don’t understand? (Sorry, I’m getting back to this really late, don’t know if you’ll see this, but…)

    • Zippy says:

      In the US, copyright owners are precluded from collecting statutory damages and/or attorney’s fees for any infringement occurring before registration. So if you accept the extremely low-resolution view of more money more incentive then registering is already incentivized, I guess.

      Is it currently a part of the rationalist memeplex that we should abolish copyright completely? I hope so. I think gwern said something about this once, but even notable software freedom advocates like Richard M Stallman don’t usually have the gall to say that copyright should be done away with completely.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Copyright requires both private property and a government, so I feel like both halves of the community oppose it.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        Gwern’s argument in “Culture Is Not About Aesthetics” is that the creation of fiction should not be subsidized, since there is already too much new fiction being produced. Copyright can be modeled as a subsidy.

        • Deiseach says:

          So what about intellectual rights and plagiarism? If we’re doing away with copyright, why not go the whole hog and say sure, let a student use chunks of someone else’s article or book in their essay with no attribution and pass it off as their own work.

          I suppose the argument there would be that there is no harm being done so long as the original author does not know about it and that knowledge is being disseminated?

          What then if the enterprising student makes a book out of the chunks they lift from others and sells it? I’m seeing examples of this from fanartists online, who produce work and share it freely, then find online services (like Redbubble) being used by people who lift their work off the internet and stick it on t-shirts etc. and sell it for their own profit, with neither permission nor attribution.

          • Plagiarism is a different issue. The student is claiming credit for intellectual work he didn’t do, thus defrauding his professor, the university that grants him his degree, and future employers who rely on that degree as evidence of ability.

            In the academic world, plagiarism is a much more serious offense than copyright violation. Things have tightened up a bit in recent years, but it used to be common for a professor to make a bunch of photocopies of an article for his students to read as part of class readings.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            First, there is a difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism. Even if copyright is abolished, private institutions can still maintain a strong taboo on claiming to have written something you haven’t. Students get expelled for plagiarism because of that taboo, not because they are infringing on someone’s copyright.

            Second, Gwern’s argument is specifically about fiction. He even has a section arguing that subsidizing nonfiction is much more defensible, and that there is no reason why you can’t remove the subsidy on fiction while still subsidizing nonfiction.

          • Eltargrim says:

            it used to be common for a professor to make a bunch of photocopies of an article for his students to read as part of class readings

            And with my understanding of fair dealings (not necessarily fair use), this kind of thing is still permissible. Whether or not litigation-averse institutions will permit it in policy, however…

          • Deiseach says:

            Things have tightened up a bit in recent years, but it used to be common for a professor to make a bunch of photocopies of an article for his students to read as part of class readings.

            This is eight years or more ago, but the school I worked in got hit with a letter from some organisation claiming that unless they paid for a licence, any copying by teachers of textbooks, etc for handouts was illegal and they would be sued.

            How they were going to go into every school in Ireland and check every class to make sure the pupils didn’t have a photocopy of the notes on the set novel or whatever, I don’t know, but the local government organisation running the school took it seriously enough to pay up (at least for that year).

            Looking it up on the web, I see that they are still going:

            (b) The copying licensed shall not in the case of any one published work exceed five per cent of the work or one chapter (whichever is the greater), save that:
            (i) in the case of an article in a journal or periodical, the whole article may be copied, but not more than one article in any one issue of the publication;
            (ii) in the case of a short story or poem of not more than ten pages in length, the whole of the short story or poem may be copied;
            (iii) in the case of material that is not a conventional book, journal, or periodical, or is not divided into distinct sections, the Licensee shall ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable, that copying is limited to extracts that are equivalent to the limits set out above.

            So it looks like you can see a relevant article in the newspaper and make copies of it for your class – if the school has a paid-up licence.

            I thought at the time and still think that this was some chancer making a handy little earner for themselves and the school textbook publishers – I somehow doubt the journalist who writes an article in a magazine that gets copied for a science or history or English class sees a penny of the license fee – but apparently it’s legal.

            I think copyright can get very blurry; if figures like Superman are now part of the cultural consciousness, does it really make sense to claim copyright over them?

            On the other hand, doing away with copyright altogether also, I think, blurs the distinction between plagiarism and copyright: if the student is guilty of not doing the intellectual work and using the stolen work to get value, what about taking the artwork or written work of someone else and passing it off as your own and selling it for a profit? Getting the degree is a means of making profit, as you expect to get better paying work than if you did not have it. The person taking your drawing or witty quote and putting it on a t-shirt for sale is also claiming credit for work they did not do.

          • Murphy says:

            @Deiseach

            Scammy as fuck, they’re a just a private company… but legal.

            The disgusting thing is that educational institutions have an exception and can copy sections freely and legally unless some shyster sets up a company exactly like that and gets enough rightsholders to sign up. Then they can extract rent under section 173.

            I can’t find any requirement for them to in any way track what works are actually being used. The schools could exclusively use Scott A’s posts as handouts if they felt like it but the company would have no legal obligation to give a penny to Scott. They can distribute it however they like as long as they’ve got “a substantial number of rightsholders in the category
            of works to which the scheme is designed to apply”

            http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2000/act/28/enacted/en/pdf

            My bet is that the owners arranged for some brown envelopes to exactly the right ministers to get that piece of shit legislation.

      • For arguments for abolishing copyright and patent, see Against Intellectual Monopoly.

        • Max Goedl says:

          Do you think intellectual property would be protected under anarchy, i.e. in a world of private rights enforcement agencies? In other words, do you think the benefits to an innovator of having his IP rights enforced are normally larger or smaller than the costs to the protection agency of enforcing them?

          • Mary says:

            Do you think property rights would be protected under anarchy?

            Depends on who you are.

          • The short answer is no, so far as the sort of market for law I have sketched. I explain the reasons why in one of the chapters of the third edition of The Machinery of Freedom.

          • Furslid says:

            Yes and no. It’s likely that major for profit distributors would contract to enforce copyright. For instance Amazon would agree not to sell bootleg works. They would contract with content creators not to do so. If they did they would stop getting distribution rights. Also, they would lose customers as many customers prefer legitimate works. They also have deep enough pockets to be targeted for enforcement.

            It is unlikely that not for profit decentralized infringement would be stopped. File sharing would be basically immune. No agreement with creators, no reputation for treating creators fairly to protect, and no deep pockets.

          • Murphy says:

            @Furslid

            Under that model it feels like “copyright” or something similar would be the most trivial of rights they’d grant themselves by those methods.

            Why limit yourself to something similar to traditional copyright when you could use the same tools to extract money from anyone who tries to distribute something you decide you feel you want to claim?

            What’s to stop you using the same tools to do a land-grab on copies of Shakespeare or anyone who uses the the word “Embiggen” without paying you a fee. Sort of a “you get what you can grab” for information monopoly rights.

          • Furslid says:

            @Murphy

            I don’t think they could. There is a natural alliance between creators to protect their rights. Why should an author deal with a company that screws over other authors? There is no such alliance between people asserting arbitrary rights. Why should I care if someone doesn’t enforce your arbitrary rights.

            Also, consumers generally like to see creators they like supported. So they will prefer to deal with companies that deal fairly with creators. So a reputation for dealing fairly with creators is valuable. A reputation for caving in to crazy claims wouldn’t be.

          • Murphy says:

            @Furslid

            Then your enforcement mechanism sounds a tad fragile.

            It also seems to rely overmuch on what people find “natural” which is pretty easily shaped by a decent advertising campaign.

            Just do what PR companies and people trying to claim thrones do: find some thin and vaguely plausible claim and then manufacture support for it. Pay a historian to write a nice little report claiming that your companies owner is clearly the direct decedent of Shakespeare or come up with some other thin excuse like justifying it based on the promotion and support your company/group provides for shakespearean productions.

            It doesn’t have to be real, just plausible enough and pretty soon everyone else in your industry will be doing similar land-grabs and the overton window will have shifted.

        • TD says:

          Do you think anarchy would be protected under anarchy?

          • birdboy2000 says:

            Personally, I don’t. “Anarcho”-capitalists are the best friends the accelerationist far-left could ask for.

          • Murphy says:

            @onyomi

            That’s really really really silently assuming that everyone will play nice.

            “would large scale combat have broken out on anywhere near the same scale if, instead of the two factions controlling hundreds of thousands of conscripts, all military commanders had to hire voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage for their services?”

            This is really really side-stepping the problem that a third option is open to you: hire a small band of voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage and use them to conscript 10 times as many people at gunpoint and to hold a few family members hostage to ensure their good behavior. Far far cheaper than hiring that many at fair market wage.

            Which is pretty close to what actually happens in many crappy conflict zones.

            Who’s going to stop them? The conflict zones I’m thinking of are where no single body has enough power that it can project to prevent such practices, government or private.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Sorry, only just got back to this now!

        Yes, this is true, but the point here isn’t to incentivize registration, it’s to prevent the problems that come from not registering. It’s true that sufficiently incentivizing registration could also achieve that, but the incentive wasn’t the point here, preventing snarls was. And given that copyright snarls are in fact a current problem, clearly the current incentive doesn’t suffice for that purpose.

    • brad says:

      If we are going with pie in the sky proposals, I like the exponentially increasing renewal system. E.g. $1k at 7 years, $10k at 14, $100k at 21, $1M at 28, $10M at 35, $100M at 42, and $1B at 49.

      • Why? The cost imposed on others by your copyright is more likely to decline over time than to grow.

        • Watercressed says:

          I’d imagine it’s because we want all those likely things in the public domain while still preserving the possibility of unlikely long-term-profitable creations.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        What’s the unit of what needs to be registered? Does an entire Disney movie that is the work of millions of dollars require the same registration fees as one photograph?

        • Murphy says:

          Even more fun: composite works.

          if the script was written in 2010 , the music was composed in 1980 but performed in 2011 and a song was written to go with the old music. The scenes were shot in 2012 and edited in 2013 but snippets were released in trailers in 2012.

          It’s one of the tricks sometimes pulled with DMCA notices on parodies:
          Someone does a parody(protected) and shoots their own everything and makes a parody version of the songs from a movie with completely different words but to the same tune so that it’s recognizable.

          Someone objects but can’t get the whole thing pulled because protected parody.
          So they file a DMCA for just the tune. Not the movie as a whole.

          Copyright is depressingly fractal.

    • Luke Somers says:

      Oi, conflicting IP is the reason we haven’t had a Star Control game worth anything this millennium. If one party owned it, at least the new game would be able to use more than just the name.

  78. Kyle Strand says:

    Scott and other open-threaders, you have very likely already seen this, but if not, you may find it interesting; I found it very nearly astounding. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism

    • J says:

      Very interesting, thanks for posting.

    • Adam Casey says:

      A very good article. Feeds into what I’ve been saying about the media reaction to Trump for a while. People don’t hate him because of his policies, he doesn’t have any. They hate him because he’s white trash.

      I don’t actually object to hating people because they are white trash. Hardly the worst prejudice. But it’s rather silly to pretend it is anything other than class prejudice.

      • Nathan says:

        I hate him because of his policies. He does have some, mostly involving war crimes.

        Broadly I think you’re correct though.

        • Adam Casey says:

          So he’s gone on a few rants which, if taken literally, would be war crimes.

          But like … so have I? I don’t actually endorse my rants. The question is does Trump endorse what he’s said about fighting terrorism. Maybe, maybe not, maybe he’s not actually thought about it. Either way I don’t think you can call those policies.

          • A POTUS who promotes war crimes is not the same thing as a random person on the internet who promotes war crimes.

          • Frank McPike says:

            “Either way I don’t think you can call those policies.”
            Surely if Trump did endorse what he said, then you would call that a policy? Up to this point, whether or not America uses torture has been a policy question. “It’s not a policy when Trump says it” seems like a kind of special pleading in order to save your initial claim. When Cruz said (in the same debate) that he wouldn’t use torture, wasn’t that a policy position?

            Even apart from that, Trump has made many statements that constitute explicit policy proposals: limiting Muslim immigration, eliminating birthright citizenship, and getting rid of H1-B visas. Those are controversial positions, and the sort that inevitably inspire legitimate disagreement. He may have endorsed some of them inconsistently, but you don’t need to believe for an absolute certainty that a candidate will actually implement a given policy in order to hold it against them.

            Many people (in fact, most people I’ve talked to) dislike Trump because:
            1. He’s proposed bad policies.
            2. He’s duplicitous and willing to lie about his beliefs.
            3. He doesn’t have serious or considered positions on important policies.
            4. All of the above.

            Even if you dispute 1, you seem to believe 2 and 3 are true. Surely these are legitimate and common reasons to disapprove of presidential candidates that don’t boil down to class prejudice? Is it really surprising that many people dislike Trump for vices that you agree he has?

          • Adam Casey says:

            Oh yeah. If Trump decides he means it and actually comes up with plans that would make those awful things happen then it’s a policy. My point is just that Trump changes his mind about everything. What he says one week is not a good guide to what he will say the next.

            Re your 4 points: I think they’re all true to one degree or another of any politician one dislikes. I think Cruz has terrible proposals and lies about what he thinks and so on.

            I’m not trying to explain why people hate Trump per se. I’m trying to explain why the extra passion, why the “this guy is basically hitler”, why this “this is unthinkable and a sign of the endtimes”. Because really, on your 4 points Trump is hardly even an outlier, let alone a monster.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Adam Casey

            I’m not paying much attention to Trump, but a pattern I’m seeing reminds me of “The serious charges are not true, and the true charges are not serious.”

            His nasty ideas are not practical (his wall etc), and his practical ideas are not nasty (supporting Social Security, Planned Parenthood, etc).

          • hlynkacg says:

            Objective observation would appear to indicate that Trump is a pragmatic populist, and honestly, I’m ok with that.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            I know most of you don’t want to hear this, but my guess is people don’t like Trump because he wants to waterboard everyone.

            If he goes on to win the nomination he will likely garner >40% of the vote in the general election.

            There are 2 possibilities.

            1. All his followers are morons and they just aren’t as smart as you, being way too sophisticated to fall for his cons.

            2. You don’t understand Trump’s followers, you don’t understand what drives them.

            And.you.aren’t.even.trying.to.

            When Islamic terrorists suicide bomb western targets most people after being aghast at the specific act make a good faith effort to understand what is driving this behavior.

            When African Americans loot and burn down their own neighborhoods there is a good faith effort to understand the social dynamics driving this seemingly irrational behavior.

            There is an assumption that there are underlying conditions with rational grievances that drive people to do seemingly irrational things. Smart people, our best and brightest, investigate and try to untangle the paradox.

            Is that what is happening here? I would argue that the media treatment of Trump voters is a confirmation to them of everything they perceived about the media and the establishment to start with. No respect. No empathy. No help. Arrogant elitists.

            Something really is happening here. Very few people are trying to find out what it really is.

          • John Schilling says:

            There are 2 possibilities.

            1. All his followers are morons and they just aren’t as smart as you, being way too sophisticated to fall for his cons.

            2. You don’t understand Trump’s followers, you don’t understand what drives them.

            And.you.aren’t.even.trying.to.

            No, we are trying to. And we are I think succeeding. But it keeps coming back to the Trump supporters being morons wrong at the object level when it comes to the probability of supporting Trump actually leading to the changes they want, for reasons rooted in the rational ignorance of the average voter.

            Bottom line, they want to feel good for a few minutes in the voting booth, sticking it to the elitist snobs even though it won’t do them any good and will probably make things much worse, because they don’t see any path to a better outcome than that.

            Which, I think, was your motive for that nice little rant. Feel better?

          • Tom Scharf says:

            I would submit to you that Hope and Change wasn’t likely to result in changes many voters hoped for.

            Who should the Trump voter be voting for instead? Who best represents their interests? They probably feel abandoned by both parties. My guess is the first person who came along and gave everyone else the finger was going to end getting the support of this group. It happened to be Trump. Trump was either lucky or more insightful than anybody gives him credit for.

            The mockery and knee slapping about Trump is starting to turn into palpable fear in the media I think. It’s going to take more than group shaming to bring him down. I’m not sure the media knows how to use any other tools in their toolset.

            If Hillary gets indicted Trump might actually win. It might actually be worse if Hillary doesn’t get indicted and she handles it poorly (i.e takes victory laps on her vindication). A lot of people are going to be holding their nose going into the voting booth this year I suspect.

          • ” But it keeps coming back to the Trump supporters being morons wrong at the object level when it comes to the probability of supporting Trump actually leading to the changes they want, for reasons rooted in the rational ignorance of the average voter.”

            Alternatively, each individual Trump supporter realizes that his supporting Trump won’t lead to changes, whether Trump’s policies are good or bad, since his vote has almost no change of changing the outcome of the election. But supporting Trump does make him feel good. So he does.

          • eh says:

            But it keeps coming back to the Trump supporters being morons wrong at the object level when it comes to the probability of supporting Trump actually leading to the changes they want, for reasons rooted in the rational ignorance of the average voter.

            Proving that Trump supporters are factually incorrect is not sufficient; you also have to prove A) that they are more wrong than everyone else, i.e. that you aren’t making an isolated demand for rigor, and B) that they have not stumbled on the right answer anyway, i.e. maybe nearly electing a scary vaugely-right-wing populist will shift public view towards positions that are genuinely beneficial, like retaining selective immigration, or not deploying ground troops to the most fucked-up region on the planet because 1 in 100,000 of your citizens were killed by a single renegade Saudi engineer.

          • Teal (formerly Anonymous) says:

            @Tom Scharf

            1. All his followers are morons and they just aren’t as smart as you, being way too sophisticated to fall for his cons.

            2. You don’t understand Trump’s followers, you don’t understand what drives them.

            There’s a difference between morons and “aren’t as smart as you”. Sticking with the latter — assuming posters weren’t lying a few open threads back when IQ came up, there are plenty of posters here for whom most Trump supporters just aren’t as smart as them. (Ditto for Clinton and Cruz supporters.) Even if the 1 out of 1000 or whatever Trump supporters that are smarter, or the 2 out of 100 that are within a standard deviation to the left, have some intelligent reason for supporting Trump that still leaves an overwhelming majority as plausibly supporting him for reasons that look ‘moronic’ from their perspective. Sure the same thing may well be true about Clinton supporters, but so what? That doesn’t obviate the claim as to Trump supporters.

            I don’t think I’ll ever understand how people can simultaneously be into HBD and the critical and undervalued importance of IQ and at the same time exhibit this weird egalitarianism that constantly posits a hidden wisdom of the common man. Most people go around doing things for dumb reasons. Understanding mass movements is mostly about figuring out why dumb people think dumb things.

            Arrogant elitists.

            Would you prefer false, cloying modesty and protestations of fellowship?

          • John Schilling says:

            Who should the Trump voter be voting for instead? Who best represents their interests?

            Either Bernie Sanders or Ted Cruz, depending on how committed they are to conservative social values.

            Neither of the two tailors their lies quite so specifically to Trump’s supporters as does Trump, and I’m pretty sure they don’t tell quite so many blatant lies in general. Their underlying beliefs and attitudes are probably as closely aligned with Trump’s supporters as are Trump’s. Their personal interests, insofar as they are not filthy stinking rich and do have to work for a living, are much more closely aligned. And they are much more likely to be able to represent those beliefs, attitudes, and interests by the highly effective means of winning an election and running an effective presidency. Meanwhile, the least effective way of representing the interests of Trump supporters would have to be handing the Oval Office to Hillary Clinton with a #NeverTrump mandate.

            And both Sanders and Cruz are as strong a symbol of dissatisfaction with the parties as you can vote for with any expectation that they will then be able to work with the parties to turn them into something the disaffected voters can trust in the future.

            Unless your desires go no further than having someone tell you pleasing lies and maybe watching the world burn, in which case, sure, if you’re that part of Trump’s demographic you’ll at least briefly enjoy voting for him.

          • Lyyce says:

            @Teal I think the point is not that most of Trump supporters support him for stupid or bad reason, but that is the case for most (if not all) of the candidates, past and present.

            Then outing only Trumps supporters as stupid and uneducated on politics looks like isolated demand for rigor.

          • Teal (formally Anonymous) says:

            The isolated demands for rigor point is a decent one, but it isn’t the same as “they have great reasons but you are too arrogant / biased to see it”. Yet I see that fairly often here w/r/t various red tribe things. I’d much prefer to see the response that the blue tribe is filled with idiots too.

          • Jiro says:

            Sure the same thing may well be true about Clinton supporters, but so what? That doesn’t obviate the claim as to Trump supporters.

            But that gets back to the isolated demand for rigor. If it’s all supporters, why single out Trump?

            This is also another case of implicature. Making a statement that Trump supporters are stupider than you implies that you think that only Trump supporters are stupider than you, even if you didn’t add the word “only”. Yes, it is logically possible that Trump supporters are stupider than you because most people are, but nobody communicates that way in the real world.

          • Lyyce says:

            True, but “they have great reasons but you are too arrogant / biased to see it” is just “they have reasons and objectivity which are a priori no worse than ours” taken to far, basically making the same mistake by assuming your ideological opponents are idiots.

            I hardly ever see people treat political opponents as sensible, from any side, that’s probably one of the reason political discourse is so fucked up.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            Does being smarter make you more qualified to determine what is best for a farmer, people in Appalachia, or the hood if you have no experience with any of these? Perhaps if you grew up in these environments.

            I don’t want my nuclear plant designed by farmers, but I don’t think farmers want their farms run by nuclear engineers. Engineers will make better garbagemen than garbagemen will make engineers (except in Dilbert), but don’t extrapolate that to infinity. Understanding the physics of basketball isn’t that helpful in being a better player, or coach. The Ivy league has terrible basketball teams, and they aren’t being asked to teach Kansas how to be better at it.

            Many problems are judgment calls with very incomplete data and constantly evolving confounders (take action in Syria?), having a big room of technocrats isn’t much of an advantage.

          • “I don’t think I’ll ever understand how people can simultaneously be into HBD and the critical and undervalued importance of IQ and at the same time exhibit this weird egalitarianism that constantly posits a hidden wisdom of the common man.”

            It’s pretty easy. Less smart than me isn’t the same thing as stupid.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            “I don’t think I’ll ever understand how people can simultaneously be into HBD and the critical and undervalued importance of IQ and at the same time exhibit this weird egalitarianism that constantly posits a hidden wisdom of the common man.”

            You are trying to fit IQ into a one-size fits all category. IQ doesn’t have much to say about when a person believes life starts in an abortion debate, what God might be, the amount of risk you are willing to tolerate in 401K investing, whether Shiites are not true enough to Islam to deserve death, how large the social safety net needs to be, the death penalty, etc. These are type of things people vote on that technocrats are simply not very useful, and when they appeal to their own IQ authority on these, it is demeaning.

            I watched my mom die a very unkind long drawn out death by cancer. I may value cancer research and death with dignity over issues such as climate change. The fact you are 16% smarter than me isn’t really a factor here.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            “I don’t think I’ll ever understand how people can simultaneously be into HBD and the critical and undervalued importance of IQ and at the same time exhibit this weird egalitarianism that constantly posits a hidden wisdom of the common man.”

            It seems pretty straight forward to me. The stereotypical Academic or mid-to-upper level bureaucrat tends to be insulated from the consequences of their ideas. As such their assumptions are never almost challenged or updated. Meanwhile the “common man” always has the gods of the copybook heading looming over them, and thus has much stronger incentive to “get it right”.

            See this reply in Scott’s post on social class.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Tom Scharf:

            When African Americans loot and burn down their own neighborhoods there is a good faith effort to understand the social dynamics driving this seemingly irrational behavior.

            And when registered Republican voters burn down their own party by supporting Trump, even though they disagree with him on a number of issues (as far as anyone can tell), we should try to understand the social dynamics.

            Basically, voting Trump is how white working-class people riot.

          • “Basically, voting Trump is how white working-class people riot.”

            Interesting analogy.

            I don’t think it’s perfect. One reason to riot is for the fun of it, and that probably applies to voting for Trump as well. But the sort of riot referred to in the previous post also tends to involve looting stuff—material rather than just psychic gain.

            It can be seen as an externality/public good problem. The result of looting the electronic store is that in the future it isn’t there so it’s harder to buy stuff. But I share the cost of that with everyone else in the neighborhood, whereas the benefit of getting a looted television is all mine.

            I don’t see a close analogy to that in the Trump case.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I don’t think looting is a core part of what rioting is about. It’s just a side effect, opportunistic behavior that crops up when you have a breakdown in public order, valuable goods, and less-than-virtuous people all coinciding. Certainly if they’re setting cop cars on fire and whatnot you aren’t going to refuse to call it a riot just because they haven’t stolen anything.

          • Zorgon says:

            It’s really quite amazing how concepts like outgroup homogenity bias and attribution of motive just go flying out of the window when dealing with a perceived low-status outgroup, isn’t it?

            I’m not American, so Trump is only indirectly my problem, but I had the same problem with my more straightforwardly-liberal FB feed and their utter and complete astonishment at the victory of the Conservative Party in last year’s UK elections. The concept that there might be a very large constituency that doesn’t think the same way they do is inexplicably anathemic to some.

            (I predicted a hung parliament or narrow Tory win, because although I anticipated the Lib Dem collapse, I did not expect the Labour turnout to be as atrociously poor as it was, nor the Tory vote to be as driven as it was, given the anaemic and rather pitiful show from the right-wing press. Still, though, some of my friends were expecting Green Party victories.)

          • Anonymous says:

            B) that they have not stumbled on the right answer anyway, i.e. maybe nearly electing a scary vaugely-right-wing populist will shift public view towards positions that are genuinely beneficial, like retaining selective immigration

            There is something weirdly circular about this line of reasoning.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            I like the this is how the WWC riots analogy. At least it is the proper way to riot in my opinion.

            This also demonstrates how out of touch the media has been with what the WWC is thinking. Not a single one of them saw this coming. The urban media bubble has ignored them to the point of not even acknowledging their existence. It’s been saturation flood the zone coverage of race, race, race. I suppose it is a hard pill to swallow that the WWC is allegedly responsible for the plight of the disadvantaged minorities and needs to pony up some of their privilege, and they find themselves living in a broken down mobile home. A valid response to that request could easily be summed up in two words.

            There may be some truth to “none of you elitists are ever going to help us so we are going to throw a brick through your window because it feels so damn good”.

            Globalization and to a lesser extent immigration have hurt the working class sector. Denying that is problematic. I don’t think protectionism is the answer or that this path was necessarily avoidable nor repairable at this point.

          • Anonymous says:

            You know have every time there’s an inner city riot and some white person gets on TV as says “don’t they realize they are only burning down their own neighborhood?!?”

            Yeah. Hurt is a relative thing. It could get much worse.

          • “Globalization and to a lesser extent immigration have hurt the working class sector. Denying that is problematic. ”

            Perhaps, but how do you demonstrate that it is true? Why do you believe it is true?

            Lots of things are always changing, so it’s hard to attribute outcomes to any one of them. The same person who may get paid less because what he was making is now being imported also buys things for less because they are imported. Some people lose a job because what they were making is being imported, some gain a job producing the goods we are exporting in exchange.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            It’s self evident that globalization has hurt the WWC. Steel mills are out of business, and the world certainly uses more steel than it used to. The labor rate in China and India is a fraction of US costs. Private sector union power has diminished because a company can off-shore manufacturing if it needs to. Even Trump morons can see these things, and they aren’t reading about them in the NYT, they are looking out their window.

            But you are correct that they aren’t complaining when they buy something for $2 at Walmart. I think it is likely true the middle and upper classes have gained benefits from globalization, the lower class has lost out.

            All the technology has automated out mostly WWC jobs and the people who maintain and design the automated machinery are highly skilled and highly paid. We have transitioned to a knowledge economy, and if you don’t have knowledge you lose. The people who lost out in the genetic lottery are in a tough position.

            I’m not one to preach about income inequality, and see this progress as the inevitable march of trying to make things better for everyone. When we tell the losing side of this march “tough shit” then I guess we end up with Donald Trump.

            The next election cycle will include pandering to the WWC by everyone. This bloc is up for grabs.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Zorgon:

            It’s really quite amazing how concepts like outgroup homogenity bias and attribution of motive just go flying out of the window when dealing with a perceived low-status outgroup, isn’t it?

            Just to be clear about where I stand: I’m a pointy-headed conservative, who pays attention to law blogs and legislative battles more than election horse-races. I thought (much of) the white working class was in my ingroup, at least politically. Lots of them call in to conservative radio shows and seem to have principles and think about party unity and all that.

            Marco Rubio would have made the best candidate,* but he had to shoot himself in the foot with amnesty; Kasich would peel off a lot of Democrats, but that’s because he practically is one (I accidentally called him “Kasinich” once); Cruz is a principled conservative and a very good lawyer who could beat an indicted Hillary, probably. Maybe.

            Illegal immigration came out of nowhere, sideswiping both parties, because outside talk radio (both conservative and African-American), everybody in the media agreed it was totally cool and nothing to get upset about. Whoops. Turns out when you’re competing with illegal immigrants for jobs, there is something to get upset about.

            So Trump, whose candidacy was totally a blast while he was just pissing off the media by absorbing their superpowers and turning them back against them,** was the only one talking about it, and now this incredibly non-conservative rich guy who gave lots of money to the Clinton foundation, of all things, is on his way to either the nomination or the destruction of the Republican party (which, for all its faults, at least provides a home for conservatives).

            I find myself wishing fervently for Sanders to get the Democratic nod, so I can vote for him. He’s too far left to actually get anything done, and every move he makes as President will either damage the Democrats’ brand (by being too socialist) or hurt their morale (by not being socialist enough).

            (* Because he’s the one low-information voters would most want to sleep with. I’m pointy-headed, but not naive.)

            (** My understanding of mass media and campaigning may be somewhat oversimplified.)

        • suntzuanime says:

          I mean, you are voting for President of the United States. War crimes sort of come with the territory.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Pretty much. If your goal is to have a president that won’t embarrass you with your tumblr international commie friends, you’re shit out of luck. Obama was about as dovish as I’ve come to expect from an American President, but the left here still thinks of him as a mass murderer (and also holds him accountable for a coup that happened 40 years ago).

      • Seth says:

        “People” hate Trump for different reasons. The key reason for the “passion” is because the Republican establishment hates Trump. They hate him for mostly the wrong reasons – because he’s nationalist rather than purely global capitalist, and he’s not a team player in terms of the Republican Party coalition and positioning. Thus, it’s acceptable for professional pundits to say he’s a horrible person. Otherwise, the same hate would be deemed proof of the derangement of hippies.

        It has nothing to do with class prejudice. The very patrician Bush was always playing at being a literal cowboy. You’re seeing the intra-party Republican fight now, reflected in acceptable bounds of professional media discourse.

      • Pku says:

        Yeah. I dislike Trump, but whenever I see a media article bashing him I remember what Donal Noye/Tyrion said to Jon: “They don’t hate you because you’re better than them. They hate you because you act like you’re better than them.”

    • onyomi says:

      I think this is ultimately a shift toward “Bulverism”–that is, skipping over explaining how you’re wrong and jumping right to why you’re wrong. I actually saw an entire event at Harvard devoted to examining the question of why so many Americans vote against their own economic self-interest. That they do so was taken for granted.

      • Anonymous says:

        I thought it was pretty well established that they do so? That it’s wrong for them to do so is what’s taken for granted.

        • onyomi says:

          It’s well-established which major party’s economic policies are better for the poor and middle class?

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m thinking of specific instances of people voting against their economic self-interests. (I also hoped the second part of my comment wouldn’t be ignored.)

            [@Onyomi, I think you edited your comment? I responded to the longer, unedited version (which, btw, I liked better).]

          • Zarel says:

            I guess the implication is that they vote against their interests in the primaries, too.

          • onyomi says:

            Re. the second part; yes, that also seems it shouldn’t be taken for granted, especially by the side (the liberal side) which so emphasizes altruism (that is, voting on idealism, not self interest).

            I do think it’s basically been proven, based on what I’ve read, at least, however, that voters don’t actually vote on the basis of pure economic self-interest. Signalling virtue and group identification are probably more important.

          • Anonymous says:

            [Content warning: Blasphemy]

            @Onyomi, yes, liberals using “self-interest” as a criticism has always puzzled me. (The only justification might be when your opponent claims that they are voting in their own self-interest and you want to point out that they aren’t.)

            I tend to think that voting against one’s economic self-interest can be rational and justifiable. For example, you may want to avoid incentivizing certain behavior, or you may prioritize fairness over personal gain (because a society in which people believe they are treated fairly is a better one). (I’m not sure if this is what you meant by “idealism”.)

          • sweeneyrod says:

            It seems pretty well established that some people vote against their self-interest — if most minimum wage whites vote Republican, and most minimum wage non-whites vote Democrat, one group has to be wrong (unless economic effects of policies that have disparate impacts on different racial groups dominate the effects of policies like raising the minimum wage, which seems unlikely).

          • suntzuanime says:

            Raising the minimum wage itself could easily have disparate impacts. It’s easy enough to construct a model where you need some unskilled workers but can automate some away in response to a minimum wage hike, and you’re a horrible racist so you’d prefer to automate away the black ones.

          • onyomi says:

            “one group has to be wrong”

            That is true. But I’m pretty sure the conference in question was taking it for granted that it was the blue collar people voting for Republicans who are are wrong, not say, minorities voting for Democrats or something else like that.

          • Tracy W says:

            On the issue of voting in economic self-interest, if a party promises a policy that directly tranfers say $1000 a year to you, but you believe that their other policies are so bad that the economy would fall apart and your total income would fall by $5000, your economic self-interest is to vote against that party.

            There’s also a short-term vs long-term issue of course. Is it in your economic self-interest to have another $1000 a year if that’s funded through debt? Although to my NZ-raised ears both the US main political parties are appalling on that point.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            If you are an unemployed coal miner who lost their job due to the “war on coal”, which way would the vote for self-interest go?

            I think there is a major disconnect in that many (most?) people take pride in being self supporting. They don’t want to be dependent on government and they see government benefits as shameful (regardless of the actual facts).

            “We won’t take a dime if we ain’t earned it, when it comes to weight brother we pull our own, if it’s our backwoods way of living you’re concerned with, you can leave us alone”

            Josh Thompson – Way Out Here
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0sYnro_3Rc

          • Chalid says:

            At the other end of the economic ladder, lots of people in the top tax bracket vote Democratic, and that is mostly against their economic self-interest (narrowly defined). I don’t think this is controversial?

          • @Chalid:

            Probably against the economic interest of some, in the interest of others. The government spends a lot of money subsidizing things, and some of it surely goes to high income people who vote Democratic.

            Some lawyers have very high incomes. One reason is the expansion of law and regulation pushed more by Democrats than by Republicans.

        • Deiseach says:

          What seems to have been established is (A) If poor/working class white Americans vote Republican rather than Democrat, they are voting against their economic self-interest (B) why would they do this? are they evil or just stupid?

          The question always at least implies, if it does not outright state, that they are talking about poor white Americans; poor non-white Americans are assumed to vote Democrat (or, if they don’t, you can’t say it’s because they’re stupid, that would be racist).

          What has not been established is that it is voting against their economic interest, or at least that they would be better off voting for the Democrats than the Republicans; when people are all too happy to lecture you about being a racist for not being delighted a poor Chinese worker has got the job you used to have, even if they are now working for buttons and in worse conditions, why should you think that voting for the party they vote for is going to help your situation? Or that, all else being equal in their circumstances, if poor white Bob and poor black Bill apply for help, there will be preferential programmes to help Bill since he is considered more disadvantaged than Bob, on racial grounds alone? Bob’s son may be able to take advantage of an affirmative action push to get into college, and good luck to him, but where are the programmes to get “sons of poor white Virginian unemployed coal miners” into college?

          • Anonymous says:

            when people are all too happy to lecture you about being a racist for not being delighted a poor Chinese worker has got the job you used to have, even if they are now working for buttons and in worse conditions

            I wonder which party is telling them this. It seems more libertarianish than a traditionally right or left position (in the U.S.).

          • Anonymous says:

            Specifically, in which ways, would the poor be better off under President Romney?

          • Anonymous says:

            “when people are all too happy to lecture you about being a racist for not being delighted a poor Chinese worker has got the job you used to have”

            No one says this. Look to Bryan Caplan or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. All your comments on US politics conveniently leave out the fact that this is an overwhelmingly pro-corporate society on both sides of the aisle, just a little less so on the left.
            We don’t talk about that on SSC. We talk about anti-corporate bias. We dont talk about the TPP or the Panama Papers. We dont talk about Palantir or Blackwater. We talk about anti-sweatshop bias.
            When convenient, everyone here agrees that voters are irrational, as per Caplan. But try to mention that this would take a certain form among social conservatives who never get what they want, just more tax cuts for the rich, and you suddenly get a lot
            of pearlclutching.

          • onyomi says:

            “Specifically, in which ways, would the poor be better off under President Romney?”

            It could at least be argued that his more pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-trade war with China stances might have increased attractive employment opportunities for the poor and middle class.

          • onyomi says:

            “You make a fool of yourself everytime you lecture us on American politics.”

            Aaand, rude anon@gmail is back.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’d much rather people be able to make wrong assertions and have them challenged, rather than being chided for looking foolish, which adds zero substance to the discussion.

          • Anonymous says:

            “when people are all too happy to lecture you about being a racist for not being delighted a poor Chinese worker has got the job you used to have”

            No one says this. Look to Brian Caplan sweetheart. You make a fool of yourself everytime you lecture us on American politics.

            Stop that! You’re making us look bad! YOU BRING SHAME TO FAMILY!

          • Ononymous says:

            “It could at least be argued that his more pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-trade war with China stances might have increased attractive employment opportunities for the poor and middle class.”

            So trickle down?

          • Anonymous says:

            So trickle down?

            Trickle down is not a thing. You can safely try again.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            I think most people need to examine the possibility that economics isn’t very correlated with red/blue tribal policy except in indirect ways. After over 50 years on this earth I’m not a big believer in presidential economic determinism.

            President Clinton didn’t invent the internet economy. It’s easy to show positive progress when you are president Reagan and the economy was a total disaster under Carter (external forces, OPEC, etc.). No policy resulted in the iPhone.

            I think policy nibbles around the edges of the much larger chaotic forces that really drive the economy. A mosquito on an elephant’s arse. This is even more the case with a global economy. Most of the things that are probably important both parties agree on. Market economy. Educated workforce.

          • suntzuanime says:

            There’s an argument to be made that early attempts to regulate the internet could have severely dampened its impact, so you could credit Clinton with avoiding those.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            There is no question that a president/congress could sabotage the economy if so inclined. Not that either side hasn’t been accused of this routinely.

            But the US pretty much runs the US economy, not the red/blue economy. To people on the outside I doubt they can tell any difference with who is in office.

          • Deiseach says:

            Specifically, in which ways, would the poor be better off under President Romney?

            Specifically, in which ways, would they be worse off? Okay, President Romney supports the business policies which lead to globalisation and outsourcing jobs to China, so the main manufacturer/employer in your town closes down and moves its BPO overseas, and you lose your job working on the assembly line/ in the back office as secretarial support.

            Just as we see under President Obama.

            Meanwhile, industries that lean Democrat are the likes of the Silicon Valley Democrats (to head off any protests, I’m not bashing the liberal entrepreneurs!) who are providing high-tech employment but are looking for employees at a higher level than “worked soldering circuit boards” (that’s what their sub-contractors in China do, if they even are involved in making things), so they’re not going to provide you with alternative employment (unless you’re able to re-invent yourself as a whizz at programming or start-ups).

            So why change to vote Democrat when it’s not readily apparent this will get you back your lost job plus you have the sneers about “bitter clingers to God, guns and anti-gays” and how all the problems of the world are due to the privilege of white cis het men?

            I think, as the couplet has it, no matter who gets into power:

            Parnell came down the road and said to a cheering man:
            ‘Ireland will get her freedom, and you still break stone’

          • JDG1980 says:

            I wonder which party is telling them this. It seems more libertarianish than a traditionally right or left position (in the U.S.).

            Matt Yglesias and Brad DeLong, both mainstream U.S. neoliberal pundits closely associated with the Democratic Party establishment, have repeatedly made statements to this effect.

            Here’s an article in Vox.com arguing it’s OK to hurt American workers to help the world’s poorest. This kind of globalist utilitarianism is very popular among the modern intellectual center-left. We can expect a Hillary Clinton administration to reflect this (Brad DeLong worked in Bill’s administration and will probably work in Hillary’s) and therefore the white working class in American will rightly see a Hillary Presidency as being opposed to their interests.

          • Anonymous says:

            @JDG1980
            Here’s an article in Vox.com arguing it’s OK to hurt American workers to help the world’s poorest.

            Except that it’s not actually saying that at all. It does explain that there’s a trade-off between free trade and protectionism.

          • The Vox article is crystal clear. Here is the moral thrust:

            Is there any defense of Sanders? There is, but it’s one that a lot of liberals won’t like: Screwing over the global poor might well be in America’s interests, or at least the interests of some Americans.

            Which puts Bernie in a very awkward position: Delivering on his campaign promises requires doing real damage to the global poor.

            This isn’t an awkward position at all. Benefitting Americans is good. Period. Story. End of.

            I definitely fall into the Blue-Tribe culturally, and feel really uncomfortable with the working class. I hang out with them quite a lot because I have many friends that straddle the class line. I am out of place.
            Good example. I went for a Cost Accounting position at a factory. One of the managers told me I was simply too nerdy to last.

            But, it’s really obvious to these people that the American government exists to advance the welfare of Americans. Screwing over the welfare of Americans to benefit non-Americans would never cross their minds.

            To Vox? Well, we need to have this deep ethical disc-

            No. Just no.

            FWIW, I believe most American politicians think Free Trade is a net win for almost everyone, so this shouldn’t comment should not be taken as support for Trump/Sanders.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ A Definite Beta Guy:

            The key word is “some Americans”.

            Say free trade benefits 90% of Americans but is bad for the very poor. (I am not saying that’s true, just stating it hypothetically.) Well, why should the vast majority of Americans sacrifice so that these 10% can benefit?

            The US government exists to serve the interests of the majority of Americans. Also, most people would say the US government has the obligation to serve the interests of Americans only through ethical means. So if we could increase our wealth a tiny bit by invading Canada and looting everything, enslaving the people to work for us, we still shouldn’t do it.

            (I think that’s sort of a moot point because it wouldn’t even benefit us in the long run.)

          • Tom Scharf says:

            Enslaving Canadians is a bad idea?

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          > I thought it was pretty well established that they do so? That it’s wrong for them to do so is what’s taken for granted.

          Direct versus indirect, near versus far is important here.

        • Paul Torek says:

          Yes. People vote their values, not their interests, by and large. Cf. The Political Brain .

      • many assumptions of the What’s the Matter With Kansas thesis have been challenged

        • Walter says:

          I always thought the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” guys were impressive for managing to live in a country with a hundred million or so conservatives and never talking to any. Like, how could they get us so wrong?

          • Frank McPike says:

            Thomas Frank has not only encountered conservatives, but in fact used to be one.

            @Onyomi
            My understanding is that general consensus among academics who study public opinion and voting habits is that Frank’s account has serious problems: either that it explains patterns that don’t actually exist, or that its narrative about how those patterns formed doesn’t line up with reality. If you’re looking for specific examples, Larry Bartels’s “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas” definitely had the best title. (You can find it here: http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansasqjps06.pdf)

            There’s also a good amount of literature debating the broader question of whether the sort of culture war that Frank’s thesis rests on really exists or drives voting behavior at all. Morris Fiorina is the big name on that issue (I don’t know if he’s addressed Frank directly, but their claims certainly conflict). You can find a direct criticism of Frank from that perspective here: http://web.stanford.edu/~jrodden/jep.20.2.pdf

    • Anonymous says:

      1. I’m not sure that liberals have any sort of monopoly on smugness. In my experience, it’s just as much a feature of conservatives or libertarians.

      2. If I believe someone to be wrong on the facts, it’s almost inevitable that’ll come off as smugness to some degree. (Come to think of it, where do I remember seeing this most often? SCC threads.)

      • Deiseach says:

        I’m not sure that liberals have any sort of monopoly on smugness.

        It’s the unrecognised smugness that piece is talking about. It’s easy to see the mote in your brother’s eye, harder to see the beam in your own.

      • “If I believe someone to be wrong on the facts, it’s almost inevitable that’ll come off as smugness to some degree.”

        I wonder if part of what determines smugness is how preponderant your views are in your circles. If all the smart and educated people you know share your world view, it’s pretty easy to believe that your view is obviously true and its only the fact that other people are stupid or ignorant that explains their not sharing it.

        On the other hand, if your views are a small minority within the bubble you live in, you’ve probably talked to people who, on other grounds, you think well of, tried to show them why your views are correct, failed, and had to come to terms with the fact that although your views may be correct, they are not obvious, and its possible for intelligent and educated people to reject them for good, although perhaps mistaken, reasons.

        • ChetC3 says:

          I wonder if part of what determines smugness is how preponderant your views are in your circles.

          Yes, people espousing unusual views are more likely to be perceived as insufferably smug. See “hipster”, “contrarian”, etc.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      The most satisfying confirmation bias I have had all year.

    • Pku says:

      It’s interesting, and I agree with a lot of it, but I think they’re still making the mistake of assigning agency only to liberals (I’m guessing most of the writer’s social circle is liberals and conservatives are still a faceless outside group for him). It feels like he thinks that liberals act, and conservatives react. Which is exactly half true, and leads to a feeling that he’s only telling one side of the story (though he does mostly avoid vilifying either side).

      (In particular, he’s a bit unfair to Jon Stewart, who despite being an icon of smug liberals was actually a pretty good interviewer when interviewing republicans).

      • Tom Scharf says:

        Jon Stewart was good face to face, but he took a lot viscous cheap shots otherwise. I watched his show for years but I thought he really got too mean spirited and took himself too seriously at the end. He spread the criticism around and wasn’t afraid to torch liberal taboos. When it was comedy it was good, when it became an agent of change it became less interesting.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Some of that may be his writers; the interviews would have been less scripted than the rest of the show. (Though to some extent as a mouthpiece you are taking responsibility for your writers, so we can still blame him.)

          • Tom Scharf says:

            Yeah I wondered about that. I assume he yielded fairly major control over the show’s content. I haven’t watched Jon Oliver so I don’t know if it changed since he left.

    • BBA says:

      Once again I link Kevin Drum’s response which distinguishes between smugness and condescension.

      • Deiseach says:

        The comments to that piece are disheartening; nothing at all to engage with “yes perhaps we do come across as condescending at times”, all arguing that conservatives are just dumb, conservatism is a religion, they can’t handle the truth!!!!!

        • BBA says:

          I like Kevin Drum but he has one of the worst comments sections on the internet, and that’s saying something.

      • Kyle Strand says:

        Thanks; that’s excellent.

        I find the second quoted tweet pretty absurd. Has that guy forgotten that Kim Davis is a Democrat?

        • BBA says:

          “Liberal” and “Democrat” aren’t synonyms, and Davis has left the party regardless.

    • eh says:

      I am reminded of two things, a blog post by Stephen Fry, and The Road To Wigan Pier by Orwell.

      Trump’s idea of what success is, what style is, what America means has largely been ‘voted for’ and has become an aspirational norm for hotels, malls, resorts and homes up and down the land, uglifying America with an especially repugnant kind of short-lasting gloss and shallow gleam.

      Trump is the faux-mahogany and fake-brass lamp and ceiling fan available in Target and Walmart that swirls and beats the air above us all, not shining light, just stirring the air noisily and to no purpose, while claiming to be somehow an heirloom and a collectible.

      http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/03/trumperytowersoverall/

      Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions — notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful — are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy. When I grasp this I grasp that it is no use clapping a proletarian on the back and telling him that he is as good a man as I am; if I want real contact with him, I have got to make an effort for which very likely I am unprepared. For to get outside the class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person. What is involved is not merely the amelioration of working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life.

      https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/

      Orwell says middle and upper classes see the working class as dirty or smelly, while Stephen Fry tries to defame Trump and his supporters in terms of tackiness and cheapness. He seems outraged that the poor buy cheap cutlery and use cheap ceiling fans. He later preempts this interpretation by claiming “that to decry such offences against taste is emphatically not a kind of snobbery”, but this seems like an attempt to smooth over cognitive dissonance rather than a real argument.

      • Nita says:

        Gaudy / tacky / tasteless is not the same thing as cheap.

        This is the Trump Taj Mahal. Does it look cheap to you? Do you think it was made that way because a different design would be more expensive?

        Personally, I think naming your casino after someone’s tomb is both tackier and more worthy of contempt than the shiniest bling-bling in the most expensive rap music video. But hey, maybe I’m just out of touch with poor folks like Donald Trump. Perhaps growing up in a Soviet communal flat has made me a total snob.

        On the other hand, I don’t buy the idea that aesthetics is somehow connected to morality. You can see beauty in what I consider ugly or vice versa, and be a perfectly fine person. But I understand that aesthetic sense is very important to some people, so they want it to be The Solution to everything — just like some smart people want intelligence or rationality to be The Solution.

        (Bonus image: the interior of the real Taj Mahal.)

        • Deiseach says:

          This is the Trump Taj Mahal. Does it look cheap to you? Do you think it was made that way because a different design would be more expensive?

          Yes, it does look cheap*. I realise that it is actually quite expensive, that a lot of money has gone into making it look like this, and that the individual elements are not cheap in themselves.

          And that the intention is to give an impression of luxury, grandeur, wealth, all the subconscious cues to influence the people to keep pushing money into the slot machines in order to entice them for “just one more spin for the big win”.

          But it is cheap, in that it’s not visually tied together well; the most important elements are the slot machines and so the design has to fit around them, yet the style is not “modern technological”, it’s a very bad rip-off of faux Versailles (in what is named after a Moghul architectural construct? This is the interior style of the Taj Mahal!) and that carpet and upholstery is dreadful: too busy, too many clashing details!

          So a jumble of incongruous and incompatible styles, done expensively but with a watered-down pop culture idea of what wealth and luxury are supposed to be, still stuck in a heavily over-upholstered suffocatingly close Second Empire style.

          I may be poor and with working class/lower middle-class roots, but by damn I am an aesthetic snob! 🙂

          I see no reason Trump couldn’t have tried for a more cohesive and internally consistent style of décor in keeping with the ‘Taj Mahal’ motif that would still convey the notion of wealth and luxe to the people playing the slots (who, for all practical purposes, may as well be playing them in a building based on ‘concrete parking garage’ style as the main interest of the casino is to encourage them to become mildly addicted enough to keep shelling out money to play, and the main interest of the players is to have the gambling experience which is more about satisfying that craving rather than winning, though the lure of the easy big win is always there of course) – well, no reason other than “this is the tried and true conventional style, don’t get fancy, go with what works” bullishness.

          *Cheap in the sense of “trying to emulate the real expensive items”, paste or rhinestones instead of diamond, and making up for cheapness by excess. That impression still persists, even if you’re using real diamonds as big as the fake paste jewels of the cheap items your taste or apprehension of impressiveness has been formed by or based upon. “Cheapness” in this sense means “not realising less is more, that you don’t have to compensate for falsity by making it bigger and shinier”.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I think the Trump Taj Mahal is intentionally tacky. That’s Trump’s brand, and also that’s what casino gamblers want and expect. Glitz and glitter and excess, flashing lights and loud noise. “Luxe” doesn’t enter into it; Trump is going for something like a pimped-out Cadillac, not a Mercedes. Yes, it’s tacky, and it’s ugly, and it has no class. But that’s all on purpose.

          Um, I think I’m still talking about the casino, but the same applies to the campaign. The man knows his market.

        • Nornagest says:

          This is the Trump Taj Mahal. Does it look cheap to you? Do you think it was made that way because a different design would be more expensive?

          Mirrors, crystal, fake gold leaf, and sculptural moldings are mainstays of the Vegas/Atlantic City style because they look luxurious but can be made quite cheap when you’re running a million square feet of them; retrofitting your house to include them would cost a lot, but economies of scale save you if you’re making a casino. Or a block of McMansions, though that’s usually a little more low-key.

          They’ve fallen out of favor in real high-end construction for the same reasons.

          • The set designers for one of the early Hollywood extravaganzas are showing the director around the set. His response:

            “It just shows you what God could have done if he had the money.”

            That’s my reaction to Vegas.

      • LPSP says:

        Orwell was way ahead of his socialist peers. Fry meanwhile continues to descend into postural emptiness. Good one for bringing up the comparison.

        I see little doubt in the theory that Left and Right politics is simply the argument between the richer and poorer sides of the middle class, with the Left representing the richer.

    • moridinamael says:

      They come right up to the point of admitting that their political opponents might have principled arguments, but still can’t bring themselves to say it.

      • Anonymous says:

        I’d love to pick your brain to figure out what you think liberals actually think.

        • moridinamael says:

          I don’t find “liberals” to be a useful term for carving reality at the joints.

          If you take the linked article at face value, the idea is that “liberals” are happy to dismiss the opposition as being literally too stupid for form coherent, reasoned opinions.

          But don’t worry, I grew up in the South, and down there we’re equally good at assuming that liberals are too stupid to form coherent, reasoned opinions.

          My gripe was more that the entire article seems to be dancing around the idea that maybe those Conservatives actually, like, in some cases, maybe, subscribe to consistent edifices of thought which they arrived at through deliberation and study. But he still can’t actually say this outright.

  79. Tophattingson says:

    The SomethingAwful vs 4chan discussion, and trying to research events surrounding it, made me notice something. There is barely any recorded history of internet communities. I know that in theory we have access to pretty much every document we need either from the source or via archive. That doesn’t matter much when you have a billion documents and no way to determine which is important. At best you get an encyclopedia dramatica article which condenses a few events and that is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

    That statement about a sudden-seeming SJW takeover of SA in 2010? I can’t read or learn more about that without consulting someone directly. The internet relies on “Oral Tradition”.

    An example from my own internet experience is a community that existed from 2010-2014 of about 100 individuals that migrated across at least 6 different websites (one of which I was de-facto running), split several times and then finally died from a total deficit of new arrivals. It’s not recorded history; you’d have to ask someone involved for knowledge of it.

    In meatspace important individuals (and even unimportant ones) writing biographies would usually cover history at that scale. Little equivalent exists on the internet.

    Perhaps we should be recording this history properly before it fades from memory, server and archive? Is 4chan or SomethingAwful or countless equivalent websites an interesting enough topic to recieve a history book (or several). I think they are.

    • Zippy says:

      Perhaps we should be recording this history properly before it fades from memory, server and archive?

      No. It will fade forever, and good riddance. It was never important, and will never be important. People will be saved the trouble of even considering reading the history.

      Of course, if you want to chronicle some online community, go ahead.

      • No. It will fade forever, and good riddance. It was never important, and will never be important. People will be saved the trouble of even considering reading the history.

        It’s nothing more than an interesting story. People like reading fiction anyways, what difference does it make if that fiction is based on actual events?

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          Well, I’d be a bit happier without the constant barrage of articles holding me responsible for the imminent reactionary apocalypse for posting funny frog memes in a Peruvian Weaving imageboard… actually, nevermind, that sounds metal as fuck.

      • Deiseach says:

        It was never important, and will never be important.

        The trouble is, you never know what historians of the future will want or need to know. What was silphium, exactly? There are so many examples where nobody bothered to write down, or draw, or explain, what a thegorbobble was, because everyone knows what a thegorbobble is! A five year old child can thegorbobble!

        And then a thousand years later we’re stuck with the “thegorbobbles may have been used for ritual purposes” which is the stock anthropologist/historian phrase for “we haven’t the foggiest notion”.

        The “Great Man” view of history, where one important charismatic figure made sweeping changes at a particular moment, is falling out of favour (if it hasn’t already long gone). Instead, we know better that the real currents of history are explained by precisely the tea-table squabbles, grudge-holding, and the Countess’ favourite cousin who was the lover of the Minister who went to school with the Duke who commanded the King’s armies managed to get her boyfriend the plum job at the Embassy through this web of connections which put him in the right time at the right place to take advantage of the opportunity to become The Great Man of the hour.

      • JDG1980 says:

        No. It will fade forever, and good riddance. It was never important, and will never be important.

        I disagree. In the past two years, we have started to see real-world political movements arise out of Internet ephemera. The SJW movement as it exists today would not be possible without the Internet, and it was largely an Internet phenomenon before it erupted into the real world (if you consider college campuses the “real world”) in the past year or so. On the other side of the aisle, the Alt-Right is largely a creation of the Internet, and the Republican Party’s leading Presidential candidate this year is soliciting Alt-Right support.

        Future historians will want to know how these political movements got started, and you have to go to message boards and social media to find the primary sources.

        • Stefan Drinic says:

          the Republican Party’s leading Presidential candidate this year is soliciting Alt-Right support.

          Is not. I’d argue it’s largely coincidential. The alt-right saw a succesful politician who opposed their mortal enemies the social justice crowd, and hailed him the great messiah. Things seem to not at all go the other way around.

          • tmk says:

            This is very interesting. I also have the impression that the online alt-right has latched on to Trump, but he has not returned the affection. For example, I don’t think Trump has ever used the word ‘cuck’, nor endorsed many alt-righters. Tt doesn’t seem like a large portion of Trump’s voters have any alt-right ideology either.

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, I don’t think he’s done much to specifically court them besides being unusually nativist. Though I am wondering now whether having a super model Eastern European wife is extremely un-alt-right or extremely alt-right. Weirdly I think it’s kind of the latter.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            The alt-right fetishises women they don’t see as western a lot, so I’d say it is. Of course, by this logic Obama courts the Red tribe by being married, so this is probably a case of looking into things too much.

          • Jiro says:

            alt-right isn’t the same thing as Red Tribe, and I thought Obama’s wife was from the US anyway.

          • null says:

            I think the analogy Stefan Drinic is making is that “Trump is appealing to alt-right because he is married to a foreign woman” is on the same level as “Obama is appealing to Red Tribe by being married”.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            That is exactly what I am saying, yes. Thank you.

          • Vorkon says:

            While I agree that the alt-right mostly latched onto Trump, rather than the other way around, I still think it’s fair to say that internet communities have had a non-negligible role in the current political climate. Trump’s support is, in many ways, a reaction to Political Correctness, as exemplified by the Social Justice movement, and as others have pointed out, the current Social Justice movement largely grew out of the Internet. Any future history which completely ignores online communities would be missing an important piece of this puzzle. Perhaps not the most important piece, but they definitely wouldn’t have the full picture.

        • The Nybbler says:

          This is at least the second wave of SJWs, the first wave was in the 1990s before the Internet was big. Maybe that’s why it died off. It started on college campuses; here’s one example:

          http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-05-08/news/1993128032_1_potential-rapists-campus-feminist-art

          • Viliam says:

            They were making the same mistake in 1993 they are making in 2016. Impressive.

            I mean, they are technically correct that every man is a potential rapist. But it would be equally technically correct to say that every woman is a potential rapist, so why the focus on men? Or let’s make it a potential murderer, to avoid the gender issues.

            (Aren’t they allowed to choose a subset they focus on? Yeah, as long as other people are allowed to focus on e.g. black men.)

          • hlynkacg says:

            All men are potential rapists, all women are potential whores, and EVERYONE is a potential murder, thief, and jaywalker. The solution of course is to treat everyone with suspicion (if not out right hostility).

            Hey guys I think we solved the “equality” problem 😉

          • Anonymous says:

            @Villiam

            I think they’re flailing confusedly, trying to achieve with modern egalitarian ethics what they instinctively feel is the right way to do things. Male on female rape is much more serious matter than the converse, because a) the costs of said rape are paid primarily by the female and her relatives, b) the ability of men to rape women is greater than the opposite.

            But this is really hard to say coming from the notion that people should have equal rights, or one of the more radical positions, such as that people actually are equal, biology be damned.

          • LPSP says:

            I’ll add to
            “I mean, they are technically correct that every man is a potential rapist. But it would be equally technically correct to say that every woman is a potential rapist, so why the focus on men?”
            by saying further that every child you see is a potential rapist adult just waiting to happen.

            You could drive by a school and wave your arm claiming “Before you lie future pedophiles” and it probably wouldn’t be wrong. This is how meaningless of an argument we’re talking.

          • Nita says:

            Well, some non-feminist rape prevention tips (don’t drink when men are around, don’t be alone with a man in his room etc.) do seem to imply that not considering all men potential rapists is reckless.

          • Part of the situation is that a good many women have been mistreated by men, and their complaints have been ignored.

            At this point, I’m seeing a lot of cultivation of rage without efforts to evaluate the actual level of risk. Also, women who *haven’t* been abused by men have their voices ignored.

            What I’m seeing is a lot of people (SJWs and MRAs) who don’t want to hear that the problem is that people are dangerous. They want to blame the whole mess on the Evil Other Gender.

          • suntzuanime says:

            How interested are you in a big list of women entitled “THESE WOMEN MAY FALSELY CLAIM TO HAVE BEEN RAPED”? Like, it’s not *untrue*.

          • Nita says:

            @ suntzuanime

            Apparently, someone already gave one of those to Eric Raymond.

          • suntzuanime says:

            That’s not the same thing as a list populated based just on gender.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Nita

            Those rape prevention tips you’re referring to aren’t saying that you have to consider all men are potential rapists. “Don’t go to college parties with lots of alcohol” (as Kasich’s version of the anti-drinking one goes) means you should consider that there may be at least one likely rapist around at such parties. “Don’t be alone with a man in his room” implies that a man who would get you alone in his room is a likely rapist, not that all men are.

            Both of these are also usually said with the condescension of age to youth, and they’re also both (especially the latter) reflective of conservative thinking. It’s not even close to similar to the idea behind “all men are potential rapists’

          • suntzuanime

            Have an account of a woman who was strongly pressured to recant a truthful testimony of being raped.

            False accusations happen. True accusations happen. People are a hazard.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Maybe I’m not making myself clear. I am not in favor of saying “look at this woman, she’s going to lie about rape*“, any more than I’m in favor of saying “look at this man, he’s going to commit rape*“. Even though rapes and false accusations do happen, to tar someone with that brush based on nothing more than their gender is vile.

          • gbdub says:

            @Anonymous,

            Male on female rape is much more serious matter than the converse, because a) the costs of said rape are paid primarily by the female and her relatives, b) the ability of men to rape women is greater than the opposite.

            a) Is substantially less true than it used to be given ubiquitous access to birth control (and also, male rape victims have been sued for child support).
            b) This is true insofar as rape is defined as “physically forcing someone to have sex with you”. But if you expand the definition to include sex after basically any form of verbal or emotional coercion or persuasion, or any intoxication by inhibition-reducing substance (even if voluntarily consumed), then women are just as capable of rape (and probably commit it at substantial rates).

            That’s actually one of the more frustrating things about the discussion to me – you can either promote the idea that a quarter of college women are rape victims, or you can promote that rape is almost exclusively male perpetrator – female victim. But the two beliefs aren’t really compatible, because they are both true only for very different definitions of rape. If you want to live in a world in which the broad definition of rape and sexual assault used to obtain those 25% numbers is ruthlessly enforced, fine, but recognize that to do so consistently would require going after a lot more female perpetrators.

          • Anonymous says:

            a) Is substantially less true than it used to be given ubiquitous access to birth control (and also, male rape victims have been sued for child support).
            b) This is true insofar as rape is defined as “physically forcing someone to have sex with you”. But if you expand the definition to include sex after basically any form of verbal or emotional coercion or persuasion, or any intoxication by inhibition-reducing substance (even if voluntarily consumed), then women are just as capable of rape (and probably commit it at substantial rates).

            Right you are. But these innovations are new. Knee-jerk responses due to whatever mix of evolved instinct and cultural momentum still abound, and tend to be towards what I said.

            That’s actually one of the more frustrating things about the discussion to me – you can either promote the idea that a quarter of college women are rape victims, or you can promote that rape is almost exclusively male perpetrator – female victim. But the two beliefs aren’t really compatible, because they are both true only for very different definitions of rape. If you want to live in a world in which the broad definition of rape and sexual assault used to obtain those 25% numbers is ruthlessly enforced, fine, but recognize that to do so consistently would require going after a lot more female perpetrators.

            The way I see it, the problem with rape is that it’s currently based (at least legally) on the unknowable state of mind of the parties to the past event. Absent there being a highly fool-proof lie detector or mind-reading device, it is quite difficult to prove any sort of wrongdoing if the victim has not been detectably roughed up by the other party. (And I should fear the government – or anyone else – having access to a mind-reading device, for obvious reasons.)

            This is complicated by the fact that sex without a prior written contract is legal, and that there is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. So you have a situation where you cannot prove or disprove consent of one or both parties, and simply the event of them having had sex is not sufficient for a conviction. This admittedly lets a lot (I have no idea how much, though) of rape go unpunished.

            There are some initiatives to deal with this, but they are somewhat bizarre. For example – putting the burden of proof on the party accused of rape. Another is the existing ban on legal children having sex with legal adults, which is apparently based on the presumption of children not being able to consent properly.

            Both are obviously absurd – the first example throws out presumption of innocence, and makes it easily possible to frame someone for rape, should they be incapable of disproving the accusation; the second is unjust to young people, whom it presupposes pre-sapient, and arbitrary with the distinction of who may have sex with whom (two 17 year olds having sex is fine, but once one of them has their 18th birthday, their nookie becomes rape?).

            Paging Dr. Friedman – can you tell us how our forefathers dealt with this universal issue?

          • “Paging Dr. Friedman – can you tell us how our forefathers dealt with this universal issue?”

            So far as age of consent, it was generally much lower than in the U.S. at present. Under Jewish law, adulthood was twelve for women, thirteen for men (possibly “and a half” in each case), plus, I think in both cases, evidence of puberty. I believe it was twelve in England a few hundred years ago, but that’s by memory. In the U.S. in 1880, twelve was the highest age of consent, and in Delaware it was seven.

            Past societies had the same problem we do with proving consent. But in many of them fornication, sex outside of marriage, was illegal even with consent.

          • Anonymous says:

            >Past societies had the same problem we do with proving consent. But in many of them fornication, sex outside of marriage, was illegal even with consent.

            Yeah. My impression is that they put a much, much lower weight on unknowables like consent, and much more on evidence – such as presence of written contract.

          • Nita says:

            ‘Rape’ in our modern understanding, as non-consensual sex, was not something they were terribly concerned with. Extramarital or otherwise ‘improper’ sex — yes, non-consensual sex — not so much. For example, ‘marital rape’ was not a thing — even if you physically held your spouse down while they they cried and begged you to stop, you wouldn’t be breaking any laws.

            And of course, talking about sex in public was not allowed, and even a shadow of doubt about a girl’s chastity could ruin her life and her family’s ‘honor’, which created a strong incentive not to complain — so, in the eyes of the wider society, there was often no problem to be solved at all.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m not sure the current state of affairs is an improvement over the past.

          • Nita says:

            I think the changes reflect an increased ability of the legal system to handle these issues. There used to be no maybe-rape-victims in the same way there were “no disabled people” in the Soviet Union — with no good solutions available, facing up to the problems would have been too painful, so they were carefully ignored.

            Look at the Old Testament, for instance — it’s either rape or not rape depending on whether it happened inside a settlement? To determine whether a wife has been adulterous, give her some cursed water? These are obviously honest, but sad attempts to get by with very inadequate means of fact-finding, and it’s understandable why a society would rather not be reminded of this deficiency in justice.

            And the solutions currently available are still not quite satisfactory, so noticing the problems is still somewhat socially painful.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m not sure outsourcing every social ill to the legal system is the correct solution.

          • Nita says:

            Right. Hence the many blog posts, books and advice columns that aim to help individuals avoid being harmed and inflicting harm on others in interpersonal relationships.

            If someone currently believes that sex is something a man can ‘get’ if a woman is negligent in ‘guarding’ it, or that women ‘can’t’ rape, then changing their mind can reduce the expected number of rapes without involving the legal system at all.

            Similarly, advice, encouragement and practical help for getting out of dangerous situations (including bad family situations), or for steering social situations away from danger, can do a lot of good.

            But when all else fails, it has to be clear that betraying someone’s trust and violating their bodily autonomy is not OK. A small minority of people seem to be resistant to persuasion and social pressure, and we have to deal with them somehow.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Nita

            Right.

            However, I, personally, would prefer a legal system where I can determine without a doubt if I am going to be in trouble for doing something or not. Currently, having sex seems a big grey area, where you risk being accused of rape pretty much every time you do it, so that the only reliable defense is not to have sex (and even then, it’s possible to get credibly accused). I would prefer there to be an explicit legal way to have sex that does not entail making a gamble on spending the rest of my life in jail for it. Right now, covertly filming your own, entire sex life (which itself may be illegal, depending on factors) seems the only nearly-foolproof countermeasure.

          • Nita says:

            Well, currently, you are likely to get ‘in trouble’ only if the prosecution can prove your guilt ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to a judge or jury. But there is no guarantee that an innocent person will never be accused and/or found guilty of rape, or theft, or murder, or any other crime.

            Every time I cross a road, I trust several drivers not to go berserk and run me over on purpose. Every time I go to bed, I trust my husband not to kill me in my sleep. Every time I have sex, I trust my partner to stop if I ask them to. Every time I buy a drink in a bar, I trust the bartender to serve what I ordered, without any dangerous alterations.

            By choice or by necessity, we all place our lives in the hands of others, and rely on their willingness not to abuse this power. Sometimes there’s a trade-off between enjoyment and risk, but no reasonable course of action can keep us safe from all misfortune and malice.

            Edit:
            Also, personally, I would avoid having sex that my potential partner seems somewhat likely to regret. So, no sex with drunk strangers, no cajoling friends into sex, no adulterous sex, no sex with folks who seem very young or emotionally volatile etc. Not just to avoid accusations, but to avoid inadvertently causing harm (which would retroactively spoil my own enjoyment as well).

          • Anonymous says:

            Well, currently, you are likely to get ‘in trouble’ only if the prosecution can prove your guilt ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to a judge or jury. But there is no guarantee that an innocent person will never be accused and/or found guilty of rape, or theft, or murder, or any other crime.

            In the case of theft, there is legal recourse in the form of financial records, such as the simple receipt. When I buy something in a store, I am not concerned that I will be accused of thievery, because these legal implements are in place. There is, additionally, AFAIK, no credible movement to make people guilty of theft upon accusation, only exonerated if they prove beyond all doubt that they are not thieves.

            In the case of murder, it is largely the same, with the addition that it is eminently possible to live your entire life without killing a single human being, and lose nothing for want of that. Not so with lack of sex, especially on the societal scale.

            Every time I cross a road, I trust several drivers not to go berserk and run me over on purpose. Every time I go to bed, I trust my husband not to kill me in my sleep. Every time I have sex, I trust my partner to stop if I ask them to. Every time I buy a drink in a bar, I trust the bartender to serve what I ordered, without any dangerous alterations.

            By choice or by necessity, we all place our lives in the hands of others, and rely on their willingness not to abuse this power. Sometimes there’s a trade-off between enjoyment and risk, but no reasonable course of action can keep us safe from all misfortune and malice.

            I do not mean to abolish all risk. Please leave the poor strawman in peace. The conversation is about legality, enforcement, detection and punishment, not about the fact that we are all at risk of being struck by (a random meteorite|deadly illness|a truck) and dying as a consequence.

            What I want is legal clarity concerning a very important aspect of life. There is currently anything but on that matter. I cannot have clarity if, for plain reason of not being telepathic, nobody can truly ascertain the key fact of the matter – consent. I want to be able to enter a legal contract with another party that guarantees that they are not able to arbitrarily change their mind later without being in breach of that agreement, or defraud me, and have the appropriate state organs enforce that contract with potential penalties.

          • Nita says:

            Of course you cannot read the mind of another person. But you can observe their behavior and make reasonable inferences, and ask for confirmation if there is any doubt. That’s what people usually do when they want to avoid infringing on someone’s autonomy, and that’s probably what your local law expects from you, too.

            Even an MMA fight is stopped by the referee when one of the fighters curls up into a ball and stops participating. Since sex usually happens in a more intimate setting, you have to be your own referee and pay attention to your partner.

            Someone who was 100% enthusiastic during sex suddenly deciding that they were raped seems like someone suddenly deciding to crash their car into yours, or to shove you off a bridge. It can happen, and it would be terrible, and there’s no guarantee that they would be punished, and no punishment could restore what they would have taken from you. But luckily, it doesn’t seem very likely to happen in the average person’s life.

          • Jaskologist says:

            And of course, talking about sex in public was not allowed

            I don’t think this is at all true (see any Shakespeare play). I suspect it originates from a caricature we hold of the Puritans, and isn’t true of them either.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “Every time I cross a road, I trust several drivers not to go berserk and run me over on purpose. Every time I go to bed, I trust my husband not to kill me in my sleep….” “…Every time I buy a drink in a bar, I trust the bartender to serve what I ordered, without any dangerous alterations.”

            …A big part of that trust comes from the knowledge that everyone agrees those actions are pure evil, there are no similar, difficult-to-disambiguate actions that everyone thinks are good and necessary, and there are serious, formal penalties to punish anyone who does them. Further, there is no large-scale movement arguing publicly that those actions are actually virtuous and that people who take them are the real victims and should be protected from the spiteful malice of their spouse/customer/impromptu-hood-ornament.

            …My take is that free love is pretty clearly a bad idea. The level of irreducible harm seems high, and all we can do is mess with the risk distribution. I don’t think there’s a win-win solution to this one.

          • Anonymous says:

            Of course you cannot read the mind of another person. But you can observe their behavior and make reasonable inferences, and ask for confirmation if there is any doubt. That’s what people usually do when they want to avoid infringing on someone’s autonomy, and that’s probably what your local law expects from you, too.

            But absent a recording, if it came to court, there would be no evidence of either. It would come down to the parties contradicting each other as to what occurred.

            Even an MMA fight is stopped by the referee when one of the fighters curls up into a ball and stops participating. Since sex usually happens in a more intimate setting, you have to be your own referee and pay attention to your partner.

            While I agree that one should be considerate, and it would be highly rude to ignore your partner’s desires, this is not the point.

            Someone who was 100% enthusiastic during sex suddenly deciding that they were raped seems like someone suddenly deciding to crash their car into yours, or to shove you off a bridge. It can happen, and it would be terrible, and there’s no guarantee that they would be punished, and no punishment could restore what they would have taken from you. But luckily, it doesn’t seem very likely to happen in the average person’s life.

            Neither is being raped, at least not outside of the Third World or prison. That’s not the point.

            I’m not sure how to convey the point I’ve made above in a more comprehensible manner than I did so far. I’ll try with an analogy.

            In the Communist Block countries, there was a common way of doing things, given their shared communist economic-legal system, in the domain of procuring necessary products (such as fruit, meat of any kind, clothes, toilet paper, etc). The centrally planned economy failed to produce and supply these goods, for reasons that are irrelevant here, but suffice to say that shortages were widespread and permanent.

            Enter the black market. You could buy what you needed there, even though it was illegal, and often the risk of getting caught was negligible because the local police commissioner was in on the thing to buy his kids the normally unavailable bananas. This de facto free market worked – less efficiently and reliably than one might expect from a legal consumer economy – but it was illegal. Participants were criminals, basically making just about every citizen a criminal.

            With the end of communism, things improved rapidly. You no longer could only source meat through illegal deals with farmer relatives, you did not need to be a party member to import exotic fruit such as oranges. For all its own faults, legal market economies work much better than black markets in the goods they are allowed to traffic, because they don’t need to contend with being locked up for it, because the government doesn’t suppress it, because they can avail themselves of the utility of trust engendered by legally-enforced dealings.

            Sex nowadays is a black market activity. I want the government to stop being so communist and allow people to make legally binding promises of exchange. I want people to be able to marry again.

          • Anonymous says:

            Legally binding promises of exchange generally do not include the availability of specific performance, much less self help.

          • Anonymous says:

            Legally binding promises of exchange generally do not include the availability of specific performance, much less self help.

            Huh?

          • John Schilling says:

            Well, currently, you are likely to get ‘in trouble’ only if the prosecution can prove your guilt ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to a judge or jury.

            You don’t consider being fired from a job or expelled from a school to be ‘trouble’?

          • Frank McPike says:

            Re: Huh
            They mean that if you contract with another person to perform a specific service for them, courts will not require you to actually perform that service, only to pay money damages. So, if you agree to mow my lawn every day for a year, and you then decide you’d rather not, I can’t get a court order requiring you to actually mow my lawn. And I certainly can’t make you mow my lawn through extra-legal force. I can, instead, get some measure of money to compensate me for that breach.

            So if the other anonymous means that we should allow people to form contracts requiring them to have actually have sex with another person, without being permitted to change their mind and decide they don’t want to, then he’s not asking for us to treat sex like other sorts of contracts, but asking for something that’s fairly exceptional and generally rejected in other contexts.

            Put another way, labor in capitalist countries (or at least countries with this legal feature) is entirely consensual at the moment it occurs, not merely consented to in advance. There may be financial penalties for refusing to work, and often those will weigh in favor of doing labor you would otherwise prefer not to do (in that respect, contractual penalties are no different than wages). But no one, not even the state (outside of exceptional circumstances, like the draft), is permitted to use force to make you work for them. That seems like a relevant contrast with communist countries too.

          • Nita says:

            @ Anon

            It would come down to the parties contradicting each other as to what occurred.

            Right. And the prosecution would be unable to prove they you’re guilty, so they wouldn’t choose to prosecute in the first place.

            Even if instead of you it was an actual rapist who actually raped someone, without tangible evidence of non-consent they would be very likely to go free. The possibility of being raped and then rejected by the justice system is something we just have to live with.

            Could you explain how exactly marriage would solve the problem? You could define marital rape out of legal existence, of course, but that wouldn’t improve the experience of someone being held down by their spouse and having things shoved into their bodily orifices against their will. Forced sex in such a marriage would still be rape, in the moral sense, just like dehumanizing treatment is still morally abhorrent even if ‘re-education camps’ are legal.

            @ FC

            there is no large-scale movement arguing publicly that those actions are actually virtuous

            There’s some sort of movement in favour of false rape accusations? That’s terrible.

            @ John Schilling

            Anon was talking specifically about the law, I think.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Nita

            These cases both happen. A person drives a car into another person for no apparent reason. A person claims consensual sex was rape because of some after-the-fact reason.

            The driver will be charged with reckless driving, vehicular homicide, or some other offense. If he doesn’t have a really good excuse, he’s likely going to be convicted of a crime. The person hit, even if they survive, will not be prosecuted.

            The person (and it’s essentially always a man) falsely accused will be prosecuted for rape. It’s a crapshoot whether he will be convicted or not; he’ll certainly spend a long time (probably the rest of his life) under a cloud of suspicion. Even if he is acquitted, there will be no serious negative consequences for his accuser.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Nita: The United States Education Amendments of 1972 is a law. Passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the President of the United States, enforced at need by men with guns, the whole deal.

            The current administrative interpretation of that law, is that universities basically have to throw out male students who are accused of rape, without due process and even in the presence of reasonable doubt. Or else the school gets shut down and the administrators maybe go to jail.

          • All this reminds me of the people who complain about false rape accusations because of “regret”. My reaction is always to wonder how much of the time they’ve been talking women into sex the woman wasn’t clearly interested in. I’ve had a safe life– my assumptions should include the use of force, too.

            I know a man who says he was falsely accused of rape. I believe him. What happened was that, at college, he let a drunk woman sleep it off at his place. She wakes up with no memories in the home of a man who isn’t her type, and accuses him of rape. She’s believed.

            I don’t remember the details of the consequences for him, but they were serious– loss of scholarship? Thrown out of university, I’m pretty sure. Also, denied access to a shelter in very cold weather.

            These days, he’s the sort of moderate feminist I consider reasonable.

            Well-attested story of a false accusation and conviction This one is about clearly criminal rape– a white woman was raped by a black man she didn’t know. She focused on remembering what he looked like.

            A man who resembled the rapist was arrested. They had very similar distinctive eyebrows, but otherwise didn’t look that much alike.

            The police line-up was mishandled. Line-ups work much better when the suspects are presented one at a time. If they’re presented in a group, the victim is more likely to look for a best match rather than an actual identification. Also, memory is more fragile than you might think.

            She identified him as the rapist in the line-up and at the trial. He was convicted and imprisoned. As I recall, he had a good alibi which was ignored in favor of her eye-witness testimony.

            The actual rapist confessed, and the falsely convicted man was released. When she found out about that (after a period of freaking out), she contacted the falsely convicted man and asked for his forgiveness. They’ve written the book and tour talking about forgiveness and the importance of handling victim’s memories carefully.

            I bring this up because the standard story of false rape accusation is based in the premise that it’s just women being erratic.

          • Anonymous, I think you’re on to something with the idea of sex as black market.

            Sorry, no cite, but I’ve read about people with religious upbringings who can’t bring themselves to say a clear yes to sex, even when they want it.

            As a general point, I think culture is like a palimpsest– the previous culture is faded out and overwirtten, but it isn’t gone. This is especially true about sex. The previous anti-sex ideas aren’t gone, they’re still in the background.

            I believe without evidence that there are conflicts from ancient Babylon that we’re still playing out without knowing about them.

          • John Schilling says:

            All this reminds me of the people who complain about false rape accusations because of “regret”. My reaction is always to wonder how much of the time they’ve been talking women into sex the woman wasn’t clearly interested in.

            That would be pretty much all of them, given the extent to which almost all segments of almost all societies encourage women to feign some degree of disinterest in sex. Which, as a clearly effective negotiating strategy even if all you want is sex, probably isn’t going to go away any time soon. And from what I’ve seen, when we try to make that go away we end up overcompensating and encouraging women to feign more interest in sex than they actually feel, which leads to equally damaging miscommunications.

            One way or another, the early stages of most non-rapey sexual relationships tend to involve people whose interests aren’t entirely clear. And that includes most sexual relationships involving people who believe they live in communities where everybody is clear and open about all of their sexual interests.

            [relevant case histories don’t need to be repeated here]

            I bring this up because the standard story of false rape accusation is based in the premise that it’s just women being erratic.

            In some cases, like your first example, it pretty clearly is just that.

            But I think the “not clearly interested” standard you raise, is confusing the issue. The standard is consent, not “interest”. There are plenty of legitimate reasons people will consent to sex when their actual interest is elsewhere – e.obvous.g overt prositition, but it goes well beyond that. And while consent can be a disturbingly fuzzy border for a legal proceeding, “interest” is even more so. Particularly when people are encouraged or find it an effective negotiating strategy to misrepresent their actual level of interest.

            It no longer surprises me to see people use “interest” or “enthusiasm” as de facto standards for rape on the grounds that a woman can be presumed not to have consented to sex if she wasn’t clearly interested. And that, I think, very much does lower the bar for false accusations by women behaving erratically, because it makes a rape accusation the insta-win strategy for e.g. avoiding the social embarrassment and/or self-loathing of waking up in Mr. Wrong’s bed.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Nancy Lebovitz:

            Yes, the whole problem is that there’s no easy answer to this.

            You could have a rule—and this is not so far from what the rule was in the past—that nobody should believe a woman when she says she’s been raped, unless she has hard evidence like bruises all over her body. (Though given the BDSM stuff these days, who knows if even that would be “hard evidence”?)

            You could have a rule that says woman who claim that they’ve been raped should be believed no matter what. And this is the caricature of what feminists believe, maybe even what some of them actually do believe.

            Or you could have a rule that says women ought to be believed—and action ought to be taken against the accused rapists—even in cases where the evidence is plausible but doesn’t amount to “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a court of law.

            In the first case you give, where a girl wakes up in the house of some stranger guy with no memory of what happened the night before, the accusation seems pretty plausible. If women in situations with similar lack of hard evidence are told to take a hike, well, you’re going to have a lot of rapists getting away with it. On the other hand, if a woman’s story in that kind of situation is believed by a college disciplinary board, maybe you deter innocent guys from lending a hand to drunk girls—but you also deter rapists. Is that tradeoff worth it? Maybe it is.

            Do I think it’s a problem that the federal government is dictating this and causing it to be implemented in the worst kind of CYA mode? Absolutely.

            One of the biggest problems is the idea that, if the man and the woman are both drinking, the woman can be let off the hook because she was a helpless victim, while the man is held responsible for his willful decision to rape. That’s pure anti-feminism, of the “women are the weaker sex” variety.

            Overall, though, the situation just forces us to consider a question most people don’t want to: how many guilty rapists are we prepared to see go free to stop the conviction of one innocent man? There are various slogans here, but the answer probably isn’t “a thousand” or “a million”.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            “All this reminds me of the people who complain about false rape accusations because of “regret”. My reaction is always to wonder how much of the time they’ve been talking women into sex the woman wasn’t clearly interested in.”

            This really looks like an attempt to blame the falsely accused. “Oh, even if they didn’t commit rape, they did something wrong so it’s OK to accuse them”. Consider the worst case of this: a woman who was not interested was begged, cajoled, and otherwise talked into sex (with no force or threats explict or implied). Does she have no agency? Is it not her responsibility to refuse to do things she does not want to do? If she does them, and then blames someone else, is she not doing wrong?

            This is further compounded by the issue that there is likely to be some interaction before sex, and in our society it is _still_ typically expected that the man initiates it. And, though less than in the past, she’s still expected to show some reluctance, to demand at least some flattery before she agrees. Thus it’s quite possible for the man to think he’s simply doing the steps of the dance, while she’s genuinely reluctant and he actually persuades her.

            Further, there are cases where no such things happen, that she was enthusiastic at the time and only changed her mind after, for example when a parent or boyfriend found out.

            Cases like the one you mention where a man is accused of rape simply because he was alone with her while she was in a vulnerable state are why you see recommendations to never be alone with a woman you don’t know well. It’s the same with men not being alone with children who aren’t their own; the danger of false accusation results in men being unwilling to engage in what should be laudable behavior.

            The mistaken identity case is bad, but it’s not of the same sort as the others. It could happen with any crime, and as far as I know there’s no big “ignore alibis” movement out there. There is a “believe women” movement, and it’s quite powerful.

          • Frank McPike says:

            @John Schilling
            The article you link is outraged at a preponderance of the evidence standard being used, and that both parties have a right to appeal an unfavorable verdict, seeming to regard both as a violation of due process. It notes, correctly, that both of those things would be exceptional in a criminal trial. It fails to note that both elements are bog standard in pretty much any civil trial, including civil trials where the wrongs alleged are also criminal. If those procedural elements are inherently unfair, a due process violation, or a serious threat to our rights, university disciplinary proceedings should be the least of our worries.

          • Randy M says:

            That’s pure anti-feminism, of the “women are the weaker sex” variety.

            But it is pure feminism in the “give women privileges to make up for historic oppression” variety.
            Motte and bailey? Or just two competing groups who will both call themselves feminists?

            There is a “believe women” movement, and it’s quite powerful.

            Ms Clinton endorsed this before she was reminded she didn’t.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Randy M:

            But it is pure feminism in the “give women privileges to make up for historic oppression” variety.
            Motte and bailey? Or just two competing groups who will both call themselves feminists?

            I would say it’s to some extent both. And also just the fact that a lot of the unsophisticated feminists have bought their own propaganda that male chauvinism / “patriarchy” is about “hating women”. There’s probably never been a society in which men just universally “hated women”. Rather, they see them as less capable, more innocent, and in need of male protection.

            I’ve quoted this before, but here is Victorian writer James Fitzjames Stephen writing against J.S. Mill’s feminist ideas, but in a way in which he sounds like a modern left-wing feminist calling for special protections for women from the patriarchal system of capitalism:

            Let us suppose, to take a single illustration, that men and women are made as equal as law can make them, and that public opinion followed the law. Let us suppose that marriage became a mere partnership dissoluble like another; that women were expected to earn their living just like men; that the notion of anything like protection due from the one sex to the other was thoroughly rooted out; that men’s manners to women became identical with their manners to men; that the cheerful concessions to acknowledged weakness, the obligation to do for women a thousand things which it would be insulting to offer to do for a man, which we inherit from a different order of ideas, were totally exploded; and what would be the result? The result would be that women would become men’s slaves and drudges, that they would be made to feel their weakness and to accept its consequences to the very utmost. Submission and protection are correlative. Withdraw the one and the other is lost, and force will assert itself a hundred times more harshly through the law of contract than ever it did through the law of status. Disguise it how you will, it is force in one shape or another which determines the relations between human beings. It is far less harsh when it is subjected to the provisions of a general law made with reference to broad general principles than when it acts through a contract, the terms of which are settled by individuals according to their own judgment. The terms of the marriage relation as settled by the law and religion of Europe are an illustration, of course on an infinitely wider and more important scale, of the very principle which in our own days has led to the prohibition of the employment of little children in certain classes of factories and of women in coalpits.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “There’s some sort of movement in favour of false rape accusations? That’s terrible.”

            Large parts of the Feminist movement have been claiming some or all of the following:
            “it is imperative that all rapes be reported”
            “false rape accusations do not exist/are too rare to matter”
            “All rape accusations should be believed”
            “those accused of rape should not defend themselves”
            “being accused of rape should be treated as a positive growth experience”

            There are not movements arguing the analogous positions for murdering sleeping spouses, running over pedestrians, or dosing peoples’ drinks. If there were, I think a lot of people would be a lot more worried about those things happening to them.

            I started digging up links, but honestly I’m pretty sure everyone in this thread has already seen them.

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            It fails to note that both elements [preponderance of evidence standard and both parties having the right to appeal] are bog standard in pretty much any civil trial, including civil trials where the wrongs alleged are also criminal. If those procedural elements are inherently unfair, a due process violation, or a serious threat to our rights, university disciplinary proceedings should be the least of our worries.

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that in civil trials you are allowed to have an attorney and you get to cross-examine witnesses, both of which are (in my non-lawyer-ly opinion) fairly important components of due process but which are sometimes explicitly forbidden in university hearings.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Yes, in civil court you also have discovery. Whereas in university hearings it’s often the accused against a board acting as prosecutor and judge both (an inquisitorial system). Also, in most civil trials where “preponderance of the evidence” is used, much less is at stake than expulsion and disqualification from further education. That standard is considered appropriate where the parties are similarly situated, where the plaintiff will have lost as much by an wrong verdict in his favor as the defendant would have lost by an wrong verdict in hers. That’s simply not the case in a punitive hearing like this.

            But insistence on a “clear and convincing” standard is “male privilege”, or so I’m told.

            https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/06/princeton-title-ix-agreement-higher-standard-proof-sexual-assault-cases-last-legs

          • Nita says:

            @ Vox

            they see them as less capable, more innocent, and in need of male protection

            That’s part of it, for sure. But there’s also stuff like this:

            I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

            he sounds like a modern left-wing feminist

            I don’t know what kind of left-wing feminists you have been reading, but I’ve never seen them call for “cheerful concessions to acknowledged weakness”, or argue that “submission and protection are correlative”.

            @ FC

            Let’s see…
            1 and 2 cannot be interpreted as “false accusations are virtuous”.
            I haven’t seen 3 addressed at legal or other authorities.
            I haven’t seen 4 or 5 at all.

          • Randy M says:

            “There’s some sort of movement in favour of false rape accusations? That’s terrible.”

            Ezra Klein comes close

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Nita:

            That’s part of it, for sure. But there’s also stuff like this:

            I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

            Yes, fair enough.

            I don’t know what kind of left-wing feminists you have been reading, but I’ve never seen them call for “cheerful concessions to acknowledged weakness”, or argue that “submission and protection are correlative”.

            I meant in regard to his conclusions, not his tone. Obviously, his tone is one of a traditionalist.

          • brad says:

            @ReluctantEngineer

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that in civil trials you are allowed to have an attorney and you get to cross-examine witnesses, both of which are (in my non-lawyer-ly opinion) fairly important components of due process but which are sometimes explicitly forbidden in university hearings.

            There’s a lot of conflation between substantive and procedural complaints. Having an advocate, being able to confront your accusers, being judged by a neutral party — those are procedural issues. The burden of persuasion, both where it rests and at what level it is set, is a substantive issue. So is the actual definition of consent.

            In my opinion, the college disciplinary systems are highly lacking in procedural due process, but the substantive rules are more or less fine. Advocates would be much better off going for the low hanging fruit of truly neutral arbitrators, or allowing assistance of counsel than fighting over “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “affirmative consent”. But the latter somehow seems more fun to argue about and so gets disproportionate attention.

            @The Nybbler
            There are other very high stakes civil matters besides college discipline, deportation proceedings to name just one.

          • Nita says:

            @ Randy M

            Thanks for the link. Here’s what he says about false accusations: “they do happen, and they’re awful.” Not really close to FC’s “[false rape accusations] are actually virtuous”, IMO.

            @ Vox

            He concludes that women must submit to men (or else…), while left-wing feminists, depending on their particular flavour, conclude that we must either “smash” or carefully reform the system. Eh, these conclusions don’t seem all that similar?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – I find I do not have the spoons necessary to continue this conversation in a productive manner. I humbly retract all statements made and apologize for involving myself in the first place.

          • Frank McPike says:

            @ReluctantEngineer
            Having lawyers present is an important part of due process in the legal system. I think lawyers are not quite so essential in proceedings outside the legal system. Still, under the SaVE Act, participants in university disciplinary proceedings for sexual assault or sexual harassment now do have the right to have an attorney present at all hearings and to consult with them freely about any element of the proceeding.

            I should note, therefore, that if you think that university disciplinary hearings conducted without lawyers are unfair, then you should thank Title IX law for introducing them. Universities have been expelling students for ages, often for offenses less serious than sexual assault (in fact, principally for drug and alcohol offenses), and almost invariably without the benefit of an attorney. And there’s still no legal requirement for universities to give students that right in non-Title IX cases. If it is your position that students should be given the right to have an attorney present at university disciplinary hearings, then that it not an objection to how they adjudicate sexual assault, it’s an objection to how they adjudicate (and historically have adjudicated) everything else.

            Some other elements of civil trials, like cross-examination and full discovery are indeed not present in university proceedings (at least in some cases because of the limited authority of universities and competing legal requirements). But these have generally not been present in university disciplinary proceedings, and are rarely present in disciplinary proceedings in other sorts of institutions.

            And while universities are trending towards adding more legal system-like protections, many parts of our society are in the process of moving further away. Mandatory arbitration clauses are becoming increasingly common, and actually deny parties access to the legal system, instead forcing them to take their claims to arbitration proceedings that don’t contain some of the typical elements of legal due process. True, parties consent to these clauses, but the same sort of consent is expressed when enrolling at a university.

            (Personally, I think that the dangers of mandatory arbitration are overstated, and that deviations from the formalities of the legal system are often good things for all parties in the contexts in which they’re employed. But the arguments against deviating from legal formalities in the university setting can apply in both cases.)

            @The Nybbler
            Many civil trials have less at stake than in university disciplinary hearings, but many also have much, much more at stake.

            It’s not at all clear to me what you mean by both parties being similarly situated. If you mean that parties have access to the same level of resources, then no, that’s not a typical feature of civil cases (or even criminal cases). If you mean that each party stands to lose the same amount should the case be decided against them, then no, that’s also not typically a feature. If I bring a tort claim against you, and you have no counterclaim, either you pay me damages (or are issued an injunction, possibly) or neither of us pay each other anything, depending on the result.

            My confusion with this line of argument is not that there is nothing to it at all, merely that it seems selectively applied.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Nita:

            He concludes that women must submit to men (or else…), while left-wing feminists, depending on their particular flavour, conclude that we must either “smash” or carefully reform the system. Eh, these conclusions don’t seem all that similar?

            The similarity is in the practical conclusion that a system of legal and social equality between men and women is or would be systematically biased against women because women can’t compete on a level playing field.

            Stephen was defending the contemporary system in which women were “shielded” from the abuses they would suffer under a regime of legal equality. Radical feminists are opposed to our system in which there is more or less legal equality, calling for more special protections to be given to women, to stop them from being exploited.

            They no doubt disagree on the details of what the protections for women ought to look like. Stephen thinks women ought to be protected by their husbands and/or fathers. Radical feminists, by the state. The point upon which they agree is that “equality under the law” would not actually result in equality but the systematic oppression of women. I think that’s an interesting similarity. I’m not trying to say that radical feminists are secretly neo-Victorian reactionaries, though.

          • Odoacer says:

            @Frank McPike

            My confusion with this line of argument is not that there is nothing to it at all, merely that it seems selectively applied.

            I think there is selective application, because many of those bringing it up believe that rape/sexual assault is qualitatively different than cheating or other actions that can get one expelled from a university. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that rape/sexual assault should be best dealt with the legal system and not strictly on campus.*

            Tangentially, Freddie deBoer argues that affirmative consent laws, which IIRC only apply to certain states’ university systems, are wrongheaded partly because:

            In any event, if we continue to treat affirmative consent as an issue that only pertains to college students, we are creating a definition of sexual consent that pertains only to a small sliver of our population which comes from particular demographic backgrounds. If we universalize affirmative consent, we unleash a lower standard onto police and prosecutors who have already demonstrated themselves to be incapable of avoiding racial or class prejudice. And I in no way believe that the inequality that is endemic to our judicial system will not fall on people of color and working class students in our universities.

            *Also, most people probably aren’t familiar enough with deportations, let alone the legal system, to have a completely coherent set of beliefs about it.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @brad
            Yes, deportation proceedings are civil and high stakes. And no “preponderance of the evidence” standard is used. They do have to prove by clear and convincing evidence that you were not “Born in East L.A.” (i.e. that you are indeed an alien).

            @Frank McPike
            The idea with “similarly situated” is that if you sue me and I’ve committed a tort against you and done $X in damage, if the case goes in my favor, you’ve been hurt by $X (before the case even started). If I have not committed that tort and the case goes in your favor, I’ve been hurt by $X.

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            @Frank McPike

            As it happens, I think do think that the disciplinary hearings at the university with which I am affiliated are arbitrary and often grossly unfair for things other than sexual assault (basically, once the process begins, nothing can stop it and the student is inevitably found guilty). The particular topic of this conversation, however, was disciplinary proceedings for sexual assault, which I still consider arbitrary and grossly unfair (even if they are less unfair than disciplinary hearings for other things).

          • Randy M says:

            Here’s what he says about false accusations: “they do happen, and they’re awful.” Not really close to FC’s “[false rape accusations] are actually virtuous”, IMO.

            He says a little more than that:

            For that reason, the law [that he supports] is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.

            That’s his point, and the same point contained it the one you first objected to

            “There’s some sort of movement in favour of false rape accusations? That’s terrible.”

            “These new injustices are the price we must choose to pay to disincentive the injustices we are dealing with now.” Basically a slightly less vindictive form of “Bring it on and let the men suffer instead for awhile.”

            Whether he/they are right in some sort of utilitarian computation is left as an exercise for the reader.

          • bean says:

            @ReluctantEngineer
            As it happens, I think do think that the disciplinary hearings at the university with which I am affiliated are arbitrary and often grossly unfair for things other than sexual assault (basically, once the process begins, nothing can stop it and the student is inevitably found guilty). The particular topic of this conversation, however, was disciplinary proceedings for sexual assault, which I still consider arbitrary and grossly unfair (even if they are less unfair than disciplinary hearings for other things).
            In fairness, the threshold for triggering other disciplinary proceedings seems a lot higher than the threshold for sexual assault proceedings. Most schools don’t kick you out if someone says they saw you smoking a joint once or that you were drunk underaged. (Yes, I know there are some conservative Christian schools which pretty much do that, but they’re certainly not the majority.) To get into expulsion-level trouble, you need to be egregiously over the line. While the actual handling of evidence may not be any better (and in fact might well be worse), innocents are a lot less likely to end up in the firing line.

          • @nita:

            Marital rape wasn’t considered rape because the wife had given consent–in public, with witnesses. That was considered part of the marriage contract, and it wasn’t revocable.

            But forcible rape in other contexts was something people worried about in lots of past societies. It was a capital crime in 18th century England, for example.

            “And of course, talking about sex in public was not allowed”

            When and where? I would have said that there was quite a lot of talk about sex in many past societies.

          • “I want to be able to enter a legal contract with another party that guarantees that they are not able to arbitrarily change their mind later without being in breach of that agreement, or defraud me, and have the appropriate state organs enforce that contract with potential penalties.”

            Until recently, you could. It was called “marriage.” The husband agreed not to have sex with other women and could be punished if he did and got caught. The wife agreed not to have sex with other men and to have sex with her husband.

            I think the wife may have also had some right to have her husband have sex with her, but I’m not sure. In Islamic law it’s explicit in both directions, although not symmetrical–the husband has the right to sex whenever he wants unless there is some good reason not, the wife has the right to sex a certain number of times a month.

          • My reaction to the preponderance of the evidence standard is that if you do it, the rule should be symmetrical. Rape is a very serious offense. False accusation of rape is a very serious offense. If you expel a student when you think it is more likely than not that he is guilty of rape, then when you don’t expel him you expel his accuser (unless there is some plausible story in which her error was innocent) on the grounds that it is more likely than not that her accusation was false (I ignore the unlikely case of exactly .5 probability).

            And yes, I think something similar would make sense in civil cases. That was the case in Periclean Athens, for at least some categories of their equivalent of tort suits. The losing plaintiff owed the defendant one sixth of the amount he had claimed the defendant owed him. We don’t know if that depended only on losing or on failing to get a sufficient minority to vote for conviction.

            An unpublished piece of mine that touches on this.

          • Frank McPike says:

            @Odoacer
            That may be true, but it’s not clear to me that rape is very different in that respect from beating someone up – generally also a good way to get expelled. Still, if someone takes the position that universities should not intervene in either case, then their position seems consistent.

            @ReluctantEngineer
            A couple people in this conversation expressed worries about various procedural features of university systems. I intervened mainly to note that those procedural features are not very exceptional (either in universities or the legal system). If we agree that there’s nothing unusually unfair about how universities deal with sexual assault under Title IX, then our disagreement is more subtle.

            My own view? There’s a lot of variation in how schools handle disciplinary issues in general, even where their procedures are superficially similar. Specifying a particular procedure is not necessarily a foolproof way of bringing about positive reform. I’m not convinced that a more legalistic system is necessarily more fair than the best alternatives (as, in fact, I think the legal system in general is not exactly flawless), although it’s probably fairer than the worst alternatives. I expect the major effect of Title IX (enforced primarily through lawsuits from both sides) will be, and already has been, to gradually standardize university disciplinary systems in ways that increasingly resemble the legal system (which, notably, seems to be the opposite of the prediction of many in this thread). While those reforms have already begun with sexual assault and sexual harassment, I expect that most of those procedural changes will eventually spread to other sorts of disciplinary proceedings within universities. Whether that is a good thing will likely depend on how good a system that university had beforehand, and will therefore vary. It will also vary based on how good universities turn out to be at imitating the legal system.

            @The Nybbler
            That’s true, but only of suits seeking damages. It’s not true if an injunction or other equitable remedies are on the table. There are differences in how the two are treated procedurally, though not in the direction you might think: the constitutional right to a jury trial does not apply to equitable remedies.

            @David Friedman
            That’s an interesting article, thanks for sharing it. I suspect I’ll end up disagreeing, but I’ll need to think about it in more depth.

            Edit: You mention an account of the relevant mathematics in a footnote. Is there a publicly available version of that?

          • onyomi says:

            @David Friedman

            Do you have any theories as to why we haven’t already created at least some variant of “loser pays,” even though it seems a bipartisan consensus that frivolous lawsuits are a big problem? I guess lawyers would stand to lose and most American politicians are lawyers?

          • Randy M says:

            But forcible rape in other contexts was something people worried about in lots of past societies.

            Even within older understandings of marriage, just because consent is assumed, it doesn’t necessarily* mean force is allowed–or everything that moderns lump under terms such as sexual contact.

            *Though they may have overlooked violent husbands at times, the two concerns aren’t necessarily linked any more than breaking kneecaps is standard banking practice.

          • Nornagest says:

            I guess lawyers would stand to lose and most American politicians are lawyers?

            I suspect this is less important than it’s generally given credit for. Most politicians are lawyers, but trial lawyers are a small proportion of the legal population, and the kind of trial lawyer that deals with frivolous civil suits is an even smaller one. I get the feeling it’s a smaller one yet among the lawyers that become politicians, but I could be wrong about that.

          • Randy M says:

            null is right

          • Anonymous says:

            There are no affirmative consent criminal laws. Only university policies. And the pro-rape faction isn’t arguing that it should stay that way, they are arguing to reinstate marital rape immunity.

            Incidentally I can’t say I have much respect for a religion that forbids consensual sex outside of marriage but is perfectly okay with fucking someone that clearly communicates an unwillingness to be fucked. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a loving God would put in place.

          • null says:

            Great job feeding the troll.

            EDIT: Randy M, I feel like it’s bad form to edit your comment without leaving the original up. This way future readers have no idea what Anonymous is responding to.

          • Randy M says:

            If I felt it likely he was arguing in good faith, that would concern me more.

            In any case, it is fairly easy to reverse engineer.

          • hlynkacg says:

            1) You must be new here.

            2) You’re lying when you say that there are no affirmative consent laws.

          • “Edit: You mention an account of the relevant mathematics in a footnote. Is there a publicly available version of that?”

            No. It’s a project I was working on, but I never finished the article. I should probably get back to it at some point, but I’ve been doing other things.

          • Nita says:

            @ David Friedman

            Marital rape wasn’t considered rape because the wife had given consent–in public, with witnesses.

            If you wake up in the middle of an operation and yell, “oh god it hurts, please stop,” but the surgeon keeps cutting you, are they engaging in a consensual activity because you signed a piece of paper saying “I consent to surgery” a few hours ago?

            The kind of ‘consent’ you give when you get married (by the way, I don’t recall traditional Christian marriage vows mentioning sex, but let’s assume they do) is not the kind of ‘consent’ we expect in consensual sex today. That’s why I said their idea of rape didn’t match ours.

          • “It’s odd that so many of you are desperate to rape have non-consensual sex with your hypothetical wives.”

            If I correctly understand the argument I think you are referring to, it isn’t that people want to have non-consensual sex with their hypothetical wives. It’s that people want a mechanism to have consensual sex without the risk of being falsely accused of non-consensual sex, an accusation they would have no way of disproving.

            One way of doing that would be to have some publicly verifiable form of assent. That is one of the things that marriage used to provide.

            Does that make the argument clearer and less puzzling?

          • jpt4 says:

            David Friedman:
            https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/24/ot48-open-your-heart/#comment-349903

            At first blush, that Delaware set their age of consent at seven years is Heinleinian to the point of incredulity, but in fact it was lowered from ten (with the penalty increased from a decade’s imprisonment to death) in 1871, and not formally revised until 1972 [0].

            [0] http://blogs.lawlib.widener.edu/delaware/2014/07/07/the-age-of-consent-and-rape-reform-in-delaware/

          • Anonymous says:

            So if the other anonymous means that we should allow people to form contracts requiring them to have actually have sex with another person, without being permitted to change their mind and decide they don’t want to, then he’s not asking for us to treat sex like other sorts of contracts, but asking for something that’s fairly exceptional and generally rejected in other contexts.

            Right.

            It wouldn’t work with marriage, at least, because the default is still (I believe?) that spouses hold property commonly. Being ordered to pay money to yourself isn’t much of a penalty. So you’d have to figure out some workaround. Ordering to perform seems like a perfectly cromulent way to get out of this. Abolishing common spousal property would be another.

            In either case – ordering to perform, ordering to pay, some other penalty – that’s entirely fine. The point isn’t to brutalize, but to indicate with clarity that what you did was wrong, that the injured party is in the right, and that the system and society at large backs this interpretation.

            pro-rape faction

            If allowing people to publically declare consent ahead of time and pre-commit to actions they might later find themselves uninterested in carrying out, but honorably carrying them out anyway, means I’m in the “pro-rape faction”, then so be it.

          • Anonymous says:

            The kind of ‘consent’ you give when you get married (by the way, I don’t recall traditional Christian marriage vows mentioning sex, but let’s assume they do) is not the kind of ‘consent’ we expect in consensual sex today. That’s why I said their idea of rape didn’t match ours.

            It’s not explicit in the vows, but there is scriptural support for it. As Dr. Friedman mentioned above, this interpretation explicitly was part of civil law until the mid-20th century.

            https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+7%3A3-5

            3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

          • Anonymous says:

            If I correctly understand the argument I think you are referring to, it isn’t that people want to have non-consensual sex with their hypothetical wives. It’s that people want a mechanism to have consensual sex without the risk of being falsely accused of non-consensual sex, an accusation they would have no way of disproving.

            Just so. I don’t believe I physically could bring myself to have sex a woman who violently resisted. I’d sooner vomit.

          • Nita says:

            I don’t believe I physically could bring myself to have sex a woman who violently resisted

            I’m sincerely glad to hear that, anon.

            But I, for example, don’t want to use violence on my husband — ever, at all. “I can’t keep going, it hurts too much — welp, I guess I’ll have to try to scratch his eyes out,” is not the kind of thought that should occur in my marriage bed.

            And I think many people feel the same way. We want to use language to communicate our needs, so being responsive to language seems like a reasonable default expectation.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Trying to divert the discussion to violent rape is an extreme red herring. That’s not the stuff that makes up the vast majority of /r/deadbedrooms.

            The norm is simple: if you refuse to take care of your husband’s sexual needs, you are a bad wife.

            If your husband responds by beating you, he’s also a bad husband.

            The question of recourse is an implementation detail. Generally, there is no good solution to a bad marriage. But since we can apparently expect men to determine in advance whether or not their one night stands will retroactively withdraw consent, it hardly seems unreasonable to expect women to refrain from marrying men who will beat them.

          • Anonymous says:

            @David Friedman

            If I correctly understand the argument I think you are referring to, it isn’t that people want to have non-consensual sex with their hypothetical wives. It’s that people want a mechanism to have consensual sex without the risk of being falsely accused of non-consensual sex, an accusation they would have no way of disproving.

            The word consent is being used is two different and confusing ways in there.

            On one account the revive marital rape immunity faction is worried about false accusations of non-consensual sex in the sense that in the moment / from contextual clues / from martial history the sex in question was something that both parties are or would be okay with. The immunity would releave this worry. Call this the shield view.

            The other account is that they desire a cudgel to coerce sex out of an unwilling-in-the-moment partner. And, “not me of course”, but allow for outright violent sex against a resisting spouse as something rude or unfortunate but not illegal. Call this the sword view.

            It’s seems pretty clear to me that, at least in this sub-thread, the sword is the main motivation, not the shield.

          • Anonymous says:

            Generally, there is no good solution to a bad marriage.

            It’s called divorce. Unless you worship a god that hates you and doesn’t want you to be happy, in which case a bad marriage should be right up your ally.

          • Anonymous says:

            It’s seems pretty clear to me that, at least in this sub-thread, the sword is the main motivation, not the shield.

            It seems pretty clear to me that it’s quite the opposite!

            Allowing violent coercion is not necessary for the norm that Jaskologist explains to work.

            It’s called divorce.

            >divorce
            >good

            laughingelfgirls.jpg

          • Jaskologist says:

            That’s like calling capital punishment a “good solution” to a murder.

      • Foo says:

        The internet is how people form communities now. (I derive more of my identity from the online communities I participate in than the city I live in, and I’m far from the only one.) “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” If we don’t learn from the historical record of communities that have been created in the past, communities of the future will continue to make the same mistakes.

    • bidirectional home says:

      “Recording the history” only encourages those smug goon fucks. Don’t give them a goddamn inch. They already meticulously archive their retarded forums (behind a paywall) anyway.

      (In case you don’t have enough context, oral tradition is the way of imageboards. Lurk more.)

    • FeepingCreature says:

      I’m all for this.

      People don’t tend to think of their small forum as the start of a movement. People don’t tend to think that they’re participating in history.

      • I think a lot of people in small movements believe that they will, or might, affect the world. Most of them are wrong, fortunately or unfortunately depending.

    • onyomi says:

      I think it’s a very good point. I think “the internet” is a space which has only very recently been taken seriously enough that anyone would think to do such a thing, but hopefully, eventually, this will be a legitimate branch of history. We’ve already seen it to some extent with things like people writing the history of Bitcoin. Of course the reason for interest there is the potential impact on the real world: which raises the question, are the histories of internet communities inherently worth recording/cataloguing/analyzing/exploring? Or are they only interesting insofar as they relate to real world events?

      A sort of compromise position: even if there’s no way to connect an internet history to real people, the behavior of online communities, if nothing else, seems to provide a rich source of sociological data. People are definitely already writing PhD theses on Facebook, for example.

    • An example from my own internet experience is a community that existed from 2010-2014 of about 100 individuals that migrated across at least 6 different websites (one of which I was de-facto running), split several times and then finally died from a total deficit of new arrivals. It’s not recorded history; you’d have to ask someone involved for knowledge of it.

      You have no idea how common this is. I’m currently ‘apart’ of two forums, one of went through six different iterations before dying like yours did, except now it’s back again with even less of the community remaining. The other forum is/was incredibly dead, before getting a facelift and completely re-branding.

      From what I’ve heard, there was some interesting history on that first forum, completely lost forever now that community went through so many diasphoras and such.

      Also, I can’t believe no one has brought this up

      http://world2ch.org/

      It’s a history of the early days of various *chans.

      • Tophattingson says:

        You have no idea how common this is. I’m currently ‘apart’ of two forums, one of went through six different iterations before dying like yours did, except now it’s back again with even less of the community remaining. The other forum is/was incredibly dead, before getting a facelift and completely re-branding.

        I brought it up specifically because I know it’s a really common occurrence. It’s a history that a lot of people who used forums over the past 10 years have experienced.

        http://world2ch.org/

        It’s a history of the early days of various *chans.

        That’s exactly the kind of material I’m thinking about. It isn’t the only recorded history though. There’s a handful of other small (and one big) attempts at recording the history of a web community. Here’s some more I have managed to find.

        https://allthetropes.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:History

        The history of TV Tropes and All The Tropes are directly linked, but only All The Tropes can comprehensively report on “The Google Incident”.

        http://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page

        An incredibly comprehensive history of fanfiction by the Organization for Transformative Works that stretches all the way back to Kirk/Spock Fanzines of the 70s. Everything you didn’t want to know about slash fiction.

        http://tanasinn.info/wiki/Complete_History_of_4chan

        4Chan events in chronological order.

    • Zorgon says:

      This is part of the reason the ants have “Archive. Everything.” as a founding principle.
      (Well, that and the habit of some of their ideological enemies of deleting everything once the damage is done.)

      In many ways I’m actually in agreement. The Internet magnifies arguments over the garden fence to Biblical proportions. Fire the whole lot into space and start again.

      • Stefan Drinic says:

        Isn’t at least as strong a reason for them doing that having a way to back up their viewpoint? When you’re dealing with opponents as dishonest as theirs, being able to exactly pinpoint why they’re wrong is a feature. I don’t think it’ll save their reputation at all, mind, but it’s a sensible theory.

        • tmk says:

          > When you’re dealing with opponents as dishonest as theirs

          Isn’t this just the kind of “boo the outgroup” argument that rationalists should avoid?

          • null says:

            1. You’re assuming he’s a rationalist. I’d expect a majority of SSC commenters are not.

            2. From his point of view, that is a factual statement and he probably has examples to back it up. Just as from some anti-GGs’ point of view, the main purpose of GG is to harass people, particularly women and minorities, and this can also be backed up with examples.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Dishonesty is a real thing, and some people are more dishonest than others, and this has consequences. I would say this is exactly the sort of truth from which rationalists must not avert their eyes.

          • Stefan Drinic says:

            I don’t identify as a rationalist. As a lazy person, I also don’t feel like at length explaining every point I make. Whether or not you think the SJ crowd these people are up against are dishonest or not, the ants believe they are, and they also think keeping records helps in dealing with that.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            it seems your innovations have borne fruit, honored cartoon general.

      • tmk says:

        Who are “the ants”?

        • suntzuanime says:

          http://pastebin.com/dLxtWbtA

          The word is censored, so a lot of people use euphemisms rather than fire up pastebin like a civilized human being.

          • tmk says:

            Ok Scott, the word blocklist is completely dysfunctional. Much of the discussion is completely impenetrable unless you have learnt the secret keywords from previous threads. Either make a public list of forbidden topics and delete an comment that talks about them, or come up with something else.

          • suntzuanime says:

            In the abstract there might be something to be said for binding the ingroup tighter with shared shibboleths and shedding the less-invested commentors since we already get more than enough comments. “Dysfunctional” always depends on exactly what function you’re trying to perform. I do find it a bit distasteful, though.

          • null says:

            I thought the blocklist was so that Scott’s blog didn’t show up in google searches for Evil.

          • tmk says:

            But in this case the ingroup will only bind together over the issues that have been problems in the past. It excludes those who are less interested in culture war topics, which I think is opposite of the intention.

          • Anonymous says:

            In the abstract there might be something to be said for binding the ingroup tighter with shared shibboleths and shedding the less-invested commentors since we already get more than enough comments. “Dysfunctional” always depends on exactly what function you’re trying to perform. I do find it a bit distasteful, though.

            I used to think I hate impenetrable shibboleths, but then I realized that in every community where I became invested, I loved the shibboleths that I could pronounce.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The euphemism “ants” was used here before the word was banned, however. It’s from “sexually viable worker ants”, the word for which is a homograph for the forbidden word, though the first vowel is the same as “gamete” and not “gamer”.

            I guess we’re developing our own version of Cockney slang.

          • Zorgon says:

            The word blocklist serves the function of making it possible to discuss concepts vaguely related to the banned issue (like, for example, the Archive Everything principle I mentioned above) while not getting sucked into the 48,000th discussion of whether or not Person X said something nasty about Person Y on Twitter that one time.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Zorgon:
            If you’re going to dredge up ancient history, at least get it right:

            It was not that one time, as you damn well know; show me one place where I (or anybody else) said it was that one time. What we’ve been saying (over and over), and that you seem unable to comprehend (over and over) is that X tweeted almost those exact words about Y that other time.

            Stop strawmanning and provide one single cite that anybody claimed X did it that one time, or concede the point. I, and readers who don’t have a dog in this fight, will (justifiably) interpret failure to provide a cite as tacit concession.

          • Zorgon says:

            That is some seriously impressive Poe-work, Agro. I was halfway through the second paragraph before I realised you weren’t actually yelling at me.

          • Agronomous says:

            @Zorgon:

            Thanks, I try. But I’m not sure it comes under Poe’s jurisdiction if it’s ideology-neutral—I was intending to poke fun at behavior I’ve seen on many sides of many arguments.

          • Zorgon says:

            I suspect that just makes it a Double Poe.

      • Deiseach says:

        Fire the whole lot into space and start again.

        Which down the line only leads to a whole lot of re-inventing the wheel. Having the bad example of those who went before should at least help not to fall into the same pits.

    • 57dimensions says:

      It seems to me in certain fandoms there definitely seems to be more recorded history, quite a few people in the tumblr and livejournal fanfic communities have put together master posts on various large events and controversies within the communities.

      There is also great deal of documentation and collection of information going on in fandoms connected to the real world, for instance the One Direction fandom–which I highly doubt anyone here is involved in–is now basically a giant conspiracy theory engine revolving around a possibly fake baby, there is so much documentation and talk about this stuff it will never die from the web. I mean, it trends on Twitter at least once a week. But, that fandom is one of the largest and most active on the web, and there are far more small communities that are much more likely to fade into nonexistence. But I guess, if you want to preserve your community, who better to document it than yourself?

    • MichaelM says:

      I spent a long portion of my teenage years on LUELinks, a bastard little cousin of both 4chan and SA. While the membership was never as big as either (I think we peaked at 20,000 accounts — not unique individuals), it had a rich, unique history of its own. There was even someone who maintained a document about that history, but it has been so long since I even bothered going back (it still exists as far as I know, even more of a wasteland than it was back then) that I don’t begin to remember the name. I wonder if the document could be tracked down.

      The interesting thing is just how like real history some of it looks. The community emerged from a particular board on the GameFAQs website as a way of circumventing moderator sanction of file sharing and obscene links and the mechanism used (links with unique codes attached to them, so you could share the code instead of the link) persisted and lay under the community for a long time. However, eventually, the takedown of Megaupload killed that mechanism, as so many links were direct links to files on that website. It was a major turning point in what was, at the time, a relatively large community.

      As someone with a deep passion an interest in history, it would be fascinating to read and write a good story of the LUEsers.

      • Tophattingson says:

        The interesting thing is just how like real history some of it looks. The community emerged from a particular board on the GameFAQs website as a way of circumventing moderator sanction of file sharing and obscene links and the mechanism used (links with unique codes attached to them, so you could share the code instead of the link) persisted and lay under the community for a long time.

        The community I referred to has similar origins. An off-topic discussion board on a forum that saw increasingly strict moderation. The split actually happened in two waves. The first was when cursing was banned and the second was when a specific sticky thread was taken down permanently.

        As someone with a deep passion an interest in history, it would be fascinating to read and write a good story of the LUEsers.

        Agreed. I would want to know more about the history of LUELinks and also GameFAQs itself. I know that it’s a rather big community but my only interaction with it has been the FAQs for the Monster Hunter series.

      • I hung out on GameFAQs a lot as a teenager, although this was long after the LUE board was made private. The thing that’s always seemed most remarkable about GameFAQs to me is how many boards it has—its aim is to have one board for every game ever made, and it has lots of subsidiary boards too on different topics. So there must have been hundreds if not thousands of different GameFAQs micro-communities, each with histories of their own.

        One board whose history I know about was the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door board, which did a particularly interesting bit of mythology-generation after an event known as “Hurricane Wally”. I only started visiting the board after this event (I made my account in early 2006, and I can’t have started visiting the board long after that), but, as I was told, what happened was that people used to post a lot of fanfiction and, especially, interactive fanfiction on the board, which the moderators considered off-topic. But they tolerated it for some time until suddenly deciding to delete everyone’s work from the board (I don’t know if they were given prior notice, or anything like that). One of the moderators who was called “wally” made a post afterwards explaining that the fanfiction had been deleted for being off-topic, and so the deletion came to be referred to as “Hurricane Wally”, and wally was a sort of folk devil for the board from then on.

        After this first “hurricane” came several others, as people continued posting their fanfiction and it kept getting deleted after it overwhelmed the board too much, and eventually some people made an off-site board to post the fanfiction on. I used to know the location of this board, but I don’t remember it, and I never visited it much. But others started posting the fanfiction on one of the dead GameFAQs boards. Now, that gets us into another interesting feature of GameFAQs, which is that there was a vast number of boards for games from the 80s or early 90s which nobody played or talked about any more, so the boards were “dead”. But people did use those boards, for all sorts of purposes—for example, people would find some obscure Commodore 64 game and post a topic on the board “claiming” the board for themselves, and then they could invite their friends there and found their own little personal micro-community. Some users were known as “board hunters”, and they made it a mission of theirs to go through the entire listings of games for each console, inspecting each board to see what interesting things they could find there, chatting with the “owners” if the board was claimed, or just making random posts for other board hunters to amuse themselves by finding. Nobody was going to talk about these games anyway, so the moderators didn’t bother enforcing the rules against off-topic postings. In fact I’m pretty sure there were some board hunters who were moderators, or who became moderators; being a well-known board hunter was one of the ways you could achieve some degree of cross-site fame.

        Anyway, the people from the PM:TTYD board who didn’t go to the off-site board went to the board of a football game for the Sega GameGear called, naturally enough, “Hurricanes”. Of course they didn’t just use it to post fanfiction on but also formed a social community, and for most of the time I was on it it was mainly just a social community. Today there’s nothing left on the board except for a thread (or “topic”, as is the traditional GameFAQs terminology) by BanditYoshi—an old regular who I remember—back in 2008, after the board had already essentially died. (I think Hurricane Wally took place in 2005 or so, so the whole saga only lasted a couple of years; people just lost interest in the board after a while.) Most of the posts in that topic are just BanditYoshi “bumping” the topic, i.e. making a content-free post so the topic doesn’t get deleted (“purged”). He’s been keeping this up regularly for 8 years now; his most recent bump was two days ago. It might be one of the longest living topics on GameFAQs now, although in less than one years’ time he’s going to run up against the 500-post-per-topic limit, and the final vestige of life on the Hurricanes board will finally die away.

        (Not that it will vanish altogether; GameFAQs added a topic archiving function some time after I stopped visiting the site regularly. But it was added too late to archive any of the other topics that used to be on the Hurricanes board.)

        • LPSP says:

          When you put it that way, GameFAQS really had a fascinating culture. I remember hosting popularity contests on the Metroid boards, where people voted for who would win in a fight between various bosses or what-have-you and I would write up a short piece of fiction about it. It’s weird to think that these vote-tourneys would persist but straight-up fanfiction banned.

    • boottle says:

      I would like to see a full history written down about the rise and fall of the skeptic movement. As far as I can tell their high watermark was around early 2011, and then a bunch of stuff happened at once, starting maybe with elevatorgate, that destroyed it all.

      • dndnrsn says:

        This would be interesting, definitely. I would buy a book that was an account of how that went down that made an attempt to be neutral (instead of the two opposing sides of “awful old white misogynist Islamophobes ruined everything” and “essjaydoubleyous ruined everything”) but that recognized the fundamental irony that an anti-religious movement was shaped by, and ultimately suffered a schism due to, the same human drives that cause those things among religions.

      • qwints says:

        Yeah, a lot of it can be summed up as a prisoners delimma of a bunch of self-promoters who could get more attention by talking about internal strife than the supposed point of the movement. If you date the skeptic movement as when TAM existed (2003-2015) it really just looks like the little brother to the New Atheist movement.

        I’d point at the Sci AM blogs fiasco and the creation of FTB as more central to the dissolution than elevator gate. But really, the American skeptics communtiy basically always was running on old money and celebrity rather than creating anything new.

        All that said, Id definitely listen to a discussion between Derek, DJ and Rebecca as to what they think happened.

        • boottle says:

          I’m from the UK, where the high watermark was maybe a little later, we had the court cases of Simon Singh and Paul Chambers bookending it. It all fell apart in similar circumstances involving political differences and supposed allegations of sexual misconduct…

          I think also there was maybe a party political dimension to it, though I’m not confident of this. In the US, it seems to me, a lot of it was anger directed at Bush and his religious views, which dissipated over Obama’s first term.

          In the UK, a lot of it was directed at the Labour government at the time, who were perceived to be overly authoritarian and hostile to Evidence Based Policy (on drugs etc). Many supported the Liberal Democrat party, with a bit of an odd couple alliance between libertarian leaners and left wingers. When the Tory-Liberal coalition came to power, opposition became more explicitly and traditionally left wing.

      • tmk says:

        Are you sure you mean the skeptic movement and not New Atheism? I always felt that they we separate movements, although with a significant overlap in ideas and supporters.

        The skeptic movement is centered around James Randi and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. New Atheism is centered around Richard Dawkins.

        Do you think that the skeptic movement got dragged into the atheists issues, or am entirely wrong to treat them as separate?

        • boottle says:

          I think they may seem separate from close up, but in the grand scheme of things there’s not much different.

          New atheists I suppose can be drawn much wider, to include anyone who read and agree with Hitchens/Dawkins etc in the mid 00s, whereas Skepticism was probably more of a real ‘community’ so to speak, with local SITP groups etc, but I’d be pretty confident to say that most Skeptics were at least some sort of Atheist, and New Atheists would agree with Skeptics on most things even if they weren’t formally active.

          Also, I think the schism that led to its downfall crosses across both groups, with Atheism Plus and all that. (And is a causal link in the chain that led to the Ant Wars.)

          • tmk says:

            Do expand on your last point. It seems interesting, but I cannot see the causal link. Are they not parallel phenomena, driven by the general collapse of the Broad Liberal-Libertarian Alliance to Control Internet Debate?

            I realize it’s dangerous to ask for a culture war discussion, but this subthread seems calm enough to handle it.

            I agree that skepticism and atheism have a large overlap. Most skeptics are not religious, and most atheists agree with skepticism. There is of the common opposition to creationism. But I think that is only one of many issues for skeptics. They also work on alternative medicine, psychic mediums, UFOs, homeopathy, various conspiracy theories, astrology, etc, things New Atheists generally don’t care much about. Maybe I only saw one side of the skeptics. Or, could it be a difference between countries? The Culture War in general is mostly a US and UK issue I think.

    • ThatOneGuy says:

      I have some knowledge of the history of 4chan’s Risk community. It was a game that was played in threads on /b/ where a host would post a map broken into sections. People would choose colors and then make posts on which blank areas to take over or which other nations to attack. They would obtain a number of areas based on the last digits of their post number. (Say 1-3 gets 1 area, 4-6 gets 2 areas, 7-9 gets 3 areas, 0 gets 5 areas, doubles gets 10 areas, trips gets 20 areas.)

      The game itself was quite fun and developed over time around the medium of 4chan’s board setup. For instance, it originally worked by posting as quickly as possible but later turned into a rounds system supported by the unique ID system.

      It’s also generally interesting since the development of the community ended up moving into skype and was full of long lists of unsavory characters.

      • LPSP says:

        Risk-style threads still persist to this day on /tg/. There are different versions for different settings like GoT and such. No idea if they have attendant Skype communities as well, but it’s likely.

    • moridinamael says:

      I think you have to do it the way we get a lot of our “real” history. You interview people. Ideally, you interview a lot of people, and don’t be too selective in your dragnet.

      I was (am?) technically a somethingawful goon but I have absolutely no idea what anybody is talking about with respect to some kind of massive SJ implosion. This is probably because I never really spent much time in the Politics subforum. I guess I did notice that it gradually became less acceptable to dismiss things as “gay” or “retarded.” That said, if you only interview the “important” people, you get a sense that SomethingAwful was just 100% politics all the time, which is the opposite of how most of its members experience it.

      • Tophattingson says:

        Interviewing people alongside prompting people to write their own history as they know it is a good place to start. Already got some of that in the comments here. A Wiki might be a viable format for that?

        Any sufficiently large “community” online is really probably several different communities that share a domain name and maybe an account system.

        For a more recent parallel on 4chan, /u/ shares the same website as /pol/ yet Trump is of complete irrelevance to /u/. Many people make the mistake of thinking 4chan =/pol/, /int/ and /b/ when in reality much (most?) of the activity is gaming, anime, porn and anime porn.

      • Patrick Spens says:

        A lot of it is Ron Paul’s fault actually. Which is something that always makes me happy.

    • Loquat says:

      I would definitely read a history of a certain blog commenting community I used to follow – the blogger migrated from one site to another (notably, the old site was one one of those totally independent make-your-own-blog hosts, while the new one was part of a portal where visitors would run the risk of being exposed to other bloggers that held differing political viewpoints), and so an influential chunk of the community decided to maintain the old place to be the community forum, picked some of the loudest and most opinionated commenters to be the mods of it, and some months later there was a drama-filled meltdown. I saw a fair bit of it myself, of course, but it would be fascinating to see an accurate summary of the whole thing.

      • God Damn John Jay says:

        My first thoughts when reading this: wow that is vague but I really want to know who it is.

        My second thoughts: Slacktivist, huh?

        (In retrospect, I don’t know about the meltdown, but there was a huge change when he left)

        • Huh! I used to post regularly in the comments section years ago, before the migration and swap-over. (I think a few other regulars here did as well.)

          I also have a vaguely-prurient interest in whatever happened there.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            Fred Clark left the site for Patheos and it just looked like the website became far leftier than it was before.

        • Loquat says:

          Wow, good guess.

          For those interested, the drama meltdown as I understand it more or less went as follows:

          One of the things the new mods decided to do was solicit essays from the community, particularly for a series on religion. A few articles went up doing basic “I’m a member of Religion X, this is what we believe, etc” intro stuff, which nobody much had any issues with… but then they posted one on atheism. And it wasn’t an intro-to-atheism type article, it was an essay by a religious believer arguing that wanting to convert people to atheism is evil. (Really, the argument worked against all religious conversion attempts period, but the author was focused on atheism specifically.) Now, if you read the wording very carefully and squinted your eyes just right, you’d understand the author wasn’t calling atheism in general evil, but we all know hardly anyone on the internet does that.

          So as you can imagine, they got a lot of hate mail and hate posts from angry atheists from the wider internet, plus complaints from atheist community members. The mod response seems to have been more or less to hunker down and wait for it to blow over – which coincidentally resulted in not ever getting around to posting the promised intro-to-atheism article which the atheist community members were asking for, and which might have mollified critics who thought the site was anti-atheist. But things never really did blow over, and the mods got into a mental state of believing anyone who wasn’t 100% supportive of them and their actions was an enemy in need of flaming, and this spiraled into a lot of community members being less than 100% happy with their performance, hence meltdown.

    • pneumatik says:

      Isn’t this the point of the Wayback Machine at archive.org? It’s just copies of web pages so you’ll have to do your own anthropology, but it’s certainly a record of past web sites. Closed forums might not be on it – I think it respects robots.txt file – but otherwise it’s pretty comprehensive.

    • Error says:

      I’ve been frustrated by exactly this with respect to Usenet. We actually have a comprehensive history of it, in the form of Google’s archive, and I’d love to dig through it for some records of the early days of my own communities. Unfortunately it’s kept behind an interface so atrocious that it’s useless for any serious historical diving.

      It’s a tragedy.

    • Tophattingson says:

      Here’s more internet history of SomethingAwful: http://archive.is/cGKD0

      Most interestingly for the idea of a SomethingAwful vs 4chan culture war.

      “There was a reading group who read Deleuze and Guattari together, producing strange diagrams reminiscent of plant organelles, claiming to illustrate rhizomaticity.”

      • FacelessCraven says:

        this is really, really, amazingly good. thank you for posting it, and kudos to the author.

        • tmk says:

          I found it really hard to follow. The author seems to have some very peculiar ideology and groups his opponents together in non-standard ways. Then he invents new terms to define them.

  80. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    SSC SF Story of the Week #14
    This week we are discussing “Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick.
    Next time we will discuss “Transmission” by Nate Soares.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I watched the film version of this story, Screamers, years before I read it, so I had the twist spoiled, but I liked it anyway. The story has a bleak, nihilistic atmosphere which fits well with the subject matter.

      I’m not sure whether Phillip K. Dick thought of the robots as being conscious or not, but if they weren’t, then the implied fate of Earth reminds me a bit of the Disneyland with no children scenario; a world of machines eternally making war on one another with no moral agents to suffer or benefit.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Ever have one of those stories that made a significant impression on you when you were little but couldn’t find later because you didn’t remember the name or who wrote it?

      Seems that “Second Variety” was that story.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        Glad to see that my subthread managed to reconnect you with “Second Variety”. What deep impressions did it make upon you?

        • hlynkacg says:

          I read it in one of my dad’s pulp sci-fi collections when I was 9 or 10 and had nightmares about it for weeks. The image in particular of “the survivor” on her way to the lunar station to start the cycle anew really stuck with me for some reason.

          Years later I remember watching Terminator 2 and finding it eerily familiar. I tried to go back and find the original story, but with no luck. Since then I’ve occasionally wondered I had somehow imagined it. Yet here we are.

    • SJ says:

      The “Second Variety”.

      First time I read it, I had a feeling that the ending of the story was going to pull the rug from under the reader. But I couldn’t predict quite how.

      This time, I knew what the ending would be. But I still read the story all the way through.

      And I’m never really sure if the various “Varietys” of automated killing machines were cooperating or not. But the main point is that multiple ones were present, and only one of them had to fool the soldiers long enough to get on the rocket to Moon Base.

    • Murphy says:

      wow, Screamers stayed really close to the original dialog.

      Though I remember thinking that the anonymous desert planet was a weird setting. Post nuclear earth makes far more sense.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      I was a little disappointed by this one. I thought that the reveal of the Second Variety was far too easily deduced too far in advance, and I spent the whole story thinking, “Well, this chowderhead SHOULD shoot her now in order to save the Lunar race from extinction, but I also can already tell that he’s not going to.” That said, it was my first encounter with the story and I really liked the horrible robots murdering everyone. Fun idea.

    • Agronomous says:

      The weird thing about this story is that, for a Philip K. Dick story, it’s not all that weird. Though I guess I did see Screamers, so I pretty much knew the twist(s). (Of course, the stupid fucking opening-spread illustration gives one of the twists away, and the middle illustration another. And the intro text—when I was on a Project Gutenberg 1950s Sci-Fi kick, I had to train myself to skip over those. It’s like current-day movie trailers….) And it’s clear that The Terminator didn’t get all its ideas from Harlan Ellison.

      Is it possible that it was a lot weirder in 1953? The whole Russians-at-first-seeming-really-bad-but-really-not thing hadn’t been done to death that early in the Cold War, for instance. Nor was the paranoia aspect.

      I think the expository dialog was very well done, and the scheming of Tasso kept me off balance. It’s a bit strange how they dance around her career choice, but I guess mass-market media were more strait-laced sixty years ago. And the incident that reveals all to the main character at the end was also very effective.

  81. Luke the CIA stooge says:

    This candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada is running on a platform of ending ALL corporate subsidies.

    I know this group has the kind of wonks who go crazy over that stuff so go nuts.

    Starting questions: What would be the benifits and drawbacks? Could this have unintended consequences? Have they tried this anywhere else that you know of? Has this been proposed seriously before?

    check him out: http://www.maximebernier.com/en/

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      Fully generalized argument- it depends on what is counted as a corporate subsidy.

      Looking at the page
      “We’ve had a good example of this kind of detrimental intervention these past few days when the government of Quebec provided a single business, Bombardier, with 1.3 billion dollars in aid. Talk about a concentrated benefit!

      Mr. Daoust justifies his request by saying that the federal government intervened in order to save Ontario’s auto industry. It’s always the same argument from those who see the federal government as a cash cow, wherever they may be in the country: Ontario received this investment, Newfoundland benefited from this programme, Quebec received this amount, that industry was favoured over another. So I deserve it too!

      We must put an end to this dynamic. There is another, simple way for the federal government to show fairness to all regions of the country, to industries, to businesses, as well as to taxpayers: It is to completely stop subsidizing businesses and to reduce their taxes. ”

      It appears to be a good plan.

    • Great idea. I don’t think you’ll find an economist anywhere who thinks that’s a bad idea. The reason nobody else has done that is that the people who receive billions in corporate subsidies lobby strenuously to maintain their privilege and regular voters don’t care enough to overrule them. This is the kind of thing politicians like to promise but never follow through on once they win.

      • Alliteration says:

        In the limited case of true large positive externalities, economist general favor subsidies. However, I can think of any obvious cases that. (Maybe vaccines?)

        On the other hand, because subsidies are so politically tempting, outright banning them might be better.

        • Anonymoose says:

          Theoretically alternative energy might qualify, although in practice I doubt the externalities are high enough.

          • Ricardo Cruz says:

            Are you referring to alternative to energy sources that cause pollution? Then, strictly speaking you have negative externalities, not positive ones. In that case, taxes are the best way to tackle it, because not only do taxes make alternatives cheaper, but they make using less energy cheaper as well.

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            Mostly, if you want to intervene in the economy for this kind of thing, the way to go isn’t subsidies – its pigou taxes. Don’t subsidize windmills, tax coal. This is the way to go because it encourages all alternatives to the thing you want to get rid of instead of relying on politicians picking a winner – even domain experts are hard pressed to do that, and politicians rarely are.

          • One problem with Pigouvian taxes, and externality policy more generally, is that it depends on knowing, at least approximately, the sign and size of the externality. For a big issue such as climate or population, that’s harder than people usually assume. There are both positive and negative externalities, they are spread out over an uncertain future, so estimating the net effect is hard, and it’s easy to fudge the calculations in the direction of whatever belief you start with.

            There’s a webbed video of a talk I gave on the subject.

        • The obvious case and common example is basic research.

        • The proposal is to get rid of all the subsidies that currently exist, most of which have nothing to do with positive externalities and everything to do with handing out political favours.

    • Deiseach says:

      In theory, it’s great. In practice, you get the company going “Okay, don’t bail us out. We’ll shut down (and likely move elsewhere) and you can deal with the five hundred people who lost their jobs, their families, the local businesses which are now heavily hit by loss of consumer spending because people don’t have good paying industrial jobs anymore, opposition parties using this to make political hay, and so on and so on. Enjoy getting your head handed to you in the next election!”

      Bombardier is interesting in this regard; its Belfast arm is heavily reducing its workforce due to the problems of its parent company, and since it replaced one of the major, and long-time, employers in the North of Ireland, this has severe consequences, even though it had been in receipt of government subsidies for over a decade:

      [Enterprise Minister, Jonathan Bell] added that the firm had received £75m of NI Executive assistance between 2002 and 2015.

      • cwillu says:

        1.3B would pay 500 people a salary of 100,000$ per year for ten years, and still leave 800 million left over for incentives to encourage other more profitable companies to open-up shop there.

        An over-simplification, sure, but then again I’m not the one implying that the two choices are “spend the money on a bail-out” and “don’t do anything whatsoever” :p

      • MugaSofer says:

        Bombardier employs 18,000 people in Quebec, and their business supposedly generates a further 40,000 Quebeci jobs.

    • John Schilling says:

      I didn’t see where he defines what a “corporate subsidy” is, which is where any such proposal will be gamed to death. For example, in the passenger-aircraft manufacturing business, the EU and especially France are often accused of subsidizing Airbus by simply giving them money. China is accused of subsidizing COMAC on account of the former still being a Communist regime and the latter being a state-owned manufacturing enterprise. The United States is frequently accused of subsidizing Boeing by buying lots of large military aircraft that look an awful lot like airliners and paying way too much for them.

      But the United States Air Force legitimately does need(*) lots of vaguely airliner-ish planes with special features and requirements that are going to push up the price somewhat. So how do we keep the usual suspects from channeling their subsidies through government contracts with terms particularly favorable to industry?

      And that’s just one example. The government is certainly going to be building infrastructure like roads, water and sewage lines, etc. If it pays gigabucks for high-capacity links to a remote site that happens to hold Company X’s mining town and little else of real interest to anyone, is that a subsidy for X? Or do you prohibit the government from building so much as a dirt road and an airstrip to support a community with a single dominant employer?

      * At least as long as it is going to be doing the EU’s warfighting as well as America’s, but that’s a separate discussion

      • Deiseach says:

        If it pays gigabucks for high-capacity links to a remote site that happens to hold Company X’s mining town and little else of real interest to anyone, is that a subsidy for X?

        That depends: is company X mining a valuable mineral that is only found in economically viable quantities in that region, and without it nobody will have the new iMachine or a working Thing for the Internet of Things to run on?

        Or is company X paying large wodges of dosh into the party-in-power’s election coffers in that state and it just so happens that the senators from that state are very influential at government level and they need to be kept sweet with pork barrel projects?

        In the first case, you could well argue that yes, it’s a subsidy for company X but it’s also a subsidy for the economic productivity of the entire nation, so it’s not merely the shareholders of company X who get the benefit.

        • Part of the argument against such subsidies is that the ability of a company to make money by doing something is a better, although imperfect, measure of the value of having that thing done than the ability of the company to persuade the government to subsidize it.

        • The Nybbler says:

          If that mining town needs Internet, why wouldn’t Company X pay for it itself and cover it with their nighunobtanium revenues? The prices of iDevices go up a bit, no subsidy required.

    • SJ says:

      Does Canada have farm subsidies in the way that the United States does?

      That would probably qualify as “corporate subsidy”, under some definitions.

      It’s a government payout for activity (or inactivity, in some cases) that large corporations can use to extract huge direct payments from the government.

      • Alliteration says:

        Canada has a milk board which has a monopoly on buying milk from farmers. Thus, milk products are significantly more expensive in Canada than the USA.

        It used to have a wheat board but that was abolished by the former Conservative Government.
        I am unsure if it has other subsidies.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Like others have said, I like it a lot but it depends on what counts.

      I support significant wage subsidies, but some people call this a subsidy to businesses. (I think they are intellectually dishonest but I’m biased to think that.)

      Are specific businesses being targeted with the subsidy, or is it a case where anyone can show up to claim the prize?

    • Chrysophylax says:

      Generally speaking, less rent-seeking is better, and any subsidies should be justified by stong arguments. There are a couple of good reasons for subsidies but they’re all easy to abuse. First, externalities. Second, regulation of monopolies can (at least in theory) involve forcing their prices low and covering their losses, but this is less practical in a dynamic setting. Third, the (dodgy) Infant Industry Argument is somewhat less dodgy when the protection comes through subsidies rather than trade barriers. Fourth, labour market imperfections, as outlined by Deiseach, although my general feeling is that any firm that can’t support itself is probably doomed in the long run anyway. Fifth, bailouts, but those cause moral hazard problems and should be both short-term and accompanied by punishment.

  82. expjpi says:

    I enjoyed the meetups a lot! Can recommend to people not sure if they’d fit in. This is a blog advocating niceness, community and civilization and the people who read it seem to get high marks for those.

    • James Bond says:

      Wow , that makes me regret not going. I am definetly hoping for some more SSC meetups around.I am guessing that there is a lot of us in the Bay Area

    • Mark says:

      Are there ever any of these in Chicago?

    • suntzuanime says:

      Which is fine until the reason you don’t fit in is that you’re not nice, communal, and civilized.

    • Liskantope says:

      I’m becoming increasingly upset at how my recent move to Europe really seems to have decreased my opportunities for attending rationalist events. Yes, I know that there are groups in various parts of western Europe, but I suspect that most of the people I know from SSC are attending events either in the Bay area or in the northeast.

      • Basium says:

        I know there are a couple of SSC readers in Berlin, if you’re near there.

      • The Less Wrong Community Weekend in Berlin is a pretty amazing annual event, for what it’s worth. 🙂 This year it’s happening in September. I intend to be there; granted, I’m a lurker, not a regular commenter, but either way, I would expect a lot of European Slate Star Codex readers to turn up there.

        • Liskantope says:

          Thanks, and I’ll definitely look into this. I think I’m close enough to Berlin to be able to visit quickly and relatively cheaply for a long weekend. I’ve always wanted to check out Berlin eventually, and maybe this would be a good opportunity. I don’t identify strongly with LW as I do with SSC, but maybe I’ll have finally finished with the Sequences by then. 😉

          • I didn’t identify with LessWrong at all when I went to the 2015 LessWrong Community Weekend; I also changed my mind quickly. (And, while I think you were just being humourous, just to stress: You don’t need to have read the Sequences!)

  83. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    That’s nice, dear.

  84. xerxespraelor says:

    ???